FEATURE:
Have a Cigar
Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here at Fifty
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THERE is debate…
as to which album is the absolute best from Pink Floyd. Many might go for 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Others might say 1979’s The Wall. There are others who will go for 1975’s Wish You Were Here. I think this is my favourite Pink Floyd album. It turns fifty on 12th September. I wonder whether there will be a vinyl reissue or anything planned for the fiftieth anniversary. Before getting to a couple of reviews for Wish You Were Here, I want to bring in some features. I will start off with Classic Rock History and their feature that looks inside one of the biggest albums of the 1970s. One that has gone six-times platinum in the U.S. It is a remarkable listen:
“As anyone who has listened to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here throughout their entire life knows, side one of the record only contains two titles. The album opener “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” (Parts I–V) and side A’s closing number “Welcome to the Machine.”
The opener “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” (Parts I–V) was written by Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Richard Wright. The lead vocals on the epic piece was performed by Roger Waters. This was a stunning piece of music that really defines the entire album more than any other piece of music on the record. The suite runs over thirteen minutes long and continues on side two as the album closer in parts (Parts VI–IX) which runs close to another thirteen minutes. The albums total running time comes in at forty four minutes and eleven seconds. The “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” suites takes up a total of twenty five minutes and sixty seconds making up for over half of the albums running time.
“Shine On You Crazy Diamond” presents rock and roll fans with such a daunting listening experience. Rock fans had never heard anything like it before. Its slow haunting beginning entraps you instantly as Richard Wright’s synthesisers portrayed a cinematic landscape that everyone’s own individual imagination could shape as they wished. The only limitations were one’s own creative visions as a listener. The arrival of David Gilmour sparse but brilliant guitar riffs further enhanced the visual and mild altering experience. And then there it is at about the four minute mark when that metallic guitar riff takes the band into the heart of the song as David Gilmour continues to perform like he is from another world. Nick Mason and Roger Waters are in such a locked hypnotic groove surrounded by Richard Wright’s synths that it all just perfectly becomes music of legend.
Side two of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album closes with the intense track “Welcome To The Machine.” The song’s opening effects set up a scene where the listeners knew they were in for something pretty special. The opening guitars chords lay the ground for the chilling vocals by David Gilmour. Richard Wright’s synthesisers surrounds David Gilmour’s vocals line with mechanical sounds of doom. This is music that’s as rare as its gets. The lyrics “Its alright we told you what to dream,” offers insight instantly to what this albums is all about. It’s in the heart of this song where we discover the rage that Pink Floyd has in their souls against the destructive forces of corporate entities on artists and human life itself. This is once again rock and roll rebellion. But it’s done for the first time in a deep progressive rock manner with a futurists almost 2001 Space Odyssey musical design.
Continuing with our look back at Pink Floyd’s classic album Wish You Were Here album here we take a listen to the album’s opening track on side two entitled “Have a Cigar.” The great Roy Harper sang lead vocals on the song. Pink Floyd continues with their lyrical rants against cooperation as they focus in empty promises by record company executives and other unscrupulous music industry individuals. While we could hear the point of these lyrics even at a young age, the music was just so entertaining and brilliant it pretty much completely overshadowed the meaning of the lyrics for many of us who were just floored by the band’s playing on the track. David Gilmour’s guitar playing is more on fire on the song than the dude on the cover of the album.
The title track of the album Wish You Were Here followed “Have A Cigar,” on side two. This was the outlier on the album. The song opened up like it was being played out of a old beat up transistor radio until the magnificent guitar playing of David Gilmour infiltrates your space with such brilliant production. High School guitar players like my friend Danny Sobstyl jumped on this one as they performed the song in coffee houses and cafes everywhere. It was just one of those perfect accessible songs that musicians could play with an acoustic guitar. A spectacular composition that sounds just as strong and important in 2021 as it did in 1975.
As we stated and covered earlier, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album closes with the second half of the “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” suite. This classic Pink Floyd album was the band’s ninth studio album release. The album was released on September 12, 1975. The album cover was once again created by the art firm known as Hipgnosis. We covered Pink Floyd album Cover Art in a very detailed article. Pink Floyd recorded the album at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in London made famous by The Beatles. The album has become known as one of the greatest classic rock albums ever released as it has sold over twenty million copies. Many Pink Floyd fans claim Wish You Were Here as their favourite Pink Floyd album. Even David Gilmour and Richard Wright have said it was their favorite Pink Floyd album they ever released. That pretty much sums it all up right there”.
