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Pink Floyd: The Early Years 1965–1972

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.3.2.0353

2380-7687

Jonathan McBurnie,

Cinema and Media Studies

To commit to reviewing Pink Floyd’s boxed set The Early Years 1965–1972 (2016) requires a special type of fetishization, both in terms of the music of the band and the box-set format itself. Box sets have been a staple of rock ‘n’ roll completists for some time, boosted in the 1980s by the convenient size and extended play length of the compact disc. Now, in a world where music is primarily consumed via download and streaming services, the box set as a format finds itself on a dangerous but delicious axis in time. Will its more physically and sonically satisfying qualities reinvigorate such releases or collapse in on itself as an irrelevant extension of outmoded physical releases? This conundrum is a convenient parallel to Pink Floyd and its music.In terms of the box set as a format, the debate of its continuing relevance is an interesting one. A threshold seems to have been crossed in the last several years; Neil Young’s ambitious (and massive) 2009 set, Archives Volume 1 (1963–72), was a ten-disc deep dive into the Canadian musician’s back catalogue. Housed within an oversized box, the set is accompanied by a 236-page book, and a slot for storing future Archive series releases. The second volume has been released, sans box, online, alongside the rest of Young’s prolific output, for high-resolution streaming. As of this writing, a physical release is yet to appear. It appears that the box set, as a form, has come to an impasse. In 2011, R.E.M. released two of their own box sets, sans boxes, via iTunes. With acts like Young and R.E.M. exploring digital alternatives for the box-set format, it was convenient to interpret this as the death knell of nonvinyl physical releases. However, one cannot deny nostalgia; R.E.M. has announced another box set, this time collecting all of their BBC Sessions. Clearly, the debate is not settled.Certainly, Pink Floyd would be at the top of many people’s lists of self-indulgent rock ‘n’ roll dinosaurs, and hearing about such a massive (and expensive) box set would only support that notion, but The Early Years succeeds in sidestepping this quite neatly, primarily by largely avoiding the “rock god” reputation by revisiting the years that the band grew from and formed its cult-hero status. The irony is that this release could be reasonably argued as Pink Floyd’s strongest and most meaningful since the late seventies, and without a skerrick of music from the era that made them the zeitgeist-devouring giants of Dad Rock, as we now know them. If you had asked a year ago whether an eleven CD or nine DVD set of Pink Floyd’s early psychedelic phase would be of any interest, the answer would have been a resounding no. Considering how rare any real movement by Pink Floyd has been the last several decades (one barely passable studio album since 1994’s Division Bell, which was itself made up of abandoned Division Bell demos and outtakes), seemingly little legacy work has been done by the band or their management compared to similarly long-in-the-tooth legacy acts.The acid-and-tea-in-the-English-countryside weirdness of early Floyd has never had the wider commercial appeal of its later self, which will presumably be subsequently investigated at length in another box set, or perhaps not. To the masses of casual Pink Floyd listeners (and we can make the assumption from album sales from the seventies and eighties that there are many of these) The Early Years is a deep dive into precisely the period that predates their involvement. As difficult as it is to imagine, by stripping back the period-specific production, Pink Floyd—or The Pink Floyd, if we are being technical—has gone a long way to boost the appeal of these tunes, highlighting their better qualities.The set moves in a rough chronology and changes rapidly. Considering that the set covers a mere seven-year period, the output and its evolution is noteworthy, a testament to the band’s thirst for just the right version of a song. Opening, of course, in the Syd Barrett and Richard Wright–led era, The Early Years takes a number of recordings to find steady footing, much like the band itself. This is largely due to the rapidly changing nature of Pink Floyd in its infancy, moving quickly from very British jug band and blues-influenced fare to Barrett’s more idiosyncratic psychedelia. There is something delightfully naïve about much of the early, Barrett- and/or Wright-written material included here, a kind of “Englishness” that didn’t quite survive the death Led Zeppelin.The next phase kicks into high gear, with multiple versions of songs that really demonstrate their evolution, some versions being more successful of others, but all the while displaying a hunger for experimentation, the fruits of labor found in the search rather than the destination. Woozy jam sessions become more commonplace and often