Wish You Were Here (1975)

Wish You Were Here (1975)

In the fall of 1974, Syd Barrett made what would be his last quiet attempt to create new music. The effort proved fruitless for the almost completely reclusive musician, and found the man whose troubled mind had given birth to Pink Floyd disappearing from the creative landscape he’d immeasurably (if unknowingly) influenced. The topic of discussion, debate, and even the occasional cruelly flippant criticism, Barrett’s post-Pink Floyd life would become the drawing board for all manner of speculation for fans and critics alike, with many wondering just where the breaking point had been and how detrimental its impact on his band mates had been even beyond the didactic narrative presented in their releases after his departure.

Just a few months after Barrett’s final creative impulse had faded into obscurity, his former band mates, now at the very apex of their own commercial and creative success, entered the studio to record their ninth and greatest album, Wish You Were Here. The emotional and physical toll of creating, promoting, and touring for their prior release The Dark Side Of The Moon would have no doubt created the obstacle of writer’s block for all four members. That void and absence of what had been a seemingly immediate creative impulse up to that point of the group would unconsciously shape the longing and mournful tone of Wish You Were Here.

Though its predecessor found the members of the band near-perfectly shaping their most advantageous musical and thematic ideas around the groundbreaking sound technology of the time, Wish You Were Here would become Pink Floyd’s most creatively uninhibited release due in equal measure to its compositional restraint and the agonizing honesty of its thematic narrative. The measure of the album’s timelessness is impossible to ascertain without giving equal consideration to the context of its creation within the spectrum of 1970s rock and roll as well as that of the band’s consistently deviating musical direction. Mired in the proverbial churn of a listening audience and music industry more inclined to gravitate to the easily digested pop rock fodder of the day, mainstream radio’s eventual overall abandonment of more experimentally inclined music would provide a kind of unconscious but no less forceful response from artists new and those already well established.

Wish You Were Here’s iconic artwork immediately betrays the emptiness and delusion of its subject matter from the mechanical handshake as well as that between the businessmen with one engulfed in the literal and metaphorical flames inextricably linked to the band’s being fully aware by then of the looming threat of creative and even more poignantly mental devastation. As intended as the album was in paying due credence to Barrett, Wish You Were Here works just as adamantly in the compositional and lyrical disenchantment of the remaining members of the band themselves. This is primarily evident on tracks such as “Have A Cigar” and “Welcome To The Machine,” both of which render a scene less focused on the retrospect of the album’s elegiac tone and more on what the band observed in themselves at that present time.

In the same structural pattern that would be repeated on Animals, Wish You Were Here is bookended by the group’s elegy to Syd Barrett, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” Almost half an hour in length and showcasing one of Wright’s most commandingly subdued performances, the song’s lyrics present a tribute to Barrett that threads its empathy through the awe-inspired perplexity of the band members at a man and, more accurately, a disease they could not hope to understand but one that had already mirrored itself in the social detachment brought on by their successes in his absence. Driving the song end-to-end is the absolute synth/keys mastery of Wright, whose impending removal from the band a few years later would provide the song with an unintentionally bitter irony.

At times equally endearing and painful, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” still maintains its eerily lingering presence, providing its obvious intention for Barrett with muted but no less gorgeously rendered austerity but also offering one of modern music’s first and most successfully realized songs rooted in the uneasy vulnerability of honest introspection concerning success and stardom’s toll on a band and the fragility of the creative mind as a result. Almost personifying its subject matter, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” features an occasional disruption of its otherwise dirge-like tempo, most notably with Dick Parry’s saxophone gradually shifting from the unified melodic pace of the band and into an almost improvisational descant separate from the other members.

Barrett’s sudden appearance in the studio during the recording of the song is as legendarily remembered as it is steeped in what now seems a natural occurrence of serendipity concerning Pink Floyd’s self-imposed inability to fully remove their former band mate from their creative consciousness. Almost completely unrecognizable in appearance and displaying the textbook idiosyncratic behaviors of a mental illness that likely remained tragically undiagnosed, Barrett wandered into the studio and was afforded the opportunity to watch a very different band from the one he’d helped start, create a song specifically focused on the detrimental void left in his absence.

A song just as likely to fit within the thematic framework of Animals, “Welcome to the Machine” is as coldly executed a song lyrically and musically as any that Pink Floyd would ever put to tape, with Gilmour forcing the very limits of his vocal range over the robotic syncopations and odd time signatures of the music. With its deliberately shrill mechanical pulses, “Welcome to the Machine” works in stark contrast to the pensive character of the album’s opener and provides a kind of topical prelude to the band’s darker material after Wish You Were Here.

“Have A Cigar” works as a near complementary piece to the prior album’s foray into dark humor laced around dejected sincerity with “Money.” Both songs feature the trademark cynicism of Waters, though the former found a rare guest vocal performance for the band by way of the indelibly influential English folk rock singer Roy Harper. As effectively sardonic as both tracks are in the overall structure of Wish You Were Here, “Have A Cigar” and “Welcome To The Machine” offer the album’s only deliberated pointed commentary outside the scope of Barrett.

Simplistic and direct, the title track to Wish You Were Here is interestingly enough one of Pink Floyd’s greatest songs if only for the fact that it spends the duration of its nearly six minutes bridging the seemingly impassable gap of the band’s current disillusionment of the time and the hopeful creative abandon of their beginnings. From Gilmour’s radio effect guitar intro to the song’s bare explication of the band’s palpable ache, “Wish You Were Here” is as much directed at the shadow of Syd Barrett as it is that of the band members themselves. Wish You Were Here unfolds across the span of its 48 minutes like the voice of its inspiration as echoed through the minds of the friends and band mates who could seemingly do anything but separate themselves from his influence.

The rarity of a perfect album does not afford itself simply to occasion, and much like Barrett himself the brilliance will justifiably be forever debated, but the humanity and fragility of grief poured into each song of Wish You Were Here will remain inarguably captivating and unrivaled. In the year since its release and in the relatively recent death of Barrett himself in 2006, the album has become one decidedly concerned with more than just the fragmented mind of its inspiration. For all its intimately achieved grandeur, it represents one of modern music’s most powerfully relevant introspective views of human fragility as well as the cruel indifference of grief. From that perspective, Wish You Were Here stands as Pink Floyd’s unintended masterpiece, as much an anguished and reluctant farewell to their friend in Barrett as it was to themselves as a band they no longer recognized.