Pink Floyd, "Wish You Were Here"
CJ tells you what to dream
CJ’s Pitch:
I don’t even remember how we became friends.
She was a sophomore and I was a junior. We might have been in the same math class or in some elective like metal shop together. Maybe we happened to be studying at the same table in the library when we started talking about…something.
We trusted each other almost immediately. Our conversations quickly went from mundane to intensely personal. She told me things without hesitation or embarrassment that I couldn’t imagine another person, even a lifelong friend, ever saying to me. And I felt compelled to do the same.
All that year we confessed our hopes, fears and dreams to each other as we navigated the stormy seas of high school. Then, she started sharing her poetry with me. Sometimes she’d just hand me a ragged-edged piece of notebook paper as we sat together in the library. Other times she’d jam a folded note into my jacket pocket as we passed in the halls. I’d often find her missives wedged into the slats of my locker when I went to retrieve my books between classes.
And her poetry was wild.
It was vivid, train-of-thought verse that sometimes rhymed and sometimes didn’t. Amazingly, it was even more revealing than anything she’d told me in the course of our friendship. It was funny and clever and insightful and heartbreaking all at once. We’d talk about some of those poems and figure out why she had written what she did. And then there were others that she didn’t want to discuss.
She just wanted someone to listen.
There are people who come into your life and completely upend the way you think about things. They force you to change your worldview and reevaluate everything that is important to you. In the popular parlance of today, you might call them unicorns. But that’s a foolish and inapt moniker. Unicorns are mythical and these creatures are very, very real.
In the brilliant words of Pink Floyd, they’re crazy diamonds.
***
Pink Floyd’s own crazy diamond was, of course, founding member Syd Barrett. Syd’s bizarre, stream-of-consciousness poetry and music became the band’s debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. At the time, it was called one of the best psychedelic albums ever. An assessment that still holds true today.
Unfortunately for Syd, Piper’s biggest influence—LSD—became his downfall. Following the release of their second album, Barrett didn’t so much leave the band as drop out of life. He moved back in with his mother and basically cut all ties with the outside world.
Wish You Were Here is Pink Floyd’s tribute to Syd Barrett with the song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” as its centerpiece. “Shine” is a nine-part ode divided into two sections that open and close the album. It contains some of the most wrenching rock lyrics ever written:
Remember when you were young?
You shone like the sun.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Now there’s a look in your eyes
Like black holes in the sky.
It’s as if the band is trying to coax him out of his catatonic state and restore his creative genius.
Come on, you raver, you seer of visions
Come on, you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine…
The title track, to me, is the realization that Syd isn’t coming back. Yes, it’s also an indictment of the meat grinder that is the music industry like the other two songs on the album—“Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar”. But there’s something else, a resignation, that pervades the whole song. Especially in the saddest verse:
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a leading role in a cage?
Syd is the ghost, the specter whose artistic brilliance turned out to be just a spark instead of an enduring flame. Pink Floyd made more successful albums, but they never made one more eloquently devastating as this.
***
We all have crazy diamonds in our lives. And even though I lost touch with mine, I still see her light every now and then.
Shine on, Taz.
Ken’s Response:
CJ said it perfectly. A wonderful story about life, love, depth, sadness, and freedom of expression. The Needham High story and the Pink Floyd tribute to Syd are perfect. Thank you for always sharing your true self, Ceej. You may not know it, but EONS has helped me change my worldview and look at the things I value in my life as well.
So instead of trying to piggyback on the pitch, I’d like to take some time to address the inflatable pig in the room. If you weren’t already aware, Roger Waters is a raving antisemite! Yeah, not even the normal, closeted kind either. This guy is more than happy to tell you how much he despises the Jewish people.
In the pre-internet days, a celebrity could hide their insanity. There were no 24-hour news cycles that were scraping the bottom of every celebrity barrel they could to find any story that might outrage some of their viewers/readers. There were no inappropriate tweets that could get someone canceled, and with only a few exceptions, a musician’s political and societal views remained at least a little bit private.
But this is 2022, and not only is every word, every picture, and every old video available at the tip of your fingers, but the outrage machine is working overtime, running full speed 24-7-365. Waters hasn’t made any attempt to hide from his abhorrent views, he’s doubled down on them. And that’s the true shame.
While most of us are becoming more inclusive, more accepting, and more open to what we used to consider nontraditional life roles, Roger Waters has embraced hatred and vitriol.
It’s a beautiful world out there full of wonderful, exciting, and interesting people of all ages, sizes, shapes, colors, orientations, genders, and faiths. We just wish you were here with us.
Pitch Successful (apologies to David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason for the diatribe)
Mitch’s Response:
Unlike CJ, I wasn’t lucky enough to have a cool poetry girl in my life, but I did have the good fortune of having a killer record and comic book collection (which might actually explain the lack of girls). I started collecting at a very young age, and can still vividly remember my 9th birthday, in the summer of 1980, when I received two much-desired double albums: The Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music and Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
I was so obsessed with Floyd that I pretended to like the mediocre albums before Meddle, I watched The Wizard of Oz multiple times, and I taught myself to write in the Pink Floyd font. I really loved everything about Floyd: their sound, their vibe, and their high-concept creativity, guided by the uniquely talented mind of Roger Waters.
In addition to Waters’ conceptual brilliance, David Gilmour is one of the most tasteful guitar players in music and he deserves all the respect he has earned - plus, he’s the best singer in the band. But to me, the atmospheric sound of Floyd is really driven by Rick Wright’s synthesizers, his Coltrane-esque sheets of sound creating a unique platform for Gilmour’s clean lines and Roger Waters’ venomous lyrics. What a fantastic band.
