Remember When You Were Young….

I appreciate all kinds of good music. "Good "is defined as what I like, and what I don't like is stamped as "Bad".

My band is Pink Floyd. I liked the revival Gilmour lead 80s-90s stuff, certainly a good show, but the real Floyd ends with "The Wall" in 1979. The final cut..well….

I worked with a young musician in 2005 when the Geldolf live aid concerts were done, and he was even blown away by the one-off throw together concert the Floyds did with the more accessible songs like "Money" and "Wish you were Here". I laughed, and said yeah, I did not expect them to play "Careful with that Axe Eugene", in which Waters whispers then screams at the top of his lungs for the several minutes.

One's appreciation of art and music is entwined with one's emotions and state of mind at the time you read/listen. I re-read Tolstoy and loved every bit of it. I tried to re-read Dostoyevsky, and couldn't do it. Mr D could write, I just wasn't into it when I tried to re-read it.

Waters took over the band – you can hear the exact point – on Animals during "Dogs" when he takes over lead from Dave in the line "gotta admit…..". Now I know "Dogs" is 17 plus minutes long, but he kept the stick for the rest of the relay. I was very mad at Roger for a very, very long time. In 2005 I figured if Dave, Rick and Nick could forgive Roger, maybe I could too. In the winter of 2006, I re-considered it all from The First album on…and I was back!!

Now leave it to me to chose, as his favourite band, one where the founder went totally off, having fried his brain on LSD, and where the eventual new leader went almost as badly off into a bathos that was simply not listenable.

My dearly departed best friend of 25 years who left us in august 2007 attended the 1977 Montreal Olympic stadium concert where the band pretty much imploded as a live act, collapsing under their own weight of self-absurdity. She had a bootleg of that concert and the tender, loving anthem of "Echoes" was differently presented as, since it was at the end of the tour, Dave and Rick's voices were shot to hell and instead of a few mellow hippies singing about labyrinths and coral caves, it sounded like Johnny Rotten and Iggy Pop in a duet. It was also where Roger spat at the audience, something that Mr. Rotten did, and was a Rotten thing not a Roger thing. Of that friend, my tribute to her is, and shall always be, from "Shine on you crazy Diamond", Roger's tribute to Sid:

Pile on many more layers, and I'll be joining you there.

Next Week: How Jethro Tull helped me lose my religion.

Tom