Won't You Miss Me?

Wishing Syd Barrett Was Here

When I was 15, Pink Floyd had lodged itself permanently and indelibly on my consciousness.  I’d play Dark Side of the Moon, flip it, and find that there wasn’t a single wasted note, vocal, or use of breath. The theme was how alienated we had become from each other, and there seemed to be a ghostly figure hovering over the whole affair.  Like, we all knew life was bad, but the lovelier this sounded, the darker it was.  Where was it coming from?

The lunatic is in my head
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me

This sounded too authentic to be faux crazy.  It sounded calm, mellow to use a word of the decade.  But it is also called “Brain Damage,” a side effect many drug users risked, but most of them came out without lunatics in their heads.  The album has sold more than 45 million copies, and there is nothing avant-garde about that number.  The industry would love to have more of those, in the rarefied air of Michael Jackson, The Eagles, The Bee Gees and Fleetwood Mac.  In rock, it is the mainstream of mainstream.  To sell that many copies, you’d have to sell your crazy to some relatively bland people.

Dark Side of the Moon stayed on the Billboard charts from 1973 to 1988, the same years, it happened, that I had been on earth.  Some listeners were high and kept needing a replacement, upgrading to CD, scratching them, replacing them, scratching again.  Many, many people were clearly besotted with the album, but did they know what was beneath it?  The other major albums in the canon—Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979)—were also wildly successful, tapping into some shared darkness we felt compelled to inhabit.  1988 was also the year of the Pink Floyd wars.  Roger Waters, who wrote all of the lyrics, sued the other guys for continuing with the band name and lost.  David Gilmour, who had a better singing voice and a beautiful guitar sound, fronted the ensemble I saw at the Cotton Bowl at 15, though they were dwarfed by giant pigs.   They filled the place as if they were the Dallas Cowboys.  Someone else was doing the suffering that came out of Gilmour’s mouth, but then he had us.  He was the voice on those songs.  Who cared about the egomaniac who wrote them, especially when Gilmour’s voice aged effortlessly, and Waters’ had not?

I knew that there was an original lead singer, like the batty uncle in the psych ward that no one talks about.  Pink Floyd was his band, named for two blues musicians.  He wrote the entire first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), and dominated: lead singer, lead guitar, and the recording at Abbey Road Studios overlapped with Sgt. Pepper.  His real name was Roger, but his stage name was “Syd,” as in acid.  Barrett disappeared after that first album.  He stayed for one track on the follow up, Saucerful of Secrets (1968), then the band was lost without him for a while, before finding their groove with Meddle (1971), then all the mass acceptance that followed.  But what happened to Syd?  “Which one’s Pink?” asked the industry creep on “Have a Cigar.”  This one, I thought. 

Half Price Books in Dallas is a place where I made many vinyl discoveries, and the Rolling Stone coverage of the Pink Floyd wars revealed that there was indeed a secret history of Pink Floyd.  His name was Syd Barrett, and he still walked the earth.  His world of psychedelic odes often sounded like children’s songs, but they were for lysergic adults.  Inspiration turned to “Arnold Layne,” a strange collector of clothes, “See Emily Play,” a Lewis Carroll inspired journey inside the mind of a little girl.  “Lucifer Sam” was a surf jam into hell, and “Bike” could have been a Pee Wee Herman song with an English accent.  “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” was Timothy Leary’s slogan, and Barrett appeared to take it literally.  Piper at the Gates of Dawn was released in August, 1967, and by the end of the year, he could no longer function in the band.  He would stiffen in the middle of a song, unable to sing or play.  This was a band that was just starting its climb, and its entire creative force had suddenly become dysfunctional.  They tried keeping him around in a Brian Wilson capacity.  David Gilmour, who had been Barrett’s roommate and guitar student—who was friends with Barrett in actual childhood—would leave his modeling career to join for the live shows, and Barrett would hang on as a songwriter, an arrangement that fizzled pretty quickly.  Interacting with his mates in the band would be too much.  “Jugband Blues,” tucked at the end of Saucerful of Secrets, was not just Barrett’s farewell to the band, but to reality.

And what exactly is a dream
And what exactly is a joke

Pink Floyd could have been the British Strawberry Alarm Clock, but losing Barrett became their muse, their secret weapon, while EMI tolerated five years in the wilderness, waiting for Roger Waters to figure out how to write songs.  Can you imagine if this happened now?  Dark Side of the Moon would have never happened.

