PINK FLOYD: A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS (1968)
1) Let
There Be More Light; 2) Remember A Day; 3) Set
The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun; 4) Corporal
Clegg; 5) A Saucerful Of Secrets; 6) See-Saw; 7) Jugband Blues.
General verdict: This is your
mind off drugs, but still very much on inertia.
Go no further than the distance between Pink
Floyd's first and second album to understand the difference between «crazy
psychedelia» and «sane psychedelia». By the time serious sessions started for
the band's second record, Syd had largely become completely dysfunctional, his
place in the band taken over by David Gilmour; Barrett is credited exclusively
for the last song on the album (ʽJugband Bluesʼ), plus guitar playing on two
more tracks where he largely acted as an incidental sideman. Yet at the same
time, somehow, in some way, his spirit still had to dominate the band: Pink Floyd was his project, largely owed
him its essence and its image, and the whole business now looked like the
desperate flight of an interstellar spaceship whose captain had just
accidentally fallen out of the airlock.
Thus begins the «transitional» era in the life
of Pink Floyd, an era in which Waters, Wright, and Gilmour had to endure the
legacy of Syd Barrett and, for a while, play the role of a collective Syd
Barrett without actually having that much in common with the real Syd Barrett.
It is not as if Waters, already at this point the most productive songwriter in
the band, was disinterested in Syd's subjects — the frightening mysteries of
space and the absurdist sides of British rituals — but he could never get into
them with the same reckless abandon as his old friend did. From the very
beginning, A Saucerful Of Secrets is
very much about composition, calculation, and discipline: a product of
artistic reasoning rather than artistic inspiration. Which, in a different
setting, would have made it vastly inferior to its predecessor; fortunately,
artistic reasoning can be quite a bitch, too, when coming from a bunch of superior
reasons.
A superficial comparison between, say,
ʽAstronomy Domineʼ and ʽSet The Controls For The Heart Of The Sunʼ (both songs are
relatable to space exploration, even if, technically, the latter is, outside of
its title, just a bunch of quotations from Chinese poetry), clearly establishes
the difference in territory. Waters' early space-rock masterpiece moves slowly,
softly, transfixing you with repetitive bass and keyboard lines as the latter
gradually become louder and more intense, yet the musical spaceship never for
once loses its steady course — guided from beginning to end by a firm, steady
hand, not a single accidental collision along the way, as opposed to the bumpy
ride (and that's putting it mildly) of ʽAstronomy Domineʼ. The instrumental combination
still works wonderfully — close your eyes and you can imagine yourself inside a
vast engine room, with Mason's mallets as pistons. But all safeties have been
locked, just as they also have been on the lead-in track, ʽLet There Be More
Lightʼ (which is more dynamic and epic, but guided just as steadily by that
unnerving bass pulse).
Even the album's most experimental and
improvisational piece, the multi-part title track (which was actually created
at the last moment to fill out empty space), plays out more like an homage to
intellectually crafted modern classical music. Its most turbulent part, ʽSyncopated
Pandemoniumʼ, superficially resembles Barrett-era improvisations — with Gilmour
producing waves of feedback by dragging his guitar across the floor or
something, Wright bashing out dissonant chords with his elbow or something, and
Mason pounding his kit with the energy of a buffalo stampede. But somehow it is
all just too well coordinated, and, most importantly, the sound is curiously
static: piano bashes and guitar buzzsaws enter in at appropriate points, do
more or less the same schtick, then rinse and repeat, whereas during
ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ pretty much anything could happen at any given point.
This is neither good nor bad — just different, an altogether separate musical
perspective that might appeal far more to those who, for instance, might have
found ʽOverdriveʼ too loose and sloppy in comparison.
And, by all means, that last part, ʽCelestial
Voicesʼ, dominated by Rick Wright's church organ and Mellotron and collective
group harmonies, is as far removed from Barrett-era Floyd as possible — it is,
in fact, one of the earliest precursors to the classic Floyd sound, with an
aura of ceremonial, religious grandness and sadness, a mini-requiem for all
those who have probably just given their lives in the epically calculated
thunderstorm. It gives good closure to the whole thing: ʽA Saucerful Of Secretsʼ
truly reads like a musical story, recounting some terrible event that happened
in the universe, and its consequences — but, again, a story means a plan, and
that was never a part of the original band's vision. Suddenly, instead of just cracking
open your mind and peeping at what lies within, they are playing Greek tragedy.
(Not surprisingly, this piece always looked awesome within the setting of the
Pompeiian amphitheater).
