Wish You Were Here
“Wish You Were Here” has been going through my head for around a year now, since last summer when I went to Mackinac Island, looked through the postcards in a gift shop, and realized I was the one who was missing.
I had known “Wish You Were Here” since I was a teenager. Liked the song. Understood and connected with its melancholy. But I never had more than a passing interest in it, and overall, I had much more familiarity with Pink Floyd’s successes The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall than with some of the other slightly less radio-friendly albums, including Wish You Were Here – an album that came out in 1975, the year before I was born. I don’t think I had ever actually learned anything about that album or song’s association with Syd Barrett – and at that time and for many years after I knew only vaguely about Barrett and his early role in Pink Floyd.
But last summer, as the song refused to leave my head, I decided to look it up and learn more about it, only to discover a much more startling relevance to my own life than I had anticipated. It is my experience that sometimes through some strange intuition or collective unconscious – a true sixth sense – songs or other works hunt us down through the years and speak to us of the uncanny.
At present, music is the one art form I have withdrawn from most completely. I am not sure why. Perhaps because I was born into music, raised in a musical family, and so always immersed in music, I associate music most closely with many of the greatest failures and torments in my life. It may also be because music is the art form with the most emotional immediacy, and that immediacy is often too intense for me; I actually need the “buffer” that other art forms allow (words, as symbols, take time to sink in – time that I need). I think also music tends to be the most overwhelming of pop cultural forms in terms of its sheer abundance, with so many artists competing that it is too overwhelming to me and so I just give up trying to find what I like. Finally, I might observe that over the past few decades music was a form that transformed very aggressively into some of the newer media, and at the time it was making that transition, I did not have access to the technology, and I think I just never caught up. As with most things, it is probably a combination of factors.
My failure to keep up with the years may also be because the music of my own generation failed to captivate me, and thus alienated me from having any desire to stay current with the scene and formats. Though I have affinity for at least some of the music of the early to mid-80s, I don’t remember the late 80s and early 90s with any affection. Grunge was supposed to have been “my” music – the music of my late teenaged/early young adult years. But though I had a few friends enamored with it, I was not. I did appreciate that it struck one as being “real” and not like over-produced corn flakes, but I was nevertheless perplexed by its popularity and unable to find any personal emotional resonance. I have nothing against grunge, mind you – just an absence of feelings.
I remember very well when Kurt Cobain committed suicide. My few friends who loved Nirvana were grieved and shocked because of the connection they felt with the music – while all I could do was engage in the helpless hand-wringing following suicide, feeling absurdly chastised, even though the most I’d ever done is heard Kurt Cobain’s name.
Well, the music of my own generation not being of much interest to me, by my late teen years I ended up adopting the 1960s and especially the 1970s as “my” music.
I think that Dark Side of the Moon may be the only album I ever distinctly recall the exact moment of buying.
But no, that’s not right, is it? Buying music used to be an event, back when it had a physicality – a visceral presence. I’m old enough to have been very well acquainted with vinyl, at least in childhood. To hold the cover and liner notes and the record itself in your hands was something inspiring – indeed, it inspired much of the creative dreaming of my childhood that I still keep myself going on today. From childhood, I remember the instance of buying any number of records, because the moment was that visceral and set in time and special.
So for absolute precision (if less poeticism), let me back up: The Dark Side of the Moon is the only CD I distinctly recall the exact moment of buying during my late childhood.
It would have been at the old, long-gone K-Mart store in North Vernon, and I’m going to speculate that it might have been around the summer of 1989. In other words, there was nothing even remotely special about the location or the moment. What was unusual was the fact that I had no idea who Pink Floyd was or the significance of Dark Side of the Moon. It was not even prominently placed – just buried alphabetically, one of many dozens of CDs. I had set myself a goal that day of buying something that I had never heard of, just for fun – just for the sheer surprise. In my sober adult years I would never think of spending hard-won money on any commodity that I’m not already one hundred percent certain about – but back then, it was usually not my money, but money I had begged from my grandmother, and so it seemed disposable. Usually (and predictably) my random CD purchases resulted in disaster, or at least in an entirely unmemorable experience. In this Russian roulette of music purchases, perhaps I was simply due for something significant – the bullet to the head, as it were. Whatever the case, it is as though by fate or some strange pull that I found Dark Side of the Moon – like there really was something mystical about the album and its cover and about Pink Floyd in general.
Ignorant or not about who Pink Floyd was, and about the fact that Dark Side of the Moon was indeed the second best-selling album in the history of the world, once I had started listening to it, it certainly had a resonance for me that other music current at the time did not.
Pink Floyd’s music is interesting to me in that it seems to speak equally well to the angst and existential crisis of the teenaged years, or to the angst and existential crisis of the middle-aged years – but it reads entirely differently in both contexts.
