040: Pink Floyd - Meddle (1971)

Happy winter, discordant rhyme, the snow, as we fearlessly meddle through another monk, in which we are accosted by a freezing pillow of wind. The intending specter of Valentine's Day, and the change in Supermarket Decor, inevitably brings the echo of the age-old question, which one's pink? Perhaps the answer can be found in here. How bad, how bad, how bad, how bad, how bad, how bad, how bad, how bad, how bad, how bad. So as you reach for a peach in your local produce section, consider that the answer may be the same as it ever was, and when it comes to you, it will come streaming in on sunlight winds, brought by a million bright ambassadors of morning. This is Discord, and RISE! Salutations, you crazy diamonds! Welcome to Discord and Rime, a podcast where we discuss our favorite albums, song by song. We're on both Twitter and Instagram at DiscordPod, and our website, discordpod.com, features show notes, and our full episode archive. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and most friendly podcast providers. I'm John McFarran, Mike DeFabio, Rich Bennell, and Amanda Rogers. To start, three cheers for our new Patreon donor, Larry Hip-Hip, Hooray! Thank you very much for your generosity. If other Discord and Rime listeners want to support the show with a monthly donation so that we can grab that cash with both hands and make a stash, you can visit patreon.com/bitscordpod. Also, it's our 40th episode. Our host this week is Mike. What are you taking us through today, Mike? Well, I hope you're all in a metal mood. And that's, that's, M-E-D-D-L-E, because that's the Pink Floyd album I'm taking you through today. Woo, you meddling. So Mike, I have two questions for you. Why this album and which one's Floyd? That's which one's pink. The second one, I hopefully will, we'll be able to answer in due time. But if you're somebody who likes rock music at all, you probably don't need me to tell you who Pink Floyd are. And it would be a stretch to call any of their albums obscure, exactly. But there are a lot of people out there whose knowledge of Pink Floyd begins with the dark side of the moon and ends with the wall. And if they know about the early stuff at all, they tend to treat it more like the back story that led up to the good stuff rather than appreciating it on its own as a fascinating period in their career. And I think metal is a particularly interesting album because in a lot of ways it's the culmination of Pink Floyd as the band they were. And it's also the beginning of Pink Floyd as the band they were about to become. Yeah, it's a good summary. So Mike, how did you get into Pink Floyd and how did you get into metal? Well, when I discovered Pink Floyd, I thought they were a weird obscure band that only I knew about because I didn't listen to a lot of classic rock radio growing up. So I had never heard any of their songs, even the really major ones. I just used to see their albums while looking through my parents' old records. And they always look so mysterious. There weren't any pictures of the band inside the album covers. Was Pink Floyd a guy with pink hair? I couldn't tell. They had an album of songs about animals, but it didn't look very friendly. And another one, another one had a picture of a man shaking hands with another man who was on fire and neither of them seemed to be bothered too much by that. The album title, when you looked at the spine, landed like a bitter punch line. Wish you were here. And then you had the dark side of the moon, which was the one I eventually got curious enough to listen to, maybe just because I like the sound of the title. But I decided to listen to it for kind of an odd reason. See, I had this VHS copy of the old Fritz Lang silent movie Metropolis, which I thought was pretty neat even though I must have been about 13 and all the political stuff went right over my head. Anyway, this tape I had didn't have like the original score or anything, just kind of a generic piano soundtrack by somebody. And I thought it was pretty boring. So I had the idea of watching it with the volume down and putting some other music on. And none of the music I had seemed right. I wasn't going to work with Huey Lewis or something. So I thought. Oh, that was fun. So I thought. Maybe stuck with here. Yeah! It's hard to be square. So I thought, let's see what this Pink Floyd record my dad has sounds like. So I started the movie and I put the record on. And the first thing I noticed was that a lot of the music seemed to go surprisingly well with what was happening on screen. The second thing I noticed was that eventually I wasn't paying attention to the movie anymore, because this was possibly the greatest album I had ever heard in my life. I had no music like this must exist, but I didn't know how to look for it because I didn't know what to call it. But by the time the album was over, I had undergone a profound moment of self-discovery after which nothing would ever be the same. I was an art rocker. Welcome! So this is the Mind of Fabulous origin story, huh? Yeah, yes it is. That's exactly what it is. And because Pink Floyd introduced me to the world of art rock, Pink Floyd are indirectly the reason I know all these wonderful people who I get to do this podcast with. So yeah, also just to reiterate, I was thinking movies with Pink Floyd albums before it was cool. Oh Mike, also we'll inevitably get around to covering DJ Shadows introducing and I feel like that's equally the mic origin story. Yeah, it comes a little later in the story, but yes, it's a story with multiple parts. Yes. Alright, so aside from being vaguely aware of them as one tends to be, I got into Pink Floyd during my senior year of high school in 1997 and 1998. Now in a certain sense, getting into Pink Floyd during high school makes me a walking cliché. But my story is a little different from the typical one. Because Pink Floyd was a case where I had to get into a band the "ron way" in order to get into them the right way. As a budding classic rock fan, I started with Pink Floyd by doing what I was supposed to do, which meant that I initially bought dark side of the moon, the wall, and wish you were here in that order. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I disliked them at all, but they initially left me somewhat cold. Listening to dark side of the moon and the wall in particular felt like a signed homework. And my initial reaction to them was essentially, this isn't the moody blues. It was only when I started making my way into the second tier of their catalog that my love of the band, including those three albums I started with, really took off. In my final semester of high school, I listened to Pink Floyd all the time, but my focus felt primarily on the following five albums. Piper at the gates of dawn, which incidentally I acquired straight up in a trade for a Queen Greatest Hits album, which I ranked as the greatest trade I have ever made. You definitely got the better end of that deal. That is true. A saucer full of secrets, the live half of Amagama, Metal, and Animals. In retrospect, Prague John was always my destiny. I just didn't know it yet. Now with Metal in particular, my origin story with that album was tightly coupled with something I stumbled across on the internet in early 1998, around when I bought the album. In doing a search related to Pink Floyd synchronicities, I stumbled across a page that described a rather convoluted sync involving Metal and the late '60s cut of the 1940 Disney movie Fantasia. Over sprained break, I set things up to try and see if this would live up to the billing. And it completely broke my teenage brain. The tar solos were conducted, fairies danced to a psychedelic blues jam, Mickey skipped down the stairs to a baseline, a broom got split into little pieces at just the right moment, and dozens of other things happened to make this one of the greatest things I had ever experienced in my life. Over the next few years, I ran that sync several more times, often for guests. And the consensus every time was that intentional or not, and to be clear, I do not believe something this convoluted was intentional. But regardless, intentional or not, the consensus was always that this was one of the greatest mixtures of sight and sound they had ever experienced. I like that this is your primary mental association with Fantasia when the right of spring is right there, I know, but yeah, to be fair though, the version of right of spring that they use and it was actually heavily abridged in kind of a hack job. Well, I look forward to hearing your Fantasia thoughts. Oh, yes, they're going to be a lot of fun. Maddo, what about you? Well, my parents had dark side of the moon and the wall, and we had classic rock radio on just all all the time. So I was always aware of Pink Floyd, and I liked them, but I was a teenager before I started investigating them further for myself. And I don't remember specifically what prompted this, but I went to the library to get a Pink Floyd album, but with no idea of context or how the band evolved or how different, their different eras were. So the first album I picked out and listened to straight through was the Division Bell, which comes quite late in their history and is not very good and unsurprisingly it didn't take. So I kind of just forgot about him for a while and then when I was about probably 18 or 19, I read Mark Prandell's Pink Floyd page and really enjoyed his reviews and decided to try them again. This time starting with the early period because it sounded the most interesting, which turned out to be correct. A saucer full of secrets just cracked my brain open and that's still my second favorite Pink Floyd album after dark side of the moon because I mean, there's really no denying that that's an amazing album. And I found that having some prior knowledge of the band's history really helped a lot when it came to navigating their catalog and I spent a good couple of years just hanging out in Floydland. Good place to hang out. Oh, it's so fun. You should all go hang out there for a while. And after all that time though, there were still some gaps in my knowledge because they have a lot of music and weirdly metal was one of the albums I didn't have. But then, you know, one of the benefits of partnering up with somebody is you get access to their music collection. And I had the extreme good fortune of marrying a Pink Floyd fan and he had metal and a couple of the other albums that I hadn't heard yet. So I finally got to hear how good this album is. And, you know, Pink Floyd is still one of my very favorite bands and one of the most calming bands. I know the other ones I go to when I'm really stressed out and need to calm down. You know, their music still just, it makes me happy in a way that's pretty much unique. All right. Rich, what about you? Well, first off, Amanda, the same thing happened to me with the division bell because I got into Pink Floyd. Well, I first became aware of Pink Floyd in the early 90s and I wasn't like aware of bands having like different eras and stuff. So I just lumped in Dark Side of the Moon with like this one that also had a cool cover. So I had no idea that it was like a weaker reunion album at the time. Yeah. And I think that's why I picked it because the cover is pretty cool. Yeah. I didn't hear it until much later. But as for me and Pink Floyd, Floyd and Dark Side of the Moon, they were like the first music my dad ever spoke of that he described kind of in terms of being sort of high art and a technical achievement. But I didn't actually personally get to know their music until I saw laser Floyd. Yeah. Yeah. It was awesome. I saw the same Dark Side of the Moon show twice at the Dianna College Planetarium in Cupertino and it had these really cool animations like cash registers and change for money, like going along with the music and this kind of like a doctor who style like swirling going into the vortex sort of thing around the run. Yeah. And the encore for it was one of these days, which was cool. Yeah, it had an encore, which was great. And my mom bought metal afterwards because they made sure to announce what album it was from. But I never really listened to the album or the other like sort of weird in between Floyd albums until we started this show. Because like you guys were just like talking like Pink Floyd, like it was still 20 years ago. And I was like, wow, even listening to Pink Floyd this whole time. There must be something there. And I finally checked out like, yeah, I'm scared by clouds and this one. And I think I got in the sense from there later more Roger Waters dominated albums that they were like more abandonment to be appreciated rather than enjoyed, but like getting to explore ones like this one. I've really gotten a sense of where the fun is. You made wise decisions, Rich. I have chosen wisely. Alright, Mike, why don't you tell us about the history of Pink Floyd up to this album. [Music] Alright, the Pink Floyd story begins all the way back in 1963 when fellow architecture students Roger Waters and Nick Mason met at the London