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New Floyd Book: “Pink Floyd FAQ”, Bonus Fun Stuff

New Floyd Book: “Pink Floyd FAQ”, Bonus Fun Stuff

New Floyd Book: “Pink Floyd FAQ”, Bonus Fun Stuff

More than four decades since their first album, and 35 years after the release of their mind-boggling masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd continues to inspire and mystify rock fans around the world. From the warped pop of their early days to the cynical psychedelia of their classic period, Pink Floyd has expanded the possibilities of modern sound like no other group before or since. Now in Pink Floyd FAQ, pop culture author Stuart Shea delivers the inside scoop on Floyd’s particular brand of genius.

Pink Floyd FAQ takes a lively and unusual approach to telling the band’s story. Brief chapters explore different aspects of Pink Floyd history, revealing the secrets behind the band’s astonishing studio sounds, massive tours, iconic album covers, cutting-edge gear, and more.

Chapters include:
• How did the U.S. discover Pink Floyd?
• What notable guests played on Pink Floyd records?
• What were the band’s most memorable gigs?
• What are their greatest moments on record, as a group and individually?
• What are the notable missteps—and how did the band recover?
• Are the seemingly confessional songs true—or should we be skeptical?
• What records influenced them, and which performers follow in their wake?
• What was it like to be at a Pink Floyd show in 1967, in 1973, in 1980?

With more than 300 pages of stories, history, observation, opinion, reminiscences from those who were there, and photos, Pink Floyd FAQ tells the band’s story, dissects their most popular work and obscure forgotten gems, and provides a wealth of little-known facts, all adding up to a provocative must-read for fans.

Stuart Shea is the coauthor of Fab Four FAQ and an associate editor of The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. A cultural historian, musician, and occasional club DJ, Shea also penned Wrigley Field: An Unauthorized Biography. He lives and works in Chicago.

Bonus Pictures: From the Book

Nick Mason in 1970. He chose a double-bass-drum setup after seeing the one used by Cream’s Ginger Baker. Credit: Jorgen Angel/Redferns

Roger Waters at the UFO Club, London, 1966. He was among the first notable musicians to use the Rickenbacker bass, appearing in public with it even before Paul McCartney. Credit: Adam Ritchie/Redferns

[Image: 55_Pink_Floyd_bw_1970.jpg]
Considering some of the ensembles the Floyd wore in the 1970s, this is a relatively dapper picture of the group. Credit: Photofest

[Image: 07_PINK_FLOYD_70s_03.jpg]
With this look, one would imagine the 1970 Pink Floyd as a grungy hard-rock band rather than sonic explorers. Credit: Photofest

Bonus Excerpt: Ten Little-Known Facts About Pink Floyd

1. Pink Floyd’s first two LPs, 1967’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn and 1968’s Saucerful of Secrets, were available in monaural mixes that the record label deleted by 1969. So even if you own those albums, you don’t really know ‘em without having heard the mono versions.
2. The signature riff to the Floyd’s 1967 space-rock instrumental “Interstellar Overdrive,” written by Syd Barrett, resembles both a Burt Bacharach song and the theme to a British sitcom.
3. An uncredited Pink Floyd are featured on “Give Birth to a Smile,” the final number on Roger Waters’ 1970 solo album Music from the Body.
4. Looking for inspiration in their attempt to follow-up the mega-seller Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd attempted to record songs using only household objects as instruments.
5. Pink Floyd’s faces were so obscure that, even in their days of fame in the mid-1970s, the band members were able to walk through crowds at their own shows and not be recognized.
6. Toni Tennille, of “The Captain &,” appeared as a backing vocalist on Pink Floyd’s 1979 double-album hit The Wall.
7. The Wall’s hit single, “Another Brick in the Wall Part II,” was partially influenced by the mid-tempo disco beat of Chic’s “Le Freak” and “Dance, Dance, Dance.”
8. Although keyboardist Rick Wright was kicked out of the band in 1979, the rock press was kept in the dark about this fact until the group’s next album, The Final Cut, was released in 1983.
9. Roger Waters asserted in a 1992 interview with Q magazine that Andrew Lloyd Webber ripped off Pink Floyd’s 1971 epic “Echoes” in writing the theme of Phantom of the Opera.
10. A 1989 Pink Floyd concert in Venice went badly enough—the band’s volume damaged buildings and loiterers vandalized the city—that the entire city government resigned in shame.

November 18, 2009 Posted by kronaz | Pink Floyd | 35, after, album, and, around, boggling, Bonus, Book:, continues, Dark, decades, fans, FAQ", first, Floyd, four, Fun, inspire, masterpiece, mind-, Moon, More, mystify, New, of, Pink, release, rock, Side, since, Stuff, than, The, their, to, world, years | 1 Comment

Biography – Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd originally consisted of Bob Klose (lead guitar), Syd Barrett (vocals, rhythm guitar), Richard Wright (keyboards, vocals), Roger Waters (bass, vocals) and Nick Mason (drums) and named in tribute to two blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The band initially covered rhythm and blues staples such as “Louie, Louie”. As Barrett started writing tunes more influenced by American surf music, psychedelic rock, and British whimsy, humor and literature, the heavily jazz-orientated Klose departed and left a rather stable foursome whose configuration would last for several years.