It’s not unusual, of course, for a song to reach you very differently when you are 12 versus 22 or 32 versus 42. Though my brother gave me Sgt. Pepper for my 10th birthday, which kicked off my full exploration of Beatles music, singing happily along through all my years, it took me until my 30s to be reduced so completely to tears driving along in my car that I could no longer sing to “Eleanor Rigby,” or “Here Comes the Sun,” or especially, “In My Life.” So this effect is not unusual. But for some reason, this weird simultaneous symbiotic relationship and yet disjunction between the emotional states of youth and middle-age seem to me particularly pronounced with Pink Floyd.
Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? (from “Wish You Were Here”)
Indeed, sir.
Pink Floyd (and especially Roger Waters) has long been accused of quite a bit of mopey disillusionment. But my thought is that if an artist does one particular thing very well, there is nothing wrong with that. And one thing Pink Floyd did astonishingly well was disillusionment and disaffection and modern alienation. Roger Waters was capable of some very keen lyrics and rage and irony.
Pink Floyd is also one of many aggravating cases where you wish with all your heart that in order to avoid the devastation of break-up, the collaborating parties could have stopped their petty disputes and worked out their differences for the sake of the art that so deeply impacted your life.
But it doesn’t work that way. Many of the world’s great or influential collaborations were rife with contention: Lennon and McCartney, Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert and Sullivan, Gilmour and Waters. The list goes on ad infinitum. In some cases a collaboration is so strained that it barely holds together long enough for fans to blink, let alone for anyone to get any work done. Apparently the conflict and competition and dynamic tension – however you want to think of it – is part of what leads to the production of great things, and so you must simply accept that it will ultimately blow up in their faces and yours and hurt all of you grievously. It’s the price you pay.
It is sometimes remarked that Waters is what gave Pink Floyd a unique voice – its greatness, really – but Gilmour, in addition to being considered a guitarist with a respected and distinctive style, is what made Waters listenable and not just overambitious noise. (Put that way, it would seem that a lot of us could use a Gilmour in our lives.)
Well, Syd Barrett was the collaborator (initially, really the founder/leader of Pink Floyd) who couldn’t even hold it together long enough to do more than haunt the rest of their music ever after.
I’m afraid this will sound rather superficial, but in my desultory research last summer after my mind had latched on to “Wish You Were Here,” one thing that struck me is how beautiful Syd Barrett was – physically, I mean. Just a stunningly beautiful creature. Of course, the soul shines through, and all that – “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” I guess. Beauty is always everything taken together. (Find him for yourself so that you can look at dozens of images. Even in still images, he’s one of those souls who radiates charisma and intelligence. You can see why he became a legend.)
The entire album, Wish You Were Here, can be taken as a kind of eulogy for Syd Barrett and deceased hopes about him, though it signifies other more universal themes as well. It has been noted that these themes can be summed up as absence or “unfulfilled presence” (Storm Thorgerson). The songs “Wish You Were Here,” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” are unmistakably about Barrett at their core. Wish You Were Here is a very compassionate album on a more general level, and Rogers Waters has said that "’Shine On’ is not really about Syd—he's just a symbol for all the extremes of absence some people have to indulge in because it's the only way they can cope with how…sad it is, modern life, [and so they have] to withdraw completely.” But it’s not exactly new for art to be about something specific and universal at the same time. So, why don’t we just go ahead and say that the album and the songs in question are about Syd.
The loss of Barrett haunted everything Pink Floyd did subsequently. The irony is that it could be argued that even in his absence he continued to be responsible for the band’s success and artistic merit, as the void he left pervaded everything the band did, either explicitly or more subtly. Thematically, emotionally, the music continued to try to deconstruct the tragedy and complexity and brilliance and beauty and absurdity. Hemingway said that a man can be destroyed without being defeated; and maybe this is ultimately realized in many ways. Waters seems to agree, calling Barrett in “Shine On,” “you winner and loser.”
In a nutshell, the little age-old tale of madness goes like this: Syd Barrett was an original member of Pink Floyd who shattered early on. Though he was still around during the band’s initial success, the others were forced to move on to greater success without him because he became extremely disconnected and erratic in the midst of probable mental illness and definite heavy drug use, most notably acid. Gilmour, and especially Waters, had been close friends with Barrett. One of Waters’ lines from “Shine On,” says, “You wore out your welcome with random precision.” That’s about right. Following Barrett’s unstable activity, the band had no real choice but to go on without him. After Pink Floyd, Barrett passed several years with a few loose-cannon solo albums and other eccentric activity, and then withdrew from the world forever, including from his former friends/bandmates. Over the course of many years, much speculation ensued over Barrett’s mental state as well as the part that acid might have played in his breakdown and withdrawal from the world.
