Come on,you painter, you piper, you prisoner and shine!
Thinking about Syd Barrett (1946-2006) for some reason lately
Back when I was young and semi-wild and free of cares (them days are gone forever), I was visiting a friend whose apartment was always adorned with a certain smoke, and where people tended to drift in and out at all hours. One quiet night, he decided to play an entire album he wanted me to soak in. This was about a musician who had had a complete breakdown, he said, and the band created this album to deal with the fact that he was still around physically but not mentally. And he took the LP out of its sleeve, dropped it on the turntable, and in dim light we sat and listened to WISH YOU WERE HERE.
You reached for the secret too soon, /You cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond. /Threatened by shadows at night, /And exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond. /Well you wore out your welcome /With random precision,
Rode on the steel breeze. /Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!
It struck me then, and still seems to me now, to be a profoundly sad album, with more yearning than most insincere love ballads. It's embedded in my DNA by now. I've owned it as an LP, cassette and CD and the next logical step is to download it directly into my cerebral cortex. Since then, I've listened to a lot of Pink Floyd. I like most but not all of their work, and appreciate the different phases to different degrees. To be honest, the early stuff where Syd Barret was in charge is fun and interesting, but not always accessible...it's a bit too experimental for me. It sounds random and unappealing, noises strung together in ways which made sense to Syd back in the mid-Sixties but which don't register with me. (But the Beatles' WHITE ALBUM seems to have more weak material than all their other albums combined, so what do I know? I think the WHITE AlBUM could be trimmed by half and be much more solid.) I know, I know, many people say ONLY the Syd Barret stuff is worth listening to and the band sold out after he was dropped. The second Pink Floyd (Pink Floyd Lite) is smooth bland Top 40 AM-radio crap like Hall & Oates or Starship. I don't agree, but then it's only music and there are no laws of physics dictating what's good or bad. It's all just preference. (To be truthful, I've met some people around Woodstock who say things like, 'I only listen to recreations of Inca ceremonial music and of course it has to be performed above 6,000 feet in the Andes' or 'If it wasn't first released on a 78, it's worthless.' But I'm not that pretentiousrefined.
Syd evidently had SOMETHING wrong with him. From all the interviews and articles over the years, I think he had schizophrenia which constant heavy use of LSD exacerbated. But I wasn't there, I never met any of them, and I was not a trained psychiatrist or MD doing a thorough exam on Syd. It's all second or third hand. The story which haunts me most is when Syd Barrett turned up unexpectedly at the recording studio on Abbey Road and listened to the band doing the song about him... and he didn't get it. Or did he? He's supposed to have said, "Sounds rather old," which you could take as a comment about him being dropped from the band being old news.
I don't know if you can say Syd Barrett had an unhappy life exactly after the band just stopped picking him up. Most accounts say he lived in his mother's house the rest of his life, sitting around in the garden, walking around town and eating. David Gilmour saw to it that Syd got royalties, which provided enough income. Before he fell apart, Syd Barrett definitely had a huge stardom right ahead of him. He young and good-looking enough to be a teen idol of his day possibly replacing Paul McCartney. But apparently a life spent on buses and in hotel rooms with the same three guys day after day, year after year, only getting out to step on stage and perform for huge screaming mobs.. this did not seem to be what he wanted. (I'm surprised the Beatles didn't kill each other with a life like that.) The wealth, the luxury, the nubile young groupies and interviews with reporters and photographers following him into restaurants.. that's not for everyone either. Maybe quietly moping around in the sun and roaming as he pleased was what he wanted most.
Anyway, what brought all this to mind was seeing the photo of Syd at the studio with his hair and eyebrows shaved off. The lyrics "Now there's a look in your eyes/Like black holes in the sky..." suddenly hit me and I listened to WISH YOU WERE HERE over and over the next day or so to see how the words all applied to Syd. I don't see anything mean or dismissive about it, just sorrow. I like the album as much as I did the night I sat through it in my friend's apartment on Tinker Street, and everything I've experienced in life since then only makes it sink in deeper.
So, so you think you can tell/ Heaven from Hell,/Blue skies from pain./Can you tell a green field/ From a cold steel rail?/ A smile from a veil?/Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade /Your heroes for ghosts?/Hot ashes for trees? /Hot air for a cool breeze?/Cold comfort for change?/ And did you exchange/ A walk on part in the war/For a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here./ We're just two lost souls/ Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year/ Running over the same old ground.What have we found/ The same old fears. Wish you were here.