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Taken from Something Else! (May 17, 2021)
'Still Wish You Were Here: A Tribute to Pink Floyd' (2021)
by Bill Golembeski
Still Wish You Were Here cover |
Still Wish You Were Here: A Tribute to Pink Floyd adds Crayola-colored emotion into the distant spaces that were obvious in the original conceptual construct of a classic album.
Case in point: The opening of "Shine on You Crazy Diamond", in contrast to the slow pulse of original, dances with Mel Collins' flute work that recalls the beauty on King Crimson's "Lady of the Dancing Water" or "Formentera Lady". He also adds additional warmth with his saxophone grace and ups the jazz buzz of the Pink Floyd original. Two minutes on, the distinctive David Gilmour guitar enters - here provided by Steve Hackett(!) - while that flute continues to haunt this song. Geoff Tate provides the vocals; Billy Sheehan is on bass; Geoff Downes hovers and pulsates with keyboards, and Ian Paice (of Deep Purple fame) is in the engine room. Let's just say this is 13 minutes of sonic-prog ecstasy that certainly deserves the title of really great "Jugband Blues" because, as "crazy diamond" Syd Barrett once sang: "It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here".
"Welcome to the Machine" continues to up the dramatic heartbeat, with the talents of newly minted Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Todd Rundgren, Rick Wakeman, and Tony Levin. Look, I love the original Wish You Were Here album, and have often cited it as my favorite by Pink Floyd, but these guys shift to a sudden prog rock Land of Oz colorization. Perhaps, despite all these superstars, after all these years, the isolation of these songs has finally found some sort of reconciliation.
Now, "and I mean this most sincerely", how does any band follow the bread-crumb trail of multi-platinum supernova success of Dark Side of the Moon? But, you know, I recently found a Jethro Tull Adult Activity Book by Kelly Grant for sale on line. Indeed! Jethro Tull has always been about "adult activity" what with "Cross-eyed Mary" and the "fly button, feel" of "Baker Street Muse", and of course (though I blush to mention this) 14-year-old Julia Fealey, Gerald "Little Milton" Bostock's "chum with who he writes poems".
Well, Pink Floyd penciled in a rough Wish You Were Here sketch of isolation, madness, deceit, and cynicism - all gift wrapped with a Roy Harper guest vocal and a blue wrapper that camouflaged the actual cover as it rested in the record store new-releases rack. Heck, even the guitar into to the title tune was phoned in like a postcard from some distant thought. And Still Wish You Were Here covers that original classic sketch with prismatic Hipgnosis album-cover light.
Just so you know, in his brilliant book A New Day Yesterday, Mike Barnes writes about Wish You Were Here, "it's a more open record than the dark inner landscapes of Dark Side of the Moon. But in the mixed bag of reviews it prompted, many pointed out the fact that excitement levels were low". And, of the final recapitulation of the epic "Shine on You Crazy Diamond", he adds: "All sense of dynamics had been bled out of the group by their obsessive tidiness". Ouch!
It's just an idea, but I really love the album because it somehow deflated the cosmic big bang of Dark Side into a tough kernel of latent rock 'n' roll frustration that perhaps is always looking (with way too much money on the line!) for a safety pin or two to jab into the "machine" - a "machine" that will always tell "you what to dream". Ouch (because of that safety pin!) again!
But, of course, there's the sublime "Have a Cigar". Yeah, I'll always love Roy Harper's anything. And his guest vocal certainly fits with the absentee theme of the record. But James La Brie, Steve Stevens, Patrick Moraz, Rat Scabies, and bass guitar guru Jah Wobble push the tune into a rather nice "interstellar overdrive".
You know, this whole tribute album is laced with the irony of Pink Floyd's The Wall fake band of Andy Bown, Snowy White, Andy Roberts, Willie Wilson, and Peter Woods who played pretend personas to prove the whole symbolic rock 'n' roll disconnect between reality and audience ignorance. Perhaps this particular record was made for someone else to play. But, thankfully, all that irony and artistic fol-de-rol aside, Still Wish You Were Here: A Tribute to Pink Floyd stands on its own musical (and quite melodic!) importance.
Sometimes, it's important to simply connect a few dots, (to see, perhaps, exactly whom Thick as a Brick's "Fluffy the duck talking to this week"; then chalk it all up to weird circumstance, sing "it's high time Cymbaline", and then leave it at that! And, by the way, those Jethro Tull coloring books bring hope for old prog guys, who in our confined senility may well get to spend our time putting color to Ian Anderson's Minstrel in the Gallery bejeweled cod piece - in certain preference to, say, listening to the Accordion Lady while learning the art of crocheting pot holders at the local senior center.
That said, the title tune, "Wish You Were Here", still in keeping with the long-distance ethos, gets phoned in - but what a party line it is, with Carmine Appice on drums, Joe Satriani on sinewy guitar, Rik Emmet on vocals, David Ellefson on bass, and (holy cow!) Tangerine Dreamer Edgar Froese on keyboards and electronics! Again, this glance at the classic tune (with its profound lyric!) ups the colorful drama. And, yeah, Satriani's guitar work, once again, plugs into that "interstellar overdrive".
And then it's Bootsy Collins' funky bass that drives the reprised "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and proves Einstein's theory that heavy gravity (with the aid of Ian Paice's percussion!) can indeed bend spacetime. Not only that, but Rod Argent's keyboards and Steve Hillage's "octave doctoring" guitar manage to warp the original into a courtly space dance ritual. Oh, "by the way", Syd Barrett is the much needed response to the question, "which one's pink?"
Sometimes, these tribute albums don't work and end up as disparate songs sung by solo performers. Perhaps, Pink Floyd's original is something like that, yet it valiantly (with great sonic purpose!) grasps at Roger Waters' Atom Heart Mother lyric: "If I were a good man, I'd understand the spaces between friends".
And, where the original LP suffers fame brilliantly, Still Wish You Were Here colors in those sketched spaces with vibrant musical hues of "Arnold Lane" and his love for "clothes" on a "moonshine washing line". Ultimately, this tribute, like Floyd's own thank you, just thinks of that "crazy diamond" Syd, who once upon a time long ago simply sang: "It's awfully considerate of you to think of me, here". And then he added, "And the sea isn't green and I love the queen, and what exactly is the dream? And what exactly is a joke?"
Still Wish You Were Here: A Tribute to Pink Floyd loves that dream, and it laughs at that joke. So, indeed, "set the controls for the heart of the sun" - because this is a lovely listen.
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