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Thursday, August 04, 2005
VEGETABLE MAN
Pink Floyd
Unreleased Single : 1969
PORPOISE SONG
The Monkees
Head Soundtrack
Columbia : 1968
[Buy It]
DARK GLOBE
Syd Barrett
The Madcap Laughs
Harvest : 1970
[Buy It]
The first time I heard Pink Floyd, or at least the first time I knew it was them, I was at the Ground Round with my family. It was back when they played old movies while you ate, talkies mostly, and they brought baskets of peanuts and popcorn to the table. The best part was that you could throw the peanut shells on the floor. Not "could." You HAD to. It was part of the whole thing. A peanut shell mandate. This took me some getting used to. I was a dirty kid, wore my red turtleneck with stains on it four days a week. But I didn't throw stuff around. I was learning the difference between dirt and disarray. These peanuts were both things all at once, and it was disorienting and exciting.
And then this one night amid the forced mess, there were these kids singing. I had never heard children in stereo, unless you count Sesame Street. But this wasn't that, this wasn't church. This was dark and terrifying and bad. Kids weren't supposed to say this stuff. "They just got some kids to sing on the record," my older brother Jeff said, when I asked who they were. "It's from that Pink Floyd movie." I nodded. I was nine, he was twelve. It was cool to talk to Jeff about music. I didn't want to screw it up with more questions.
It may have been a week or a month or even a year later that I watched The Wall. "Who's Pink Floyd?" I asked my brother later. "He's that guy in the movie," he said, "It's about him." That was all he said, but what it meant to me was that The Wall was a documentary about a musician Pink Floyd. A dead rat and some other hard things in childhood forced him down a very dark road. I had never seen madness before. I squinted and squirmed and rewound, watched him shave off his eyebrows over and over again. Set up the toy airplanes. I watched the family room door, knowing my mother wouldn't like this, though I wasn't sure why. I loved this boy, this man, wanted to hug him even when he became a Nazi. He was having a hard time.
Imagine my surprise when Bob Geldof showed up on MTV a couple years later hosting Live Aid. "I thought that guy was Pink Floyd," I said to my brother, who howled and howled, stopping long enough to sputter something about "I Don't Like Mondays."
And then it completely unraveled. Of course it wasn't real. How could I have been so stupid? A lot of things began to fall apart and make sense and fall apart again. I had already learned the truth about Sergeant Pepper's and Tommy and the Monkees, but this was different. This was the beginning of the part of my childhood where doubt and reason and hope would have to fight it out. Not only was there no one named Pink, not only was The Wall not a documentary, but this Geldof guy wasn't even in the band.
This trauma erased Pink Floyd from my consciousness for a while. In high school I heard REM cover "Dark Globe" on a flexidisc insert in Sassy magazine. I promptly sought out The Madcap Laughs. This wasn't easy back then. There was definitely no asking Jeff, and I'd be laughed out of town if I asked the guy at Newbury Comics about something from Sassy.
But I found it. My long-awaited reunion with my first lunatic. All I had were the cover art and the record. I'm sure there were books and articles, but I didn't read them back then. I just wasn't that concerned with anything but the songs and who I believed Syd to be. A sweet soul too fragile for this world, who lived on a mushroom with some elves. I loved him. I had no interest in elves, didn't believe in them at all, but I knew that Syd did. So I loved them, too, for keeping him company.
In the late nineties I tried to track down some of his writing or artwork for the literary magazine I edit. In one of my first extensive internet searches ever, probably using Hotbot with Netscape, I found out what we all know: he went crazy, probably from the acid. Lived with his mother until her death, at which time he burned all of his art books and journals, along with a tree and a fence. He had rabbits and cats but forgot to feed them. He was beautiful and young and full of everything and then he went away to be fat and away, maybe crazy, maybe just over it.
My private love affair with Syd, blown wide open by the fucking internet. It used to be that you found stuff out because you looked hard or asked around and people told you things. It's still people telling you things, but now it's written down and you have to deal with the fact that things you like are also liked by a ton of people with freaky fan sites. In this case mostly people who also love Pink Floyd, which isn't something I can support.Labels: classic, joanna, memoir
posted by Joanna
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