This is for all you haters who tried to deny that Pink Floyd is indisputably one of the four greatest rock bands of all time:
No one can touch them.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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It’s like you’re trolling AG.
right?
And the other three are… Stones, Zep, the Who?
By coincidence, I’m going to see Townshend and Daltrey this Friday. Should be fun.
Older I get, the more I Enjoy Pink Floyd. Agree with the Who, and go for U2 and the BOSS( the Older, the better).
I think Pink Floyd has “aged” well. The Zep used to be up there, but the older I get, the less “special” it seems.
Did I mention I am an old fart?
No Beatles, guys?
For me, it’s the Beatles, Led Zep, Pink Floyd, and Wilco.
The Beatles are musical gods. The most sublime and miraculous of all bands. But they are overrated as performers.
The other bands I mentioned are complete in both realms.
One of my biggest genius moments (or so I thought) as a musically dumb bass player was to put my Fender J through a Boss DD3 echo pedal. I thought I was so smart & inventive until my guitarist (a huge Gilmour fan) played me “One of These Days,” which I’d never heard up til then (circa 13-14 years ago).
I was totally depressed about the song I wrote. I mean, I thought I was the genius! Then we met a drummer who was jazz-trained but loved punk and ska, and took the digital-echo song as a challenge–like “You won’t break me with this metronome crap.”
We recorded it for that band’s first demo and when we played it live for drunk college kids it would just slay.
In my case, at least, echo hid all kinds of ineptitudes–but I’m just a bassist, so WTF do I know?
Well, yes, Pink does hold a pretty unique position among popular rock bands, don’t they? Many of their songs are in a genre unique to the band itself.
Been pretty interesting to hear Roger Waters mature in the last year or two and say, publicly, that he was too controlling back in the day and that he made a lot of mistakes in dealing with the other band members.
No. No. No. NO!
You did not just post a Live at Pompeii video that isn’t Echoes.
This is the song that inspired me to play guitar.
It also has the handy quality that if you listen to it on a road trip, you are suddenly halfway to the next state.
Funny. At first, I thought you were referring to the songs ability to teleport you across space and time into the future. But then I realized that we were probably referring to its 24 minute length.
Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have included the ‘suddenly’ in there.
the transition at minute eight is so bad ass that it’s like the baddest ass in the world.
Booman, I think you embedded the wrong video because this is a five minute drum solo.
heh. if you say so. try ejmw’s video of echoes and imagine being in Pompeii to hear Gilmour play for the ghosts of the ancients.
I will say the drummers hair is awesome.
and his mustache.
This song was originally recorded at the very height of five-minute drum solos, eg “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida.” The difference between this and that? It isn’t a solo. The drummer is constantly looking at the bass player and other band members for a reason. Every beat and cymbal are there for a reason.
Floyd builds an atmosphere; it’s what their songs do. A lot of my first-wave-punk colleagues hated them for the slow, interminable pacing at times, but it was always to a purpose, which is more than a lot of other bands, then and now, can claim.
As a previous commenter said, they’re a genre unto themselves. That, to me, is the mark of a truly great band. It’s why my appreciation of Zep (despite their radio overplay) has deepened over the years – plenty of bands have imitated different types of things they did, but nobody else has covered so much terrain so well. Same, in a very different way, with the Beatles.
The Stones I’m more ambivalent about – they had a decade of pure greatness, like the other three bands, but I guess they’re a little more tarnished for me by having continued to put out more mediocre work for the 40 years since then. Same for The Who. Maybe the others would have done the same if they’d stayed intact. A shame we’ll never know.
I saw Led Zeppelin play in Pittsburgh when I was fifteen. I went with my friend and her older brother. My mom had no idea who the band was, or that I would be engulfed in a visible cloud of pot smoke that was so thick that kids like me got high just being there.
It was an awesome show.
And all this time people have been telling me that second-hand smoke is a bad thing…
Floyd was a big part of my youth, to be sure. I was 17 when The Wall came out and it was far and away the album of choice in the spring and summer of ’80 for the group I hung around with / partied with.
One summer I had a nighttime (midnight – 3 am) show at our college radio station. If you wanted people to call in a lot you could feature obscure comedy or the Beatles, take your pick. But the most participation I got was when I played a 25 minute live version of Echoes from a bootleg I’d picked up – everyone wanted to hear the other side (which had some live stuff with Syd Barrett).
The name of my radio show was “There’s no way out of here” – I started with that song every time. Seems silly now, but what the hell.
Never saw the band live. Did see Gilmour at the SF Kabuki theater in 1984, and he did a lot of the Floyd songs. One of my buddies was a phenomenal guitarist and he told me that Gilmour’s work was the hardest to emulate of any rock musician at the time.
Alas, I sold the bootlegs with all my LPs when we moved in 2005. I find it hard to listen to all those songs that I heard 1000s of times in my youth – burned out on them. Still put on Time every now and again, though.
Somewhat different genre, but…
After Floyd there is other bands, but only one band that can do what Floyd does.
I listen to them as much as I have the last 40 years, but listen to much more classical now a days.
Floyd stacks up good in many ways against classical composers given the difference in genre.
Their music has stood the test of time better them most of their contemporaries, even their pre DSOTM cuts.