The quintessence of music..and Floyd!
So, having thus far targeted oddball and somewhat obscure bands/artists and albums, this time I pick a certified classic from an alltime great with fans all over the world. But again, not without an element of underrating. For, Pink Floyd means Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall to most rock fans, especially the last one. To the acid rock crowd, Floyd means Piper At The Gates of Dawn. But I can say confidently that a devoted Pink Floyd will have a special place in his/her heart for Meddle. Ok, admitted, we Floydians like almost everything they touched and Dark Side..is my favourite too. But all great things start somewhere and for Pink Floyd's classic era, that starting point is Meddle.
Meddle in itself though has a starting point: the even more underrated Atom Heart Mother. AHM is where Pink Floyd began to move to a different style and leave the Barrett legacy behind, though never completely. The sound became lush, mellow and atmospheric and some ambition became evident on the Atom Heart Mother Suite. But at this point, they were still confused about whither they wanted to go and this results in the album being somewhat unfocused (nevertheless one for which I have a lot of consideration and certainly more than both Gilmour and Waters profess at this point). On Meddle, they begin to perfect the formula, they begin to make the best of their great ideas. The perfection of Dark Side...eludes them yet, but they're close, the submarine is marching swiftly to its destination, ha ha! One of These Days has menace, A Pillow of Winds oozes beauty, Seamus has shock value and amusement and San Tropez has the cool quotient. In particular, Gilmour's vocals and guitarwork on A Pillow of Winds are beautiful and delicate to the point of defying description through words. On One of These Days, Waters shows he has realized he can never be an ace bassist (and at this point, Chris Squire and Greg Lake must have begun playing circles around him, I reckon!) and instead channels his efforts into coming up with memorable basslines. And just THAT bassline drives the song on its own steam.
The thing that has changed now about Pink Floyd's music is they are seemingly calculating the psychological impact of every little whisker they produce on the listener. They didn't have the chops of the prog rock bands emerging around them, especially in comparison to the talented musicians populating the Canterbury scene, and they didn't have the songwriting genius of Beatles before them or The Who from contemporaries. But what they had that no band before or after has ever possessed to the same measure is a window into your brain. Yes, better beware, Pink Floyd know what you go through when you listen to what sounds. And, after all, isn't music all about producing some response from your mind? We like to call it heart, it's really the right side of the brain we are talking about and though Pink Floyd themselves weren't probably extraordinarily gifted in the right side, they seem to have studied its workings in some amount of depth and applied it to their music in spades.
And nowhere is this more evident than on Echoes. Worth the price of the album solely for its existence, worth exchanging all other music in the world for it (fanboy alert!!!!) and indeed the key motivation to write about the album. I feel privileged to have listened to it and to now write about it. This, my dear friends, is what music is all about. A motley gathering of sounds ranging from the delicate to the bizarre arranged in a way that evokes an emotional response from you. And because it is a pure gathering of sounds as opposed to conventional music put into unorthodox formats, which is what prog rock was all about, each time you listen afresh, you discover something new. The sheer density and depth of this over-20 minute monster once again defies description. The musical ideas when you take them apart are limited and not spectacular or profound. To add insult to injury, Gilmour's guitar lines sound uncomfortably like Procol Harum's Repent Walpurgis. But, let me reiterate again, it's not about the originality, the chops, the talent, it's simply about the reaction the music generates from you and whatever else you won't react to, you'll react, either in disgust or in wonderment, to THAT noise after the 10 minute mark. Floydians have speculated about what it's supposed to resemble. Some think it's a submarine, some think it's a dark cave, I think it's a whale whistling. That it's something to do with the sea is obvious enough from listening to the song. The sea's infinite vastness has never been captured on sound better and more imaginatively than this. You can lose yourself in those sounds for an eternity..and the song too goes on for an eternity, leisurely, unhurried and elaborate, strengthening the impression of the vast endless expanse of infinity that the sea is. You could long for chops and get bored of it or just bask in those sounds. Considering the contamination level of Mumbai's beaches, it's a good alternative to actually soaking yourself in seawater...it even tastes salty, I promise! And unlike some Floydians, I am a strict teetotaller...sorry, it's a myth that you have to be stoned or drunk to enjoy their music. If you say that, you are just admitting to how deficient your imagination is! Just my opinion, hippies, kindly don't take offence as none is intended.
As you can see from the above, I have actually described very little about the music. That's the point, duh! Everybody has their own version of Echoes, it means different things to different people, takes them to different places. It's a fluid, vast, fertile breeding ground for your imagination. And that's why I humbly submit that Echoes and Pink Floyd capture the quintessence of music better than most rock bands in the world. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's the greatest piece of music ever (though it's my personal favourite and might be forever) but there's precious little else in music that's so abstract and yet so lively, so elaborate and vast and yet always over too soon for you, so weird and bizarre and yet so compellingly beautiful, so easy to fall in love with and yet so hard to fully comprehend (make that, impossible to comprehend!). If Pink Floyd had never made anything else worthy of recording on tape, much less of listening to, they would have still earned their greatness for Echoes alone. Things don't really work that way in the real world and Meddle kickstarted a hot streak for them which eventually sealed their place as one of the enduring classic rock bands and the only prog rock band to have true crossover appeal (Genesis and Yes changed their sound 360 degrees to appeal to pop audiences, Pink Floyd always were...just Pink Floyd!). Further, Echoes is part of an overall enjoyable, eclectic album called Meddle that's worthy of belonging in any self respecting rock music collection.
- By Madan