Gilmour has been quoted as saying that he believes Barrett would have had a breakdown with or without the acid. This seems curious to me, knowing what I know about substance abuse on both an objective and personal level. Perhaps even without the acid and other drug abuse, Barrett would have been unable to deal with Pink Floyd’s fame and would have broken down. But it is difficult not to wonder if the acid was a tipping point. It would seem that perhaps if not for this abuse, Barrett would at least have been able to go on making some kind of valuable contributions to the world, perhaps on an individual level, even if unable to deal with the juggernaut Pink Floyd had become.
Probably the most famous story is that seven years after his dissolution from Pink Floyd, and during the making of the Wish You Were Here album, Barrett unexpectedly dropped by the studio, having deteriorated so far mentally and physically that much of the band failed to recognize him at first. Waters, his childhood friend, was so devastated by the transformation that he cried. Others cried, too. They played “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” for Barrett, but he showed no sign of understanding that it had anything to do with him. Poignantly, he offered the band his services on the album. Following this recording session was David Gilmour’s wedding reception; Barrett briefly attended, vanished without saying goodbye, and that was the last any of his band members ever saw of him up to his death in 2006.
Inevitably, after his retreat into seclusion, Barrett became a lot of things to a lot of people. Nature abhors a vacuum, so we all try to fill in the gaps. In some people’s eyes he became a kind of poster child for reclusiveness, for disaffection – sort of the ultimate middle finger to the world.
However, I believe that it’s important not to “romanticize” what happened with Barrett. There is nothing romantic about being unable to make valuable contributions to the world. (The only reason in my own reclusiveness I call myself “fantastic” is to create any way for me to communicate with the world again – by adding the requisite “wink” that this world now requires in every situation.) Tributes to Barrett seem suitable. It’s perfectly appropriate to celebrate his life and the work that he did produce, and also even to celebrate the fact that he made the best of a life that was mostly lived in seclusion. But I don’t see it as appropriate in any way to glorify a withdrawal from the world that was probably not his choice.
Though what speaks to me is the more sincere and disingenuous “Wish You Were Here,” the song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” is also a thing of beauty. In it, Waters calls Barrett, dubiously, “legend” and “martyr”; these are romanticized labels, if ever there were any. But Waters probably meant these and other words in the song ironically. The song’s tone suggests that the various labels he mentions can be taken however one wants to take them, going along also with the album’s overall themes of the individual being appropriated or manipulated according to other people’s views or for society’s purposes. (And after all, the song that follows the first parts of “Shine On” is “Welcome to the Machine.” Nor is it a coincidence that the beautiful cry of stranded despair and alienation of “Have a Cigar” precedes “Wish You Were Here.”) Maybe hitting closer to home, at one point in “Shine On,” Waters calls Barrett “prisoner.”
I posit that reclusiveness is rarely a choice, but a necessity. It can be more harmful in some cases than others. Sometimes it can lead to legendary creativity – let’s say, in the case of Emily Dickinson. But all of the evidence in Barrett’s case shows that his withdrawal from the world was neither a choice, nor the best outcome for him, nor the best outcome for those who cared about him, including loved ones, friends, and fans. Reclusiveness of Barrett’s type I think it could be argued is a kind of slow death. There is nothing more romantic about it than the suicide of Kurt Cobain – which is to say, nothing romantic at all. It is damaging. Is there anything more soul-killing to those of us left behind than the waste of beauty and brilliance and potential?
Barrett’s sister, who was his main point of contact with the outside world after 1982, has defended him by saying that the view of Barrett as a recluse and as perhaps mentally ill is the perspective of the rest of the world being forced upon him – that the world wanted things from him that he was unwilling to give. She preferred to cast his withdrawal from the world as a kind of “selfishness.” Interestingly, she specifically objected to the label “recluse,” citing that he continued to interact with his family, to leave the house from time to time, and to visit certain museums and gardens. He continued painting, read a lot, wrote a book on art, and enjoyed gardening. I don’t mean to giggle at Barrett’s sister, but this certainly sounds like the typical to-do list of a recluse to me. Most of it is mine, too. I must also say that in my experience, reclusiveness does not preclude visitation upon gardens, limited interaction with family members, or the occasional trip outside of the house. Reclusiveness is more of a state of mind than a literal arrangement of affairs, although the state of mind does end up radically diminishing one’s affairs.
Regarding Barrett’s mental state, the surprising thing would of course be if he were remotely sane and stable. It’s not exactly a well-kept secret that the greatest of artistic sorts have their troubles. Often this can manifest as relatively harmless eccentricity, but even in the most benign individuals, it will generally veer into something more alarming sooner or later. It’s a fine line; some lucky individuals just veer slightly back and forth, while some cross the line and never come back. Rob Stilwell has told me that he had a friend who after much thought resolved that only two great artistic individuals in all of history were sane: Chaucer and Bach. And Rob and I have our doubts about Bach.