longer but also more proficient and inventive. The BBC Session recordings included are worth the price of admission in themselves, as they chart the progress of a group of students trying to accommodate disparate influences, becoming more self-assured and sonically muscular as unnecessary elements are discarded. As always, these sessions were recorded at an incredibly high quality, and demonstrate a band at ease with themselves and their surroundings (not always a given with Pink Floyd). John Peel’s droll introductions are notably left in, a comforting reminder of the BBC stalwart and tastemaker’s long-distance stewardship of talent.My only real quibbles with the set grow from its completist tendencies. Rather than having audio-only versions of the DVD content, the sets include Blu-ray discs as well. Knowing that Blu-ray players are perfectly capable of playing DVDs, surely audio would have been a more sensible choice. This may seem like an arbitrary criticism of the choice of release format, but format is one of the chief lenses through which to view this release, and a major drawcard for fans willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for more Pink Floyd. The DVD inclusions are, however, exhaustive and often insightful. For the die-hard Pink Floyd listener, various clips really do appear to be a trip into a here-to-unknown past. Being aware of the band’s often fractious middle and later periods, it is almost jarring to see Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason goofing around between takes, looking more like art school malingerers than soon-to-be rock ‘n’ roll royalty.At nine DVD’s, the set covers an incredible amount of terrain. Documentaries from the era, live clips, interviews, and concert films abound, much of it still looking terrific, shot on film. Videotape and digital footage have their own distinctive aesthetics, of course, but none of it would seem quite right in this context; just take a look at how terribly Pink Floyd’s 1995 concert video for Pulse has dated. Perhaps the most compelling content is that which demonstrates how the band itself fits into the era. Like Pink Floyd’s music, casual fans are much more familiar with the era subsequent to these early years, where the band has well and truly established themselves, and all of the vision that comes with it. The Wall (1979), a double album (their second-best selling) and a subsequent film, is perhaps the unassailable visual reference for the band. Three decades on and it is still hard to imagine the band without the accompaniment of Gerald Scarfe animation, but in The Early Years we have various festival films, television appearances, and documentaries that really put Pink Floyd in a context previously unseen, unless you were lucky enough to have been there at the time. Returning to whether a band of Pink Floyd’s overwrought magnitude can survive the digital age, the presentation of such obscure (and often visually and sonically delightful) morsels is certainly an argument in the affirmative.Of course, it is the details that will tantalize the hardcore Pink Floyd obsessive, and let’s be honest, it is likely that most of those willing to shell out for this box set would describe themselves in this way. Witness Frank Zappa’s entertainingly phoned-in jam session with Floyd. Clearly bored stiff with the experience, Zappa sarcastically minces through an atonal chore of a solo more reminiscent of Captain Beefheart than Pink Floyd. Witness David Gilmour using surprisingly good French on a television interview. Witness the disheveled, sobered-up hippies waking up after the Belgium concert, surrounded by trash, sheepishly grinning at the rolling camera.Included with the set is a range of facsimiles of curios from the era, which serve to further illustrate the cultural space that the band occupied at the time. The cultural phenomena Pink Floyd became after 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon recalibrated the group, in terms of enduring popularity, alongside acts like Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, catapulting them into a trajectory of increasing momentum that didn’t diminish for over a decade. These period-specific inclusions such as flyers, letters, tickets, and posters, are aesthetically distinct from those of Pink Floyd’s subsequent years, which had a much more consistent aesthetic. For a second- (or third-) generation Pink Floyd fan, such visions of the band are almost unthinkable. For so long they just were. Even the box set’s packaging is understated, referencing the light shows and psychedelics that the band was known for in its formative years. Stripped of inflatable flying pigs and deconstructed concert sets, The Early Years is a timely (and refreshing) reminder of what Pink Floyd was. If every box set released was of this quality and scope, any argument over merit would be rendered moot. After all, we all like dinosaurs for a reason.Jonathan McBurnie is an artist, writer, and gallery director based in Townsville, North Queensland.