There was a time when I listened to those solo albums for pleasure, and now I listen to them with a mix of fascination and reluctance.  I’ve been on the dark side of something here and there, and what seemed like a freak show when I was younger is really eavesdropping on a breakdown. Barrett released two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs (a bit on the nose) and Barrett, both in 1970, and you can hear his former bandmates in the Floyd do their best to make these records happen.   “Dark Globe,” bare bones with just vocal and guitar, never keeps a tempo, and the voice and the words are a raw manifestation of falling apart:

My head kissed the ground
I was half the way down
Treading the sand
Please

Please, please lift the hand
I'm 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?

During the Floyd wars, Roger Waters said he liked singing this song in the bath, but Barrett was clearly crying for help.  Barrett was still a handsome chap, a former front man for a band that would make it later.  He still had girlfriends, groupies, hangers on who would help him get by.  He stalked the other members of the Floyd, showing up at recording sessions just to glare at Gilmour.  Some of the songs were sweet, playful, childlike, but “Dark Globe” was where he really lived.  I can’t really listen to these albums for too long the way I did when I was younger.  It was outsider art then.  Being on the inside is no joke.  Barrett crashed a Pink Floyd session for the last time when they were recording “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond,” a song about him.  He had gained a lot of weight, had shaved his head and his eyebrows, and it took a while for the band to recognize their former leader.  Waters asked him how it sounded.  He said, “It sounds a bit old.”

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
Shine on you crazy diamond
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom
Blown on the steel breeze

Come on you target for faraway laughter
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine

Barrett moved to Cambridge with his mum, and she instructed the members of Pink Floyd to never contact him.  Barrett stayed in and made abstract paintings, went back to calling himself “Roger,” and would sometimes be stalked by fans and tabloids while he was riding his bike around town to pick up groceries.  (Is this the same bike as “Bike”?  You could never know.)  He was trying to look like a normal person, but we knew otherwise, and how horrible for him.  Our insanity should be our own business, even if we are getting Pink Floyd royalties.  Waters ran into Barrett at Harrods, and Barrett dropped his bags and ran out of the store.  There would have been no Pink Floyd without this man, and there he was, still alive, but gone.  Waters said that Barrett was schizophrenic.  Richard Wright said he never recovered from an acid overdose.  Some combination of that is probably true. 

There was a brief truce in The Pink Floyd wars when, in 2005, Waters and the old line up reunited for a Bob Geldof charity concert.  When they performed “Wish You Were Here,” Waters, the only one talking, dedicated it to Syd, who, according to his sister, was watching on live television.  On the record, the song begins with someone tuning in a radio station, and after passing an advert and a moment of classical music, he comes upon a familiar riff.  It’s a trance beginning in E Minor, and the guy is clearly parked somewhere, anywhere, and he starts to play along with the radio.  The guitar is David Gilmour, of course, but we really are hearing this mysterious man, dragged back in, only able to reconnect in this moment.

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year

“Here” does not mean, “now.”  Gilmour misses his old chum, from an irretrievable past.  Syd is staring at him, but he is gone. 

When the reunited Floyd performed it on live television with an image of beautiful young Syd behind them, from a period when he was already not quite himself, Barrett watched it silently from home, sitting with his sister.  He could have picked up a guitar and joined in, like the beginning of the record, but he didn’t.  He just turned it off and didn’t say a word.  He died of pancreatic cancer the next year, at 60.

The Syd Barrett of 1967 is delightful.  And I love songs from the solo albums—“Baby Lemonade,” “Octopus,” “Terrapin,” and so on, to a point.  Collector fetishists get off on it, and I was among them at 15.  There was a time when nothing could be too raw.  But there is also a time for tenderness, and when I need refuge from the struggles of Syd, I turn back to Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, reactions to him, but made whole.  We’re two lost souls living in a fishbowl.  Certain things can never be made whole, including the idea that I would ever listen to that music for comfort.  “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”  True that, John Donne.

There was a time when Syd Barrett was a mystery, this mysterious spark of creativity too good for this world.  That madcap may be laughing, but you are not in on the joke.  You wished he was here, but he has been gone for a long time, long before he left his body, and if had been up to him, he would have been left alone.  He tattooed his brain all the way.

Won't you miss me?
Wouldn't you miss me at all?

Of course, Syd.  I will miss you on your terms.  I’ll miss who I was when I discovered you, when the world had more unanswered questions, when the movie could never get too violent, when endless night was just a poetic idea, and not the actual dark globe where we all have to live.