I understand that Barrett’s sister’s view is probably the most compassionate of all – it shows a full acceptance of him. Loving any particularly complex, troubled soul means accepting all parts of the person. Attempts at chastisement or “correction” will certainly accomplish nothing (a fact that seems to be vastly misunderstood by many), and showing acceptance and appreciation for the whole person is the kindest and most helpful thing one can do. I’m not sure his sister’s choice to call his withdrawal “selfishness” is any improvement over other alternative “labels”; but in any case, it is understandable how the family member of a person with fame and legacy might have a well-meaning wish to deflect some of the seemingly more damaging comments and labels.
If Barrett should not be romanticized for his withdrawal, neither does he have to be condemned or pathologized. We don’t have to bandy about labels or diagnoses just to acknowledge that an outcome took place that maybe shouldn’t have; and just because Barrett perhaps found happiness and other pursuits and peace in seclusion, which indeed should be respected, does not mean that it was the best outcome for him or for anyone else.
This points to the fact that no matter how compassionate or even “realistic” a view is, that doesn’t make it necessarily accurate; it doesn’t make it the truth. Truth extends beyond reality into the ways things should or could be. Certainly a man can’t be expected to yield to every expectation the world has of him, as his sister pointed out. However, the degree of beauty that Barrett possessed, and the degree that others continued to wish to work with him or to experience new work from him, is surely a part of the truth.
I will cop to imposing my own philosophy on the matter, and if Barrett wanted to withdraw from the world, that can indeed be respected. But the evidence does not fully point to that, either. Barrett’s actions don’t belie a man who chose to withdraw, or who was merely following his own “selfish” will. It’s not as though Barrett left Pink Floyd and went off into some idyllic sunset. The time between Barrett being shut out of Pink Floyd and his withdrawal to Cambridge was no less than ten years (1968-1978). He attempted to return on his own to London in 1982, but lasted only two weeks, then walked the 50 miles back to Cambridge.
You don’t walk 50 miles from London back home to your mother’s house in Cambridge where you subsequently withdraw forever from the rest of the world because you’ve been going through terrific times in your life; you also don’t show up during your former band’s recording sessions and sit sullenly in reception, or go to their shows and glare at them, because life has turned out pleasingly for you. It is not as though Barrett’s break with Pink Floyd was a clean one. Their relationship died a slow, excruciating death – all parties were reluctant to give up on each other. One of Waters’ lines from “Shine On,” says, “Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.” Though this references Barrett’s mental state, it can just as easily point to this period during which he seemed to almost literally haunt or stalk the band. For a long time, he showed up at the strangest times and the strangest places.
At the time of his dissolution from Pink Floyd, Barrett was in his twenties. We often see our best and truest, even if also clumsy and foolish, impulses in our youth, because we haven’t had time to be beaten yet. That Barrett attempted for many years to be a successful musician, that he continued to try to live in London, that he once crazily followed his former band to Ibiza to ask for their help on his solo album, that as late as 1975 in his visit to the Wish You Were Here sessions he offered his services, even if out of his mind when he did it, shows unmistakable impulses to connect. A man who attempts to make solo albums, no matter how fractured those attempts, was not ready to give up on music or the world. That he then retreated the 50 miles from London back to Cambridge to his mother’s house says to me that his subsequent withdrawal from these things was neither entirely voluntary nor selfish. And that he turned away entirely from music during these later years and didn’t ever want to have to look at it again doesn’t mean that he didn’t want it. Granted, his seclusion might have been the only or most “realistic” move left for him. But that doesn’t make it “right” or “true,” nor does it negate the validity and truth of the wishes of all of those who mourned him, missed him, and wanted to work with him.
Barrett’s sister nor David Gilmour nor anyone at all can be seen as any final authority on the matter. Their words may or may not have something to do with the “truth,” and may be well-meaning attempts to deflect certain damages. The nature of Barrett’s breakdown and withdrawal from the world is something only he would have known. And probably he didn’t know either.
Emerson said, “Music…takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are.” It isn’t always about the “actual.” Sometimes who we are, who we could have been, who we are or were meant to be, is a deeper truth going beyond what is merely “actual.” Rather than trust the place where Barrett ended up in his head, ultimately I find that my heart and intuition most trust Barrett’s childhood friend, Roger Waters, both in his tears at Barrett’s unrecognizable state when he showed up during the recording of “Shine On,” and in his pronouncement “wish you were here.”
We all know how to wish. The problem lies in the words you and here. Many of us spend a lifetime trying to locate either one.
