Pink Floyd's Meddle at 50

The album cover features a close-up of an ear overlaid with some water droplets.  The great graphic designer Storm Thorgerson created this but the band weighed-in heavily on the idea.  He later regretted it, saying it was his least favorite Pink Floyd album cover.

“Basically, we're the laziest group ever.  Other groups would be horrified if they saw how we waste our recording time.”  (Blake, page 159)  That's what David Gilmour opined as Pink Floyd muddled through various musical ideas for their sixth studio album back in 1971.  At first all they had was a bunch of short pieces that might turn into a song or two.  The band was just noodling around.  They were not under any pressure.  Their record company wasn't bugging them for another album.  They just felt that it was time to do – something.  But what?

They started calling the assorted fragments “Nothing.”  There was Nothing One, Nothing Two, and so forth for about 36 short snippets of piano or guitar.  They were busy touring at the time and basically worked in some studio sessions in between gigs.  But “nothing” was all they were coming up with.  Until...

One day Gilmour, Roger Waters, and Nick Mason were sitting in the control room, probably cracking jokes or possibly throwing darts.  Richard Wright was at the keyboard in the studio just messing around, putting together another nothing when he happened upon a singular note.

Ping!  Wright hit the note completely by accident, although you could argue that it was bound to happen since the band had been randomly fooling around with various notes and chords for so long.  Ping!  All four band mates froze.  They knew they had something instead of nothing.  In fact, after the initial Ping!, several of the other snippets of nothing suddenly seemed to be the seeds of a much larger work.  It would turn out to be the band's most ambitious musical composition to date and the catalyst for their future direction which would lead to some of the greatest selling albums of all-time.

But before all that happened, back in 1971, in a series of sessions broken up by touring dates, Pink Floyd put together the album Meddle.  I did not care for Meddle when I heard it in college for the first time probably around 1978.  It just seemed like a mishmash of mediocre songs compared to Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Wish You Were Here (1975), the albums that got me hooked on the group.

And compared to those efforts, Meddle is clearly inferior.  But, years later, I came to appreciate the album for what it was, an awakening.  With Meddle Pink Floyd found who they were supposed to become.  They had been searching through a musical desert for so long following the psychotic breakdown of Syd Barrett, trying to overcome the tremendous setback of losing the band's primary singer, songwriter to psychedelic drugs.

Their live shows featured their “space rock” material which was largely influenced by Barrett.  But, little of that had translated over to their studio records, which tended of feature an assortment of mediocre short tunes mixed with longer, experimental pieces.  To some extent Meddle is the same, but that initial Ping! changed everything and puts the record in a grander category.  

Like the band's immediately preceding record, Atom Heart Mother (1970), the album features a collection of songs on one side and a massive extended work taking up the other.  Unlike that album, however, Meddle shows the band finding its footing and discovering what was possible with a higher level of collaboration between the four members.

A close-up of the band's name on the album cover.

Meddle starts with “One of These Days”, which could easily be considered another Syd Barrett space rock tune.  There is a raw energy to this menacing, somewhat angry rocker featuring Waters' rapidly thumping bass and Gilmour's multilayered growling guitars.  This is a strong, solid instrumental track, masterfully captured.  Wright is particularly noteworthy with his keyboard work.  

It has the distinction of being the only song in the Floydian repertoire with Mason on “vocals.”  Actually, it is just Nick saying (distortedly) one line which is the complete (longer) name of the song.  “One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces!”  This is easily the best of the “song” side of the album.  It became a crowd favorite in live performances as well.

“Pillow of Winds” follows and is one of the very few restful, take it easy kind of songs that Pink Floyd performed.  Waters and Gilmour take co-credit for this one; very accessible and relaxing.  But, it is still just a nice, random song in the way this whole album side is collection of randomness.  Listening to it now, it seems more twangy and haunting than I remember it.  A really beautiful piece of mostly acoustic music.

“Fearless” is the track that the critics seem to like most about this side of Meddle.  It has a fun little rift to it.  Gilmour's exquisite multi-track vocals are on display.  The band grooves through it in effortless stride until the song dissolves into a bunch of Brits singing “You'll Never Walk Alone” at the conclusion of a soccer match.  Typically strange late-60's Floyd here.  This is another nice, easy rocker.

If the critics like “Fearless” they despise the cliché “cocktail-hour jazz” song (Schaffner, page 165) “San Tropez.”  There is nothing remarkable about this track.  It sounds like dozens of other songs in the acoustic jazz genre and it doesn't relate to anything else on this side of the album.  Still, it's fun.  I like the way it shuffles along though even if it isn't special.  Waters leads this one.

The bluesy “Seamus” finishes off the side.  This one was voted in some fan polls as the worst Pink Floyd song ever.  I don't know.  There were several really bad tracks before Meddle came along.  I like it for what it is, which admittedly isn't much.  Gilmour overlaps standard acoustic blues with a hound dog howling in the background.  Honestly, considered altogether, this is a very diverse and disjointed group of tracks, very reflective of where Pink Floyd was at the time but more so who they used to be.  