Polytechnic and decided to start playing music together. As bands tend to do, there's went through a number of different lineup changes and different names, including Sigma six, the abdabs, the screaming abdabs, the mega deaths, and eventually the T set. That's like six different bands. Which came first. The abdabs are the screaming abdabs. Like did they try to expand upon it or did they decide that screaming abdabs was too long? We don't want to be associated with screaming. I just imagine the idea of plural mega death and I'm just thinking pieces sell, but who are buying or something. I just love that they went from the mega deaths to the T sets. Right. Yeah, I'm getting the sense of a band that didn't know what they wanted to sound like. Exactly. But by the time they were calling themselves the T set, they consisted of Waters on bass, Mason on drums, Richard Wright on keyboards, Sid Barrett on rhythm guitar, Chris Dennis on vocals, and Bob Close on lead guitar. In 1965, Chris Dennis and Bob Close left the group, and Sid Barrett became the leader of the band. Later that year, they discovered that they were playing at the same venue as another band called the T set. So Sid Barrett came up with the name the Pink Floyd sound from the names of two blues musicians that were mentioned in the liner notes of a record he had by Blind Boy Fuller. By 1966, they were just the Pink Floyd. They should have been the new T set. So Pink Floyd did what all psychedelic bands did before psychedelic music existed. They started out as an R&B band, but since Bob Close was the only one of them who could really play the blues, they had to find a different style after he left. Luckily, they had Sid Barrett, who turned out to be a wonderfully eccentric songwriter, and their new sound combined his strange, whimsical songs about gnomes and gingerbread men with extended instrumental explorations, which they started doing live so they could play longer sets without repeating songs. By late 1966, the Pink Floyd were generating some serious buzz, and they were signed to EMI in January of 1967. Their first single, Arnold Blaine, was a delightful song about a clothesline rating transvestite. And it made it to number 20 on the UK chart even though several radio stations banned it for being about a clothesline rating transvestite. Their next single, C-Emily Play, did even better than that, and in August, they released their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. So things were looking really great for the Pink Floyd, but there was one problem. Sid Barrett had begun taking lots and lots of LSD, and some people can do that with no problem, but as all you good King Crimson fans out there know, one too many schizophrenic tendencies makes it complicated. Barrett's behavior became increasingly erratic and difficult to deal with, and it eventually became evident that he was suffering from a complete metal breakdown. This was most obvious at concerts when he would stand completely still at the front of the stage and refuse to sing or play or move or do anything at all, including during an appearance on American bandstand, before one show they discovered that Barrett had crushed up a bunch of quailudes, mixed them with Vaseline, and combed the mixture into his hair. As was the style of the time, yes, points for creativity. Apparently, he had decided just that minute that his hair was too curly and he couldn't be seen like that. And I guess I mean, I kind of get the Vaseline, but I guess the quailudes were supposed to calm it down. I don't really know. I have no idea. It's terrible. Yeah. So clearly, they weren't going to be able to tour with Sid Barrett anymore. The others in the Floyd had the idea of hiring David Gilmore, previously of a band called Joker's Wild, to be their live guitarist while Barrett would write their songs. But Barrett was so far gone that that situation didn't work either. And I think he was kind of upset that he didn't get to be like the pink Floyd guy anymore. So by 1968, he was out of the band completely, and Gilmore was their new permanent guitarist. The last words, Sid Barrett sings on a pink Floyd album are, "And what exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke?" And it is one of the saddest things you will ever hear. Mm-hmm. It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here. Yeah. And the sea isn't green, and I love the queen, then what exactly is a dream? So as one might expect, the Floyd floundered a little bit, post Barrett. But the first thing the new lineup recorded that they all agreed was really good was a track called "A Saucer Full of Secrets," which wound up being the title track to the next album. It was 12 minutes long, and to a lot of people in 1968, it probably didn't sound very much like music at all, but just a lot of dissonant noise. But it marked a huge change in the way Pink Floyd wrote their songs. Drawing on their shared architectural background, they created a piece of music that couldn't really be notated in any traditional way, but when it was written out, it looked like a huge elaborate chart with peaks and valleys indicating the direction of music, which was meant to represent a battle with everything leading up to it as well as its aftermath. It was a bold move, but it paid off, and a Saucer Full of Secrets remained a live staple for the band for years. So after the double album "Amagama," containing one extremely awesome live album and one album where each member was given half a side of vinyl to do whatever they wanted, and whatever they wanted was usually something very weird. And a soundtrack to a French movie called "More About Drugs," the Floyd's next proper studio album was 1970's Adam Hart mother. This was partly an attempt to stop being seen purely as a psychedelic freak out band, and the album cover was the least psychedelic thing they could think of, it's just a big picture on a cow. It's a great picture of a cow. Oh, I love that cover. It's fantastic. It's a truly awesome cow. Yeah. So the title track to Adam Hart mother took up the entire first side of the album and was an instrumental featuring brass and choir arrangements by avant-garde composer Ron Giesen. And when they went on tour for that album, they took the entire brass section and choir with them, and it did not go well at one show somebody poured beer down the tuba. So perhaps as a result of negative feelings associated with that tour, Pink Floyd came to really loathe Adam Hart mother to kind of a ridiculous degree. Gilmore has said, quote, "Adam Hart mother was a good idea, but it was dreadful." I listened to that album recently, "Got it, sh*t! We're literally our lowest point artistically," unquote. And according to Waters, quote, "Adam Hart mother is a good case, I think, for being thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again," unquote. I like it. Yeah, I'll probably listen to it tomorrow. Yeah, sorry. They don't have his words. And it has summer '68 on it, I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Very worthwhile album. You notice Rick Wright had nothing bad to say about it. Right. Well. So when they went to work on their next album, not only did they have no new songs, but they weren't even sure what the album was supposed to sound like. What was a band to do? That's what we're going to talk about today. Okay, so we're going to get to metal by Pink Floyd in just a second, but before we do that, let's take a quick break. Hey there, meddlers, if, like me, after a long, hard day on the dark side of the moon, you'd like to kick back with a Twinkie Weenie sandwich and throw on some weird Aliankovik, I just recently discussed his movie, UHF, on our friend Libby Kudmore's podcast, The OST Party. And that's OST as an original soundtrack. It was really, really, really fun, and I encourage you to subscribe to the show in general. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/discordpod if you'd like to support the show. Our $2 a month tear gets you early access to our compilation episodes, which at this point gets you the entire first disc of Nevermind the Mainstream, the best of MTV's 120 minutes, which should ring a bell if you'd like to stay up really late and watch music videos in the late 80s and early 90s. Finally, if you have just a second, please rate us, or better yet, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. And thank you so much for those who have. Especially the person who referred to us as "white exennial turbo nerds," which is 100% accurate. Alright, enough ticking away the moments that make up a dull day. Back to Pink Floyd. And we're back. We're going to start with Track 1. One of these days. I should also mention that these clips come directly from my own original pressing vinyl. That's awesome. That's awesome. The only Pink Floyd vinyl I have are my mom's dark side of the moon in the wall, and I can't play them. They're too beat up. [MUSIC] One of these days is such a strange contradiction of a song. It's quintessentially Pink Floyd, but they don't really have any other songs like it. It's a kind of song they would never write again even though elements of it would continue showing up in their music for the rest of their career. And it's instantly recognizable and immediately memorable even though you can't exactly hum it. Sure you can. I suppose if you really tried, yeah. Only Pink Floyd could have made one of these days and they could only have made it when they did. One of these days is one of Pink Floyd's architecture songs, as I've come to think of them. And what I mean by that is that it's a kind of song that was a major part of the late 60s, early 70s Pink Floyd sound, where what defines the song isn't a melody or even a riff, but a structure. These songs are improvisational in nature, but they are never jams. They are held together by a predetermined series of events. And the way in which these events happen may differ from one performance to the next, but they always happen. And always in the same order. One example of these is a sossical of secrets, which we've been over before. Another is careful with that exugene, where there's no predetermined melody to speak of, but you know that in every performance certain things will happen, not the least of which is Roger Waters screaming bloody murder. In a way, it's fair to say that these songs weren't written so much as constructed. So, what defines one of these days? Well, it's not a catchy tune. It's Waters rumbling bassline that's really just one note being played into a tape delay. It's rights, icy organ stabs, punctuating every chord change. It's Gilmore's slide guitar that snarls out at you like a junkyard dog. It's that descending guitar lick Gilmore plays, but let's Waters know it's time for him to stop on his tremolo pedal and plunge the song into total darkness. Oh, that sounds familiar. It's the massive drum hits that sound like a SWAT team about to break your door down with a battering ram. So, immediately by Mason's distorted proto-death metal announcement that one of these days he is going to cut you into little pieces. When and only when these conditions have been met, shall the band let it rip, which is what you knew was going to happen from the first note. So, I'm going to play a little bit more, but I'm going to play a little bit more. I'm going to play a little bit more, but I'm going to play a little bit more, but I'm going to play a little bit more. I love that you managed to include half the song. I sure did. If you're going to do it, this is the one to do it. So, a few extra fun facts about this song, first of all, when they played it live it would just be Waters on bass, but for the studio version both Waters and Gilmore played bass, one in each speaker, and you can tell which one is Gilmore because his bass sound is a lot dollar. This is because when they sent a roadie to get new bass strings, he decided he'd rather go see his girlfriend and didn't come back to the studio. The lesson is by your own bass strings. Second of all, if you're a Doctor Who fan, and you thought that middle section sounded suspiciously familiar, yes, that is a direct quote of the Doctor Who theme they threw in there, and they played it every time. I'm going to include a clip of the original Doctor Who theme here for anybody who's never heard it, and also because Delia Darby-Shire was a major pioneer of electronic music, and I thought she deserved a dimension. And that frightening growl of the title phrase is often called Nick Mason's vocal debut, but he'd actually contributed vocals a few years earlier to a song called Corporal Klaig on The Sons of Full of Secrets album. And finally, who was it that Pink Floyd wanted to cut into little pieces so much? It was a DJ named Jimmy Young. They thought he was annoying. That'll show. He probably had it coming. Amanda, what do you think about it? I love this. People don't really tend to think of Pink Floyd as a rock band so much, but here they are, rockin' you like a hurricane. This isn't totally unique in their catalog, but it is unusual, and like Mike said, they never really did it quite like this