Apologies if there is any repetition. However, I think that it is important to highlight the relatively few features written about this album. Wish You Were Here should get a wave of celebration and investigation on its fiftieth anniversary. The Boar published a feature earlier this year that heralded a classic album that shines bright (like a crazy diamond) fifty years after its release:
“Wish You Were Here opens with its longest track, a prolonged lament for an absent friend: ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 1-5)’. The song is centred on a haunting guitar refrain which has since achieved iconic status, only interrupted by Waters’ sombre vocals at the nine minute mark. This leaves plenty of time for Gilmour’s tastefully restrained yet expressive guitar playing, which is noticeably free from the soaring majesty of the solos on ‘Time’ or, later in 1979, ‘Comfortably Numb’. The song ends with a passionate saxophone solo by Richard Parry, who also played on The Dark Side of the Moon, most notably on ‘Money’. On any other album, this would be the standout track.
‘Shine On’ segues smoothly into the desolate industrial soundscape of ‘Welcome to the Machine’ and quickly establishes the emotionally charged politics of Wish You Were Here. The private tragedy of Syd Barrett becomes a public commentary on the insatiable exploitation of the music industry; Barrett’s own breakdown becomes symbolic of the musicians chewed up and spat out by the ‘machine’. The track’s initial ambience is then punctured by heavily layered, futuristic synthesisers and Waters’ talented lyricism once again comes to the fore. He comments on the commodification of artistic creativity: “What did you dream? It’s alright, we told you what to dream” (‘Welcome to the Machine’, Pink Floyd).
In an abrupt yet thematically cohesive change of tone, ‘Have a Cigar’ brings the listener into the office of a music executive, who tells the band: “You gotta get an album out / You owe it to the people”(‘Have a Cigar’, Pink Floyd). This allusion to the music industry churning through artists in a bid to hit the charts is accompanied by disquietingly upbeat instrumentalism, with a bass groove and energetic guitar solo. Voiced by folk musician Roy Harper, the executive asks, “Oh, by the way, which one’s Pink?” (‘Have a Cigar’, Pink Floyd), assuming that ‘Pink Floyd’ is the name of one of the band members. Pink Floyd’s vision of the industry feels distinctly dystopian, dominated by an unsavoury combination of ignorance and greed.
After a brief burst of radio, the album’s most famous song, ‘Wish You Were Here’, opens with another memorable riff from Gilmour, this time played on a twelve-string acoustic guitar. The popularity of ‘Wish You Were Here’ is unsurprising, given that this song above all captures the emotional devastation wrought by Barrett’s absence. Not to be outdone by Gilmour’s guitar, Waters’ lyrics are particularly poignant here; he suggests that “we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year” (‘Wish You Were Here’, Pink Floyd). Sure enough, the album takes the listener on a cyclical journey, beginning and ending with ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’.
‘Wish You Were Here’ ends with the sound of wind blowing, which continues seamlessly on the album’s final track ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 6-9)’. This is in many ways the perfect outro, featuring the most dramatic solo on the album. Gilmour’s lap steel guitar shrilly mimics the rising and falling cry of a mourner before the vocals return for one final time, telling the absent Barrett “we’ll bask in the shadow of yesterday’s triumph / And sail on the steel breeze” (‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 6-9)’, Pink Floyd). In the dying moments of the track, a brief snatch of melody from one of Barrett’s songs, ‘See Emily Play’, can faintly be heard, one last tribute by Wright before the album reaches its conclusion.
With Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd set the gold standard for introspective and politically astute rock, with a legacy that extends into the 21st century. The album’s bleak view of the music industry now appears to have been worryingly prescient. By the time of Syd Barrett’s death in 2006, companies had already begun to shift towards a streaming model with the creation of Spotify, and the exploitation of the ‘70s has continued in the form of streaming giants’ cynical underpayment of artists. In many ways, Wish You Were Here is deeply rooted in time and place, but its intimacy and provocative politics remain undiminished, even half a century later”.