Flip the album over and you have a completely different story.  Now we come to the greatness of Meddle.  The Ping! starts “Echoes”, a 23 and half minute breakthrough piece that is the first really extraordinary music Pink Floyd ever recorded, serving as both prologue and basic blueprint to the steady stream of incomparable concept albums that would follow throughout the 1970's.

This lengthy, diverse piece saw the band in full collaboration with all four members contributing to its creation.  The Ping! was Wright's inspirational kick-start but his keyboard work is essential to the music as it shifts and morphs along.  Mason and Gilmour change up percussion and guitar as appropriate, often with outstanding effect.  Waters, who developed an exceptional talent for lyrics, wrote the words which, as he once put it, were “all about making connections with other people.  About the potential that human beings have for recognizing each other's humanity.” (Schaffner, page 161)

An atmospheric, bluesy quality slowly emerges as the Ping! repeats.  Wright, a keyboardist heavily influenced by jazz, begins to meander around as Gilmour joins in with some simple electric guitar.  With a easy drum roll the whole bands joins in playing a theme from one of the various “nothing” sessions. The lyrics are sung somewhat hypnotically by Gilmour and Wright as a duet.

The first slight shift comes at about 5:30 when Gilmour starts to play variations on the original theme.  Momentum builds until at 7:00 Wright's organ and Gilmour's guitar turn into a straight-up jam session.  Mason and Waters provide the backbone upon which Gilmour shines with his famous stratocaster as Wright is explosive on the keyboards.  

This has a nice groove to it and continues in several variations until, with a wailing guitar at about 10:45, the jam fades into the background, giving way to a bizarre series of atmospheric sounds produced by pushing the guitars and keyboards through synthesized tech.  Wind sounds are added to the slow-motion maelstrom.  Then...gulls.  Seagulls accompany the wailing guitar and other synthetic sounds.  This is truly a sonic psychedelic experience.

About four minutes later, Wright's keyboard ascends with a singular chord accentuated by a return of the repeated Ping!.  At 16:10 things begin to slowly build again.  With both Gilmour and Waters hitting the same notes repeatedly as Wright dances around on multiple keyboards.  Mason's percussion is marvelously cymbal heavy.  Then, at 18:14, Gilmour takes over with a solid guitar that slowly shifts the song toward another crescendo until we come back to Waters' wonderful lyrics again.

One stanza captures the essence of the song:

Strangers passing in the street
By chance, two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can?

After 20 minutes, we are back to familiar ground with the strength of the original build-up before all the bizarre stuff started happening.  The last couple of minutes are the most beautiful part of “Echoes” musically, featuring Wright's delicate keyboards and Gilmour's semi-bluesy guitar until we give way to another singular synthesized chord overwhelming the band and then ultimately fading away.

Still not completely finished, “Echoes” was performed live in April – June 1971 under the title “Return of the Son of Nothing” before the final touches were added in the studio in July and August.  The title was then changed to “Echoes” to more clearly reflect both the sentiment of Waters' lyrics and final music itself.

“Echoes” has a couple of other performances of note.  It is featured in the Pink Floyd film, Live at Pompeii.  The band plays into an empty, ruined amphitheater but you get the chance to see what all the members are actually doing to create some of the strange sounds in piece (video here).  More recently, it was performed by Gilmour with Wright accompanying in Gilmour's splendid Live at Gdansk concert film.  This would be the song's final (and best, video here) performance as Wright died a few months following the event. 

"Meddle" as the album title was a joke by the band. It was intended as a goofy amalgamation between "metal" and "mettle" and "meddle," a strange juxtaposition.  I didn't learn that tidbit until decades after I first listened to it.  For a long time, I didn't listen to this album at all, I was so unimpressed with it.

And if this had been the band's last album no one would remember them.  They would only have this tiny cult following that everything that has ever existed seems to have these days. But, of course, Pink Floyd became a global phenomenon just two years later. 

That makes Meddle special.  This was before all that, when they were only beginning to understand what was possible.  When they were all contributing more or less equally on the development of new material.  Tweaking and experimenting, which is what they had been doing all along.

"Echoes" was the first burst of radiance that made you go "wow."  It started out of randomness and ended up as a large collaborative piece of music with a specific poetic message.  For the first time, Waters demonstrated his brilliance with lyrics that were fully embodied by the music.  Gilmour and Wright were outstanding with their duet and their use of multiple guitars and keyboards.  Mason on percussion supported the piece with occasional flashes from his cymbal work.  

The rest of the album is just a band struggling to figure out who they are.  None of it really goes together.  It is almost like a bunch of demo tracks even though "One of These Days" is quite good.  So, you can't really call Meddle a "great" album.  But it birthed a lot of greatness to come.  I enjoyed revisiting this old friend this past couple of weeks.

Meddle was first released in the America 50 years ago today.

Late Note: This interesting video documentary on Meddle was posted the day after my post.

The inner gate-fold of the original album features what is one of the best photos of the group I've seen.  Left to right are Waters, Mason, Gilmour, and Wright.