{"id":18143,"date":"2020-02-18T05:30:09","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T10:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=18143"},"modified":"2020-02-19T07:43:46","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T12:43:46","slug":"no-good-trying-syd-barretts-the-madcap-laughs-at-50-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2020\/02\/18\/no-good-trying-syd-barretts-the-madcap-laughs-at-50-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"No Good Trying: Syd Barrett’s ‘The Madcap Laughs’ at 50 (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"excerpted from my book, Reinventing Pink Floyd<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

In early 1968, mere months after Syd Barrett left (or was dismissed from) Pink Floyd, his management team of Peter Jenner and Andrew King encouraged him to begin work on a solo album. Upon Barrett’s exit from Pink Floyd, Jenner and King had cast their lot with Barrett, believing that the prime architect of Pink Floyd \u2013 and its primary songwriter \u2013 had the better potential for ongoing creative and commercial success. In a 1996 interview, Rick Wright recalled that the band’s managers \u201cthought Syd and I were the musical brains of the group, and that we should form a breakaway band, to try and hold Syd together.\u201d Barrett’s managers thought that his unschooled approach would combine effectively with Wright’s more traditional musical foundation. \u201cI doubt if Syd could read music,\u201d Jenner says. He had observed Wright’s strengths within the context of Pink Floyd. \u201cRick could read music; he knew what chords were. He was always the one who set the harmonies and things in the studio,\u201d Jenner recalls. \u201cIf we said, ‘let\u2019s have some backing vocals,’ he would be the one who would get the notes together for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

That January, Wright and Barrett were sharing a flat in southwest London. \u201cBelieve me,\u201d Wright told interviewer Mark Blake, \u201cI would have left with him like a shot if I had thought Syd could do it.\u201d But by most accounts, Barrett could not.<\/p>\n

Jenner had seen potential in the few songs Syd had written near the end of his time with Pink Floyd, though he was fully aware that the material was not of an especially commercial nature. \u201cAs his songwriting became more interesting, it also became more sort of weird and psychotic,\u201d Jenner says. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t what the record company wanted.\u201d An attempt was made to get Syd \u2013 now a solo artist \u2013 into the studio. But early recording sessions with Jenner producing yielded little suitable for release; the producer would later admit that he had underestimated the difficulty of working with Barrett in his current state. Today, Jenner says that working with Syd reminded him of the electric trolleys he encountered as a child in postwar London.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019d stand there in the fog and you couldn\u2019t see anything,\u201d Jenner says. \u201cTrolley buses were silent; they were electric, so this light would come toward you out of the fog, and then it would disappear away again into the fog. And I always thought that that\u2019s what had happened to Syd in the studio. Something would emerge from what he was doing, and we’d say, ‘Oh, that\u2019s good! Can we get more of that, please? Can you do that again?’ And then he would go back into the fog. And then the next time he came out of the fog, it was something different.\u201d Shortly after those abortive May 1968 sessions, Barrett returned to Cambridge and went under psychiatric care.<\/p>\n

By the end of the year, Syd seemed well enough to return to work on recording his debut album. The project was handed off to Malcolm Jones, the head of Harvest Records, EMI’s progressive subsidiary label. Sessions with Jones producing took place in April 1969, focusing on both new recordings and overdubs and edits to the 1968 tapes. Barrett enlisted the help of friend Willie Wilson from Jokers Wild, David Gilmour’s old band.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew Syd from when I lived in Cambridge,\u201d Wilson recalls, noting that Barrett sometimes sat in with Jokers Wild. Once David Gilmour joined Pink Floyd, he, Wilson and Syd all lived in close proximity to one another. \u201cSyd just said to me one day, ‘I’m going into Abbey Road in a few days’ time; will you come and play drums on a couple of tracks?’\u201d<\/p>\n

The handful of recordings in which Wilson took part would initially feature only him and Barrett at EMI’s Abbey Road. \u201cIt was a huge, cavernous studio. I had my drums, and Syd had his Telecaster.\u201d Wilson’s friend Jerry Shirley \u2013 drummer for Humble Pie \u2013 was at Abbey Road as well. \u201cI was a chauffeur,\u201d Shirley says with a laugh. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t rely on Syd to get himself there. They needed somebody reliable to make sure Syd got to Abbey Road. I had a car, and Willie had a license.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter we recorded the tracks, it was then decided that bass was needed,\u201d Wilson says, \u201cSo Jerry got the job.\u201d \u201cThey needed a bass player and there wasn\u2019t one,\u201d Shirley recalls. \u201cBut there was a bass. So I picked it up and played it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut because of Syd\u2019s erratic chord changes \u2013 and Jerry not being an actual bass player \u2013 he found it really hard,\u201d Wilson says. He describes Shirley’s bass on those tracks as \u201ca bit of hit and miss as far as the particular note he should be hitting.\u201d Shirley recalls adding \u201cpercussion bits and pieces\u201d for several tracks on The Madcap Laughs<\/i> as well.<\/p>\n

Even though The Madcap Laughs<\/i> sessions represented the first time Wilson had been in a recording studio, Syd’s loose style of playing didn’t present a challenge for the drummer. \u201cNot having to follow a chord sequence, it didn\u2019t really make a lot of difference to me,\u201d he says. \u201cSyd was fine rhythmically.\u201d Comparing Barrett’s approach to meter with that of old blues men, Wilson says, \u201cif it sounds right in your head, then you do it that way.\u201d Shirley concurs. \u201cThat was Syd all over. He was obviously listening to a lot of blues when he was younger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barrett didn’t offer much in the way of direction for Wilson, leaving him free to sort out his own drum parts on the Jones-produced sessions. \u201cI don\u2019t seem to remember too much of anybody saying, ‘This is what you should do,’ or, ‘That\u2019s what you should do.’ So I just played as I played at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later sessions involved overdubs to Barrett solo recordings; those featured three members of Soft Machine: bassist Hugh Hopper, keyboardist Mike Ratledge and drummer Robert Wyatt. These sessions, too, were fraught, as Barrett’s idiosyncratic approach to songwriting \u2013 coupled with his mental instability \u2013 made communication and progress difficult. Though they would yield recordings for use on the final album, in general those sessions with Malcolm Jones producing didn’t go well, and by the end of May 1969, Jones had given up. Wilson says that Jones \u201cfound it a bit hard going; he couldn’t quite keep up with Syd, the way that Syd was. So Dave and Roger took over production on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a> \u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

excerpted from my book, Reinventing Pink Floyd In early 1968, mere months after Syd Barrett left (or was dismissed from) Pink Floyd, his management team of Peter Jenner and Andrew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18144,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,57],"tags":[4094,4093,3176,2108],"class_list":["post-18143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book","category-psych","tag-floyd","tag-pink","tag-reinventing-pink-floyd","tag-syd-barrett","cat-10-id","cat-57-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18143"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18385,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18143\/revisions\/18385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}