again. I think they might have been aiming for something like this with Run Like Hell on the Wall, and I like that song, but it's not nearly as successful. I enjoy what you said about it being an architectural song too. I think you're right on about that, and in fact, in Nick Mason's memoir, he pretty much says more or less that same thing, so I think you're right on there. And they were doing that right from the beginning, like I think another example of this is Interstellar Overdrive, you know, back when they were the house band at the UFO club, real early on, where they do the intro, and then said we'd just go wild for however long he felt like that night, and then, you know, Mason does his big drum roll. There's always those same elements. Yeah. And, you know, like not to sound all Pink Floyd hip-story, I just think it's interesting that that type of song dates back to the very beginning of the band. Oh, yeah. And my favorite detail, though, of how this was recorded was that vocal. They had the tape running at double speed, and had Nick Mason say, "What if these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces?" And then they ran it back at half speed. And it's just terrifying. It's so scary, especially with headphones on, oh, man. And I think there's some ring modulation going on there, too. Yeah. And I'm not, I can't do a producer mic bit about ring modulation because it's too, there's a lot of math involved. I don't really know how it works, but basically, John should do it. Yeah, it involves adding a lot of just, like, weird harmonics to things, in harmonic overtones and things. Give me them for your series. Like, one example would be, you know, the intro to Black Sabbath's Iron Man, and Prague John's favorite use of the Ring Modulator. [music] Rich, what do you think about this song? Well, I really like the studio as instrument, like, element of this album, like, it's similar to, you know, we covered Brian, you know, last year. And, of course, like, you know, there's the Beatles, like, just, you know, their work with George Martin in the studio, but, like, I don't know, so, but at this point, like, Floyd, we're still, like, super collaborative and, like, unbound by any sort of, like, depressing concept, like, the later ones. So, like, I just like that, at this point, they were just a band that would just sit around and try to make cool sounds that people hadn't heard before. And, this whole album is just kind of a production jam session, in a way, like, they didn't, like, they didn't jam, but they kind of, like, it's, like, collaborative jamming in some way. It's hard to describe, but, like, it's just working together with, anyway, this song is the epitome of that for me. Like, it's just such, like, it's such an interesting creation, and I especially love, like, the, like, the two side-by-side guitars, it makes me kind of, like, feel, like, I'm on a tightrope or something for the entire song. Yeah. And I can't remember whether this is from the laser show or just my own overactive imagination, but, like, overall, this song gives me, kind of, the sensation of being in, like, this fighter jet that's in, that's in, like, a never-ending spiral toward its target. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah, it rocks. I mean, this is, kind of, this is, kind of, their highway to the dangers I would, I guess. [laughter] Yeah. All right. So, for me, Mike did a really good job of hitting on the essence of the song itself. So, I want to use my time to talk about a couple of things tangential to this track, and to this album. The first thing I want to bring up is the movie Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, originally released in 1972, re-released in an extended form in 1974, and somewhat ruined in the 2002 director's cut that, unfortunately, is the only version available on DVD. The core of the movie is footage of a series of live performances by the band performed in absence of an audience, split between a Paris Soundstage and a Roman amphitheater among the ruins of the ancient city of Pompeii. One of the Pompeii performances, filmed at night, is indeed a performance of one of these days, and the footage is particularly interesting because due to a mistake in which most of the filmed footage of the other band members was misplaced, almost all of the footage in the performance focuses on Mason. I find the footage of him here absolutely fascinating. It reinforces the notion that, no, he wasn't an elite art rock drummer in the sense of Bill Bruford or Phil Collins or Carl Palmer, but he was exactly the drummer that Pink Floyd needed, and he's a blast to watch. There's a particularly fun moment with about a minute left where he's bashing away and a stick just flies out of his right hand. And this is followed by him continuing to bash away with his left hand and him definitely retrieving a new stick and proceeding like nothing happened. That scene is so much fun. There's nothing, nothing he's playing is particularly complicated, but he just throws all of himself into it. There's this one drum fill he plays. That's the simplest thing ever. It's just tada, tada, tada, tada, tada, tada, tada, tada. Yep, but he puts his entire upper body into it. Yep. He just loves drumming so much. And even when there's just one spot where he's just starting to activate a symbol to his left, and he's just watching it, like this is the most, this is yet another really important part of this great concoction I'm putting together. He's just watching it with such, such strong intent, making sure, okay, it's doing what it needs to. Okay, let me get back to the groove. All right, so the other thing I'm going to talk about and this is going to be recurring throughout this episode is about where this track lands in terms of the phantasia sync that I mentioned earlier. So the setup of the sync is such that this track appears at two points in the movie. The first is during the sequence involving Mickey as the sorcerer's apprentice. The showstopper moment here is the one of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces line happening just as Mickey is chopping up the broom. Oh yeah, but there are other very fun bits as well, such as Mickey skipping down the stairs to the baseline or the water spilling everywhere during the chaotic midsection of the song. The other portion waters the other portion comes in a section that renders the sync deeply twisted and darkly ironic. It occurs much later while the unscentar men and women are frolicking about with each other and the mason line occurs about when a centar man is pushing a centar woman gently on a swing, suggesting that they would have an unfortunate ending far in the future. Oh, no, it's a real trip. I wanted to do that sync actually, but it goes with the VHS version, right? Yes, and the movie was re-edited when it was released on DVD and I don't think it would work anymore. That's too bad. Yeah, well, what syncs have you all done, by the way? I think that's interesting to talk about like I did the dark side and Wizard of Oz want in high school and I was completely sober. And it was it was fine. Yeah, I did dark side of the rainbow in college also completely sober just in a friend's dorm room and it was fine. I've watched the dark side of the I've watched the dark side of the rainbow one. I think on YouTube years ago. Yeah, it was okay. It was not as good as the Fantasia one. I've done the I've done the Wizard of Oz one and I've done the 2001 sync with echoes. I have done that one too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it also goes with interstellar overdrive. Oh, fun. Yeah, and of course your own metropolis sync. Oh, yes. Yeah, the one I came up with it's like you started this whole trend, right? Yes, that was me. I'm an invented pink Floyd sinking. Yes. Yes. All right, let's move on. Track two is called a pillow of winds and it could not be more different. I learned the word Iter down for this episode. Really? Yes. I'm not British enough. It's also in another pink Floyd song called Julia Dream. Yeah. And in flaming. Oh, you're right. They like to sing about Iter dance a lot. Huh? It's their, it's their conceptual link. Yeah, it's their poodle. They're in their early 20s, right? Well, you know, sleeping. Yeah. The dark was forth and waved all by the seasons chained, and we did walk. Now wakes the hour now sleeps the swan, behold the dream, the dream is gone. A pillow of winds is a song that even hardcore Pink Floyd fans don't seem to mention very often, and I can understand why that is, it's very, very easy not to pay attention to. For a long time I just sort of thought of it as something that only really existed as a matter of sequencing necessity, like if you open your album with a sneering ball of menace, you have to follow it up with something nice and gentle. But if I do pay attention to it while it's playing, it's a lot more than that. It's just as effective a mood piece as anything else they ever did. I especially like the way it just sort of melts into a minor key about a minute in, and I always forget how long it spends in that minor key, because my association, part of why I didn't really like the song all that much when I was first getting into this album, it starts out in exactly the same key as make it with you by bread, and I just, I couldn't shake that association, but I always forget how quickly it changes from that, and it turns into a very different song. This one is mostly a Dave Gilmore composition, the lyrics were co-written with Roger Waters, but Gilmore wrote all the music and sang it. Gilmore was really good at writing these nice, quiet songs to float away to, and Pink Floyd were about to become a band that had increasingly little room for those kinds of songs. In a way, everything on this album is something Pink Floyd would do for the last time. So enjoy it! There aren't many others like it. I feel like this song gets overlooked primarily for the crime of not fitting at all the notion of what Pink Floyd is supposed to sound like, which is kind of a shame, because I think it's really quite lovely. The song title, according to Nick Mason, is in reference to a possible scoring combination in the game Majon, which the band had taken up while touring. Yeah, Pillow is a pair, and a wind is just one of the types of titles. It's like two of a kind. Oh, there you go. Did you play Majon a lot when they were in Central Pay? That makes sense. Yeah. I also feel like the title reflects the nature of the sound pretty well. I mean, it seems a little trite, but Gilmore's voice really does have the feel to me of a warm soft pillow. And the way the song waivers back and forth between e-major and e-miner makes it feel like it's being blown back and forth by the wind. Not too stiff of a wind, but one that's making it waver a bit. Well, in getting into this album, so I never really think of Pink Floyd as a beetle-esque band ever, but I keep coming back to them as a surprising reference point. Yeah, while I mentioned the studio is instrument earlier, but right here, coming off of one of these days, it really makes me think of the transition on the white album between back in the USSR and Dear Prudence. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a great comp. Yeah, yeah. It has the same kind of like chimie drone going on, and actually the bass, well, so Mike, back in the Todd Runger episode, you mentioned like the pedal point in international feel. I think this is, this is another one, like the bass forms a pedal point in this song. It does, yeah. Yeah, which is part of the drone, which like kind of like helps it achieve its effect. I mostly bring that up because like we tried talking about pedal points on our own and then that gets episode and we totally got it wrong, and I'm here to have an interest. Yeah. I think part of that is that Roger Waters as a bass player, I think he, he tried to, he he generally tried to play as few notes as he could get away with. Yeah. So he's doing that in this song. Yeah, yeah. It's effective. It's just funny when you like listen to it really closely. It's like, huh, the bass is just kind of just, yeah. Any plays fretless on this song, which I don't think he did very often. So that's interesting. It's a lovely effect. Yeah. I really, really like what you said about the Beatles comparison, because I was just thinking how nice it is, how that, that howling wind, you know, from one of these days transitions into this nice guitar, which sounds just like the airplane transitioning into the guitar and deer prudence. Mm-hmm. So yeah, yeah, that's, you blew my mind a little bit, that hadn't occurred to me. This is just, it's a little whisper of a song and it would just blow away if it weren't for that change into the minor key, which is very cleverly placed at the line when night comes down. You lock the door. It makes it sound like they're reminding you that night time is when all the scary things come out. You know, because it's pink Floyd. They can't make you too comfortable, right? So and then it's just, it's, it's kind of a soft, comforting, sleepy kind of a song, except for just these little phrases here and there, you know, like the dream is gone, a bit about cold rain and being beneath the ground. And when they say the dream is gone, that line always made me think of silently acidity by Queen's Reich. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then it occurred to me that all of silent lucidity kind of sounds a lot like this. Yeah, that's, that song is made completely of pink Floyd rep offs. It is. It is. It's probably why I love it so much. I, oh, I freaking love silent lucidity. But yeah, I have to admit that when a pillow of winds isn't actually playing, I usually can't bring it to mind, but if it, it's really, really well done, and it's a lot more substantial than it seems at first glance. Now in the Fantasia Sink, this is a transitional passage in both of its occurrences. But there are still some interesting bits that appear, especially in the first iteration. The sense of a calm after the storm is reinforced in seeing the waters dissipate in the early stages of the song at the end of the Sorcerer's apprentice sequence. And the ending portions of the song also make a lovely soundtrack to the portion depicting the early stages of the creation of the earth. In particular, the little bits of pedal steel near the end work really well with the meteors quickly dashing across the screen as we slowly zoom in on the newly formed world. And with that, we will move on to track three. This is called Fearless, and it is awesome. Yeah, it is. [Music] You say the hills too steep to climb, just like me, you say you'd like to see me try to climb. You pick the place and I'll choose the time, and I'll climb the hill in my own way. Just wait a while for the right day, and as I rise above the tree light and the clouds on and down, here in the sound of the things you said today. This is another pleasant Gilmore Waters composition with Gilmore singing. Only this time it has an electric full band arrangement, and it's structured more like a conventional song. I'm not sure what the stadium full of soccer fans singing you'll never walk alone is doing there because it's not exactly a ghost sports kind of song, but I think at this stage in their career, Pink Floyd still enjoyed throwing unexpected things into their songs because why not? What's really interesting to me is that they never played this song live, and it's very similar to a song Gilmore contributed to Adam Hart mother called Fat Old Son, which on the album sounds a lot like something that could have been on the King's Village Green Preservation Society. By 1971, they had turned it into a 15 minute behoy myth with a towering Rick Wright organ solo in the middle. I imagined they probably could have done something similar with Fearless, which I'd argue is an even better song than Fat Old Son, but they never played it at all, even when they were touring the album. However, I did get to hear Nick Mason's new band Saucer Full of Secrets play it when I saw them last year, so it hasn't been forgotten. I have always really loved this song, but it's kind of hard to articulate why. I do think it's definitely better than Fat Old Son, which I also like, but I don't know. I like this one better. I think it's because I tend to enjoy repetitive grooves like this, as long as the phrase that's being repeated is an interesting one, which this definitely is. It sounds to me a lot like the worm section of Yes's Starship Trooper, which came out just earlier this same year, and which I also love, and that up and down basing guitar riff thing is, it's a really good counterpoint to the vocal melody, or maybe it's the other way around, I don't know, but that's what comes to mind first when I think of this song. As for the lyrics and the soccer crowd and all that, there's a very good book by Nicholas Schaffner called a Saucer Full of Secrets, the Pink Floyd Odyssey is the subtitle. I recommend this book all the time, it's really good. And according to that book, the line fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd, which is one of Pink Floyd's all-time best lyrics, if you ask me, is an illusion to sit bear it. And he goes on to say that toward the end of the sessions for metal, that line inspired Roger Waters to go on to write another song about said that he initially called the Dark Side of the Moon, that later evolved into brain damage. So you could say fearless inspired the whole album. As far as the soccer fans, I don't really know why they're there, and honestly, I could probably do without them, or at least shorten them considerably. Nick Mason says that it was Roger Waters who was set on including the Liverpool fans, which he adds was weird because Roger was an arsenal fan. I'm not sure that's the weird thing. As for why they did that, I mean, nobody really knows. I've read some speculation that he chose the Liverpool Football Club signature song because of Liverpool's history is a blue collar, labor city, which I guess aligns with Roger's socialist political beliefs somehow, I don't really get it. There's also a pretty involved theory that I enjoyed quite a lot, that fearless is about Jesus. And they added the, you'll never walk alone, because if you accept Jesus, then you'll never walk alone. I really, really doubt that that was the intended purpose of the song. This isn't you two were dealing with here. No, but sure you could interpret it that way if you want. Actually, it fits pretty well. My best guess is they just said, hey, this would be weird and fun. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds about right. Well, what I like about this song is that it's just this, it's a really thick sounding song, like even though it's kind of just like basic stylistically. And just, well, so this album is kind of for me where the Pink Floyd sound really like sort of coalesces. Yes. This upgrades to HD, if you will, it really starts to envelop you. And so as a result, even when they're just dicking around, every song nonetheless starts to feel really, really purposeful, and I think that the song benefits from that. I don't know. Nothing about it compositionally really wow is me, but I just love listening to it. It's just such an experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I have no connection between the song and Fantasia, but the song does show up in Richard Link Lauders 2016 comfort food, bro college comedy, everybody wants some with two exclamation points. It's named after the Van Halen song. And it's, it comes up during a scene where the characters are passing around a bong appropriately enough. Yeah. A lot of people have taken drugs and listened to Pink Floyd. I'm not sure if you're aware. Really? No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. I'm off the episode now. Yeah, I've always really liked this one for a handful of reasons. So on the whole, it feels like it should be classified as a pop ballad, but it also centers around a rising riff that surprisingly crisp and rocking, especially if a riff that prominently involves an acoustic guitar. The vocal melody is effortlessly memorable. The electric guitars gently layered on top of the acoustic part make for an arrangement as subtle as any that Gilmore ever came up with. And the light touches of piano and the final verse in Coda are the ideal inclusion to a song that might have been monotonous in the final minute without them. I also really like the lyrics, both in terms of individual lines and in terms of the overall messages and imagery. I've bounced around to different theories of what they mean. But a theory I've settled on recently that tweaks another theory I came across is that the two verses depict two separate instances of different individuals demonstrating examples of what it means to be fearless. In the first example, the subject successfully sets out to achieve a goal they were told they could never accomplish. And in the second example, a different subject faces their captors unflinchingly in the face of their own eminent execution. See, it's Jesus. Yeah, exactly. Where the ending soccer chat fits into this, I can't entirely say. Maybe this is the chant they hear from supporters in the crowd at the end. Or maybe this is the song they hear in their mind as the end draws near. This is some first-class trolling, calling it soccer over and over again. That is an excellent point. Whatever we're Americans, we say that here. As for the Fantasia Sync, this song appears twice, both times to memorable effect. In the first iteration, this song serves as the soundtrack to the creation of the world. And if the idea of hearing this song going well, volcanoes incessantly explode, sounds ridiculous. Don't knock it until you try it. This iteration also has the glorious detail of having the "football" chant appear just as the first microscopic life forms appear and begin to divide incessantly. Oh, cool. Yeah, it's really great. In the second iteration, the song primarily accompanies the storm sequence. With one poor soul and is donkey, serving as the target of divine lightning bolts before the storm finally passes. And where Beethoven's sixth symphony originally made the sequence starkly menacing, here the sequence takes on an amusingly comic effect, with the final cheering dissipating just as the visual sequence draws to a close. Yeah, it's really neat. Alright, let's move on to track four. This is called "Centro Pay". John is doing his shaming down the street dance. I'm breaking a stake with a break on the sand, riding a wave in the wake of an oasis down. Sleeping alone in the drone of the darkness, scratched by the sand that fell from our love, peeping my dreams and I still hear her calling. When fear alone, I'll come home home, back with a home bound, the pigeon that does, gone with the wind and the rain on the airplane, born in a home with no silver spoon, I'm drinking champagne like a good type of comb, sooner than wait for a break in the weather, I'll gather my far-flung thoughts together, speeding away on winter new day, if you're alone, I'll come home home home. This must be the cheerful guy in the band. He's known for that. Highly doubt this is anyone's favorite Pink Floyd song, but it amuses me that this is the one song on the album credited to Roger Waters alone. "Bitter, angry, my father died in the war, dragged down by the stone, we don't need no education, bread-crunching noise ass Roger Waters, who filled nearly all subsequent Pink Floyd albums with songs of alienation and insanity," wrote this breezy, carefree, chilling at the beach song. I've seen some people compare this song to Jimmy Buffett, and yeah, it's possible to hear this song that way, in which case, "Yuck." But what I realized recently while listening to it is that it doesn't sound like Jimmy Buffett. It sounds like Harry Nelson, and if you take it that way, it has a certain charm to it, like it's Pink Floyd trying to sound like Harry Nelson, like that's kind of adorable, but however you hear it, I hope you enjoy hearing Roger Waters in a good mood, because like a lot of things on this album, it will never happen again. Like, he wrote a chipper song on the next album, but it starts at the lies, the memories of a man in his old age or the deeds of a man is primed, it's about somebody dying and being bitter about life and how pointless it is, and that's the cheerful song of the album. Well, I want to jump off that Harry Nelson point, because I think it's great, because I think what makes this song to me more than just a lark is those gigantic monotonous piano chords that have a ton of decay on them. And that strikes me as like a very like Harry Nelson touch, like the thing that he would do. And to me, it makes the song sound really, really claustrophobic, and like you're on the French Riviera, sure, but like your indoor is going stir crazy on a really dreary day. But I really like this one. I mean, it's such like a stupid joke in the middle of the album, but I don't know, but they still give it like a nice full treatment, like everything else. Yeah. This song and Shamus are not included when doing the Fantasia Sync. And I think that this in part is why for years, I would skip these two tracks and generally consider them a nuisance to the albums overall flow. And coming back to this album for the sake of the podcast, though, I was shocked to discover that more than 20 years after I first became acquainted with them, I kind of like them now. Like everybody else, my initial inclination was to make the Jimmy Buffett comparison. But now that I'm a little older and a little wiser, what this song reminds me of more than anything else is the song "Sunny Afternoon" from the 1966 King's album "Face to Face." Huh. Yeah, yeah, good. In no way does a song "This Cherry" and "Sunny" result in the album's "Face to Face". But I don't think it's going to be a good song. I think it's going to be a good song. But I think it's going to be a good song. It's going to be a good song. So, I think it's going to be a good song. The true epic of the album. Santa Payne might not be anybody's favorite Pink Floyd song, but Sheamus holds the distinction of being most