The Madcap Gets the Last Laugh: A Remembrance of Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett (1946-2006)
By Uncle Dave Lewis (AMG)
It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here/And I'm much obliged to you for making it clear/That I'm not here. - Syd Barrett, "Jug Band Blues" (1967)
The skittish, pleasant, and slightly addled Englishman named Roger Keith Barrett who was left behind in the wake of psychedelic rock star and Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett's breakdown didn't know much, nor had anything in particular to say, about Syd Barrett. This proved vexing to the legions of Syd Barrett's fans, as he had been Syd Barrett. When word arrived earlier this week of the passing, on July 7, of Roger Keith Barrett at the age of 60, the author's wife commented that she'd already thought Syd Barrett dead a long time, and in a sense, this is still right. Syd Barrett wrote the lion's share of songs featured on Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in 1967 and followed it with two beautiful, eccentric, and fearlessly original albums of his own in 1969-1970. But Barrett hadn't stepped up to the mic in a recording studio in 35 years, and it looked like it was going to stay that way. Now we know for sure that Barrett's legacy of about 55 original tunes, perfect in its own way, is not going to be added to.
In the media of late, many phrases have been battered around relating to Barrett's legacy — "troubled genius," "tragic figure" — Syd Barrett as a poster boy for acid casualties, a tortured genius who flamed out too soon, due to drugs and insanity. Barrett has long been ready for "the summing up," as Somerset Maugham might have said, and the equation seems to be "talent plus drugs equals disaster," a story we all know too well; mere fodder for VH1's Behind the Music. This interpretation of Syd Barrett, however, doesn't do much justice to the very real, and unique, contribution that he made to music. Far from being a collection of pathetic ravings of a lunatic, Barrett's musical works open the door to an uncompromising psychological and artistic sensibility previously unrepresented in music, the echoes of which still resound in music in the 21st century.
The son of a Cambridge zoologist, Roger Keith Barrett was dubbed "Syd" as teenager and an art student at Cambridge University. He got into music as he was an enthusiast for old blues and jazz records of some considerable depth; he learned the banjo first, then guitar, and even played bass for a time. When Barrett renamed the band he was playing in with Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason "the Pink Floyd Sound" in 1965, he derived the name from those of two still mega-obscure bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. From Anderson he seems to have derived some elements of his signature rhythm guitar style, which also owes a lot to Bo Diddley in that he makes extensive use of non-standard, "gapped" fingerings and alternate tunings — maddening to figure out, by the way.
When the Pink Floyd Sound made its bow in the ultra-hip London scene in 1966, it was sort of as a uniquely English counterpoint to the Velvet Underground in New York — they featured the first psychedelic light show ever seen in London. The Pink Floyd also played long, largely atonal jams like "Interstellar Overdrive," which would last up to a half-hour. It was a freaked-out scene, fueled to some extent by the popularity of LSD, and soon the Pink Floyd became the toast of swinging London, as even established groups like the Yardbirds began to move in a similar direction in an attempt to keep up with the trend. By 1967, they had a chart hit in Barrett's song "See Emily Play," a song about a mysterious girl who "inclined to borrow somebody's dreams until tomorrow."
For a time, Syd played the part of the psychedelic pop star to the hilt. His Stratocaster was covered in mirrors, and in old photographs, his gnomish countenance stares up, looking like Alex de Large from the Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. Looking the part and being the person proved to be two different things for Barrett. The long jams represented the taste of Waters and the others in the group; while Barrett's psychedelic guitar playing was earnest and inspired, it wasn't as "good" as that played by his friend Jimi Hendrix. Barrett favored writing pop songs with oblique references, uneven phrase lengths built on the lengths of lines within his text rather than fitted to a predictable eight-, 12-, or 16-bar structure. "See Emily Play" has a nine-measure verse and a nine-measure chorus, unheard of in pop songs of the time. But something about it works.
Although banned by the BBC, the song "Arnold Layne," about a man who steals ladies' undies from clotheslines, came as a revelation to singers in the British pop scene, who customarily fabricated American accents in order to sound more like their idols across the pond. Barrett didn't attempt to disguise his natural singing voice and accent, and one vocalist who noticed was David Jones, ex-singer for a group called the King Bees that had flourished and floundered in a very brief time. When Jones re-emerged as David Bowie in 1968, the American accent he used in the King Bees was forever retired, and most of Bowie's contemporaries among English rockers would follow his lead.
It was on Pink Floyd's first tour to the United States in 1967 that Barrett began to show the effects of his illness, apparently undiagnosed schizophrenia. It would render him catatonic during performances, and even struck Barrett during an appearance on American Bandstand. Clearly, he wouldn't be able to remain in the group if it were to continue. While his use of LSD is often blamed for his breakdown, it did not bring on the schizophrenia — that had already been there for some time, as it was part of the makeup of Barrett's brain chemistry. Unbelievably, there was a time when doctors experimentally used LSD as a way to treat schizophrenia. Guess what? It doesn't work. It was from cases like Barrett's that physicians finally figured out the effects of lysergic acid are individual to the person, and that the drug was at least not reliable, at worst even dangerous, for combating mental disorders like schizophrenia. For Barrett, the drug hastened the effect and possibly magnified the intensity of a condition that would have claimed him eventually if left undiagnosed — just with not as much intensity, nor as soon as it did.
After Barrett and Pink Floyd parted company, guitarist David Gilmour took his place in the group, and they went through a long phase consisting mostly of equally long instrumental jams of the kind favored by Waters, until finally hitting it big with Dark Side of the Moon in 1973. Make that very big — it's the third best-selling album of all time and held a spot on the Billboard chart for 751 weeks. After it dropped off for a week, it was back again. Throughout their subsequent work, Barrett is a constant reference point in one way or another — the album Wish You Were Here and the song "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" being the most overt references. In a way, the latter-day Pink Floyd built into their music the mythical idea that they were mere servants of an unseen lunatic who is "in my head" and can't get out.
Despite their attempts to establish a sense of continuity with the past, the Pink Floyd that recorded both Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall was a totally different group from the one that recorded The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. One wonders why they kept throwing references to Syd Barrett into their mix; fans of the pop version of Genesis led by Phil Collins don't really care that at one time the group was a prog rock band led by Peter Gabriel. Perhaps it's just an aspect of Pink Floyd that remains intriguing and mysterious to their fans, and so the group cultivated the legend. Or on the other hand, one cannot discount that the members of Pink Floyd feel that Barrett represents their common heritage, and continue to pay tribute to him out of respect for his vision, even though musically and commercially they have been unable to continue it as it was. Many writers speculate as to what Pink Floyd might have sounded like if Barrett had stayed in the band, and some point to the song "Dominoes" (from the post-Floyd album Barrett) as evidence of what that might have sounded like. While it is true that Pink Floyd would never have been what it was without Syd Barrett, it is just as true that Pink Floyd would not have become what it did if he hadn't left.
Barrett was still popular in London when he left Pink Floyd, so he wasn't able to stay dormant very long. Harvest label head Malcolm Jones and Pink Floyd members Richard Wright and David Gilmour, who was Barrett's replacement in Pink Floyd, childhood friend, and has remained one of Barrett's strongest advocates, helped to spearhead the making of two rather hastily prepared Syd Barrett solo albums in 1969 and 1970, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. So hastily prepared that in the rush, the wrong take of "Feel" ended up on Madcap and what was universally admired as the album's best track, "Opel," was left off of the master by mere accident. In these efforts, Barrett moved out of the psychedelic rock vein into some style that really doesn't have a name — it is not rock, folk, or even folk-rock as we understand it.
Barrett is able to refine his sense of collage in terms of lyrics and music, and while he once stated in a rare interview that he did not consciously relate music to painting, his sense of music making is nonetheless very visually oriented. The twists and turns of his texts rotate on an axis that is enhanced by his distinct harmonic and melodic interests. If either music or text becomes misshapen, warped, uneven, or distorted resulting from these combinations of elements, so be it. "Terrapin" is such a lovely tune, so why is Gilmour's carefully crafted guitar line so bitter sounding? Because to harmonize Syd's music "right," one must use "wrong" notes — that's just how it works out.
The Madcap Laughs actually charted in the U.K., and while Barrett did not, in retrospect it is the more focused of the two efforts. Not everyone agrees that these albums fully represent Barrett as a musically functional entity, and some complain that these efforts are not so much musical as clinical in appeal, a nice way of saying that Syd's valedictory work is little more than a psychological freak show. Pink Floyd's co-manager Peter Jenner once described "Vegetable Man," Barrett's never-released final song for the Pink Floyd, as "psychological flashing," and AMG's own Stewart Mason evaluates the song "Feel" from The Madcap Laughs as "disgustingly exploitative." Hindsight is 20-20, and it is much easier in the current context for someone listening to "Vegetable Man," or its equally ill-fated counterpart, "Scream Thy Last Scream," to think it sounds like underground rock music from the 1980s rather than 1967. In 1984, the English group the Jesus and Mary Chain realized that "Vegetable Man," with its pounding beat and its lyrics about the inadequacies of one's hip outfit and hair fit right into their noisy, post-punk ethos. The Jesus and Mary Chain's recording of the number became an underground hit, even though the original remains unreleased to this day; "Vegetable Man," though written in 1967, sounds current, not retro.
Barrett was well read in a wide range of literature, and while all of his work reflects this interest, the later works demonstrate it a little better than the former. The seemingly impenetrable work of Irish novelist James Joyce seems to have been especially important to him beyond the fact that Joyce's verse is used for "Golden Hair," one of Barrett's loveliest songs. Take for example this excerpt from "Finnegan's Wake":
Lady Marmela Shortbred will walk in for supper with her marchpane switch on, her necklace of almonds and her poirette Sundae dress with honey and her cochineal hose with the caramel dancings, the briskly best from Bootiestown, and her suckingstaff of ivory-mint. You mustn't miss it or you'll be sorry.
- James Joyce, "Finnegan's Wake" copyright 1939 by James Joyce. Published in the USA by The Penguin Group
And lyrics from "Rats," a no-wavish drone song found on "Barrett":
Bam spastic tactile engine heaving crackle slinky dormy roofy wham/I'll have them fried bloke broken jardy cardy smoocho moocho paki pufftle/Sploshette moxy very smelly cable gable splintra channel/Top the seam he's taken off. Rats, rats lay down flat…
- Syd Barrett, "Rats" copyright 1971
In this context, Barrett's work seems a little less "madcap" and a little more the result of being well-versed in literature that many of us would like to say that we know and understand, but don't. Although Barrett's instability was a factor in the way his work came out, it doesn't seem so strange to us now that we have experienced artists such as Tom Waits, Eugene Chadbourne, Devandra Barnhart, Suzanne Vega, Roger Manning, and even the more self-confessional end of Kurt Cobain. Barrett's collages of lyrical randomness, blues and folk roots, personal revelation, whimsy, and wide-eyed wonder continue to inform us, whereas no band seems to have made a profitable business of knocking off Pink Floyd in their operatic, slightly depressing brand of space rock, popular as it is.
Barrett's interest in 19th century children's literature is often noted, but only accounts for a small number of songs within his output: "Bike," "The Gnome," and "Effervescing Elephant" among them. Nonetheless, they have proven very powerful in the end, as these simple little ditties are known to many ordinary families as singalong favorites from the car at vacation time. To David Gilmour, these Barrett songs have meant the most to him over time.
Gilmour has commented that Barrett's career trajectory was "painfully short," but if he'd had his way, one suspects he would have preferred one like that over the "painfully long" experience he's had with Pink Floyd. The appearance of Pink Floyd, with Gilmour and Waters intact, at Live 8 in November 2005 was the first indication of any civility between the two figureheads of the group that anyone had seen in 20 years, and both vehemently deny any possibility of a reunion tour. Talk to either Gilmour or Waters about Pink Floyd, if you can get them to do so, and they will agree in that to them, Pink Floyd is a multi-platinum Excedrin headache, complete with its profits, taxation, court proceedings, label relations, promotion, touring, and angry fan blog postings. Syd Barrett never had to deal with any with this, and his former colleagues in Pink Floyd saw to it that he never did.
After a final 1974 attempt at recording came up empty handed, Barrett remained at his mum's house, gardening, painting, and taking the dog for walkies. This is how he spent his last 30 years — Barrett was a schizophrenic, but he was never thrown out of the family home, and did not die in prison or in a mental institution. When asked in 1970 what he thought about the future, and was he looking forward to singing and playing again, Syd Barrett said, "Yes, that would be nice. I used to enjoy it. It was a gas, but so is doing nothing." As circumstances worked out, that is what he got to do in the end; like many of Syd Barrett's songs, Syd Barrett's story is not a "tragedy" — his life had a happy ending, and in this sense, the madcap enjoyed the last laugh.
_________________ Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill
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