A bee stung them and they were puffy for days.Originally Posted by JKL2000
A bee stung them and they were puffy for days.
Wow, I'd trade both albums for all the amazingly good live music Floyd performed pre-Meddle. That's some of my favorite music ever, and far surpasses the album versions in most all cases. I know it often gets forgotten about, or is unknown to a lot of Floyd fans. Partly the band and label's own fault because they didn't release any of it.
Well, the character in the song says that he had a fever, not that a bee stung him.
In the film it seems like he catches it from a dead rat he finds in a river.
Never cared for this. Some of the material is OK live, but this and Waters solo Pros & Cons of Hitch-Hiking were of the same cloth and I wasn't crazy about the latter either.
Compact Disk brought high fidelity to the masses and audiophiles will never forgive it for that
I think it probably was a bee sting, but knowing Waters, the bee was symbolic of something much more sinister, so he equated it to catching the plague from a dead rat floating down a river polluted by capitalistic greed and war mongering blah blah blah <pantomimes a jerking-off motion> just another brick in the wall
Compact Disk brought high fidelity to the masses and audiophiles will never forgive it for that
There was a cartoon in PROG a while back, The History of Pink Floyd, something like that.
Anyway, when they reached The Final Cut, the panel shows one of the Floyds asking "What's our next album, then?" And Waters answers "My Dad's Dead." Nick Mason says "Pretty grim, that."
I cracked up reading it. It so succinctly summed it up.
(Cartoon quoted from memory)
High Vibration Go On - R.I.P. Chris Squire
I guess I have no way of being certain, but I'd bet that most bands don't know, during the recording of their last album, that it will actually be their last album. I'm not sure if knowing would make a difference in terms of quality, but I tend to think that it might.
Bands/artists I can think of who released at least six studio albums, who haven't released an album in over 10 years, where I think the final album was better than at least half of their other albums:
Beatles: Abbey Road
Funkadelic: Electric Spanking of War Babies
Bob Marley: Uprising
Captain Beefheart: Ice Cream for Crow
Black Flag: In My Head
Um... that's the best I can do. I will say that I think Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door is both a very good and very satisfying final album, IMO, but I don't think it's as good as most of the rest of the Zeppelin catalog, so I don't include it.
If Double Fantasy counts towards the John Lennon catalog, I would include it as well.
The common thread to the five artists on my list is recording careers that would not be considered particularly long. It's not uncommon for artists to make one of their better albums 10-12 years into their recording careers, so that has to play into this as well.
OMG, I HATE that cartoon in PROG!! Not that particular one - I'm actually about a year behind in reading PROG - but I hate the ones I've read so far. It's like something that would have been in Kids Magazine, if anyone remembers that.
I like reading PROG, but that cartoon and Rick Wakeman's column totally bite. I will say, the PF cartoon you mention sounds a bit more coherent than the comics I've read in PROG so far.
Amused to Death !
The Floyd one was pretty funny though. Gilmour keeps popping up during the Syd panels asking "Has he gone mad yet?"
High Vibration Go On - R.I.P. Chris Squire
I thought that the song was inspired a Waters tour experience when he had to get a shot and it made him numb.
I think "The Gunner's Dream", "The Fletcher Memorial Home", "The Final Cut" & "Not Now John" are marvelous songs.
The rest could have been better with a bit or consideration (and some more participation from Gilmour in the electric guitar/singing department).
But like others above, in my teens and twenties I LOVED it. The emotional "scream along" aspects were wonderfully therapeutic.
"He who binds to himself a joy doth the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity's sunrise..." - William Blake
ok, *that* thing is their WORST album... with the possible exception of Tales of Kidd Funkadelic and/or America Eats Its Young (though AEIY has at least 3 good tunes and the others have no redeeming qualities)
Why is it whenever someone mentions an artist that was clearly progressive (yet not the Symph weenie definition of Prog) do certain people feel compelled to snort "thats not Prog" like a whiny 5th grader?
my sentiments as well... though I like TDB a bit better than Animals and the 2 soundtrack albums I have to say
Why is it whenever someone mentions an artist that was clearly progressive (yet not the Symph weenie definition of Prog) do certain people feel compelled to snort "thats not Prog" like a whiny 5th grader?
Really, you think? I think it's great. I like it better than Uncle Jam, America Eats It's Young, or either of the first two.
Wow ! You like TDB better than Animals..each to their own I guess !
Yeah, I was going to remark on the same thing. Astonishing. It's like preferring Van Halen to Led Zeppelin. (Though I do like most of TDB.)
A few thoughts about what the various topics discussed:
1. My understanding is, after the Animals tour ended, Roger sequestered himself and wrote two song cycles. One was The Wall, the other was Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking. Reportedly, he considered doing a solo album, as the other three had done, at the time, but it was decided that a Pink Floyd album would be a better seller, which was important because the band had lost all of it's money in an investment scheme that went bad. I've forgotten who it was who said both (either Gilmour, Mason or Wright) "sounded exactly alike" and "you couldn't tell them apart".
