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Monday, September 22. 2008

The Wright Stuff

On a web site forum I frequent, one of my online buddies is Miss March 1978, Christina Smith. Miss March has quite a few fans and friends there; in essence, she got nekkid for us some thirty years ago. While that is always a good way for a woman to make friends with me, my affection for Miss March has grown as we shared our life experiences and found other, more cerebral, mutual interests, including music.

We’ve been “trading” YouTube clips, most recently of the acid rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer. We both love that trio and their music, remembering fondly the concerts we’ve attended and the joys of sitting, with or without chemical amusement aids, alone in our transcendental empyrean as we succumbed to the expanding, contracting, twisting, vibrating, reverberating, swirling, shifting, floating, rumbling, crumbling, exploding, soothing, comforting warmth wrapped in the streams of semi-conscious symbiotic intercourse across the universe into our souls.

It didn’t matter that 35 years ago we didn’t know each other. What does matter is that 35 years ago we shared the same experience; at one time holding the same album jackets, gazing at the same cover art, realizing with the same wonderment, the existential satori of living in the moment — experiencing the moment — with every fiber of our bodies, minds and hearts.

Music, even without a lyric, communicates and in that exchange we find our shared humanity, our common denominators that tell us I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. It brings us together; just take a pebble and cast it to the sea, then watch the ripples that unfold into me.

It means something to us personally and in those rare occasions if and when we share, in a moment, a thought, sensation and emotion, we’ve connected. What could have been doesn’t matter. The melancholy that wraps us in the disappointment of what didn’t happen falls away in diaphanous silk sheets, glittering into emptiness as the moment of what we do have and share fills us with the serenity of finding another who knows our soul, feels what we hear and sees the breath of our thoughts exhaled into the crescendos of our lives; our symphonies, or maybe they’re small trios, created within our individual hearts, combine into one and we touch, with warm exhilarations, the light of knowledge.

Therein lies Heaven: the moment of knowing together, for the first time. We can explore together what was once emptiness, nothingness; a space created when two minds reach that fork in the road and sculpt, without direction, into one.

On a larger scale, a different band became that connection for millions around the world. They eclipsed every other band from that era, with the possible exception of Led Zeppelin.

They had a keyboardist that didn’t splash the flash like Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman, but without that keyboardist, the band would have been something wholly different and maybe not the most recognized sound in popular music.

It was 35 years ago I heard Dark Side of the Moon for the first time. Before that, Pink Floyd was a weird band, by reputation, and their music was really the cutting edge of the avante gard of rock and roll. The only Floyd album I was familiar with before Dark Side of the Moon was Meddle, which preceded Floyd’s break out album. And the film, Pink Floyd in Pompeii was a must see.

We all wanted to be like Syd Barrett, but did we? He had left the band, the talk went, from over dosing on LSD. His mind went south and was no longer cognizant of the world around him. Syd Barrett, by 1969, was already a relic of the Hippie Generation, a casualty of its excess, an example — had any of the powers-that-be thought of it — of what happens when someone uses so much LSD. Syd Barrett was the mythology of lysergic acid diethylamide in the flesh.

So we didn’t do too much acid at one time.

Dark Side of the Moon changed everything we knew, or thought we knew, about Pink Floyd. All of a sudden Syd Barrett didn’t matter any more. This was the band of Roger Waters, David Gilmore, Nick Mason and the quiet, foreboding, Rick Wright. It was the eerie, mood-evolving keyboards of Wright that really defined the “Pink Floyd Sound.” Gilmore’s guitar and Waters’ lyrics were unmistakable. My brother Rick thought they were too depressing

With everything that made Pink Floyd stand out from every other rock band of the time, it was the keyboards of Wright that put the signature on the band’s sound. We noticed Wright with Meddle, as he wove his melodies in, around and over those of David Gilmore.

Wright brought jazz to the Floyd and that was the quirk that gave the band a difference. It was Wright’s unique contribution to the Floyd.
 The chords for “Breathe” came from Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue.”

Ironic how that band morphed into a guitar dominant band. Until Wish You Were Here, Rick Wright’s keyboards would often be the front of the band. Wright wrote the music for “Great Gig in the Sky” and had significant contribution to the composition of “Breathe” and “Us and Them.” Maybe his exclusion from the composition of the music was the shard of resentment that caused Rogers to force him from the band before the short tour for The Wall. Doesn’t really matter. Richard Wright made Pink Floyd different and though he is now gone from this world, we will always have Rick Wright every time we put on our favorite Pink Floyd albums.

It was in my reverie with ELP and Miss March that I learned Rick Wright had passed away September 15 from a short bout with cancer. Someone had posted a tribute video to Wright on YouTube. Can’t find that one again, but here’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” possibly his greatest composition.

Why it went a week before I knew: I was so wrapped up in the current election no other news mattered. His death was reported on all the major news organizations, but it slipped my notice. Sometimes we miss the important bits of our personal lives.

Where were you when you first listened to Dark Side of the Moon?

Posted by Tim Forkes in The Arts at 00:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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