Piper at the Gates of Dawn

I wish I had been twenty years old in 1967. Among all the trippy splendor of that summer, I can't imagine how amazing it would have been to listen to Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn for the first time. It is always a fun listen, and even amidst the trippiest music of that year, it stood out. It combined drugs, psychedelia, space, and whimsy, and laid the groundwork for the band's future.

This was the innocent Floyd; before they wrote about time and money, political animal metaphors, and bricks in the wall. Syd Barrett sings of gnomes, bicycles, scarecrows and outer space over the backdrop of his punk-ish guitar playing and Richard Wright's ethereal keyboard. Barrett was admittedly not the guitarist David Gilmour was, nor was he the songwriter Roger Waters turned out to be. Still, he seemed very much into the music for the music's sake, and unlike his band mates didn't get swept up in his own ego, even if this is because he completely dropped off the radar.

This is among the trippiest albums in my collection. It manages to be just as psychedelic as Electric Ladyland, After Bathing at Baxter's, or any of the other acid-flavored albums of '67, but Syd Barrett's writing and the instrumentals make it much different from anything else. "Astronomy Domine" and "Interstellar Overdrive" are great space-rock jams, the latter of which ends with a climax that swings manically around your head. "Lucifer Sam" and "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk" are raw rockers. "The Gnome", "Scarecrow", and "Bike" are all Barrett's trips into whimsy. The lyrics aren't terribly complex, but their simplicity works to balance out the spacey-ness of "Astronomy Domine" and the fantastical "Matilda Mother". The child-like spirit of "Bike" is a great contrast to the dark, thought-provoking brooding of Animals from ten years later, and listening to them back-to-back, it's like hearing a completely different band (which it was when Barrett left).

It's a shame Barrett didn't stay on with the band. One of my favorite photos of Pink Floyd is with all five of them: Barrett, Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Nick Mason, not long before the sides split and the band went on to stardom, while Barrett dissolved into obscurity. It would have been interesting to see where the band went had both Barrett and Waters been present as songwriters. Still, you can't deny that Barrett was taken over by his vices, nor can you deny the results of Pink Floyd moving on without him, so it does well not to get too wistful about the possibilities of what might have been. Instead, we have Piper at the Gates of Dawn to show the beginnings of an amazing rock band blazing a trail that so many others would follow to this day.