Pink Floyd

With the announcement today of the death of Syd Barrett, one of the founders of the band Pink Floyd, that particular group has been on my mind this afternoon. I haven't heard much of the stuff that Barrett was responsible for (I believe it was just one album or two), but Pink Floyd certainly played a part in my adolescence and young adulthood.

If you were a sentient teen in the 1970s, you couldn't avoid Dark Side of the Moon, which sold a gazillion units and was on the charts for something like two decades. The image on the cover, of a light shining through a prism and turning into a rainbow, was painted on the walls of the senior meeting room at my high school. When I got to college, six years after the release of the album, it was still the music of choice for those who wanted to get stoned. I never partook in the herb known as cannabis, but I certainly listened along with those who did, the music enough to get me high.

My freshman year of college was when The Wall came out, and there was a curious phenomenon as one walked across campus. You could hear "Another Brick in the Wall" from multiple dorm windows. When you got out of earshot of one stereo playing it, you quickly picked it up out of another window. "Comfortably Numb" quickly became the new anthem for stoners.

When I was in high school, one of my friends dated a guy a few years older who was in a band (they even once played CBGBs, and I went to see them there, my only trip to that now defunct club). Since he was older and an honest-to-god musician I thought he was the bee's knees, and one of his heroes was Syd Barrett. Wherever he is now, I'm sure he's saddened at Syd's demise, and is perhaps moved to play the song that the remaining Floyd members recorded as a tribute to him--"Shine on You Crazy Diamond."