It is amazing that Wish You Were Here was made at all. The Dark Side of the Moon almost ended the band. On 13th January, 1975, Pink Floyd set up Abbey Road’s Studio 3 to start work on their seventh studio album. Sessions took place either side and between two tours of North America. That created extra tension and issues. The slightly fragmented and uneven recording. Their focus and powers being pulled and stretched. Although the tour of North America was a success, there were issues with the police being heavy-handed with fans. I am going to pick up on a Classic Rock feature from 2022. They provide a detailed and fascinating history and background leading up to Wish You Were Here:
“Back at Abbey Road in May, Waters was keen to carry on working, despite obvious tensions. “We pressed on regardless of the general ennui for a few weeks and then things came to a bit of a head,” he recalls. “I felt that the only way I could retain interest in the project was to try to make the album relate to what was going on there and then – the fact that no one was really looking each other in the eye, and that it was all very mechanical.” Waters’s vision was cemented at a band meeting. “We all sat round and unburdened ourselves a lot, and I took notes on what everybody was saying. It was a meeting about what wasn’t happening and why.”
Waters extended further still his ideas of general themes of absence and detachment by opting to write yet more new material.
“I suggested that we change it,” Waters continues. “That we didn’t do the other two songs [Raving And Drooling and Gotta Be Crazy], but tried somehow to make a bridge between the first and second halves of Shine On, which is how Welcome To The Machine, Wish You Were Here and Have A Cigar came in… Dave was always clear that he wanted to do the other two songs – he never quite copped what I was talking about. But Rick did and Nicky did, and he was outvoted so we went on.”
With Gilmour and Waters – the principal players in the band – at complete cross purposes, recording carried on, even if Gilmour wasn’t convinced: “After Dark Side we really were floundering around. I wanted to make the next album more musical. I always thought that Roger’s emergence as a great lyric writer on the last album was such that he came to overshadow the music.”
Even by agreeing to disagree there was also a sense they were being held back by general lethargy, promoted by an alarming divorce rate within the band. Although his own marriage had hit the skids very recently, Waters was able to divert his energies into songwriting. But in Mason’s case his impending split “manifested itself into complete, well, rigor mortis. I didn’t quite have to be carried about, but I wasn’t interested. I couldn’t get myself to sort out the drumming, and that of course drove everyone else even crazier.”
Having finally settled on what it was they were now going to record, they set about putting it all down on tape. Shine On was to be split into two halves: Parts 1-5 and 6-9. Part 5 eventually featured their tour saxophonist Dick Parry, who switches between baritone and tenor sax. Particularly problematic were Waters’s vocal sessions. “It was right on the edge of my range,” Waters recalled. “I always felt very insecure about singing anyway because I’m not naturally able to sing well. I know what I want to do but I don’t have the ability to do it well. It was fantastically boring to record, cos I had to do it line by line, doing it over and over again just to get it sounding reasonable.”
Consequently further tensions surfaced as the boredom of the process took its toll and band members became increasingly disinterested in turning up for sessions at all. “Punctuality became an issue,” Mason recalled. “If two of us were on time and the others were late, we were quite capable of working ourselves up into a righteous fury. The following day the roles could easily be reversed. None of us was free from blame.”
Little changed when they came to record Have A Cigar, and again Waters’s singing was showing its limitations. This time though, their friend Roy Harper was drafted in to sing. “Roy was recording in the studio anyway,” recalled Waters, “and was in and out all the time. I can’t remember who suggested it, maybe I did, probably hoping everybody would go: ‘Oh no, Rog, you do it’. But they didn’t. They all went: ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.’ He did it, and everybody went: ‘Oh, terrific!’ So that was that.”
It was an instantly regrettable decision, and although Waters reluctantly conceded a credit on the album, there was certainly no question of payment. Tape engineer John Leckie recalled Waters saying to Harper that they must make sure he get paid for his efforts. “And Roy said: ‘Just get me a life season ticket to Lord’s.’ He kept prompting Roger, but it never came. About 10 years later, Roy wrote a letter to Roger and decided that, due to the success of Wish You Were Here, £10,000 would be adequate. And heard nothing at all.”
Have A Cigar is Waters’s cynical take on the music industry, and contains the immortal line: ‘Oh by the way, which one’s Pink?’ “We did have people who would say to us: “Which one’s Pink”’ and stuff like that,” Gilmour recalled. “There were an awful lot of people who thought Pink Floyd was the name of the lead singer, and that was Pink himself and the band. That’s how it all came about. It was quite genuine.” In many respects Waters was biting the very hand that was feeding him.
On the eve of their departure from England to begin their second tour of North America, Syd Barrett made his aforementioned appearance at Abbey Road. It was the last time the band ever saw him. Part 9 of Shine On You Crazy Diamond includes the melody from See Emily Play as the track fades out. An afterthought? Perhaps”.
