Lunacy by John Kruth

Author:John Kruth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Backbeat
Published: 2022-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Originally referred to as “The Religious Section” or “The Mortality Sequence,” “The Great Gig in the Sky” was inspired by Rick Wright’s fear of dying while on tour, whether in a plane crash or “on the motorways of America and Europe,” as he explained.

Early bootleg recordings from Pink Floyd’s live shows reveal that “Great Gig” was once a very different piece of music from the track that closes side one of Dark Side of the Moon. First conceived as a dreamy organ fugue for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point but rejected by the finicky director, “The Mortality Sequence” provided a much-needed respite from Pink Floyd’s sonic onslaught during their live shows, while shining the spotlight on Wright’s ethereal organ playing for a few minutes.

Pink Floyd’s creative quest was always in a state of flux. Like jazz musicians, their mode of composing often relied on their ability to improvise together as a unit, although the Floyd’s method was more laborious and costly than that of artists like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, whose extraordinary musicianship allowed them to spontaneously compose onstage and in the studio.

“As a guitarist, it’s a constant question I face,” Robert Musso muses. “Am I going to improvise—do one or two takes and play free—or am I going to get compositional and create parts? Am I harmonically and rhythmically correct and serving the composition? I always try to do both.”

Pink Floyd often arrived at Abbey Road with little more than a foggy notion of what their next album might be. “Basically, we’re the laziest group ever,” Gilmour quipped, unabashedly unapologetic for wasting expensive studio time and burning through record company budgets.

Eventually, the Floyd’s crazy quilt of half-finished lyrics, riffs, and rhythms would take the shape of songs, as in the case of “Echoes,” which initially began as a few vague ideas first dubbed “Nothing,” then growing into “The Son of Nothing” and finally “The Return of the Son of Nothing,” before blossoming into the side-length track that became their most significant post-Barrett recording to date.

Similarly undefined was the role of their young engineer/producer Alan Parsons, who’d previously worked on Atom Heat Mother, the Beatles’ Let It Be and Abbey Road, and Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, McCartney. While he is credited on the album sleeve as “engineer,” Parsons helped expand that role by “making criticisms or suggestions that would normally be made by a producer,” as he later recalled.

“Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t (keep my big mouth shut),” Parsons admitted. One of his brainstorms of a lesser magnitude was to mix recorded fragments of the 1969 moon landing throughout the album—an idea that was quickly (and wisely) dismissed by the band, as it would have forever linked Dark Side of the Moon to that historic event, rather than leaving the work open to listener’s interpretation.

While Pink Floyd often had “no idea of what they were going to do,” Parsons was relieved to find that, with Dark Side, rather than enduring the band’s usual process of endless jamming and

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