Wish You Were Here at 50

Proof of purchase.  My 1994 CD.

“The band is just fantastic, that’s really what we think Oh by the way, which one’s Pink? And did we tell you the name of the game, boy, we call it riding the Gravy Train.” from “Have a Cigar” written by Roger Waters.

After Dark Side of the Moon (see here and here), Pink Floyd achieved superstardom. Which, of course, is what every recording industry band dreams of. But, what happens when you achieve that success? I have seen the band members interviewed (separately) about what that was like. In listening to the various responses of Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason it seems they were basically numbed by their own success. Waters’s marriage fell apart, Mason’s did too as they recorded their next record, Gilmour just wanted to make music and didn’t see what all Roger’s fuss was about, and Wright just sort of drifted along with, like, whatever.

The band was selling out concerts globally and toured triumphantly in 1974. Dark Side was a cultural sensation. They were all mega rich and famous. But none of them were very happy. Now they needed to make their next record, because that's just what Pink Floyd always did since 1967. But instead of flowing forward creatively, they stalled. None of them had the slightest clue what to do next. Honestly, no cared about that more than Roger, which is where he starts asserting himself into things and butting heads with Gilmour. Roger wrote the lyrics for one of Pink Floyd’s best songs, the 23-minute “Echoes” on Meddle. He wrote most of Dark Side which was basically his concept and everyone was on board. So he was going to write something again. No one else was doing anything.

Waters had, in fact, two half-finished songs that the band had performed versions of live and Gilmour thought those were good enough. Waters didn’t care for them and they would come out two years later on their next album. For the current album which no one had a clue about, Waters crafted five songs or rather the lyrics and basic tune of them. Gilmour and Wright, being more talented musically, fleshed it out into a finished piece and got writing credits for their contributions.

Twice during the rambling do-nothing start to their lengthy recording schedule Gilmour was just noodling around on the guitar and Roger would perk up and say, “Wait, what’s that there?” The first time was the four-note sequence which inspired “Shine On” so that is no small contribution, kickstarting Roger’s brain. The second was a wonderful riff he developed on acoustic guitar that inspired “Wish You Were Here.” For that Gilmour got equal billing (deservedly so) for c0-writing that song. Waters wrote “Have a Cigar” and “Welcome to the Machine” while everyone else went back to doing basically nothing in the studio.  Yet, when it came down to it, the band delivered fantastically solid performances that really grip you.

So, in a sense Pink Floyd was still a united front, they could still co-create even if Rogers had to push everyone along. But it was the band’s natural tendency toward inertia due to their lifestyles colliding against Roger’s vision for music as a conceptual art form that created the deeper tensions within the band. Everyone detested Mason’s drumming and there were many takes until he got it right. This was the least of the issues. It was somewhat resolvable.

The early sessions were "very laborious and tortured," according to Waters, who often felt that they all wanted to be somewhere else. The “Dark Side” drive, which was present up to Dark Side simply vanished. The band members just aimlessly sat around the studio if they bothered to show up at all. Although eventually Gilmour came up with four notes and riff which lead to the whole album idea that Roger had, lyrically, all to himself.  

The recording process stretched from January to July 1975 at Abbey Road. It was fragmented and difficult. The sessions were interrupted twice by (sold-out) US tours, making the recording process disjointed, but that’s not uncommon really in the music world. Technical disasters added to the frustration—engineer Brian Humphries accidentally destroyed backing tracks for "Shine On" that Waters and Mason had spent many hours perfecting, forcing them to re-record the entire piece. So, the Floyd were being unintentionally screwed by their own recording engineers as well.

Pink Floyd’s fault lines ran along predictable lifestyle divisions, but the details reveal just how deep the dysfunction went. Gilmour and Wright were the stoners, content to drift and jam and let ideas float up organically. Waters and Mason preferred alcohol, and drunk Roger (alone, basically) worried about forward momentum. Gilmour was more interested in improving the band's existing material (which Waters wrote) and opposed to another concept record. He wanted to concentrate of the songs and the music whereas Waters wanted to elevate the content and ideas within the music. Wright later described these early sessions as "falling within a difficult period."

Wright, who had been such a quiet melodic architect on “Echoes” and Dark Side, contributed mightily and atmospherically to “Shine On” but he was no leader. Gilmour remained fantastic and creative, but basically lazy—happy to contribute brilliant guitar and vocals when called upon, but not eager to drive the songwriting process.

Like I said, other than his brilliant solo performances on the album, he basically contributed four-notes and a great riff. The strain also showed in Roger’s almost desperate attempt to sing the satirically magnificent "Have a Cigar," requiring several takes to perform an acceptable version. His problems stemmed in part from a basic insecurity about his vocal ability at the time. When Gilmour was asked to sing in his place but declined, eventually Roy Harper was brought in and he absolutely nailed it.

