Legends of the business. Ill-fitted to the psychedelic turn found on their debut, but legends nonetheless. Pink Floyd was bigger and better suited to other genres, the prog notions which would soon define their heady days at the top of the rock mountain are not found on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. There is a sense of fitting in with the likes of Frank Zappa and Trout Mask Replica, the nutty days of LSD and Tom Wolfe play their major influences on a period of freedom of the soul. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is concerned with its bass thumps and percussion, the rhythm of which backs a flourish of lighter vocal work from Syd Barrett. He would later retire from music, the reasons for which are not relevant to the tones felt through The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
What comes clear on a re-listen though, a step back into their early works, is the major change which came from Roger Waters picking up the reigns of frontman duties. Here are tones of planetary observances, a limp-wristed sense of floral wonders and a tripped-out change of pace gives the band this clear desire to connect with geophony. Fading in and out of whatever remains of your left ear after years of ringing, raving and rattling the eardrum with cotton buds gives Lucifer Sam a neat place in the headphones. Again those sly bass grooves rumble through like a cheap spy flick made for TV. Sharp works on Pow R. Toc. H brought about instrumental brilliance which soon became the core of Pink Floyd. It is their grand appeal and with the percussion and interjections, a shy addition at first which soon finds itself battling for supremacy over the consistent acoustics, a war of layering is presented.
Loose tones rip through this, a playful sense from Barrett is one which either warms immediately or remains rigid and confused by the psychedelic effects rattling around in his brain, distracting from the emergence of a sound which would soon boom bigger than the band expected. Choke on the bread as much as you like, the greasy spoons and crawling repetition of asking for a doctor on Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk has the energy of improvisation to it – so firm this was during the mid-1960s. Jam sessions put to tape and barely altered, making this sound more like a cacophony of whatever the band had been listening to that week than anything of monumental importance or urgency, even with Barrett striking veins of gold from time to time, Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk included.
Important the Barrett-led era of Pink Floyd may be, it is hard to level it as anything beyond rambling and disconnected lyrics which occasionally plucked something which can now be moulded into a contemporary range. Often leaning towards nonsensical, and it is easy to remember The Rascals hit the top of the charts doing the same. But Barratt was backed by exceptional instrumentals and sudden sparks of lively instrumentals. Twee little numbers left to bubble under their psychedelic twangs – a slice of early David Bowie before he shook off the lyrics of lacking substance and instead turned inward and sourced what he believed in, as was the case for later albums from Pink Floyd as they pivoted from murky fashion statements to confident prog musicians.
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