Make Your Name Like a Ghost

Syd Barrett was lost to this reality a long time ago, but news that the last bit of him has drifted away still makes me really sad.  The world’s a little less wonderful without him, life a little less candy-coloured.

The music’s still there, of course.  While his chief creation – Pink Floyd – ran in different directions without Syd there to tend it, his presence haunted, informed.  David Gilmour –old roommate, good friend, and eventual replacement – even included Barrett’s “Dominoes” on many dates of his recent solo tour.  Below, from a May performance at Albert Hall, he’s joined by David Bowie on “Arnold Layne.”  The sound is lousy, the video fuzzy.  And shouldn’t it be?

I’m tempted to post the megaepic versions of (S)hine on (Y)ou Crazy (D)iamond from Floyd’s Animals tour... but while they totally fucking rock, that’s that band’s tribute to its creator, not mine.  I loved Syd’s acid-addled child’s-eye view of the world.  My favorite Barrett song is “Bike” from Piper at the Gates of Dawn.  After all these years, it still makes me laugh and dance and jingle and share; it contains, in one playful three-minute, twenty-two second clip, just about everything that’s missing from grimbly-grumbly later-Floyd.

But as I see(via Hype Machine, where you can hear more) Fluxblog has just posted that one, I offer these:

• Pink Floyd – The Gnome (mp3)(buy)


• Syd Barrett – Effervescing Elephant (mp3)(buy)

“The Gnome,” also from that first Floyd album (in the next studio, The Beatles were working on Sgt. Pepper, and McCartney was a big fan), features perhaps the purest expression of joy, ever:  “And then one day – Hooray! – another way for gnomes to say, ‘Hooray!’”  It’s glee, squared.  Big adventures are beside-the-point:  Look at the sky, look at the river.  Isn’t it good?

“Effervescing Elephant” is from Barrett’s second solo album.  Gilmour and Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright produced the record – and sweetened it, sonically, a bit too much.  But this happy little song about how Death Will Get You (though arranged by Gilmour) has just a tuba and an acoustic guitar; it comes in from, and goes off into, the night.

Goodbye, Syd.  If you’re reading this – and why do I think that, if anyone should wind up all-knowing, all-seeing, after death, it’d be you? – I hope you’ve found all your missing pieces.  I hope everything makes sense, now, but that everything’s still a mystery.  I hope you find a hundred billion new ways to say “Hooray!”

tags: syd barrett  pink floyd  

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