people's least favorite Pink Floyd song. It might have something to do with it being a pretty standard 12-bar blues. It might also have something to do with Dave Gilmore sharing lead vocal duties with an actual dog. And we are firmly pro-dog here at Discord and Rhyme, but they are not creatures endowed with the gift of song. Me, I just think it's funny. It's not the last time they would use dog sounds in a song, but it was the last time they would deploy them in such a jocular manner, or do much of anything in a jocular manner. Come to think of it. Sheamus was the dog's real name, and he was a cally belonging to Steve Marriott, of the small faces and humble pie. And if any of you are out there thinking, I wonder if they ever did this one live. Well, they kind of did. Although not in front of an audience. They performed it in the live at Pompeii movie, where it was retitled Mademoiselle Nobs, as their canine accompanist was not Sheamus, but a bourgeois named Nobs. That version doesn't have any lyrics at all, and features Gilmore on harmonica, Waters on guitar, and right-holding a microphone in front of the dog. As with its immediate predecessor, I like that this exists, and I don't agree at all with my lawn-held position that this somewhat ruins the album. Digging through old reader comments on my site, I found that somebody once compared this to the track "Mother's Lament" from the cream album "Disraeli Gears". Oh! And I think that's in the right ballpark for Sheamus. It's a silly throwaway that could only make it onto an album back in the days when bands felt comfortable, including weird, stylistic pastiches that hadn't passed a focus group test of what would make for the optimal version of an album. And I tend to like this kind of crap more than other people do. So, hearing it here is just fine by me. Plus, the sceneing guitar, so I realized as we were here, I was trying to figure out what does it remind me of. It kind of reminds me in a weird way of the door's saw on "Cars Hiss" by my window, where Jim Morrison, at the end, scenes a perfect imitation of a wall-wad guitar solo. And this just sounds like kind of like that solo, but done by a dog. So, in a certain sense, I kind of feel like an idiot for liking it, but I also like it. I have to sort through some things if you will excuse me. I feel like an idiot for liking a lot of things. So, yeah. Amanda, while I try and figure it myself out, what do you think about it? Well, I'll try and set you straight. Nick Mason wrote in his memoir, quote, "In a rather embarrassed way, I can only describe this as a novelty track." Nicholas Schaffner quotes David Gilmore, saying, "I guess it wasn't really as funny to everyone else as it was to us." So, at least they felt appropriately guilty about stinking up the record with this garbage. I mean, I guess I kind of like that they did it. You know, they took that risk. But again, I don't ever want to listen to this and it scared the shit out of my dog. That's fair. I forgot to mention something earlier. I want to circle back on. So, this song also makes a prominent appearance in the beginning and ending of the 1990 film, "Rosen Krants and Guilden Stern are Dead," which I watched my freshman year of college. And I was absolutely delighted to hear it in that context, even back when I didn't like the song at all. So, take that as you will. I think I would be too. They actually used shameless as the theme music for a movie. It was great. Well, you all hear a cream song in this, but I hear a song that we've already covered. It's like, this is like their pink eye on my leg from "Ween's the Mollest." Yes. Which means, as we observed then, you could also use this as, like, great technical difficulties music, which you stand by. Yeah. As for the song itself, well, it's part of the time-honored tradition of songs that annoy your pets, as Amanda said. I'm thinking in particular of the high-pitched tone at the end of Sergeant Peppers, like, right before the, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." Oh, yeah. There's like this really high-pitched, well, it even says, like, it doesn't it say in the liner notes, like, it's a, that it's meant to annoy your dog? Yeah, I think they put it there deliberately to annoy your dog. Yeah, yeah. So, the first time I played this, my dog was napping and just looked up a couple of times, but the second time I was playing it a lot louder, and you started barking and burst in from the other room. Nothing for this mysterious singing dog. Yeah, my equivalent for my cat actually is that a while ago, I watched this indie movie called Bird People, which ends with five minutes of uninterrupted bird song. It was awesome. Yeah, sounds exciting, right? That's great. The other thing I have to say is that all four banners get song-ready and credit on this one, and I'm curious how that split up. And I also think the dog should get song-ready and credit here, too. Well, yeah. And that's a thing. I miss was a very good boy. He just didn't need to be the lead vocalist on a pig. Yeah. Got to achieve a lifelong goal. Most dogs only dream of that. That's true. How much longer can I drag out the dog discussion so to delay the awesome song you all want to get to? Shut up, Rich. All right, so finally, the album wraps up with track number six, called Echoes, a short, insignificant piffle that we can get through in about two minutes, and oh, it seems I've been handed a note, and oh, oh, I see. You thought we were going to get out of this early? [ding] That's it. That's the entire clip. At 23 minutes and 31 seconds, this is the single longest track we have yet discussed. We have yet discussed on Discord and Rhyme. And as such, we are going to need to break it down into several sections, or cut it into little pieces, if you will, in order to do it justice. And we're going to begin by talking about a single note, because it's what the entire song grows out of. That sound is a piano played through a Leslie speaker. And I described how a Leslie speaker works way back on our episode about the Moody Blues on the threshold of a dream. But essentially, it's a speaker that spins around and gives things a swirly sound. Well, something I didn't mention about Leslie speakers is that they don't exactly have an even frequency response. They have these very pronounced resonant peaks that are part of what give them their distinctive character. So one day while Rick Wright was playing his piano through a Leslie speaker, it happened that every time he played a certain note, it had this piercing, very loud quality that none of the other notes had. And as you can hear, it barely even sounds like a piano at all. It sounds more like a submarine sonar pinging out into the depths of the ocean. So when the band heard this, obviously, they had to make it the basis of the entire second side of their next album, because that is how a pink Floyd do. Amanda, what are your thoughts on the note? It is a cool note. [laughter] Echoes was the first thing they did during the sessions for recording this album. When it was came time to make a new album, they didn't really have any ideas. And so, you know, they took this note and ran with it and ended up with Echoes as we're going to get into, you know, as the song goes on. But the rest of the album was planned around it. Like, they ended up with this side long epic on their hands and they had figured out a fill the other side. Nick Mason regrets that they put it on side two instead of side one. But they'd already done that on Adam Hartmother and well, that's Adam Hartmother. I think it was smart to sequence it the way they did. You know, like, Laura's in with the angry rock song and then we settle in with the other normal sounding things. You know, and then Shamus. And then unleash the thing. And then she gets real. Well, then what else were they going to do? End with Shamus? Yeah. [laughter] That would be a bummer. [laughter] Rich, any thoughts on the pain? Well, I like the pain. It's hard not to like the pain. It seems like kind of a counterpoint to the sound in one of these days. Like, what that sound would sound like underwater. But I don't know if they intended it that way. I mean, this wasn't a very, like, pre-planned album. But as for Echoes itself, well, I was prepared to make this my first big contrarian moment. I was going to be like, "Good, good, good, sucks." But I took Mike's advice from B.O.C.'s astronomy and played the song really loud in my living room. And let me tell you, Floyd is meant to envelop you. Oh, yes. It completely changed my opinion. I was completely converted. And thus sparing me all of you, like, "Sir, you've started banging already." [laughter] Yeah, go listen to something good, like Kylie Minogue. Or Ariana Grande. Yeah, so you're not going to hear any, like, "Haterade for me," going toward Echoes is what I'm saying. That's good. I'm frantically deleting all my bainer jokes from the notes right now. [laughter] I've heard a lot of music in my life that falls under the general umbrella of rock music. And I'm hard pressed to think of another case in that artistic world where a single note carries so much dramatic effect and creates such a pronounced sense of anticipation in the listener. I only have recordings of a small handful of live versions of Echoes, both with Pink Floyd and in solo performance years later. But something that really strikes me in those performances is just how much the audience, in each case, loses its collective mind in response to hearing that note. Even today, when Echoes is almost 50 years old and technology has advanced to allow musicians to create pretty much any sound that might pass through their minds, there's a sense of other worldliness and visceral power to that sound that I still find astonishing. Now in the Fantasia Sync, Echoes plays in full three times. Once near the beginning, once in the middle, and once near the end. I never quite figured out the exact specific ideal moment to start it. But the opening pin roughly corresponds to the following three moments in the movie. When the conductor disappears into the animation near the beginning, when a wet, swampy world appears on screen in the middle, and when the conductor puts his arms down at the conclusion of the storm sequence that fearlessly accompanied, it's an amazing effect in each case. It would go really well with Tinkerbell's wand. Yeah. We're such Disney shills. Alright, let's move on to part two. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ So Echoes the song doesn't begin so much as it gradually coalesces out of the ether. This part of the song was contributed by Rick Wright, and he didn't really get a lot of time in the spotlight on the first side. And he gets a little piano solo in Central Pay. That's pretty much it. But he didn't really get his moment. But Echoes, on the other hand, is a song that really couldn't have existed without him. In fact, after he died in 2008, David Gilmore dropped Echoes from his solo shows entirely, because he didn't think it was even possible to perform it without him. And he's got a point. Wright wasn't a keyboard virtuoso in any sense, but he brought a feel to Pink Floyd that nobody else had. And he's really the glue that holds the song together. I absolutely love Rick Wright. He's my favorite part of the band, and I don't think he really gets enough attention or credit for shaping their sound. And it's easy to see why. Like, he doesn't really go nuts with the keyboard solos or anything. He's not Rick Wakeman. He's just the connective tissue that holds the band together. He's what makes Pink Floyd sound like Pink Floyd. And as much as I love him, even I often don't really take notice of what he contributes to their songs, which is a big mistake, because he was amazing, very, very subtle, but super important. I like the idea of him being connective tissue, as opposed to like the stringy Roger Waters muscle tissue, like a bitter aftertaste. I am not a cannibal. Or so you want us to think. This is a section where words really fail me. Other than to observe the truly remarkable chemistry between David Gilmore and Rick Wright. And to observe that in terms of a depiction of formless elements circling around each other in a way that still manages to make sense, this passage reminds me a lot of the nuages movement from Debussy's Nocturns. [Music] [Music] Yeah, it's, you're right, it's very impressionistic. In the Fantasia Sync, the link between visuals and sound was so immediately striking here, that I felt compelled to put aside any lingering skepticism and keep going with it. For those of you who haven't seen Fantasia in a while, or ever, the first animation we see in the movie is a series of backdrops of clouds, punctuated with sporadic emergence of lights, sometimes in little points, and sometimes taking the forms of various instruments as boxed dakata and fugue and D minor plays in the soundtrack. Over time, more images emerge, mostly as different abstract collections of shape and color. And I'd be hard-pressed to think of a more perfect merging of sound and visuals than this portion of echoes and Fantasia. And with that, we will move to Part 3, the part that sounds like a song. [Music] [Music] I hold the trunks. I hold the trunks. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] So with all that introductory business out of the way, we finally get to the part of echoes that sounds like a song. And it's easy to think of echoes as essentially a four or five minute song with this colossal structure built up around it. But it didn't come together that way at all. It was made out of a bunch of little bits and pieces that each of them brought in, some of which worked and some of which didn't. Sometimes one of them would add something while the others were out of the room. They would spend hours in the studio working late into the night on these little experiments called "nothings" that would yield almost nothing usable. But eventually they had enough of them that they had something called "Nothing Parts 1-24", which evolved into "The Son of Nothing" and "Return of the Son of Nothing" until they finally had echoes as it exists on the album. From the way it was put together, it's pretty remarkable that it ended up sounding like a song at all. It's more like an experimental collage that came out as one of the best songs they ever wrote entirely by accident. Gilmore and Wright share lead vocals on this song. And while they continued to perform it live up through 1974, later live versions just don't sound as good as the earlier ones, and that's mostly because they both adopted a much shoutier vocal style by then, and it just didn't suit the song at all. Plus by 1974 they'd added background singers and saxophone solos, and those sounded great on Dark Side of the Moon, but they were completely out of place and echoes, and I think they knew it. Also, did that riff at the end there sound familiar to you at all? Here I'll play it again. ♪ No? How about now? ♪ Yeah, Andrew Lloyd Webber pretty much stole that riff outright for Phantoms of the Opera, or at least Roger Waters thinks so. Here's what he had to say about it in a 1992 interview with Q Magazine titled, "Who the hell does Roger Waters think he is?" Quote, "Yeah, the beginning of that bloody Phantoms song is from echoes." Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. It's the same time signature, it's 12/8, and it's the same structure, and it's the same notes, and it's the same everything. Bastard, it probably is actionable. It really is. But I think the life's too long to bother with suing Andrew Phantoms of the Opera. I think that might make me really gloomy. Unquote, "I'm not sure what he means by 12/8 because I'm pretty sure they're both in 4/4, but hey, I didn't write it." So, regarding the Andrew Lloyd Webber stuff, Waters' bitterness regarding Lloyd Webber's appropriation of the riff for Phantoms found in amusing expression in the song, "It's a Miracle," from the 1992 Roger Waters solo album, "Amused to Death." The song contains the following lines, "We cower in our shelters with our hands over our ears. Lloyd Webber's awful stuff runs for years and years and years. In earthquake hits the theater, but the operetta lingers. Then the piano lid comes down and breaks his f***ing fingers. It's a miracle." Doesn't the most memorable part of that song? I like the song, but yes. Regarding the song itself, I'm really struck by the even-killed gentleness of the vocals from Gilmore and Wright. I like the 1974 version of Echoes Michael Looted to probably a little more than he does, just because it's Echoes, and that means it has a pretty high floor. But they're clearly inferior to the vocals they lay down in the studio. I also really like the small detail of how before they start singing, you can clearly hear a small smacking of the lips that didn't get removed. It's a reminder that for all of the technical wizardry that the band deployed, this was music made by people and not by robots. And it's also a reminder of a time when albums weren't sanitized as to remove all blemishes in the name of "Solus Perfection." Rich, how about you? Well, in this part of the song, I hear another Beatles similarity. Actually, both my wife and I heard this. We noticed that the rhythm of the verse is just the way they sing it bears a similarity to across the universe. Yeah. And that isn't unique to this song in the Floyd catalog, because on dark side of the moon, both breathe and time do the same thing. The quiet desperation is the English way at that part. Yeah, I don't know. I just think it's interesting finding these little nuggets of Beatles throughout Pink Floyd, because as I said, I never thought of them as Beatles inspired, but it's all a big miasma of influence. Oh, yeah. And the Beatles invented music, right? Yeah, there was no music before the Beatles. No, they made it up. That is true. Amanda, what about you? Well, to start with, I looked up sheet music for echoes. And every single arrangement I found was in 4/4, so whatever Roger Waters. Yeah, the song part of this is really lovely. The original lyrics started out with the line "Planets Meeting Face to Face," which I think is pretty cool. But they decided they want to move away from the sci-fi reputation they'd built up for themselves and they changed it to be about oceans instead. And the imagery is really nice. And Rick and Dave always sounded wonderful singing together. Their voices are really similar. Yeah. And especially in the early years, I sometimes can't tell them apart, but they harmonized just perfectly. Yeah, there's a live version they did when they were touring around the time of this album. They were still playing Adam Hart mother but without the brass and the choir. And I like that arrangement more than the one that's on the album. And there's a section where instead of a choir, there's just this long stretch of writing Gilmore just like wordlessly harmonizing in falsetto. And it's just gorgeous. It is. Well, that would work really well as well in the final section of their live versions of "Salsa Full of Secrets." Oh, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, they had really good chemistry in this regard. Linking to what Amanda said about the lyrics starting out as "Planets Meeting Face to Face." There was an apocryphal quote floating around for years from Roger Waters, in which he claimed that his greatest regret was that he wasn't in a position to have written music for 2001 a space Odyssey. And these original lyrics helped fuel a rumor that Echoes was actually written as a sync to the Sargate portion at the end of 2001, and Michael alluded to that earlier. Regarding the Fantasia sync, this section of Echoes works best in the first iteration, in which among other things, a pattern of clouds bears a striking resemblance to a flock of hovering birds near the beginning of the first verse, at a bright glowing sun emerges prominently around the second verse. Huh. Alright, let's move on to the next part, the guitar solo. The guitar solo. The guitar solo. The guitar solo. What I really like about Dave Gilmore's guitar playing is how economical it is. Even in the context of some seriously epic rocking, he never plays anything that's the slightest bit self-indulgent. His solos are always these perfect little constructions, as much as the songs themselves are, and there's never a single note out of place. And he's such a perfectionist that there are those who consider his style somewhat cold, but I don't think that's true at all. I think he plays with a lot of feeling. He's just not spontaneous about it. Yet for me, as a guitarist, Gilmore is an interesting case, because in theory, I'm ambivalent towards him, and in practice, I absolutely love him. The slow methodical care that he puts into every note, where it sometimes feels like every note was focus group tested, is pretty far from any standard notion of what rock guitar is supposed to be. And in the extreme cases, you get something like the solo from comfortably numb, where the solo that made it onto the album was pieced together note for note from various draft versions he had previously recorded. And incidentally, this solo made the list of the 50 worst guitar solos of the millennium that we discussed back in the yes episode, and in a certain sense, I understand its inclusion. The practical problem with this kind of analysis, though, is that I absolutely love the comfortably numb solo. As I love most of Gilmore solos, and this solo is no different. It's perfect here. And his solo's in live performance also managed to be perfect in their own ways, even though he'd actually changed a few things here and there. And there's not too much to say about the sync except that in the first iteration Leopold Stakowski conducts the first third of the solo or so, and it's pretty awesome. I have heard Dave Gilmore in interviews say that he's not very good at coordinating his right and left hands, and that's why his playing is so precise, because he has to plan everything out. Now, I'm not sure how true that is in comparison to normal people who are not rock stars, because he seems pretty good at it to me. But it does make sense. Like, he's not the kind of guitarist, he's just going to rip off a wild solo at a moment's notice. He's not known for his crazy shredding skills, but his style is wonderful, and it's very, very recognizable. Like, I remember hearing Paul McCartney's song No More Lonely Nights One Time, and this was a song I'd heard a hundred times before, but for some reason this time, I thought, wait, wait, wait, hang on, is that Dave Gilmore playing that solo? And sure enough, it was. It's just, you can tell, you just tell. Yeah, he's unmistakable from the first note. And I wanted to make a note that I had the exact same response, almost beat for beats, when I recently listened to the McCartney song We Got Married from his Flowers in the Dirt album, which also features Gilmore on guitar. I thought at first, like, oh, the guitarist here sound like something from late '80s Gilmore, and he looked it up, it's like, oh, of course it is. Good call. It's like, oh, quote, that's why it sounds like that. Alright, let's move on to the next part, the funky psychedelic blues jam. It's a funky part! Oh, I should have warmed up my lava lamp for this part. One of your many lava lamps. I wish. Yeah, this is lava lamp music. It's not just that one Richard Link Potter movie. It's quite a song, if you could see him leaving part of like a stoner montage. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I love this part of the song so much. Anybody can just stick along jam in the middle of a song to make it fill up the album side, but most bands don't have what Pink Floyd had and what Pink Floyd had was atmosphere. There isn't a single moment in this section where they just sound like they're jamming. They sound like they're marching into the unknown. I love all the layers of guitar and organ they have swirling around in the mix. I've heard the quadrophonic mix of this song and this is the part where they really go nuts moving things around the room. If you listen to it on headphones like we're doing right now, you can hear it. There's actually two drum tracks left and right, which is it's just such a cool sound. Like Mason's not playing anything complicated because he's Nick Mason, that's not what he does. But it's just the sound of like these two drum tracks being like slightly off from each other. It's such a cool sound and actually I think there's two of everything, maybe not two bases, but there's two organs, there's two guitars. This is one part where live versions, live versions are great, but they never quite had. They weren't quite as psychedelic as this section because of that because there weren't two of all of them. But this is one of those songs that really makes me wish I could have been around to see them play it live. Because listening to it, you could just see the dry ice smoke. Which also reminds me, this song was the first time they ever used an inflatable in concert. They performed next to a lake and they had a giant inflatable octopus rise up out of the lake during this song. Also, they played so loud that they killed all the fish in the lake. Rock and roll. Rich, why don't you go? Well, so I'm glad to hear that it's rumored that this syncs up. This was originally meant to sync up with 2001 because I don't really get a like underwater vibe from this song except for the pain. Which sounds like sonar. I get a space vibe from it. And just one thing I know about the early 70s is that everything sucked and everybody loved space. This song in particular does sound to me like a journey into space. Like earlier you were looking out into the unknown. And this is when you like get on pink Floyd's rocket ship or space dirigible or whatever. And you start you like chug alongside them having the time of your life. I like that. And I mean, that's quite different from how it plays out in 2001. But this is my space journey. Maddo, what about your space journey? Well, Nick Mason also describes that concert with the octopus in his book and his words. The moment would have been improved if a number of over enthusiastic and