"Wish You Were Here," perhaps the best lyrics in rock history.  Gilmour and Waters joke around in a blurry image under it along with some of Storm Thorgerson's fantastic artwork.

You can hear these dynamics in the album's DNA. Those long, suspended passages where the band seems to float in amber? That's the stoner vibe, Gilmour and Wright stretching things out, comfortable in the drift. The acerbic lyrics, the pointed themes, the moments of sharp focus? That's Waters, drinking and increasingly intolerant of aimlessness, forcing the band into coherent statements. Mason just keeps it all stitched together—definitely nothing flashy. This album would be the first that Mason got no credit for any of the songs.

The sessions reached their emotional climax on June 5, 1975, when Syd Barrett made an unexpected appearance at Abbey Road. Both "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and "Wish You Were Here" had been written for Barrett, meditations on his absence and what he'd meant to the band’s early years. Then, in one of the most haunting coincidences in rock history, the long-absent musician himself appeared during a mixing session for the very song written about him. You can’t make up stuff that good!

Nobody had seen Barrett in six or seven years. The portly figure with shaved head and eyebrows who wandered into the studio looked nothing like the charismatic, pin-up handsome frontman who had defined Pink Floyd's early years. The band members didn't recognize him at first – Waters thought he was EMI staff, Wright assumed he was a friend of Waters', Mason failed to recognize him entirely. Only when Gilmour finally identified their former bandmate did the full emotional weight hit them. When the realization dawned, both Gilmour and Waters were moved to tears.

The timing was surreal beyond belief—it was also Gilmour's wedding day. Barrett had wandered into not just a recording session about him, but into his replacement's wedding reception, a walking embodiment of all the album's themes about presence, absence, and the people we used to know. He left without telling anyone, disappearing as strangely as he'd arrived, like a literally zombie materializing just long enough to remind them that their songs about absence were about a real person who was still, somehow, devastatingly present.

The band’s growing fractures certainly weren't fatal to the album's quality. This is a truly incredible album with a distinctive "edge" – the tension between connection and disconnection, presence and absence, that runs through every track. It's not the smooth, unified cohesion of Dark Side of the Moon. It's more jagged, more uncertain, more human in its imperfections.

"Welcome to the Machine."  A funky, satirical song with remarkable foresight for the contemporary world. Roger rests on the edge of the mixing board, listening and finetuning.

Wish You Were Here remains my favorite Pink Floyd album, which makes it one of my favorite albums period. Dark Side comes in a close second, and it's certainly far more appealing to listen to—smoother, more accessible, more perfectly crafted. But I prefer the shadows and sharp corners of Wish You Were Here, its willingness to sit with discomfort and absence rather than resolving everything into cosmic harmony. (A fracture between Waters and Gilmour here.) Making a marvelous something out of a remarkable nothingness that pervaded the band, the sessions, and their private lives.

Dark Side can feel almost too perfect, too complete in its vision. Wish You Were Here shows its seams, admits its struggles, lets you hear the band working through their own confusion and loss. The creative tensions that would eventually tear the band apart are already audible here, but they haven't yet overwhelmed the music. Instead, they've given it a particular kind of emotional weight, a gravity that comes from real stakes and real fragility.

Together, these two albums are the greatest one-two punch in rock history.

Fifty years on, that fragility feels more relevant than ever. We're all swimming in fishbowls now, year after year, looking for authentic connection across ever-expanding distances. Waters' most vulnerable moment and his most cynical one sit side by side on this album, and both feel true. Even in the dozen years since I last wrote about this album in 2013 (when it had sold 19 million worldwide), it has astonishingly sold almost 5 million additional copies, bringing its worldwide total to about 24 million. That’s an album with extraordinary staying power.

I need to make a confession about memory and vinyl. In college, there would come a time late on a party night when only a few were left and we were all buzzed, so we sat around an oil lamp or maybe a candle and listened to the side one of Wish You Were Here. At least, that's how I remember it. The problem is, I was wrong about what we were actually hearing.

For decades, I carried this vivid sense memory of floating through "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V)" into "Welcome to the Machine," and then somehow hearing the title track "Wish You Were Here" nestled right there between those two longer cosmic pieces. It felt so right, so perfect for those late-night moments of half-drunk communion around flickering lamplight, that my brain just inserted it into the sequence where it emotionally belonged.

Of course, "Wish You Were Here" lives on side two of the original vinyl, tucked between "Have a Cigar" and the closing movements of "Shine On." But that’s not what was in my head at the time. My phantom version of side one, listened to countless times when I had a late night buzz, shows how something can work on memory and desire.

