{"id":38,"date":"2009-08-31T05:07:19","date_gmt":"2009-08-31T10:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=38"},"modified":"2009-08-31T05:07:19","modified_gmt":"2009-08-31T10:07:19","slug":"interview-the-machine-pink-floyd-tribute-band","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2009\/08\/31\/interview-the-machine-pink-floyd-tribute-band\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: The Machine (Pink Floyd Tribute Band)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>The Machine<\/strong> are a four-piece band based in New York and dedicated to bringing the music of <strong>Pink Floyd<\/strong> to concert audiences. Since the last Pink Floyd concert (not counting the brief Live 8 reunion gig) was in October 1994, bands like The Machine are one of only a precious few ways to get a fix for a live Floyd jones. And the group &#8212; founded in 1988 by guitarist\/vocalist Joe Pascarell and drummer Todd Cohen &#8212; are very, very good at what they do. The group performs dozens of shows annually across the USA and Europe. <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.musoscribe.com\/images\/machine_live.jpg\" alt=\"The Machine live onstage\" align=\"right\" height=\"233\" hspace=\"10\" vspace=\"10\" width=\"350\" \/> One afternoon in 2009 I sat down with the group (Pascarell and Cohen plus bassist Ryan Ball and keyboardist Scott Chasolen) right before the sound check for that evening&#8217;s concert. Joe Pascarell explained how the band got its start: &#8220;When we started, it wasn&#8217;t our intention to have a Pink Floyd tribute band. We just got frustrated with all the crappy bands playing crappy music. We said, &#8216;let&#8217;s just form a band that plays the music that we like. I don&#8217;t care who&#8217;s gonna come&#8230;whatever.&#8217; And we like Pink Floyd! So that was a lot of what we did. And you&#8217;ve got to remember, this was twenty years ago; not like now when there&#8217;s a tribute band for every band in the world. It was a unique thing.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And,&#8221; Pascarell continued, &#8220;people would say, &#8216;Wow; you never hear a band play that music. Nobody else does that.&#8217; So we learned some more. And some more. Eventually our set was like half Pink Floyd and half other stuff&#8230;and then this guy heard about us, and he said, &#8216;Learn more Floyd, and I&#8217;ll try and get you gigs as a Pink Floyd band.&#8217; So that&#8217;s how it started; it wasn&#8217;t a conscious decision from the outset to do it. It grew out of the fact that we absolutely love this music.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I asked the group if their initial Pink Floyd pieces were the more mainstream material, or if they launched their project by performing live versions of &#8220;Alan&#8217;s Psychedelic Breakfast.&#8221; Pascarell punted. &#8220;Nobody&#8217;s ever asked us that. I have to think about it for a moment.&#8221; So Todd Cohen fielded the question. &#8220;The more mainstream songs. I don&#8217;t think we started doing the weird stuff until we were in a few years.&#8221; That jogged Pascarell&#8217;s memory: &#8220;Yeah. The catalog is so large, I think it was natural to start with the more well-known songs.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.musoscribe.com\/features\/the_machine.shtml#jump\" title=\"Bill Kopp interviews The Machine (Pink Floyd tribute band)\">Lots more. Click here to read the rest&#8230; <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Machine are a four-piece band based in New York and dedicated to bringing the music of Pink Floyd to concert audiences. Since the last Pink Floyd concert (not counting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","cat-41-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}