FEATURED ALBUM: Pink Floyd - Animals

[Vic2012]

Listening to the album now. Dogs is just such a great track. Love the guitar.

[viukkis]

Now THAT, I’d bother to listen to online!

And you probably can do that, since it was also released as a live album: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Frogs_Set_2

[Mister Triscuits]

And you probably can do that, since it was also released as a live album: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Frogs_Set_2

...and its companion volume includes "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" as well as a cover of "Thela Hun Ginjeet."

[infandous]

I see everyone complaining about radio play

thankfully, I never listened to the radio much... only ever heard it at big outdoor get-togethers; so no album(s) have ever been ruined for me
so DSOTM is still a classic and my 2nd fav Floyd album behind WYWH. Meddle comes in 3rd and I would prefer to play the early albums before ever reaching for Animals

In my case, it's because I wasn't even born when Pink Floyd formed, and when I started listening to music more intently around age 10 or 11 (the year The Wall was released) I always listened to the radio. It wasn't until I went to college at the end of the 80's that I stopped listening to the radio. Then, of course, I had roommates and parties I went to where albums like Dark Side and The Wall were played, sometimes on repeat for hours. Other albums like WYWH that was not quite as common, but still common enough (and I heard the title track and Welcome to the Machine on the radio for years before that).

With Pink Floyd, at least in my case, not listening to the radio didn't help the overplaying at all. Of course, I was also a big fan for 10 years or so, and listened to ALL the albums many times. Though as I mentioned previously, the one I didn't actually ever own was Animals, so that one didn't get overplayed for me (also, not one I remember hearing at parties and never on the radio).

[Scott Bails]

Heard WYWH on the radio in the gym just today.

Now there's a tune to get the blood pumping.

[JJ88]

I wouldn't say 'classic rock' radio ever really took off in the UK in the same way it appears to have done in the US. So these sort of bands never get overplayed in quite the same way here.

[GuitarGeek]

My understanding was that Dogs & Sheep were originally planned for WYWH but didn't work in context of that album so became the basis of Animals.

Well, I suppose that depends on what you mean by "planned for Wish You Were Here". They were playing Shine On You Crazy Diamond (at the time, a single approx 18 minute piece), Raving & Drooling (which eventually morphed into Sheep) and You Gotta Be Crazy (which later became Dogs). I've heard it said that Gilmour, Wright and Mason wanted to record the three pieces, put Shine On You Crazy Diamond on one side of the LP, and the other on the other side, but Waters had "other ideas", I guess you could say.

Once Roger decided on the theme of "absence, literal and otherwise" for Wish You Were Here, he decided You Gotta Be Crazy and Raving & Drooling "didn't belong", so they had to cook up new music to take their place. I think I've read that this decision was made sometime before the spring and summer '75 US tour, but because Have A Cigar was the only thing they could come up with that fit in with the new concept, they were forced to continue playing You Gotta Be Crazy and Raving Drooling (because apparently, reverting to play any of the pre-Dark Side Of The Moon music, other than Echoes, was apparently too much to bare or whatever).

[NogbadTheBad]

So what you're saying is you agree with me.

[GuitarGeek]

In 1977, unless you had been fortunate enough to see them live on the WYWH tour, you would have had very little chance to hear any of the material that wound up on Animals prior to its release. It sure sounded like new music to me.

Depends on where you lived. Almost immediately after the '74 UK Winter tour, there was a bootleg on the market that had the three new songs on it. And it was packaged in such a fashion that it looked "professional", so reputedly, some fans were fooled into believing it was the new album.

Dogs is a bit of a...well, dog really. It's not really all that musically interesting to start with, and to then stretch it out to fill a whole side just emphasises its lack of quality. A lot of 2nd division prog bands did this in the seventies, but it's a bit disappointing that Floyd went down that road too on this occasion.

Beg to differ. I always thought Dogs was an awesome track, with the acoustic intro fading up, the guitar harmonies, the synth solos, etc. Love that bit during one of the guitar solos, where Gilmour plays a series of "pinch" harmonics, sort of making a "barking" kind of sound. And I love the last verse, with each line starting with "Who was...", apparently a homage to Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

for me Dogs is one of the finest longer moments from Floyd.

For me it works better than either Atom Heart Mother or Echoes, which are the two that strike me as being "half baked".

Animals was NOT ‘two years in the making’.

Well, the basic musical ideas that make up Sheep and Dogs do date back to the spring and summer of 1974, that's presumably what is meant with "Animals was two years in the making".

The DSotM tout extended into 1974 and 1975 with new material introduced but WYWH did not come out until just after the touring cycle had ended - September 1975.

Are the '74 and '75 dates officially considered part of the DSOTM touring cycle? I remember being told that the US tour was actually billed as the Wish You Were Here tour, though you are correct that the album didn't even come out until a couple months after the last live date of 1975.

