What is the musical foundation of Classic (ie, Roger Waters-led) Pink Floyd?
Last week I heard “Run Like Hell” on the radio for the first time in years. I always liked that song a little bit, at least parts of it. At the same time, it’s always been one of many Pink Floyd songs that make me nauseous. I think the nausea I’ve experienced in songs like this one and “Have a Cigar” have something to do with the heavy use of delay and Waters’ knack for coming up with the least-pleasant melodies in rock. But the nausea-inducing qualities of Pink Floyd were not at the front of my mind while this song played.
What I couldn’t help but think about was how Pink Floyd arrived at that sound. I know they’re supposed to have been into Da Blooz as young men, naming their band after two bluesmen. That could be true but I don’t hear it in the root of most of their trademark songs from Dark Side of the Moon through the end of their Waters years.
Syd Barrett, the light shows, and all the people who’ve tripped at their shows would make them obvious candidates for coming out of psychedelia, but musically, I find their best-known ’70s sound has little to do with the sound of ’60s psychedelia, even the psychedelia that they helped create under Barrett’s direction.
They get lumped in with prog rock because of the long songs, but beside David Gilmour’s heroic guitar solos, each of which follows pretty much the same path of blazing entry followed by tasteful melodicism, the other musicians of Pink Floyd are understated and possibly even rudimentary compared with the likes of Bill Bruford and Robert Fripp.
The more I thought about “Run Like Hell” and all those long songs from albums like Animals that run together in my non-Floyd-loving mind, the more it occurred to me that these guys were pretty damn original, with greater implications for the future of rock, for better or for worse, than I’d ever given them credit. Longtime Floyd lovers, those of you who’ve drooled at the sight of the inflatable pig, may be thinking, No shit, Sherlock! Point taken, but I’m curious to hear what you think the musical foundation of Classic Pink Floyd really was. I have some thoughts on the matter, but maybe I’ve been obvious enough. Let me see what you think first.
I look forward to your comments.
I used to be really into pink floyd, but i personally don’t think they usually satisfy my very demanding hook/minute quota.
I’d say that Pink Floyd’s music was rooted in trying to make intelligent music to match their ‘intelligent lyrics’. They drew from a variety of sources, like stealing jazz chord changes for some of their songs, or throwing some blues notes into a solo, or writing songs in ‘WEIRD’ and ‘FREAKY time signatures that Thom Yorke would later be eating for breakfast, or taking some classical themes and simplifying them to a rock context. And i think they were generally good at making pleasant, intelligent music. But when it comes to coming up with interesting vocal melodies, they’ve always been a little lacking.
Also, i hate david’s solos. They’re tasteful, but also pretty boring, and usually indisguishable from each other.
There is blues in Floyd’s music, but it’s a weirdly static kind of blues, not entirely dissimilar to Clapton’s. It’s got a loping quality that allows them to stretch out without having to require their rhythm section to do anything interesting. I think of parts of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” for this quality.
Additionally, there’s an element of latter-day Beatles in the Dark Side. Check out the guitar sounds on “Brain Damage” and “Us and Them,” and compare them to “Dear Prudence” or the end of “You Never Give Me Your Money.”
Mr. Mod, you’ve seen the Classic Albums episode on Dark Side, right? Rick Wright talks about his jazz influences, and it’s pretty cool. He shows how he used chords learned from Kind of Blue for “Breathe.” I never knew that before. Once he gets rubbed out of the band circa The Wall, all that goes out the window. I think maybe the musical foundation of that album is down to Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen, as much as anyone in the band at that point, even Waters. Also, no one sang like Waters before him, because who would want to?
I was about to say that I suspect the hidden hand behind “classic” Pink Floyd belonged to two similarly named dudes who were not in fact brothers: Gil Evans and Bill Evans. Who, it must be noted, both worked with Miles circa KIND OF BLUE, so I’m glad to know I was right.
It may be instructive to know that supposedly “Run Like Hell” was deliberately written as a pisstake of disco, and therefore should probably not be taken as indicative of influences.
Where did you read that “Run Like Hell” was a “pisstake of disco,” Great One? It uses a vaguely disco beat but not a beat that unlike beats used on earlier Pink Floyd albums when they do one of these atmospheric rockers. I need more evidence that Waters would dilute a song from his Great Life Statement, The Wall, to do a pisstake on a current fad.
Oats, I’ve seen parts of that Classic Albums episode, but I don’t recall the segment with Wright and the influence of Miles Davis. I can see how that music would have influenced Wright in particular and maybe the band as a whole for a couple of songs, but I’m not sure that it gets to the musical foundation of the band. Very helpful suggestion, nevertheless.
And yes, I do hear the later-period Beatles influence on a song or two from each album. Because they’ve always been the songs easiest for me to like, I don’t consider them “real” Pink Floyd songs, more like Waters trying to write a real, somewhat concise song – and this gets to the heart of some of my thoughts on the band’s musical foundation, which I am not yet confident about revealing.
I don’t have much to say on this topic. I owned Ummagumma and Meddle back in the day, but after that I pretty much avoided the band. Except for hearing Money on the radio, I don ‘t believe I’ve ever heard Dark Side of the Moon. I know, shocking.
I do have a very nice amp/effects plug-in on the computer (Guitar Rig), and there’s a preset called ‘pink numb lead,’ so I can punch up Gilmour’s sound any time I want and wail away, even though I have no idea what such a solo is supposed to sound like.
By the way, I’m glad you mentioned Ummagumma and Meddle: for purposes of this discussion, those albums predate what I consider “Classic Pink Floyd,” although they do say a lot about what I think I have to say about the band’s musical foundation.
I think the Davis/Evans/Evans suggestion makes a lot of sense. There’s something to be said for the presence of an influence of modal jazz on the Pink Floyd sound. Not being a musicologist, I’ve never entirely understand the modal jazz concept, but it seems to replace the chorus/improvisation approach with a kind of layered rhythmic drone: the song hinges on a central rhythmic backbone that surges and heaves throughout the piece while soloists add color on top (or all over, as the case may be). Davis really paired this approach down to the basics on his 70s funk jazz material like On The Corner. But I think maybe there’s a lot of unsung influence of modal jazz on the development of psychedelia and drone.
in the book “saucerful of secrets” they describe ‘run like hell’ as a pisstake on disco, too.
but don’t think of it, mod, as “watering down” his “great life statement.”
as waters says at the beginning of this clip, “rlh” is a song addressed to the weak. the lyrics are about the shalloweness of social scenes. its four on the floor disco beat provides a musical backdrop for those lyrics. that it’s only ‘vaguely disco’ and also like some earlier material may be due to nick mason’s notoriously limited palette. but which earlier floyd songs have this beat? i can’t think of any.
as for your original question, honestly, i think that one of the things the late floyd took with them from their early days is an openness to combining different influences, and letting technology take them to new places. sure, there are influences as obvious as the blues and the beatles, but people are right to cite richard wright’s interest in specific jazz artists, and even their limitations as players a contributions to their sound. their ongoing interest in using the studio as an influence on their sound has to be mentioned as well.
the use of voices, bullhorns, sound effects, tape loops has always been prominent. and that’s probably a beatles influence, too.
falling under this category is also an openness to other less exalted effects, like pedals. gilmour’s riff in “rlh” couldn’t have been written without the delay pedal, and it’s a use of a delay pedal that’s different than the way most people had used it up to that point (to add echo or atmosphere to a guitar solo or vocals that are otherwise played the same way they would be played *without* the delay on). gilmour is actually responding to the delayed signal and making it repeat in a rhythm that the the rest of the band plays along with. it’s pretty clever, actually, though i don’t like the end result. perhaps even these uses of technology are traceable back to a tendency they developed in their early days, tinkering around in abbey road’s *other* studio, while the beatles were down the hall, making sgt. pepper.
I meant to say, also, that in the end, you’re right, mod: their combination of these things results in a pretty original sound, like it or not (and i used to, but nowadays, i just don’t; it just doesn’t move me).
OK, you guys are starting to make sense with the modal jazz aspect, but can someone who has a better understanding of this aspect of jazz better assess how much of a role that really plays in their music and how much of it is the explanation that a band of mostly rudimentary musicians has applied to best explain what they were doing? Any of us who make music probably have been influenced by things we don’t really grasp or come close to mastering, but that doesn’t discount the effect a foreign piece of music might have had in shaping what we think we’re doing.
saturnismine wrote (among other fine things):
YES! Now you’re getting at some of the things I’ve been thinking about – and the heart of what made the band way more original and influential than I’d previously considered. Thank you for restoring my confidence in what may be my “No shit, Sherlock” thoughts on the matter.
Well, one thing about the idea of the modal is that it IS rudimentary, or at least can be. Forget chorus/improv (jazz) or chorus/verse (rock); just string a basic bluesy beat out for as long as you can add interesting variations on top of it. Melody can become secondary. I mean, there’s a fine line between simple and dumb in matters like these, yes? Isn’t that true of much drone and psychedelia?
But I’m not making a case for it as their basic influence or something like that. And it’s telling that when they combined some of that sort of stuff with basic pop songs that they had their biggest successes.
Spaceman rock? By which I don’t mean songs about going to the moon.
Spaceman rock is not what I had in mind, but I do think they fall squarely in the middle as an as-yet undefined form of rock, which I will reveal unless convinced otherwise by the Hall’s thoughts on their musical foundation. I will say that you, Mwall, have been making a lot of sense.
Are 70’s Genesis and Steely Dan in that form of rock too?
a tie in with your jim croce thread, mod, where you look for a trans-atlantic equivalent to nick drake.
i think the trans-atlantic, albeit later, equivalent to the floyd might be the flaming lips, who are conceptual, technologically progressive, not afraid to let the studio take them to new places, psychedelic, and given to “big statements” about “humanity,” that they stage in big ways in big venues.
cdm, Steely Dan is definitely NOT the form of music I think I’ve identified. I don’t think Genesis is either, but truth be told, I often wonder whether they played any form of music in their Classic era.
The Lips are not really part of what I have in mind, in terms of musical foundation, either, although they obviously pick up on a lot of what Pink Floyd did – but in their case they deliberately followed the Floyd. This category I’m working ties together bands that have no real antecedants. It may be a remarkable linking characteristic that I’ve uncovered. Pink Floyd is smack dab in the middle of it!
I should add, saturnismine, the Lips, since they’ve come into their own, may be part of what I’m thinking about after all. When I’m sure I’m onto something and let the cat out of the bag, let’s come back to them and see how they stack up.
Certainly there were tracks on Ummagumma (Careful With That Axe, Eugene) and Meddle (Echoes) that fit into that modal, dronal methodology, but that was before the songs about Roger Waters’ personal issues came to the fore. I don’t know enough about later Floyd to know how much of the early style was incorporated into songs, as opposed to extended space-outs.
i agree, BigSteve, but with one inconsequential exception: if the bios are to be believed, the waters songs from “dark side” on that explore neurosis and personal issues aren’t autobiographical; he led a pretty normal, even bourgeois life, had a good relationship to his wife, etc.. the content of those songs is apparently inspired by barrett’s demise, and a general urge to bring modern alienation to an individual level. after reading that, my inability to connect with those ‘personal issue songs’ made sense. there is something detached about them. it rings true that their author wasn’t really experiencing much of what he was singing about, and was, by all accounts, unsympathetic and even cruel to barrett while barrett was unraveling.
This is what I hear in classic Floyd. Slowed down, opened up, studio-fied Blues. But I’m not sure that I would’ve gotten to that opinion if I hadn’t heard anything that preceded Dark Side.
Though the use of saxophone and gospel singers does give a clue.
As you ponder this, feel free to chime in with your thoughts on Waters’ Secret Life of Hitchhikers, or whatever that album was called. I think E. Pluribus Gergely was a fan of that one.
After “Animals”, Waters presented Floyd with the songs / concepts for “The Wall” and “The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking.” They smartly rejected the latter in favor of the former.
But you can hear the solo album’s roots in Waters’s Floyd days: the first song of “hitchhiking” has the same chord progression as “In the Flesh” from “The Wall.” I always thought “Hitchhiking” was deliberately obtuse, and it suffers from the absence of Gilmour and Wright, who were responsible for some of the less narrative, but more musically accessible moments on the Wall. Hitchhiking is VERY boring, to me, just like “the final cut,” where gilmour’s contributions are minimal, and Wright is out of the picture.
I once read a Floyd insider — possibly in that bio that Saturn mentioned — complain that the difference between Roger and David was that Roger would be happy to write three different sets of lyrics and put them over the same tune, while David would be happy to write three different tunes, but put the same set of lyrics over all of them. That neatly encapsulates the problem with ALL of their work since the split, frankly.
I’ve read that quote too, Great48. The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure it was attributed to Nick Mason.
I’m surprised to see that there’s more people that used to like Pink Floyd and now they just don’t do much of anything for them. I saw them a couple of times and I had their records but anymore the only one I ever listen to is Piper. It just seems like there isn’t that much there. I remember when The Wall came out on compact disk people said the best thing about it was the helicopter, like the music was okay, but the noises were the best part.