Less efficient, I believe, is Waters' attempt
at stealing the other side of Syd's personality — the playful British
eccentricity, that is — with ʽCorporal Cleggʼ, a song nominally dedicated to the
WW2 service of Roger's dad (in those happy innocent pre-Wall days) but essentially following in the footsteps of such character
vignettes as ʽArnold Layneʼ and ʽThe Gnomeʼ. It actually sounds like it would
rather belong in a Who-style or Small Faces-style sarcastic gallery (The Who Sell Out, etc.) than in with
these other space panoramas, and its carnivalesque elements (the irritating circus
kazoo merry-go-rounds) are a poor stab at humor from a band whose funniest
member had just mutated into a vegetable, and whose other members have always had
a collective sense of humor about the size of a pinhead. That said, it isn't
really a bad song — multiple sections, catchy chorus, theatrical delivery,
clear message — it is simply very much out of place here.
With a respectful nod to Rick Wright's two atmospheric,
stately, gentlemanly (but, as usual, too humble to be particularly memorable) contributions
(ʽRemember A Dayʼ and ʽSee-Sawʼ), it is always more comfortable to focus
attention on the last song on the album — while ʽJugband Bluesʼ was allegedly
not written by Syd specially as a parting gift to the band, there is no other
way one might interpret the lyrics about how "it's awfully considerate of
you to think of me here / and I'm most obliged to you for making it clear that
I'm not here". I am pretty sure that many fans at the time, not fully
aware of the dire nature of the situation, had to regard the inclusion of the
song as one final insult to a terribly mistreated Barrett — when in reality it
was more of a last sorrowful farewell. Here, the carnivalesque atmosphere
actually works («sad clown» was quite a legitimate part of Barrett's image),
and the acoustic conclusion ("and what exactly is a dream? and what
exactly is a joke?") still occasionally brings me to tears. There is
madness, exuberance, and terrible sorrow in this song — Syd almost literally
breaks down over the course of its three minutes, a lost and confused piper at
the gates of sunset. For that matter, the song is very typical of the solo
stuff on his 1970 albums, so if you somehow happen to consider yourself above
this sloppy, broken-down shit, do not even bother with The Madcap Laughs.
Since none of the CD editions of the album so
far seem to have included any bonus tracks, it should be quickly noted that
Pink Floyd released two more singles that year — both of them commercial
flops, but both also very nice if you do not judge them by classic Pink Floyd
standards: Wright's ʽIt Would Be So Niceʼ is, by all accounts, his personal
reply to Brian Wilson's ʽWouldn't It Be Niceʼ, and does the baroque dream-pop
schtick quite convincingly (at least it is not any worse than the usual stuff
on Nuggets II), and ʽPoint Me At The
Skyʼ, too, sounds like it could occupy a solid place in the pantheon of
psychedelic pop one-hit wonders like Dantalian's Chariot or Sagittarius. That
last single, however, is probably better known for the first appearance of
ʽCareful With That Axe, Eugeneʼ, Floyd's first horror masterpiece that we will
talk about in more detail once we get to Ummagumma
(because, honestly, the single version sounds like an early rehearsal take next
to the expanded version on the album). In any case, all those songs are decent
stabs at a style that neither Waters nor Gilmour nor even Wright himself were
comfortable with — songs that do not put too much of a Pink Floyd stamp on the
psycho-pop standards of the time, but still deserve to be remembered as
footnotes.
On the whole, though, I like and endorse this
period and this album: I like the idea of Pink Floyd trying to persevere in the
ways of Syd Barrett more appealing than the idea of Pink Floyd searching and
searching and searching for a different way, which would result in the relative
disasters of Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother. Without Syd, they
may not have been the most convincing and sincere of space-rockers on the
block, but they knew the ropes well enough to produce results that could still
be memorable, emotional, and even haunting. I mean, when you are really out in
space, you don't want it always to be
a bumpy ride, right? Sometimes it pays off to have yourself a calm, steady
soundtrack — at least long enough to consume and digest your saucerful of cosmic
lunch in relative peace.
"Corporal Clegg" fails in that it tries to straddle the line between Barrett whimsy and the dark cynicism of the band's later work. It probably would have worked better on "Piper" itself, as Waters' first published song -- it's an ok song, whereas "Stethoscope" is a flat-out ugly fail. The darkness would be somewhat at odd with the rest of the album, but then again so is "Stethoscope", lyrically anyway -- "Clegg" is simply a more, shall we say, committed work, not something that sounds like it was dumped out at the 11th hour.
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