[GuitarGeek]

The length of the songs worked against the album's success at the time (either too short or too long for airplay), but it helps immensely nowadays because I'm not sick to death of anything on the album from being overplayed like DSOTM, WYWH and The Wall. My favorite has always been "Pigs...".

I'm not so sure it had that much effect on the success of the album, given that it apparently still went to number three Stateside, and number one in the UK.

They sunk their money in a studio (keeping Roger busy)... and also the band getting ripped-off in bad investments.

Not to mentions solo albums, taking away many ideas away from the band.

The bad investments (or at least the fallout from said investments) and solo albums came later in the decade, after the completion of the Animals tour.

If we talk literally in terms of two years prior to the release of Animals, that would take us back to January of '75. At the time, they were still working on the material for Wish You Were Here.

So they spent April on the road in the US and Canada, then there was a gap of a couple months, before the tour resumed in June. I've never heard an account of what they were doing during that interval, but one suspects they might have gone back to the UK to continue working on Wish You Were Here, and/or making plans for their "triumphant return" to the UK, at Knebworth.

So the Knebworth performance was on July 5th, just a mere week after the last show of the US/Canada tour. Then one imagines they may have continued to work on Wish You Were Here, given that at Knebworth, they still were playing Raving And Drooling and You Gotta Be Crazy.

Note that on the North American tour dates, they still didn't have Shine On You Crazy Diamond completely nailed down. On at least some of the dates from April, there's still no sax solo, and the last night of the June tour, in Hamilton Ontario, parts VIII and IX still aren't there. So they must have still been working on the album relatively close to the release date (at least compared to how such things usually go, where there's typically several months between recording an album and it's release).

Then they probably spent the last couple months of 1975 relaxing, and perhaps thinking about what the next album was gonna be. Early '76 was probably spent outfitting Britannia Row, their new studio that they had purchased, and then the rest of the year spent on knocking the material we would come to know as Animals into shape.

SO, one suspects they spent, at best, a few months working on that "15 minutes of new music", as well fine tuning the arrangements and lyrics of what we now know as Dogs and Sheep.

[GuitarGeek]

So what you're saying is you agree with me.

If you're talking to me, yeah, I guess I was agreeing with your comment. It's just an interesting idea that you'd come up with an album's worth of material, then toss half of it aside, because your bass player has come up with a new concept.

Then again, I've heard talk of some songwriters who claim they write upwards of 40 songs per album, then whittle it down to the 10 or 12 that make the final cut (pun intended).

I've always wondered what happens to those 20-30 songs. Do they just go on the bonfire, or do they get reused on later records, or what? I know Jethro Tull recycled Lick Your Fingers Clean as Two Fingers, Genesis turned The Light into...whichever song it was on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, etc, and one of the bits in Starship Trooper was apparently originally part of a song that Peter Banks era Yes had played live. And then there's talk of how some of the songs that were on The Final Cut were apparently part of Roger's original demo recording of The Wall.

So maybe putting You Gotta Be Crazy and Raving & Drooling on the back burner, then reworking them for the next album wasn't that unusual.

[Trane]

So what you're saying is you agree with me.

And with Rog, Dave, Rick & Nick

So maybe putting You Gotta Be Crazy and Raving & Drooling on the back burner, then reworking them for the next album wasn't that unusual.

TBH, I think it was a brilliant idea... Can you imagine Crazy Diamond with Dogs & Sheep (or You Gotta Be Crazy and Raving & Drooling) on the same studio disc?

Of course it reads more like a conceptual album about lunatics and lunacy, but that ould've sound like DSOTM part 2

Instead we got two totally different sounding-albums that are miles apart, and yet totally floydish.

Floyd is my fave band, because they totally reinvented themselves and their sound with every new album (from Saucerful onwards to The Wall), yet kept sounding just like them.

[notallwhowander]

Floyd is my fave band, because they totally reinvented themselves and their sound with every new album (from Saucerful onwards to The Wall), yet kept sounding just like them.

Yeah, they are quite a study in progressivocity.

(For me, the only band that has competed with Pink Floyd in personal obsession and geekery has been King Crimson.)

[BravadoNJ]

Lyrically, their best album and still relevant..... men are pigs!

[Halmyre]

Lyrically, their best album and still relevant..... men are pigs!

But one of the pigs is called Mary...

[Mister Triscuits]

...and the pig cries Mary.

[MYSTERIOUS TRAVELLER]

Mary had a little lamb... err, sheep

[TheLoony]

Since there's this Floyd thread hanging around thought I'd add a little.

First, the recent doc on WYWH is amazing from the pic of Syd wandering around the studio and no one knew who he was to the artwork and well, the whole nine yards. Very well done. Dave and Roger seem to be quite honest about what went down. Well worth the time.

Second is this video that Youtube forced upon me. Didn't know Avenged Sevenfold had covered WYWH but this live version has Lizzy Hale also. Pretty damned cool considering they were probably just being born or even weren't born when the song came out.

Yeah, it's not Animals related but what the hell.