I will wrap things up with a couple of reviews for the epic Wish You Were Here. I am going to go back to last year and a review from Pitchfork. It is a compelling review of a “mournful, emotionally charged mood piece that grounded a historically cosmic band”:
“Nearly 50 years and 20 million in sales later, it’s safe to say this theme resonated far beyond the cloistered world of rock stardom. It didn’t replicate the culture-defining ubiquity of Dark Side nor the feature-length conceptual heft of 1979’s The Wall. But, fitting for a record born from growing pains and adult disillusionment, its legacy is somewhat more understated. There is an apocryphal legend that this is the album that convinced Gilmour to quit smoking, after he heard his unsuppressable cough somewhere low in the mix during the staticky intro of the title track. It also inspired one of the coolest packaging designs in music history, from the band’s loyal collaborator Storm Thorgerson at Hipgnosis, who talked the record company into selling the album with an opaque black sleeve so that serious collectors might own the album without ever actually seeing the real cover. (“Brilliant,” he says in a 2012 documentary, snapping his fingers at the camera: “That’s really absent!”)
But the most famous story about Wish You Were Here is a more troubling one. On a late spring day in June 1975, Barrett wandered into the recording studio, physically transformed, eyes vacant, unrecognizable to his former bandmates. Everyone present has retold the story the same way over the ensuing decades: No one could believe it was him. He had no response to the new music they played for him. He seemed to be in another world entirely. It was the last time most of the band saw him before his death in 2006. Gilmour has said he thinks about him every time he sings the title track, a staple of the band’s catalog that he’s since referred to as a “very simple country song.” Its imagery of a heaven indistinguishable from hell, of heroes traded for ghosts, have become so ingrained in our FM radio subconscious that it can be hard to remember how gutting it must have felt from this band who achieved everything they wanted and still found themselves haunted, hardened, beaten down by where their dreams had led them. After all, Wish You Were Here is what it says on postcards from somewhere beautiful. But it also means you’re alone”.
The final piece I am going to highlight is a review from the BBC. I wonder if we see albums like Wish You Were Here today. One that starts out this amazing suite, then we get a few standalone tracks and the album ends with another suite. A concept album I guess. Maybe some bands do this sort of thing, thought you hope that more can go beyond the traditional and do something as ambitious (or risky) as delivering their own Wish You Were Here:
“As the follow-up to the Floyd’s iconic, record-breaking 1973 concept album The Dark Side Of The Moon, this album is often unfairly overlooked. With the benefit of hindsight, Wish You Were Here has the same faultless pacing and sequencing of its predecessor, but a more coherent musical narrative, structure and tone, as well as greater lyrical sophistication. Here, the ‘concept’ is more down-to-earth, since much of the record is an extended tribute to the late Syd Barrett the genius behind their early works, who flew too high and burned too bright, becoming one of rock’s most infamous drug casualties before Pink Floyd emerged from London¹s psychedelic underground scene to become one of the biggest success stories of the 1970s. It’s also the last great album by a band that would produce something as adolescently puerile as The Wall by the end of that decade.
Barrett is the subject of the epic “Shine On You Crazy Diamond, parts One and Two” of which take up more than half the playing time and bookend just three other shorter tracks. Despite some questionable keyboard tones from Richard Wright, the majestically unhurried instrumental intro is a triumph of suspense. It¹s nearly nine minutes before Roger Waters starts singing and the effect is startling, as are the words: ‘Remember when you were young?/ You shone like the sun / Shine On You Crazy Diamond!/ Now there’s a look in your eye / Like black holes in the sky’. It’s debatable whether the ‘iPod generation’ will get all of the eerie, almost visual sound detail in the more melodramatic “Welcome To The Machine”, which presages some of the pomp of their later work. Guest vocalist Roy Harper is a gritty presence on the music industry-bating “Have A Cigar” and the breathless title track finds Waters’ lyrics at their most soul searching. Some may baulk at Dave Gilmour’s long, bluesy guitar workouts, which form the backbone of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and crop up throughout the album. Hey, these were the dying days of prog. rock. Punk was just around the corner and it’s easy to see why, but mid-seventies post-psychedelic angst seldom sounded so chilled”.
On 12th September, it will be fifty years since Wish You Were Here was released. If you see it as the best Pink Floyd album or one of their classics, there is no denying that it is a work of genius. It still sounds mind-blowing and cosmic half a century later. I hope that it does get some new love and inspection closer to the anniversary. Some might feel this is an album only a certain generation can appreciate. Older listeners. That is not the case. This is a spellbinding albums that will reach new generations…
ALL around the world.