Rating My CD's: Remember When You Were Young

47. Pink Floyd -- Wish You Were Here

So, So you think you can tell

Heaven from Hell

Blue Skies from pain

Can you tell a green field

From a cold steel rail

A smile from a veil

Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade

Your heroes for ghosts?

Hot ashes for trees?

Hot air for a cool breeze?

Cold comfort for change?

And did you exchange

A walk-on part in the war

For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish

How I wish you were here

We're just two lost souls swimmin'in a fishbowl

Year after year

Running over the same old ground

What have we found?

The same old fears

Wish you were here

I was tempted to just grade it and leave it at that. Nothing I put here will be half as good as those simple, raw lyrics, laid over a four-note blues riff so plain that I could play it. I love this song so much I feel idiotic even saying anything after it. It's an specific agonizing remembrance by Roger Waters of Syd Barret; it's a common human yearning for absent friends. This, and not "Comfortably Numb", that entre-act of the parade of horrors that is The Wall, is the most personal thing Pink Floyd ever did.

The rest of the album is but padding to this melancholy heart. "Welcome to the Machine" and "Have a Cigar" use Dr. Who synth as a queasy background to complete self-disgust, as a successful rock band ("Machine") and thus, part of the music industry ("Cigar").  No doubt some of that is guilt, but it's tempting to push that too far: when Barret died in 2006, none of his old bandmates showed up at his funeral.

And then there's the "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" bookends, likewise aimed directly at Barret. They seem to be suggesting some kind of hope or grace that the old piper will rub off his rough edges and return to stardom. But did they really want that to happen? Would they have let him back in the band if he had?

I think this lyric from the second "Shine On" will explain:

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

Shine on you crazy Diamond

And we'll bask in the shadow of yesterday's triumph

and sail on the steel breeze

Come on, you boy-child, you winner and loser,

come on you miner for truth and delusion and shine!

Mental illness never just affects the sufferer. To knowing someone with mental illness is to know how close you are to that affliction: if it could strike one, it could strike anyone. Given how much attention Pink Floyd devoted to Barret over the years, perhaps you can say that he never really left the band. He just went on ahead of them.



Grade: LL