Here we are 50 years later and the album is still rock solid (slight pun). One of the greatest rock albums ever, in my opinion. Naturally, I've been thinking about how these five tracks rank for me now, not in terms of critical consensus but pure personal impact. Here's the ordered they landed with me with recent relistenings.

1) Wish You Were Here
This has always been the best track on the record. It might contain the best rock lyrics ever written. Certainly, it's in serious contention. Roger Waters strips away every bit of psychedelic mythology and cosmic conceptualizing to deliver something devastatingly plain and human: "Two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year." No clever metaphors, no elaborate conceits, just the blunt ache of missing someone across an unbridgeable distance. The older I get, the more that simple language destroys me. Its vulnerability distilled to its essence.  Just a fantastically talented performance by Gilmour, who recorded the vocals in one take.

2) Have a Cigar
I love this one’s persistent funkiness and a single line that may be as good a lyric as Waters ever wrote: "By the way, which one's Pink?" Six words that perfectly capture the clueless, commodifying attitude of record industry suits who couldn't be bothered to understand the art they were packaging and selling. It's funny, it's cruel, and it's aged very well – every hollow corporate phrase in the song has only gotten truer with time. The fact that they handed the vocals to Roy Harper makes the satire even sharper, like the band couldn't be bothered to sing this nonsense themselves. Harper’s vocals struck me as so close to Waters’ tone that I didn’t realize it wasn’t Roger until I was almost 30. Roger has sung it plenty in the last 50 years just not on this studio version, which he regrets but, hey, Roy's rendition can't be beat.

3) Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V)
Half a century later, the patience of that opening still astonishes me. It is so easy to remember why we selected this for those buzzed moments. This isn't just an intro, it's the band daring you to breathe slower, to let the night expand around you. Rick Wright carries the whole piece at the beginning, then serves a scaffolding for David Gilmour's guitar which is slow, confident, no rush at all—it stalks memory itself, circling around Syd Barrett's absence until you start to feel your own absences rise up too. Back then it felt cosmic; now it feels almost tender in its strange innocence. Then there’s that Dick Perry saxophone sound invoking the vibe from Dark Side. Just a fabulous 13 and half minutes of easy music that belies the song’s deeper meaning. The guitar pay-off comes about 7 minutes in. As on “Echoes” they take their splendid time developing this one. Gilmour calls this his favorite Pink Floyd song.

4) Welcome to the Machine
If "Shine On" is elegy, this is interrogation. The synths still sound alien, but now they feel prophetic in ways the band couldn't have imagined—like they foresaw how everything would eventually become a machine. I used to hear it as critique; now I hear it as resignation. Roger's vocal, half-spoken and half-accusatory, hasn't lost an ounce of venom. David does a nice job backing and supporting. Rick is outstanding.  This track leans heavily on some of his best keyboard work ever. An anthem of Enframing itself. Never more relevant.

5) Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts VI-IX)
The closing suite doesn't feel like a reprise so much as a quest. Where the first half clung to memory, this half turns it into epic urgency, slightly unsettled. It's less about Syd specifically now and more about the drive itself. This one features a great rocking almost upbeat groove (Gilmour’s contribution) on multi-layered slide guitar before the final refrain.

This photo was a real discussion point on the original album.  I had a few conversations with friends over the stillness of the water in this shot.

Wish You Were Here captures two essential sides of Roger Waters at his creative peak. On "Wish You Were Here," he's completely vulnerable and human, voicing absence and longing in a way almost anyone can fold themselves into. On "Have a Cigar," he's dripping sarcasm, weaponizing wit against the absurdities of the music business machine. Vulnerability and sneer, ache and satire, side by side.

Both are completely authentic expressions of who he was—someone who could expose his own fragility and, in the next breath, skewer the world's stupidity with surgical precision. That duality is part of why the album cuts so deep. Waters isn't offering you one mask; he's flipping between them, and the band wraps both sides in music that amplifies whatever mood he's channeling.

Gilmour and Wright contribute heavily to the album’s outstanding performances but, for the most part, they were just along for the musical part of the ride. Roger’s ideas only interested them as music which, of course, was not the fullness of Roger’s perspective. He wanted to make a point. And he did so because no one stopped him. No, they actually supported the tunes and the music and made the album as exceptionally listenable as it is biting and bracing.

The album debuted at #1 in both the US and the UK but the band took a break. There would be no tour. They’d rather be apart than make more millions touring. They couldn’t stand the idea of being around one another. From mid-1975 to February 1977 Pink Floyd did not tour for the first time since it formed. Wish You Were Here sold on its own. This says a lot about the state of things...and the music.  They were frustrated, talented and excessively satiated all at the same time. Literally drowning in their own success.

Wish You Were Here was released in the US 50 years ago today. Given that the album is still selling, on average, over 400,000 copies a year it keeps riding the Gravy Train to this day.

(Assisted by ChatGPT and Claude.)