The sound was hardened somewhat in 1968 when guitarist David Gilmour joined the band. In 1969, Barrett suffered a mental breakdown, attributed to prolonged usage of hallucinogenic drugs (especially LSD). With Barrett’s state becoming less and less predictable, the band’s live shows became increasingly ramshackle until eventually the other band members simply stopped taking Barrett to the concerts, with Waters and Gilmour taking his place as lead vocalists.

Whilst Barrett had written the bulk of the first record, Piper at the Gates Of Dawn (1967), he contributed little to the second A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), forcing the band in a new direction. With the loss of their main songwriter the band was perceived as losing focus and a distinctive sound: the next record, the double album Ummagumma (1969), was a mix of live recordings and unchecked studio experimentation by the band members, with each recording half a side of vinyl as a solo project (Mason’s wife makes an uncredited contribution as a flautist).

1970’s Atom Heart Mother, a UK number one album, is sometimes now considered a dated psychedelic period piece and has been described by Gilmour as the sound of a band “blundering about in the dark”. The title piece owes much to orchestration by Ron Geesin.

The band’s sound was considerably more focused in Meddle (1971), whose 23-minute epic “Echoes” is heard by many critics today as one of their best works ever, and which also included the atmospheric “One of These Days” (now regarded as a concert classic, with a distorted, disembodied one-line vocal) and the pop-jazz stylings of “St. Tropez”. Their forays into experimentation and trying new things were expressed on “Seamus” (earlier, “Mademoiselle Nobs”) a pure-blues number featuring lead vocals by a Russian wolfhound.

Despite having never been a hit-single driven group, their massively successful 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon featured a US number one track (“Money”), and more importantly remained in the top 100 for over a decade, breaking many records on the way, and making it one of the top selling albums of all time. Dark Side of the Moon itself was a concept album dealing with themes of insanity, neurosis and fame which, due to the use of Abbey Road studio’s new 16-track recording equipment and the investment of an enormous amount of time by the group and engineer Alan Parsons, set new standards for sound fidelity.

pinfloyd Dark Side of the Moon has also been the source of a persistent, but false, urban legend that it was conceived as a kind of synchronized soundtrack for the film The Wizard of Oz. Dark Side of the Moon and the three following albums (Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall) are often held up as the peak of Pink Floyd’s career. The first of those, Wish You Were Here, released in 1975, is a tribute to Barrett in which the lyrics deal explicitly with the aftermath of his breakdown, including the critically-acclaimed, mainly instrumental “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and the classic title track.

By 1977, and the release of Animals the band’s music came under increasing criticism from some quarters in the new punk rock sphere as being too flabby and pretentious, losing its way from the simplicity of early rock and roll. Animals contained more lengthy songs tied to a theme, taken in part from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which used pigs, dogs and sheep as metaphors for contemporary society.

1979’s The Wall gave Pink Floyd renewed and highly enthusiastic critical acclaim and another hit single with the track “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II,” and its youth catchphrase “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control,” as well as the extraordinary track “Comfortably Numb” which, though never released as a single (and interestingly, hated during sessions by both Waters and Gilmour), became a cornerstone of AOR and classic-rock radio playlists and is today probably their best-known song. It is also the only song on Pink Floyd’s four concept albums to not segue at either the beginning or end. The album also became a vastly expensive and money-losing tour/stage show. During this time, Roger Waters increased his artistic influence and leadership of the band, prompting frequent conflicts with the other members and causing Wright to quit the band, though he would return, on a fixed wage, for the album’s few live concerts. Paradoxically, he was the only one of Pink Floyd to make any money from the “Wall” shows, the rest having to cover the excessive costs. The album was co-produced by Bob Ezrin, a friend of Waters who shared songwriting credits on “The Trial”.

The Wall remained on best-selling-album lists for 14 years. A film starring Boomtown Rats founder Bob Geldof was adapted from it in 1982 written by Waters and directed by Alan Parker, and featuring animation by noted British cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.

After 1983’s The Final Cut, bandmembers went their separate ways till 1987, when Gilmour attempted to revive the band with Nick Mason. A bitter legal dispute with Roger Waters (who left the band in 1985) ensued, but Gilmour and Mason achieved the legal right to release an album as Pink Floyd (Waters, however, gained the rights to some traditional Pink Floyd imagery, including almost all of The Wall). Richard Wright re-joined the duo during the recording sessions of A Momentary Lapse of Reason as a session musician, and was paid a weekly salary. By any account, Wright was a member of the band for the 1994 release of The Division Bell and its subsequent tour.

All of the members of Pink Floyd have released solo albums which have met with varying degrees of commercial and critical success. Waters’ Amused To Death was especially praised.