I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives (by Defensive Listening)

So, Syd Barrett is dead. Yes, it's true, the only member of Pink Floyd with any integrity is gone. Syd Barrett was an incredible talent as a founding member of Pink Floyd (originally as "The Pink Floyd Sound") and somehow seemed even more uniquely gifted throughout his solo career.

If you were to read any kind of band bio on the Floyd and use that as your only reference, you would probably end up completely disregarding any of Barrett's solo work... but this would be a mistake. Each and every song on the Syd Barrett "Crazy Diamond" box set is significantly more remarkable than pretty much all of the material on the Pink Floyd "Shine On" box set because Syd's stuff hasn't aged at all, and you certainly can't say that for the heavy handed seventies synths and embarrassing blues rock soloing found all over those Floyd blockbusters, no matter how much you like them. In other words, Barrett wasn't taken very seriously as a songwriter or guitarist in the late 60's/early 70's, but this was probably because he made records that could have been made today. Or maybe they couldn't. So-called "freakfolk" sounds pretty silly when you compare it to the genuine weirdness on an out-take of the song "DarkGlobe," and the cheesy hippie era wasn't quite ready for the stripped down and starkly haunting beauty found in any of the songs on "The Madcap Laughs" or"Barrett." Thats a shame, because it means that Syd Barrett didn't quite fit in anywhere, and will probably be remembered mostly for two things: giving Pink Floyd it's name and going insane.

I think he deserved more than VH-1 sensationalism and played out rock lore as predictable as a frat boy drunkenly slurring "Dude, do you know what Ozzy did one time?" For someone who started a band so wildly popular, he'll probably always be a footnote to the mainstream version of rock history, even though he was a man who influenced David Bowie and Marc Bolan when they were still lame little folk singers. I think his direct musical influence is most evident in the realm of underground rock, revealing itself in everything from the Melvins cover of "Interstellar Overdrive" to the quirky acoustic song-writing of Entrance.

And although I'm anonymous, I'd like to share a little personal story. The second ever rock show I went to (after Sid King at Hard Rock Cafe) was a weak and bloated Pink Floyd concert at Texas Stadium in1994. I didn't care that they were an aging and inferior version of the band, because I was in the eighth grade. When David Gilmour and the other chubby millionaires took the stage, they opened up with"Astronomy Domine", the first song on Pink Floyd's first album, which was written by Syd Barrett. I had never heard the song before that night, and it was the greatest thing my young ears had ever heard. It was pounding, throbbing, and eerie in a way that no other song they played that night would be. I automatically went out the next day and found the record it was on, along with anything else Barrett had to do with. Years later, long after my inevitable conversion into a punk/experimental enthusiast, my experience as a music fan came full circle. It was a few years ago, at a show performed by a reunited Mission of Burma during SXSW. This was one of my favorite punk/indie rock bands, and they played a very faithful cover of "Astronomy Domine." Its funny, because Mission of Burma themselves were credited with having a lot to do with expanding rock's possibilities, and here they were covering a Syd Barrett song that was more than thirty five years old... and it made total sense, fitting right in with all their futuristic avant noise and deconstructed song structures. And that's how I want to remember Syd Barrett. Not as some sixties sideshow, but forever relevant.