mind-altered fans had not stripped off and taken to the water. And scenes reminiscent of 20,000 leagues under the sea. These lunatics got tangled with the air pipes and threatened to spoil the performance by thoughtlessly drowning. The nerve. I very highly recommend Nick Mason's book, by the way. He also says that by this time the EMI studios at Abbey Road were badly out of date and didn't have a 16 track tape machine which just would never do for the likes of pink Floyd. So they took themselves off to air studios, which was the studio that George Martin had set up on his own after he left EMI and the majority of the recordings were done there. Which is probably a good move. I've never heard that quadrasonic mix, but I would love to. There's just so much going on here. And then regular mix is clear enough that it doesn't sound muddled or anything you can hear everything they're doing. But this would be a great opportunity to really go wild with throwing the sounds around. Yeah, it's a little gimmicky. Like every couple of bars, like all the instruments will like switch places and things like that. But it's fun. It would be fun to hear once. Yeah, and also also, you know, it matches their concerts were in quad, I should mention. Oh, yeah, they they had this thing called the azimuth coordinator, which was a joy stick that I think Rick Wright controlled that would throw sounds around the auditorium. That sounds delightful. And I think I think this is the first album they recorded with 16 tracks, if I'm not mistaken. I think so too. Yeah, and they you can hear that they're using all of them. Yeah, I think prior, the one prior to this, they had eight tracks. But before that, they were only four and they just had to make it work. Yeah, do a lot of bouncing. Yeah. So if you've ever seen Fantasia, you may recall there's a sequence fairly early on with a bunch of glowing fairies dancing in a forest to Chikoski's dance of the sugarplum fairies. Well, imagine 17 year old me, drug-free, sitting down to do the metal Fantasia sink for the first time, and seeing that sequence accompanied by this. The world has plenty of blues jams, and by the standards of traditional blues jams, there's a case to be made that this isn't especially remarkable. But there definitely aren't enough psychedelic blues jams in the world, and I too love this section to an absurd degree. It's a good reminder that Gilmore, for all of his willingness to adapt his style to the requirements of the band when he joined them as said Barrett's replacement, was a blues guitar set heart. And it's also a great reminder of how one of Gilmore's greatest strengths was his ability to seamlessly integrate crazy noises and effects into blues-based playing. Those fish died for a good cause. I wish I wish they hadn't killed those fish. Those fish should have thought about that before they decided to live in that lake. Yeah. This section also works really well in the second and third plays of echoes in the sink. In the second section, this portion functions as the soundtrack to the epic battle between a T-Rex and a Stegosaurus. Ooh, yeah. And in the third pass, this accompanies the interactions between the hippos and the crocodiles, giving a very trippy shame to the sequence. Alright, so with that, let's move on to the next part, the Seagull and Whale noises. This is definitely the biggest barrier to entry on echoes. This is very much like staring in a wall in your dorm music. Now this is the weeding out the casuals part of the song. So I don't know how many of you were aware of this, but the earth is flat. And when you get to the edge, this is what it sounds like. So that ghostly moaning sound in the background is Roger Waters running a guitar slide up and down his base with the base run through the same echo effect that he used on one of these days. Those unearthly cries that sound like they might be seagulls, but maybe not, are what happened when you accidentally plug a guitar into a wawa pedal the wrong way. And that's exactly what Dave Gilmore did, and it's how we discovered how to make that sound. And this wasn't the first time he used it in a song he was doing it a year earlier in a song called Embryo that they played live a lot but never released a proper studio version of. I'm glad I got to hear those again. I could maybe do without this part. It's like they listened to the seagull sounds and tomorrow never knows and thought I bet we could make that more annoying. It's more Beatles. Yeah, it is very, oh, and that seagull sound though was Paul McCarty laughing and then they manipulated the sound. It's very cool. I mean, I will give him that and it fits well with the rest of the song, especially after they just sing about albatrosses. Exactly. But I think it stretches on for a couple of minutes too long. I like this like thematically going along with the space thing because like this is less looking out into the unknown and more being abandoned there. Well, because like as the previous part fades out, it almost feels like the party is leaving you as the noises fade in like you got separated from them or something. Yeah, and this is where the song feeling like space is really like effective to me because it sort of feels like you're floating in the void and you're starting to hallucinate from being by yourself for a really long time. But yeah, I don't actually like this part or at least like it should only last like a minute, but I guess like I guess it going on forever really like hammers it into your brain for what it's worth. It just it just makes the payoff better when the music comes back. Yeah, that's the that's the main way I think of it. Yeah. In the abstract, I would probably say the section is a little too much of a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. The tricks that they pull off to make the wind sound and the seagull cries are fascinating and the little bits that seem like deep sea sonar pins are really neat. But there's definitely a sense of them stretching this part out a bit too much, maybe to make it seem like it has equal weight with all of the other major sections. On the other hand, this section is ridiculously awesome in the first pass of echoes and the fantasia sync, even if it's unremarkable in the next two passes. The section corresponds perfectly with the portion where the visuals go deep under water, where we see fish with made up faces alternately swimming away and dancing for the camera. And the end of the sequence corresponds almost perfectly with the end of this section. Now, as I said a while before, I don't believe for a second that the band did anything like this intentionally. And yet, the mashup is so perfect that I have to wonder if a higher power was having fun in trying to make something like this happen. You never know. Oh, I also want to mention later on during this section, it wasn't in the part I clip, but they threw in way in the back of the mix. There are sounds of actual crows. Yes. Oh, yeah, and it's a really neat effect having like actual birds contrasted with like guitar birds. Maybe it's really trippy. Pink Floyd doing something trippy. Who knew? Yeah, that's new. Yeah, I know the sounds you're talking about, but I didn't realize that was what it was. Yeah. All right, let's move on to the part where words fail me. Seriously. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Oh my god, it's full of stars. I was going to say exactly the same thing. So if the pre-noise instrumental section sounded like the band marching into the unknown, the post-noise instrumental section sounds like the band coming back from the unknown to show you what they found there. I love the buildup in this section. Pink Floyd understood very well that the best way to build tension is not to play too much, and this section is a masterclass in holding back. And it helps that what they're building up to fully justifies the buildup itself. It's a triumphant guitar fanfare from Gilmore that bursts out of the song like a blinding flash of white light. And what's really great is how after the fanfare they continue the build. They're not done climbing the mountain yet. Yeah, well, this is where the song really won me over. So this is where I love the space metaphor the most because this feels like just when you've given up and you've been hallucinating for a while, you suddenly hear a signal. And like a build in the distance and like as your rescue gets closer and closer you go from just feeling like completely chilled to the bone to being just immersed in this head to toe warmth. And that's how good this part of the song is to me. It's also some of the last Floyd music to me that feels really like good and life-affirming. You know, before all the damn like cynicism took over like your sheep and your dogs. Yeah, I don't know, the song to me is like everything M83's entire career has been chasing. Whoa, yeah. It occurred to me just now actually that Echoes has a lot of colors. Typically for me with songs there's only one or maybe two colors. Echoes has like 10 and they're all swirly like they they move around in this particular section. I didn't put a lot of advance thought into this because it just really solidified just now. So please forgive me if I'm a little incoherent. But this section is suddenly a lot brighter than it had been before like you know the light just got flipped on. And suddenly everything like the weird little visualization that it gives me just starts moving a little faster. And it it's just brighter. There's more activity and so the whole song looks really cool in my head. But this part looks the coolest. That makes sense. So the short version of my comments is as follows. The longer version of my comments is a good deal more involved than that. The return of the Pin with faintly quiet Pin Echoes in the background. Is one of the greatest mid track moments I can think of in any large scale progress piece. The long gradual build with the guitars, the keyboards and the drums doing so little. And yet so much makes me feel the tension and the vibrations deep in my core in a way that few instrumental passages can pull off. Maybe something from the build and Starless can match this. The triumphant guitar fanfare Mike mentioned sounds like trumpets announcing a monarch. And it's so cathartic and yet the tension keeps piling up even as they release it. This section can add has made me cry big manly tears more than once. And I expect this will happen periodically my whole life. Yeah, Johnny mentioned in our Slack that there was a part that made you tear up. I knew it had to be this part. This portion also provides the greatest portion of the Fantasia Sync experience. And that it provides absolute knockout moments in each of the three passes. In the first pass, echoes replaces chakowsky's waltz of the flowers in a sequence involving fairies waking the flowers in fall. And the guitar fanfare emerges as the flowers open and the seas emerge to be blown about by the wind. In the second pass, the lengthy build corresponds very nicely with a lengthy sequence involving a vibrating vertical line. And in the third pass, the lengthy build corresponds to the night on bald mountain sequence, in which the night demon churnabog summons demons and throws them into a burning pit as he becomes bored with them. Wow. This sequence in particular probably would have broken my brain if I'd ever inexplicably decided to watch this sink wall. Alright, so let's move on to the next part where the song finally, finally comes back. Inviting and inciting me to rise. Through the window and the walk I'm streaming in on sunlight wings, a million bytimes a glimpse of morning. But no one seems to be allowed to rise, and no one makes become wise. So I throw the windows wide, and roll to hear the colors of the sky. Ah, that's so satisfying. With a deafening roar and woosh of spray, we're back to the song again. They're singing about sunshine, which is appropriate because it does feel like you fell asleep earlier in the song and had a very strange dream, and then woke back up. And it also might be another reason why this song didn't last very long in their life set. All those songs about insanity and war and the pressures of society looked at echoes and said, "You can't sit with us." This is probably also a good time to mention that this song has been sampled and in a pretty unusual way. It shows up at the beginning and end of Wayne's Birthday Boy from the Godwine Satan album, and I think it was less a conscious artistic decision and more the result of having recorded the song over a tape with echoes on it. This is more Wayne references than I was expecting. The song is back. And the closing lines of "and no one seems me lullabies, and no one makes me close my eyes." So I throw the windows wide and call to you across the sky, followed by the main riff is devastatingly perfect. In the sink, the line and through the window in the wall comes streaming in on sunlight winds a million bright ambassadors of mourning corresponds with the moment that the winter fairies emerge in the first pass. And there's a moment in the last lines with the fairies ice skating to the music that always hit me especially hard. There's also a series of rapid cuts between images of winter that is astonishingly effective in the context of the especially intense instrumental parts after the verses. They did something nifty to the vocals in this section that wasn't there the first time around. One of them sounds a little distorted or filtered or something. I don't know exactly what the effect is. So it sounds shiny. You know, the first vocal part is a more dim gray. Like it makes me think of a very gray sea. This part sounds like the sun's coming up. I'm pretty sure that's a Leslie speaker. Oh, okay. Yeah, that would make sense. They were really into putting Leslie's own things around this time. Well, Leslie's are cool. What's a Leslie speaker? For more information on the Leslie speaker. All right. We're almost to the end, but there is one last juicy little detail that the band threw in for us at the end of this. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] You didn't think they were just going to fade the song out. Did you? Of course not. Pink Floyd have one last trick up their sleeves to astound and delight you. That ascending noise you hear as the song fades away is all of them going, "Ahhhhhh." With some tape echo generously applied. And what this does is create something called a shepherd tone, which is an auditory illusion where a sound sounds like it's constantly rising in pitch forever, but it's really not. And usually it's done with sine waves stacked on top of each other, but Pink Floyd do it with their voices, and it's a really cool effect. There's a live version from a BBC session where the audience is dead silent until the sound has completely faded away. That wouldn't happen for much longer either. Richie, have you had that? Well, I kind of had to remove my headphones a little bit listening to this. So I find shepherd tones really unsettling and borderline terrifying, like the fact that my brain is being fooled just the unendingness and they're just kind of an unpleasant sound. But they are a really cool studio trick, so they're a very appropriate way to end a Pink Floyd album. I just usually remove my headphones by this point. I can see that. I had no idea that was vocals. I don't know what I thought it was. Just cool sound, but Pink Floyd has never been a band where I really want to pick apart their music and see exactly what is going on at any given point because the whole is so great. It would just, I don't necessarily want to do that. I'm willing to accept all these cool sounds at face value. But when I do find out what's actually going on, it's always really cool. Yeah. For me, the greatest part of the music in this section is the two quiet upward piano notes repeated twice underneath the shepherd tone. Live versions don't tend to include that, and I always get really tense when it isn't there because it's an absolutely perfect ending. Now as for the sink, the loudest portion of the shepherd tone vocals corresponds with the moment that Mickey is using his magic on the broomstick. And there's some quiet throbbing sense that briefly emerged just as the newly charged broomstick starts pulsating with light. It's one more great moment in an experience full of great moments. And if you don't have a copy of metal, I have good news. Fantasia comes with its own music. Yeah. It also sinks up reasonably well. And that's the end of metal. So Mike, what are your final thoughts? Look, I love the big famous Pink Floyd albums as much as anybody. I'm not going to be some kind of hipster about it. I will always love those albums. But these days, when I feel like listening to Pink Floyd, more often than not, it's the Pink Floyd of 1971 that I want to listen to. And a lot of people think of Pink Floyd as a depressing band. And if you've only heard stuff like the wall, then sure, that makes sense. But Pink Floyd in 1971 weren't a downer band at all. They were just a band out to make some wonderful music that hadn't been heard before. And while over the next decade, they might have gradually turned into Roger Waters and his three-side men. On metal, the most important member of Pink Floyd wasn't any of them. It was all of them. Yeah, like Mike, even if I like or love all of the most famous Pink Floyd albums, I've always had a major soft spot for the post-sid and pre-darkside albums. The band's research and development phase, where they came up with many of the ideas that they later refined for broader consumption. Among the studio albums of this period, metal has to rank at the top for me. And now that I no longer dismiss Central Pay and James as useless junk, this means that I now think of it as essentially on par with the band's most famous work. Not least, because Echoes is the best thing they ever did. Pink Floyd might have left the 1970s as one of the most overrated bands in the world. But they answered the 1970s as one of its most underrated. And this album deserves everybody's attention. Yeah, the stretch of albums from dark side of the moon through to the wall are all incredible. I'm also not going to sit here and try and tell you otherwise. Their earlier period is it's a little quieter. It's less showy, but it's every bit is interesting. And in the case of large portions of the wall, more interesting if I'm being honest about it. The further you dig into early Pink Floyd, the more gems you're going to turn up from just pretty little sparklies like a pillow of winds up to big ol' honkin' rocks like Echoes. And Metal serves as an excellent overview of what they were capable of and shows that they were not afraid to take risks like I said before, even when the result was shameless. You know, honestly, a band that features a dog on lead vocals on the same album as a side long epic is a band that is really worth your time and attention. And I have only dabbled in Floyd over the course of my life, so I can't really opine on them at length. But for this album, I like that they just really like through everything at the wall and just saw what stuck. And in the process like that just happened to form the classic Pink Floyd sound like all of dark side of the moon starts here. It's just kind of in a more like primordial form. And I think anyone who thinks of them as classic rock dinosaurs should really check out these early albums where they had just had no mission at all other than to make sounds you'd never heard before. Like listening to this album I can totally see why Mike picked this and why it's so foundational to his entire ethos and music. And you know, Nick Mason famously said around the time the punk revolution was happening and I think it was Johnny rotten would go around wearing and I hate Pink Floyd T-shirt said to someone, well, you don't want the world populated entirely with dinosaurs, but it's a terribly good thing to keep some of them alive. And Pink Floyd is one of the ones that needs to be kept alive. So Mike, if somebody listens to this album and they rightly decide that yes, echoes is amazing and the album is really good, where should they go next? You may have heard of an album called The Dark Side of the Moon and you may be aware that it has a reputation for being quite good. This is correct. It was our practice episode. That's true. However, I'm going to assume most of you have heard the big famous Pink Floyd albums and recommend a few more albums from their early period. First, I want to recommend the album they made right after metal called Obscured by Clouds. I think it's one of the most overlooked albums they ever made and I think it's mainly because it was a soundtrack to a movie nobody cares about. But it deserves more attention because it's full of really good music. My favorite on there is Dave Gilmore composition called Childhoods End, which is really the first emergence of the big classic rock FM radio hit. Pink Floyd's sound that everybody knows. You shout in your sleep, perhaps the price is just too steep. It is your conscious arrest. It wants put to the test. You wake with a start to just the beating of your heart. Just run the man beneath the sky, just to his, just to his eyes. The other album I want to recommend is the one they did right before metal, which is Adam Hart Mother. Not everybody likes this album all that much, particularly the band, but there's some great music on it and I think it's well worked your time. It's flawed, but it's flawed in a lovable way, like a dog with an under bite. And it has what's probably my favorite Rick Wright song, which is Summer 68. Oh, it's so good. Yeah. And I would like to know. What do you feel? What do you feel? What do you feel? [Music] All right, Amanda, what about you? As far as proper albums go, if you like the sound of pre-Darkside Pink Floyd, I always recommend a saucer for the secrets. It's not perfect, but it has set the controls for the heart of the sun and jug band blues and is there for a winner. [Music] [Music] [Music] Other than that, I think I might be the sole defender of Best of Collections here on Discord and Rhyme. They are an excellent way to get acquainted with a band and then even if you end up loving them and by all the albums, sometimes you still just want to listen to all their best songs right in a row and maybe there are bonus tracks. And anyhow, there's a really, really great Pink Floyd collection called Echoes that you should listen to if you're not super well acquainted with the band and you want to know them better. It has plenty of songs from all the major eras and they're all jumbled up. You get stuff like Learning to Fly, which is quite late, right next to Arnold Blaine. They're very first single. It's excellent. And I still listen to it despite having most of the albums the songs came from. And plus this way, you get when the Tigers broke free without having to buy the final cut. I like the final cut. And you get high hopes without having to buy the division belt. Yeah. I like the division belt. Well, if anybody is coming into this episode completely cold, I can only recommend the really obvious Pink Floyd albums. But if you don't know what those are, well, I can't recommend which you were here highly enough, the one that came out after dark side of the moon. I would say that like track for track, honestly, like the songs had become almost like Pink Floyd memes in a way that the ones on dark side of the moon didn't even like you have like have a cigar or you have shine on you crazy diamond. There's a welcome to the machine like those are all basically Pink Floyd catch phrases right there. Yeah. And that's really all that I have. I really don't like the wall, but I'm not going to negative up this episode. Alright, it asks for me. I'm going to go a little off board here. What I'm going to recommend is actually a late period David Gilmore solo live album called Live in Good Dance. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, it is. And the reason I'm going to recommend it is that it contains a performance of echoes that is the final performance of echoes. It is the last performance that Gilmore and Wright ever did together in performance on and let me tell you they went out with a bang. It's an amazing rendition, especially in the psychedelic blues jam, but I also really, really love the moment when Gilmore returns with the guitar fanfare. And yeah, it's a great rendition. It's probably my favorite version of the track and it's not even from a Pink Floyd album. So yeah, get that. The first half of the album. The first half of the album is him touring a solo album that had recently come out. It's fine. But the Pink Floyd stuff on there and especially the performance of echoes absolutely make it work through a while. And they play they do the intro to Sean and you crazy diamond with actual wine glasses, which is pretty amazing. Yes. Yeah, they did a lot of neat things in there. And I think we're done. 40 episodes. Yeah. And that's just awesome. Yeah. All right. Next episode. Oh no, it's ambiguously prog John. On our next episode, I will be leading a discussion on the 2003 radio head album Hail to the Thief. An album that is somewhat falling between the cracks of history and that I think deserves a lot better than that. Especially since many of its themes naggingly insist on remaining relevant. Roll credits. Roll credits. Thank you for listening to Discord and rhyme. You can buy or stream metal and other albums by the Pink Floyd at your local Sam Goody as well as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon. And we've made you a Spotify playlist that you can find on our website discord pod calm. Follow discord and rhyme on Twitter at discord pod for news and updates. Visit my music review archive at john McFarron music reviews dot org fair warning I rate albums and hexadecimal. I am currently working through Paul McCartney solo discography because Paul McCartney's classical albums won't review themselves. Editing is by Rich and special thanks to Mike for his production skills. You can check out his music at other leading brand up band cap dot com. See you next album and be ever wonderful. [Music]