Pink Floyd was the perfect combination of psychedelia and prog-rock, but like CJ’s muse we were always destined to drift apart.
###
Most Jewish kids grow up immersed in ancestral paranoia and casual anti-semitism. We constantly have to decide whether today is the day when we tell our boss that it’s not cool to joke about “the money lenders in New York” or if we want to pretend to be Irish when the drunk guy in the bar starts ranting about the “kikes". Most of the time you just ignore it, a combination of self-preservation and cowardice, knowing that you won’t change minds, but you might lose some teeth. But along the way you begin to learn how to tell the merely ignorant from the truly hateful.
I love Pink Floyd. I love Wish You Were Here. I want to love Rogers Waters, but it’s hard because he clearly despises Jews in general and Israelis in particular. When you put the Star of David on a pig and play “Money" you are not advocating for the rights of others, you are reinforcing dangerous stereotypes that get people killed. When you condemn and boycott the only country in the Middle East that protects the rights of women and gay people, you are not merely raising awareness, you are falling for cynical propaganda perpetuated by those who openly call for the death of all Jews.
Make no mistake, Roger Waters is a virulent anti-semite, and it’s no surprise that David Gilmour wants nothing to do with him. I don’t, either.
That said, I can’t deny how talented Rogers Waters is as an artist, how much Pink Floyd meant to me as a kid, and the stellar musical accomplishment that is Wish You Were Here.
Pitch Successful (I even bought Radio KAOS, you stupid jerk!)
CJ’s pitch was successful and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here will be welcomed to the Newbury St. Collection.
Hey you! One of these days, if you have the time, we’d love for you to breathe some life into the comments section and tell us wot’s…uh the deal with Pink Floyd and Wish You Were Here.
Please join us next week as Mitch doubles down on the badly-behaved boomers with a pitch for Derek & The Dominoes’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
The Exile on Newbury St. Spotify playlist features our favorite songs from all the albums we’ve discussed to date. Subscribe today and listen back on the fun we’ve had so far.
This has always been my favorite Pink Floyd album, and for me, is Gilmour's high point as a musician. His soulful vocals give Waters' lyrics a deep gravitas and his guitar work stabs at one's heart. Just a brilliant effort, especially when one considers that it was largely recorded with the band members in absentia with one another.
I wrote this about WYWH and what the record means to me in May. I know link dropping is poor form, but I hope this excerpt is okay (please delete if not!).
I didn’t have a Taz in my life, but I had a lot of people come & go at work over the years. They were all there at just the right time… and I miss ‘em a lot.
###
For being a devout audiophile, my dad had some really weird guardrails about music.
Any and all jazz was kosher. Rock & Roll was in bounds, just never played in my house-I didn’t hear any until I started school.
But Pink Floyd & Alice Cooper (and later Prince) we definite no-go items. He always regarded them as vaguely dangerous— as a sort of evil that needed to be warded off at all turns. it was off brand for a man not at all religious & rarely phased by anything, who nevertheless once spent an entire drive across the metro area ranting when one of my aunts brought a boyfriend in a Dark Side of the Moon T-Shirt to a family gathering.
###
My relationship with the band has always come in splinters: a song here, watching The Wall there. I never went to laser light shows. I didn’t try and sync Dark Side with the Wizard of OZ.
All of that to say that Pink Floyd is a band whose records are best consumed in whole. And that until this past week, I’ve never done that. Or really listened to much of their work at all.
Over the last few years, I’ve gone back to listening to music with intention. Sure, it’s still on while I’m doing something else, but that’s no longer the default mode.
And if there’s a silver lining to the hellscape of the last 2 years, it’s been connecting with other music writers online.
The catalyst for both of those was the bottom falling out of the aviation industry. I work as an Operations Agent for an airline. Pre-COVID, my job was to keep 5-6 plates in the air at all times. In the spring of 2020, it was reduced to being a distant early warning station, monitoring air traffic control feeds for diversions that rarely came.
As flights stopped coming, co-workers started going. Everyday felt like the last day of school as people took leaves. Many never came back, and between voluntary separations & retirements, roughly 18000 people hit the exits.
All of that to say that each of these points converged this past week.
###
A group of music writers meet monthly(ish) via Zoom to discuss a record. Hosting duties are rotated, and one of the perks of the job is picking the record. This month’s session was hosted by friend of On Repeat Terry Barr.
The record? Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here.
Most people in my universe count this record as a rite of passage from high school or college. I’ll have to settle for counting it as something I did before turning 50.
As part of the discussion, people are asked to share any stories they may have about the record; your first time listening, how the album makes you feel, memories attached to it, etc.
###
My work area is surrounded by concrete. That gate you sit at waiting for your flight? I work underneath it. That means radio reception is spotty at best, and we can listen to anything we want as long as it’s one of the 2 stations whose signal makes it in to us.
One of those is a classic rock station. And slower songs are usually reserved for the early morning hours, when people are either asleep or hanging onto the carpet to keep from falling off the face of the earth….or at work like me.
This is when you hear slower songs like Wish You Were Here, and it’s almost guaranteed that it gets played before sunrise. You can set your watch to it.
Week after week, the handful of us on the field would hear it, and roll our eyes or make some joke about having not heard it in forever. The type of inside joke that people make at an hour when actual talking is hard.
There is a line of thinking that Wish You Were Here is a tribute to Syd Barrett, and a lament to his absence from the band.
The title track reminds me of those countless pre-dawn Sunday mornings, and coworkers who are no longer here to spend them with.
It feels like I’m the last the last one at the party sometimes, and man, do I wish they were here