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Wish You Were Here
By Cory Casciato
casciato@mscd.edu

Illustration by Adam Goldstein/goldstea@mscd.edu

Legend.

It’s a label that gets thrown around all too casually but in rare cases it’s not only appropriate, it’s necessary. Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd and one of the original “acid casualties,” was the real deal: a legend.

His recorded output amounts to little more than four albums worth of songs. One album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and a few singles with Pink Floyd, two solo albums and a collection of outtakes and alternate recordings comprise his complete musical works. His musical career was over by 1970. It’s a modest output for a legend but what it lacks in quantity is more than made up for by its quality.

Barrett’s work with Floyd ranged from driving, psychedelic space rock to folksy tales about English eccentrics and sad scarecrows. His songs, voice and guitar led the band to stardom, but his erratic behavior and out-of-control drug use got him ejected from the group before they completed a second album.

His solo albums offer a quieter, more intimate and less immediately accessible sound. By the time they were recorded Barrett was even further gone from reality, increasingly disconnected. His lyrics, enigmatic even in the Floyd days, became positively inscrutable. Lines such as “In a clock they sent through a washing machine/ come around, make it soon, so alone” might have been phonetic poetry, free association or simply the ramblings of a stoned madman.

His guitar work became similarly unpredictable, swirling around the beat in strange patterns, stopping and starting at odd times. He did manage to turn in some nice, fairly straightforward folk rock tunes, but his best work from the period is his weirdest. It was as if he was feeding his sanity to his muse; the more of it he turned over, the better the songs were. After recording two albums and enough outtakes to eventually compile into a third release, Barrett withdrew from the music business and, for the most part, society.

Barrett’s behavior added to his legend, fueled in part by his former bandmates continual use of him as a source of inspiration. During the recording of Wish You Were Here, an album that is essentially a tribute to him, Barrett showed up at the studio, uninvited and unexpected, before disappearing again. His drug-fueled mania and collapse in the Floyd days was almost certainly the model for the protagonist of The Wall, possibly Pink Floyd’s most famous work.

The fascination of musicians with Barrett wasn’t limited to his former bandmates. The Damned sought Barrett to produce their first album, but had to settle for Nick Mason, Floyd’s drummer. The Television Personalities wrote a song called “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” Bands as diverse as Phish and Voivod have covered his songs.

In the end, the true measure of a legend isn’t how much or even what they did so much as how it affected people. Barrett died on July 7 at age 60, but the news didn’t break until July 11. I felt a genuine sadness when I heard, a deep and pervading sense of melancholy. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t produced music in years, and almost certainly never would have recorded again had he lived to be 100. His brief career and long period of obscurity in no way diminished his influence and impact on rock music in general, or on his fans in particular.

Barrett had been a constant companion, by way of his music, throughout 16 years of my life. By the time he died I thought of him as a friend. I was listening to “It is Obvious,” from Barrett, when I realized I was in love with the woman who would become my first wife. Nearly a decade later, when I began dating the woman who is now my wife, I put “Octopus,” from The Madcap Laughs, on a mix I made for her. I’ve introduced him to my friends, to my daughter. Of the approximately 400 artists represented in my music collection, he’s the only one that has ever inspired such devotion for so long. Barrett lived an outsized life that managed to both burn out and fade away.

Legendary.