That last bit of trivia from the New York Times obit of Roger Barrett (who changed his name to "Syd" and pretty much invented psychedelic rock in 1967) struck me as, well, sort of touching. Especially if you’ve come to regard Pink Floyd as a money-generating blimp that imploded roughly around 1982, but somehow kept on floating above arenas and stadiums decades later, rolling out the slow-motion hits and – despite frequent feuds – continuing to roll in cash.
Barrett only fronted Pink Floyd for about two years – maybe one and a half, if tales of his true mental disintegration under punishing amounts of LSD are to be believed. But he left a very lasting mark on the music scene – a thin, shimmering line that runs through psychedelia and folk to alternative music, if the off-kilter rhythms of Pavement and Kevin Shields are any indication.
What did Syd do? He played guitar and he sang, and the other bandmates (drummer Nick Mason, bassist Roger Waters and keyboardist Rick Wright) tried to keep up with his whimsical flight paths. It can be argued that, even in the supposedly ego-less world of acid rock in the 1960s, a good leader was still necessary. That is, if the band was to rise above the dreck.
Syd led, and you can hear him steering rock into very strange and interesting new territory on seminal tracks like 1967’s Astronomy Domine (from their debut album "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," though a much headier live version is to be found on the double disc "Ummagumma"). There, Syd’s monotonal voice pitch-shifts into suspended, unresolved minor keys. And his guitar bashing is monumental: atonal chords that seem to predict punk, post-punk, and many other things. His propulsive rhythm strumming verged on stuttering genius, and his otherworldly slide guitar – apparently using a Zippo lighter against the strings played through an echo box– resulted in dissonant yet enveloping soundscapes.
What else did Syd do? He wrote songs that seemed to conjure up long-lost nursery rhymes told by a lost soul – but it was his uneven rhyming schemes that characterized the music. Syd’s singing tended to emphasize off beats. His songs lurched along to the sounds of their own piper, with metrical feet that never quite matched. Legend has it one Syd-penned tune – Have You Got It Yet? – was played in a completely random arrangement every time he attempted it, driving his bandmates to distraction. A few lines from 1967’s Bike give an idea of the typical Barrett rhyming pattern:
I’ve got a bike
You can ride it if you like
It’s got a basket, a bell that rings
and things to make it look good
I’d give it to you if I could
but I borrowed it…
All this uneven cavalcade is juxtaposed against a 4/4 marching band beat. Surely, there was method to his madness. At least for a while.
But his mental frailties became more evident, especially under the harsh TV glow, as on a Top of the Pops appearance in which Syd simply melted down on-camera, scaring spookily at the red light while the band played on and the lip-synch track ran without him. Bad times.
The band ejected Barrett after the second album (to which he contributed only one song) and went on to bigger, more commercially polished things. The lyrics of Roger Waters, however, always seemed like conscious allusions to the mental state of their former bandmate. I’ve always felt that Waters and new guitarist David Gilmour felt some guilt about Syd’s mental collapse, especially as they basked in rock star fame and excess on the stellar sales of Syd-inspired concept albums like "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Wish You Were Here." As Igan D’Bayan noted when I mentioned Barrett’s passing: "Pink Floyd’s best (post-Syd) material was influenced by him."
Yes, you can definitely hear it in Waters’ Brain Damage, a direct nod to Syd. Songs like Shine On You Crazy Diamond adopt a shifting meter and drifting waltz-time suggestive of a wandering mind, while the acoustic Wish You Were Here is, for once, a heartfelt summing up of where the band was, and how they regarded their old psychic flame.
For good or bad, Barrett had a marked influence on Waters’ songwriting, with the slashing Pigs and pulsing Sheep (from "Animals") further resurrecting the Syd school of uneven metrical reading. And certainly most of The Wall is a kind of guilty look back at the dark side of fame: even Bob Geldof’s character in the movie version adopts the shaved head and eyebrow-less look that characterized Barrett the last time the band saw him in a studio.
And where did Syd go? Even in suburban retirement, he went on to influence countless bands. Ex-Soft Boy Robyn Hitchcock made an alternative career out of penning Barrett-like ditties, complete with madcap lyrics. David Bowie thought enough of Syd to record See Emily Play on his glammed-up tribute to the British Invasion, "Pinups." Groups as diverse as R.E.M., Television Personalities, The Dead Kennedys, This Mortal Coil, Mazzy Star, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Love and Rockets, The Cure, Smashing Pumpkins, Phish and Mars Volta have either covered or claimed Syd as an influence.
Yet he passed away in self-willed obscurity at the age of 60, apparently due to a diabetes-related ailment. It’s been a strange season of passings. Within the last year, I have found myself writing obituaries for Hunter S. Thompson and synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog. Both, like Syd, seemed to have been dipped in the quicksilver, gonzo energy of the ’60s.
But Barrett walked away from fame, the psychic flame, the crazy sparkle. When I heard the news about Syd, I found myself wondering if this ’60s casualty was still worth mentioning, having remained on the sidelines of music for 35 years or so, after releasing two idiosyncratic solo albums. But he is still a rare and flickering talent, his music kept alive on countless iPods throughout the planet. And, as Motorcycle Boy told Rusty in Rumble Fish, Francis Ford Coppola’s meditation on madness: "Even the most primitive of societies have an innate respect for the insane."