In January 1975 Pink Floyd entered London’s Abbey Road Studios to do the seemingly impossible: compose and record a follow-up to their epochal The Dark Side of the Moon. Recently the resulting disc, Wish You Were Here, was reissued in a remastered version with new mixes plus bonus live tracks. The deluxe set – part of the Why Pink Floyd? reissue series – provides an opportunity to revisit that era in the band’s history and to once again pay tribute to the group’s late founder Syd Barrett, whose mental breakdown provided the genesis for this gentler but equally brilliant follow-up to Dark Side.
Dark Side of the Moon was released March 1973 and tore its way up the charts and onto American FM radio, which was in its heyday. The band’s previous albums were all challenging listening, evolving from the pop and psychedelia balancing act The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, their 1967 debut, to 1971’s Meddle, which was anchored by the full-side, 23-minute sonic opus “Echoes” and reached only #70 on the Billboard Top 100 Albums chart.
Dark Side was Pink Floyd’s first calculated shot at the commercial stratosphere. It fared brilliantly. The LP wedded the exploratory sonics of the group’s live shows and earlier albums with crafted pop songwriting, rising to #1 on the Billboard album chart and staying in the Top 100 for 741 weeks due primarily to the success of the singles “Money” and “Us and Them.”
Generally speaking, the cycle of life and its trials were Dark Side of the Moon’s theme, but one song, “Brian Damage,” was specifically inspired by the group’s original frontman Syd Barrett, who had begun to go mad after Floyd’s first album and was replaced by David Gilmour. That song’s lyric “if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes” was directly inspired by Barrett’s on-stage, out-of-synch performances with the group as he’d spiraled down the rabbit hole.
“Brain Damage” implies that the pressures of the music business played some role in Barrett’s deterioration, and that notion planted the seeds of Wish You Were Here. Even as Dark Side of the Moon was being released, Pink Floyd’s bassist and main lyricist Roger Waters was writing for the next studio project. When the group went on a tour of France in early 1974 they played three new Waters driven compositions: “Raving and Drooling,” “You Gotta Be Crazy” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” The first two ultimately evolved into “Sheep” and “Dogs,” respectively, on 1977’s Animals. But “Shine On” became the heart of Wish You Were Here.
Waters pressed on with his writing, and by the time Pink Floyd entered Abbey Road again during 1975’s first week, the fabric of the album was knit – at least in his mind. Absence (obviously), regret, cynicism and the artifice of the music business were the raw material he drew upon. Struggling to embrace these ideas within an overriding musical concept, Pink Floyd decided to split “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” which had evolved into a suite, in two parts, using that song as a bookend for the newer numbers. “Have a Cigar” was an obvious slap at high-powered music executives. British folk-rock guru Roy Harper, the subject of Led Zeppelin’s country blues mash-up “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper,” was called in to cut the vocals when the arrangement proved to be out of Waters’ range. “Welcome to the Machine,” a song about being depersonalized and consumed by the music industry, preceded “Have a Cigar” to create a mid-LP mini-suite skewering the artifice of the business’ culture. The album’s sole other track, “Wish You Were Here,” is a direct message to Barrett, although it could also be interpreted as a song about unfulfilled love.
Getting to that five-song structure was not easy. The recording of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Wish You Were Here” were made more poignant by Barrett’s unexpected arrival in the studio during the sessions. After 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets, Barrett had taken two futile, recorded stabs at a solo career and withdrawn to his mother’s house, where he became an avid gardener and returned to his first form of artistic expression, abstract painting.
On June 5, 1975, six months into the arduous sessions, the band was mixing “Shine On Your Crazy Diamond” when a fat man with shaven eyebrows and a shaved head entered the room. The members initially failed to recognize their former leader and friend, whose conversation made little sense and whose condition drove both Waters and Gilmour to tears. Although Barrett reportedly spoke about his fondness for pork chops and listened to the mixes, then attended a reception that day for Gilmour’s wedding in the EMI cafeteria, he left without saying goodbye. Gilmour, who’d been a friend of Syd’s before taking over his guitar seat in Pink Floyd, quietly kept tabs on Syd until his death from pancreatic cancer in 2006.
More practical aspects of the recording process were challenging. Engineer Brian Humphries, who had worked with the band on 1969’s soundtrack for the movie More at Pye Studios, was unfamiliar with Abbey Road’s gear and accidentally spoiled the “many voices” backing track for “Shine On” after Waters and drummer Nick Mason had painstakingly crafted it. The tracks needed to be rerecorded. And there were tensions between Gilmour and Mason. The drummer’s failing marriage seemed to be taking a toll on his work. Initially Waters and Gilmour even disagreed over the sessions’ conceptual direction.
Focusing on making “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” – as well as a scathing appraisal of the band’s merits as artists and rock stars in New Music Express that appeared during the recording of Wish You Were Here – seemed to unite Pink Floyd once more. Gilmour hit on the song’s opening, ringing four-note guitar phrase by accident, and the sound reminded Waters of Barrett’s plight. After that, the group swung into action. Gilmour lost the three-to-one vote to split the “Shine On” in half and place new numbers between it, and they soldiered on.
Throughout the album, Gilmour’s acoustic guitar was used to balance the more modernistic tones of the synthesizers the band employed extensively, giving Wish You Were Here a more organic sound than Dark Side of the Moon. Dick Parry, who played sax on Dark Side, returned, and the gypsy jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, who was recording in another of Abbey Road’s studios, played on a track, but his contributions were later scrapped. The classical music heard at the end of “Wish You Were Here” is Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, recorded from Gilmour’s car radio.
Packaging was the final touch needed for the album’s release. Once again Pink Floyd called on Storm Thorgerson, who’d designed the cover of Dark Side of the Moon. Listening to the album, Thorgerson felt the prevalent theme was “unfulfilled presence.” The front cover photo of two businessmen shaking hands – one of them aflame – was shot on the lot of Los Angeles’ Warner Bros. studios with two stuntmen. To Thorgerson, it defined the music-biz handshake as an empty gesture and depicted to notion of “getting burned” in a business deal. The back cover photo of an empty suit in the desert is equally obvious. To further capture that sense of absence, Thorgerson directed the band to shroud the LP in dark shrink wrap so the art was invisible, with a sticker on the outside announcing the package’s contents.
Retailers ordered 900,000 copies of Wish You Were Here for their shops before it was released. Even Rolling Stone’s savage review didn’t hamper sales, which quickly drove the disc to #1 in the U.S. and U.K. Over the subsequent years, guitar giant Gilmour has repeatedly declared that the brilliant, cynical and compassionate Wish You Were Here is his favorite Pink Floyd album.
He’s also playing London’s prestigious 100 Club on June 21, as well as Britain’s premier outdoor festival, Glastonbury, on June 26.