Once Bob Ezrin got involved, he basically went through the whole thing and served as "editor". He apparently advised Roger to drop some of the lesser songs, and rework some of the lyrics. I think it was specifically said that Roger had included very explicit dates that gave his age, which was like 35 or whatever at the time. I think Ezrin said that "kids don't want to know that their rock stars are old". I also remember Gilmour saying one time that one of the hardest things about The Wall was keeping it from being a triple LP. So presumably those songs that eventually resurfaced on The Final Cut were part of the original demo, and perhaps were amongst the material Ezrin 86ed.
2. The backing track to Comfortably Numb did indeed originate from a Gilmour demo recorded while making his first solo album. I believe Gilmour once played the demo, or part of it anyway, when he appeared on a radio show in the 90's, I believe, so that might be where the track that was part of The Wall Demos bootleg that was mentioned earlier in the thread. Also, just because a bootleg identified as "The Wall Demos" doesn't include any songs that ended up on The Final Cut only means that whoever put the bootleg together didn't include those songs. Maybe the guy behind it focused solely on the music that actually made it onto The Wall, and just because the bootleg credits Roger with playing all the instruments, doesn't mean it's necessarily true. Lots of bootlegs have completely incorrect information.
3. Don't put too much faith in anything you see in The Wall film as being a reflection of Roger's "vision". As I understand Roger, Alan, and Gerald Scarfe did a lot of arguing during the initial stages of working on the movie. I forget who it was who said that you had three guys who were each used to having his own way trying to maintain that status on something that they were theoretically supposed to be collaborating on. So I guess to "get things done", Parker announced that they were taking a break from filming, which would resume after a couple months or whatever. So with Roger away, Parker pressed forward and filmed nearly all the live action material, doing all the post-production, etc. That's why on the back cover of The Final Cut, the soldier is holding a film can (also why the psychiatrist in the videos for the album is named "A. Parker"), because Roger felt like Parker had stabbed him in the back. So the whole rat business may have been something Parker dreamed up, not Roger.
4. In the context of the story, Comfortably Numb is about Pink being sent out onstage when he was really too ill to perform. Roger has said somewhere that actually happened to him at one point on one of the mid 70's tours. He was sick, and they brought in a medic who gave him a cortisone shot, to "keep (him) going through the show". I don't know if I've ever heard an explanation of what the "When I was a child I had a fever" bit is about, whether Roger was actually sick as a child or what the symbolism is supposed to be.
5. Spare Bricks morphed into The Final Cut as a result of the Falklands War. Roger was so incensed about people still dying over stupid shit, that he was driven to write at least most of an album about the topic. The line "Maggie, what have we done" refers to Margaret Thatcher, and specifically to her role in the Falklands debacle. I believe there's also lines in there about Reagan and about Galtieri (the Argentinian general who invaded the Falklands in the first place), as well. Some of the songs may have been part of The Wall, originally, but they were pressed into service on The Final Cut to express Roger's horror over that particular event. In that context, I think The Final Cut is a brilliant commentary about warfare and about that particular war.
6. The Final Cut is a Waters solo album, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason is a Gilmour solo album. As music that I actually want to listen to, I much prefer AMLOR. There's really only one song on AMLOR that I don't like, that being Dogs Of War. The rest of the record I think ranges from "pretty good" to excellent.
7. The Division Bell I thought had a lot of great songs, but perhaps paradoxically, it somehow didn't add up to much. As one big listening experience, I don't like it very much, but I thought the individual songs were mostly very strong.
8. I agree that Electric Spanking Of War Babies is one of the worst Funkadelic albums. I definitely prefer Uncle Jam Wants You.
Agreed. Some of the most moving, beautiful music of Pink Floyd's career is on this album. I don't care for "Fletcher Memorial Home" or "Not Now John," but I think the rest is stellar.
Wow. Maybe I have the defective copy!
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
Wow, that was an amazing and thoughtful response. Thanks.
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.
I always assumed that Roger was drawing a parallel between being high and out of it as an adult star with feeling high and out of it as a sick kid- the early experiences of thinking, hey, this is weird but it's actually kind of fun too. That and the fact that the cure can make you just as out of it as the sickness, only differently. I always felt the descriptions of hands and head feeling like balloons was spot on- that's exactly how I feel when I have a cld and take meds.
And I thought (in seriousness) the fever was "the fever to make music" and "hands felt like two balloons" was "guitar-playing was so easy my hands felt lighter than air."
last note on this so as not to derail the thread... but ... yeah, at least on UJWY side one is not too bad and Field Maneuvers is a good little jam... what is redeemable on TESoWB? Not much to these ears, and I've been a huge fan since the 70s. Just as a footnote, Funkadelic *did* record one album after TESoWB, released archivally, it's called By Way of the Drums and it's pretty bad too. But Funkadelic was never really Funkadelic after Bernie left.
Why is it whenever someone mentions an artist that was clearly progressive (yet not the Symph weenie definition of Prog) do certain people feel compelled to snort "thats not Prog" like a whiny 5th grader?
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks