The Post-Rockist

Please, please, please lift a hand, I am only a person, with Eskimo chain, I tattooed my brain all the way.  Won’t you miss me, wouldn’t you miss me at all? 

Syd Barrett died last week, but he has been gone a much longer time.  Long before he had the opportunity to check out of the musical world, Barrett had become the object of unimaginable myth-making; an LSD mystique that was further shrouded by his own retreating mental faculties.

Hardly known amongst most casual fans of the band he started, Pink Floyd, Barrett is a shining icon to the legionnaires of psychedelic folk rock; a vital reference point for numerous musicians who have come in his wake, from Robyn Hitchcock down to Jeff Mangum.  Even perennial tastemakers David Bowie and Brian Eno regularly tout the impact Syd made on their music, with some sources claiming that the story of Ziggy Stardust is based, in part, on the short-lived career of Syd Barrett.  But for all the praise and accolades and apocrypha poured upon the myth of madcap Syd, the harder it is to grasp the cracked man, pardon the phrase, behind the music.  His story is one of celebrity excess, paranoiac betrayal, and idyllic escape.  Let’s see if we can’t add a little more to the myth today, shall we?

Born Roger Keith Barrett in Cambridge, January 6, 1946, the “Syd” came later, as a sort of tribute to a local drummer named, coincidentally, Sid Barrett.  A banjo was the first instrument he ever picked up, followed later by a Hofner bass.  By the time he met future Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, who also played bass, he had switched to guitar since they didn’t think it right to start a band with two bassists (or, presumably, two Rogers).  When Barrett was only 18, the two started out on the pub circuit, playing Stones covers and blues-based rock’n'roll.  By 1965 the band had changed its name to The Pink Floyd, a reference to the obscure bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, and by 1966 they had started down the same path The Beatles would take, incorporating elements of improvisational jazz and psychedelic carnival to their sound.

With increasingly popular live shows and ever-increasing experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, the Floyd became a mainstay of the “London Underground.”  Elaborate light shows were an integral part of their performances, in which band members would stand hidden among the smoke and shadows, never posturing like sexual beasts or stepping out to chat up the audience.  (The admixture of sound and vision haunts Pink Floyd to this day.  For as long as I can remember, a museum in the town where I grew up features a “Laser Light Show” set to Dark Side of the Moon.  I doubt it will ever cease to be a source of constant enjoyment to West Michigan’s cannabis culture). 

In January, 1967 the band stepped into the studio with Joe Boyd to record “Arnold Layne,” which, despite being banned by the BBC for its fetishistic titular character, reached #21 on the charts.  Under the management of Peter Jenner and Andrew King, Pink Floyd was signed to EMI.  Their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was written almost entirely by Barrett, who composed fantastically nonsensical pop songs based loosely on folklore, I Ching randomness, and experimental Bo Diddley guitars.  His lyrics sometimes dabbled in nursery rhyming schemes, playfully prancing through the melody only to be abruptly shattered by a disjointed couplet.  Take, for instance, the first verse of “Bike”: “I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you like, it’s got a basket, a bell that rings, and things to make it look good.  I’d give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it.”

Pink Floyd’s second single, “See Emily Play,” enjoyed moderately more success, allowing the band to promote it on Top of the Pops.  After the third week on the Pops, however, Syd refused to play, allegedly because he had learned that John Lennon wasn’t obligated to do such pandering to the public.  Barrett’s erratic behavior started to become a bigger problem for the rest of the band.  Although he had always been an atypical guitarist - sliding Zippo lighters down the strings into echo box amplification, executing minimalist solos, painting his Fender Esquire silver and adorning it with mirrored discs - it had always been to good effect.  When he would detune his guitar during a shoddy rendition of “Interstellar Overdrive” or strum the same chord throughout an entire show or simply wander off stage mid-song, it began to wear on the rest of the band. 

David Gilmour, Barrett’s childhood friend, was brought on board as a guitarist in reserve to play whenever Syd fancied he’d stop.  Eventually the antics became too much, and one day when the rest of the band loaded up in their van to head to a show at Southampton, they simply opted not to pick Syd up. 

A wounded Barrett was known to show up at other Floyd gigs and glare at his usurper, Gilmour.  He would hang around the studio when the band was at work on their sophmore record, A Saucerful of Secrets, which includes only one Barrett tune, “Jugband Blues,” and even that was considered a concession.  Other Barrett tunes from this time, “Scream Thy Last Scream” and “Vegetable Man,” would only show up on later rarities compilations.

Barrett hid from the limelight for a while, only to show up at studios to occasionally record sketches of songs with Peter Jenner and Malcolm Jones in 1969.  These songs were to become the basis of his first solo album, The Madcap Laughs, which was finally produced by his former bandmates Gilmour and Waters.  The songs are unembelished and serenely dreamlike in quality, fragile constructs of a vanishing mind.  Tracks like “Octopus” or “No Good Trying” showed Barrett to be a master craftsman of kaleidoscopic rock songs; “Love You” and “Here We Go” were dazzlingly upbeat ditties; while “She Took a Long, Cold Look at Me” and “Feel” were barrenly emotional.  Rhythms drifted along in drowsy, time-delayed fragments, and Barrett’s vocals cracked and shifted pitch from a gnomish falsetto to a flat, English tonic.  Some claim that Waters and Gilmour’s decision to leave the warts and studio chatter in the final mix was a deliberate attempt to humiliate their fragile comrade, but listening today it sounds exceedingly heartfelt and honest.  The recording was accomplished sporadically, and not without great effort.  The spontaneous nature of the recordings are emblematic of how his fans have come to absorb news of their reclusive icon: with their antennaes always on in case they catch any reception from Planet Syd.

He receded further into himself.  Barrett made very few public appearances to promote his new album, and on those that he did, he would more often than not walk off the set before a song was finished.  When 1970 saw the release of Barrett’s second solo album, Barrett, the songs were more put together, but the songwriter was falling apart.  Once again, David Gilmour produced the record, this time playing bass and enlisting the support from Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright and Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley.  The lyrics, however, portrayed a greater sense of paranoia (”Wolfpack”) and isolation (”Dominoes”).  Even the rosy, beautiful day Barrett sings about on the excellent “Gigolo Aunt” seems a distant concept, where the beach is “blue and gray.”  On “Baby Lemonade” Barrett opens the album with a plea to be rescued from some unspeakable, gloomy fear (“In the sad town, cold iron hands clap the party of clowns outside.  Rain falls in gray far away.  Please, please Baby Lemonade…”).  The delivery is detached, but the message is clear: he knows he’s losing touch with the outside world, and with the things he loved so much, but there’s nothing he can do to hold on, except to hope that someone can pull him back in.

Shortly after the album’s release, Barrett returned to his mother’s house in Cambridge and reverted to his birth name, Roger.   Back at his home in Cambridge, Barrett forsake his guitar in favor of gardening and his original love, painting.  One of his favorite things to paint, apparently, was a white semi-circle on a blank canvas.  Obsessive fans would report sightings of Barrett walking to the corner store, The Damned tried to talk him into producing their first album, and spotty attempts at recorded songs surfaced among diehard collectors, but slowly and surely the crazy diamond faded into obscurity.  One sad tale recounts when a portly, shorn Barrett mysteriously appeared at the 1975 studio recording of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” one of Pink Floyd’s many tributes to their fallen leader.  Barrett reportedly held a toothbrush stationary and jumped up and down in an effort to clean his teeth, but mostly sat in a corner, mute.  The rest of Pink Floyd was understandably shaken.

Sorting out the truth from the growing myth became a tangled knot as Barrett remained resolutely silent for the next 30-plus years.  Are we celebrating his schizophrenia, his “acid casualty” status, as a pre-punk badge of honor when we talk about how wonderfully trippy his songs were, or are we truly mourning the loss of an exceptional, insular talent in his passing?  There is always something in ourselves that we can learn from madness, but thankfully most of us will never have to go there.  When Roger Keith Barrett passed away July 7, 2006 from complications arising from his diabetes, we lost a marvelous artist and a brave performer.  “Won’t you miss me?” Barrett asks in the song “Dark Globe.”  Yes, Syd, yes we will.

Pink Floyd - Bike (from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn)

Pink Floyd - Vegetable Man

Syd Barrett - Dark Globe (from The Madcap Laughs)

Syd Barrett - Baby Lemonade (from Barrett)

Syd Barrett - Effervescing Elephant (Peel sessions)

-Posted by Todd