{"id":19630,"date":"2020-10-12T05:30:24","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T09:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=19630"},"modified":"2020-09-24T15:55:24","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T19:55:24","slug":"pink-floyds-atom-heart-mother-at-50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2020\/10\/12\/pink-floyds-atom-heart-mother-at-50\/","title":{"rendered":"Pink Floyd’s ‘Atom Heart Mother’ at 50"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week marks the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the release of Atom Heart Mother<\/i>, the fifth album from Pink Floyd. In this edited excerpt from my book, Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to The Dark Side of the Moon<\/i><\/a>, I discuss the making of the album\u2019s epic title track with Pink Floyd’s collaborator, Ron Geesin. \u2013 bk<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"Feeling that they had hit a creative wall with a lengthy piece they had been playing live, Pink Floyd\u2019s other band members were receptive to a suggestion from Roger Waters that they call upon Ron Geesin for help. The composer’s avant-garde credentials were next to none; perhaps he could give \u201cThe Amazing Pudding\u201d \u2013 or whatever the band’s latest epic would eventually be called \u2013 what was needed to bring it into shape for release.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we did Atom Heart Mother<\/i>, they were at their lowest point of creativity,\u201d says Geesin. Acknowledging how busy the members of Pink Floyd had been with outside projects, he says, \u201cthey were pretty exhausted, and they didn’t really know where to go. It just happened that I was on the spot around that time.\u201d<\/p>\n

In some ways, Geesin was an odd choice. For one, Pink Floyd had never worked with an outside composer, nor used session musicians (save Norman Smith’s drumming on A Saucerful of Secrets<\/i>‘ \u201cRemember a Day\u201d). And by 1970, the group had largely taken control of its studio work: on release of Atom Heart Mother<\/i> in October, Smith would be listed as \u201cexecutive producer.\u201d More significantly, perhaps, was the fact that Ron Geesin wasn’t even a fan of the band’s work. \u201cI wasn’t interested much in their music,\u201d he says. \u201cI’m still not. It doesn’t do anything for me.\u201d Speaking about progressive rock \u2013 a term often applied to Pink Floyd’s music \u2013 Geesin sniffs, \u201cit doesn’t matter how progressive it thinks<\/i> it is; it’s not actually very progressive at all.\u201d Even though Geesin had shared billing with Pink Floyd as far back as 1967, he contrasts his music with the sounds they made. \u201cI would just do my thing, which is a sort of an absurdist eruption,\u201d he says, describing it as \u201ca nice contrast to what was going to come on next.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, owing to his friendship with Roger Waters and the positive experience of collaborating on the soundtrack for The Body<\/i>, Geesin agreed to help. In early April 1970, the band provided Geesin with work-tapes of the early version of \u201cAtom Heart Mother\u201d and then got on a plane to New York City, where they would begin a North American tour that would run through late May.<\/p>\n

From Geesin’s perspective, the material he had been given was rather basic and lacking in melody. He characterizes Pink Floyd’s musical approach this way: \u201cIf it wasn’t a defined song, then they would be making what was equivalent of a background wash to which the public supplied its ethereal melody in its own [collective] head.\u201d But for \u201cAtom Heart Mother,\u201d it was \u2013 among other things \u2013 Geesin’s job to create an actual melody. \u201cWith ‘Atom Heart Mother,’ I supplied the melody to their background, literally,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

When it comes to popular music \u2013 be it rock, country or many other styles \u2013 the concept of repetition is a feature, not a bug. But for the avant-garde-minded Geesin, the repetitive nature of the Pink Floyd track he was working on was a bridge too far. Upon hearing the main theme reprising for what to him seemed like the umpteenth time, he recalls exclaiming, \u201cOh God, not again!\u201d So he decided to change it. \u201cThe last two choruses \u2013 if you want to call the sequence a chorus, which is the same chord sequence as the first theme \u2013 I just changed it to a whole completely new melody,\u201d Geesin says. \u201cWhich really works: you’ve got the repetition underneath but you’ve got the top doing [something] different.\u201d<\/p>\n

With \u201cAtom Heart Mother,\u201d Geesin sought to transform Pink Floyd’s piece \u2013 noted on early session documents as \u201cUntitled Epic\u201d \u2013 into something a bit more musically weighty and serious. One way in which he pursued that goal was to compose parts for a brass ensemble and choir. While choir-like vocals had cropped up toward the end of \u201cA Saucerful of Secrets,\u201d Syd Barrett had brought in a Salvation Army band for his final Pink Floyd session, and Rick Wright had performed a trombone solo on \u201cBiding My Time,\u201d Geesin’s plans would represent exploration of new territory for the band.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we got in the studio, they had no bloody clue what was going to happen with those brass players,\u201d Geesin says. The members of Pink Floyd had not yet heard a note of Geesin’s score, he says, \u201cbecause I couldn’t play those 10 brass parts on the piano to them.\u201d But once the ensemble did record Geesin’s written parts on top of a basic track cut by Waters and Mason, everyone seemed satisfied. \u201cThey’d run the tape with my new stuff, and it seemed to sound right,\u201d Geesin says.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The vocal choir that appears toward the middle of \u201cAtom Heart Mother\u201d splits its time between somewhat conventional \u2013 if wordless \u2013 vocalizing and some truly weird recitations (\u201cSuck! Suck!\u201d in the section subtitled \u201cFunky Dung\u201d) that are unlike anything in the Pink Floyd catalog before or since.<\/p>\n

The part of \u201cAtom Heart Mother\u201d known as \u201cMind Your Throats Please\u201d is closer in spirit to Pink Floyd’s own outr\u00e9 musical excursions such as \u201cA Saucerful of Secrets,\u201d but Geesin’s contributions are faded in and out of the mix as well on the final version. And in keeping with the band’s penchant for including found sounds into its works, toward the final moments of \u201cAtom Heart Mother,\u201d two snippets of studio chatter (\u201cHere is a loud announcement!\u201d and \u201cSilence in the studio!\u201d) are woven into the sonic mix.<\/p>\n

Geesin would experience great frustration during the sessions for \u201cAtom Heart Mother.\u201d Owing to EMI’s prohibition on tape splicing, the basic track laid down earlier by Waters on bass and Mason on drums had to be performed as a single performance rather than a spliced-together collection of shorter tracks. In practice that meant that the tempo wavered throughout; that, in turn made it quite difficult for classically-trained brass and choral musicians to follow along when overdubbing their parts. \u201cThe tempo goes up and down,\u201d Nick Mason told MOJO<\/i> in 1994. \u201cWe just staggered through it.\u201d Furthermore, once the orchestral parts were added, it was realized that the entire score was off from Pink Floyd’s basic track by one beat; there was no way to correct the error.<\/p>\n

Despite misgivings \u2013 regarding how the piece was completed, what he sees as an unfair diminution of his credit for the work, and frustration with how it was performed \u2013 Ron Geesin remains quite proud of his work on the first side of Atom Heart Mother. <\/i>He views it as a moderately successful combination of Pink Floyd’s style with something more adventurous. \u201cIf you take two seemingly disparate styles and put them together, sometimes they’ll make something greater than the original two,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I think that’s what happened with Atom Heart Mother<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Atom Heart Mother, the fifth album from Pink Floyd. In this edited excerpt from my book, Reinventing Pink Floyd: From […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19631,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,62,65],"tags":[4314,1705,3176,4315],"class_list":["post-19630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psych","category-rawk","category-review","tag-atom-heart-mother","tag-pink-floyd","tag-reinventing-pink-floyd","tag-ron-geesin","cat-57-id","cat-62-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19630","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=19630"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19634,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19630\/revisions\/19634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}