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Pink Floyd:
Syd Barrett (vocals, guitar)
Roger Waters (vocals, bass)
Rick Wright (piano, organ)
Nick Mason (drums)
Recorded at Abbey
Road Studios, London, England.
Pink Floyd's debut was its only recording based on the vision of
founding singer/guitarist Syd Barrett, an art student whose world
revolved around music, mysticism, and liberal doses of hallucinogens.
The band's moniker was taken from the first names of Georgia
bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council (an album of theirs was a
favorite of Barrett's), and the album's title came from a chapter of
Kenneth Grahame's children's classic, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (also
a staple of Barrett's library).
Recorded at Abbey Road at the same time The Beatles were cutting
SGT.
PEPPER, PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN is an avant-garde pastiche of
trippy improvisation and snappy pop snippets--a blurring of musical
borders that went far beyond what the Fab Four were doing a couple
of rooms away.
(Producer Norman Smith had been The Beatles' chief engineer for much
of the early '60s.) Instrumental space-jams like "Pow R. Toc H." and
"Interstellar Overdrive" smashed the conventionality of the pop
mainstream by opening up traditional song structures, as bits of
Rick Wright's reverb-soaked Farfisa organ and Barrett's scratchy
guitar float in and out of the mix.
The other side of Barrett's musical expression was an ability to
write shorter "pop" songs that were similar to traditional fare only
in length--acid-fueled observations of a Siamese cat on "Lucifer
Sam," and child-like tales on "The Gnome" and "Bike."
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