Pink Floyd - The Early Years 1965-1972

Pitchfork 88

“Today’s underground may be the answer to tomorrow’s leisure,” intones an earnest British newscaster, narrating film of London’s U.F.O. Club circa January 1967 while its house band, Pink Floyd, jams amid the flashing lights. And darned if he wasn’t right: the black-and-white segment is now found on the massive new $550, 11-CD/9-DVD/8 Blu-Ray box set, Pink Floyd: The Early Years, 1965–1972. With over 27 hours of material, the package overflows with replica 45 rpm singles, gig flyers, posters, tickets, sheet music, and more, and the ark-like box should provide serious leisure-time satisfaction for both longtime Floyd freaks and aspiring heads alike.

The Early Years tells the remarkable story of Pink Floyd’s career up through the moment they became part of yesterday’s underground and today’s mainstream, stopping just before the writing and recording of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon. Charting the band’s progression from the wig-flipping baroque psychedelia of Syd Barrett’s songwriting through their wooliest jams and into the new space beyond, The Early Years doesn’t follow a straight path. It shows an astonishing capacity to turn corners and evolve, a long arc that might give hope to every band jamming away in its practice space in search of a voice.

Beginning as a blues combo with the perfectly British drug-punning name the Tea Set (“tea” being slang for weed, maaaan), the band rechristened themselves as the Pink Floyd Sound by the time of the 1965 demo sessions that open the box’s first disc. Though not particularly competent or interesting R&B players, as demonstrated by their cover of Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” just as much as an untitled 1968 “Blues Jam” on a later disc, it’s fascinating to hear Barrett’s already distinctly bent rhythm guitar as filtered through the Bo Diddley beat of “Double O Bo.” Unheard before being released in 2015 as a double 7" for Record Store Day, the 1965 sessions also highlight the first fruits of Barrett’s songwriting, the playfulness of “Butterfly” displaying the stylist and singer he already was. “Along with Anthony Newley, he was the first guy I’d heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent,” David Bowie would say of Barrett, a madcap permission-granter for a new generation of British musicians less beholden to imitating their American heroes.

Leaving the band in a haze of mental health issues in early 1968, Barrett’s legend would loom over the quartet for years. On the set’s volume from that year, titled Germin/Ation, Floyd’s earliest songwriting without their former leader sounds like a drab imitation, with keyboardist Rick Wright’s “It Would Be So Nice” anticipating the B-list ’60s twee-pop parodied by Spinal Tap on “Cups and Cakes.” Instead, Floyd would start to find themselves in the deep space of their early jam centerpiece, “Interstellar Overdrive,” the nearly 10-minute freak-out that closed their 1967 debut and whose descending chromatic riff dropped them into the beyond. With seven versions on the set, including a devastatingly weird DVD/Blu Ray-only 1969 take of the later slower arrangement featuring Frank Zappa on guitar, the song would provide the first portal for the band’s furthest explorations. (One of the set’s few big bummers is that it doesn’t offer audio-only downloads of the live performances featured on the visual discs.)

For fans of Floyd’s experimental tendencies, The Early Years offers enormous fun, beginning with a never-bootlegged soundtrack session. Recorded by the Barrett-era lineup in October 1967 to accompany an abstract film by John Latham, the nine takes are all light show swirl, star-splatter guitar, and primitively convincing free drumming by Nick Mason. And though, later on, Barrett replacement David Gilmour would rightly become known as a guitar hero, his playing throughout The Early Years is judicious when it comes to solos. Wailing some tasty space-blues on “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” during a jam-heavy August 1969 set from Amsterdam and a blistering “Atom Heart Mother” from Montreux ’70, Gilmour just as often fits into the band’s tapestry of gentle cymbal taps and moody keyboard filigrees.

Where their American countercultural cousins in the Grateful Dead found mind-manifesting wonder in their musical interpretation of cosmic space, the Floyd more often channeled the cold vacuum and existential tedium, perhaps a reflection of the post-psychedelic fate of Barrett. “Moonhead,” their soundtrack to the Moon landing performed live on BBC TV and captured on Bonus Continu/Ation, is a deliberate controlled float, more proto-symphonic than hippie jam. It’s this questioning sadness that the band starts to tap into during their 1969 sessions, the first mournful strains that would find their fullest expression on Dark Side of the Moon. The watershed event comes when Waters’ “Cymbaline” and “Green is the Colour” and Gilmour’s “The Narrow Way” all first turn up on the box, part of a May 1969 BBC recording for John Peel; it’s one of seven sessions for the DJ, all classic bootlegs in their own right.

In slightly different and renamed form, all three songs play a part in one of the box’s most enticing if imperfect pieces: a complete live recording of The Journey and The Man, the band’s first attempt at conceptual suites of music, performed as two halves of a show on several occasions in 1969. Though fans have attempted to reconstruct the performances as though it were a lost album, the actual product includes reworked existing pieces, going back as far as “Pow. R Toc H.,” from their 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, here becoming “The Pink Jungle.” Performed with onstage happenings and fourth-wall-breaking intrusions, the music is a fascinating forerunner to Floyd’s more successful theatrics. With sci-fi noir atmospherics (“The Labyrinths of Auximines”), live musique concrète featuring band-members sawing through wood (“Work”), overblown drum solos in disguise (“Doing It”), as well as genetic connections to the Anglophonic fun of the Syd era (Waters’ “Afternoon,” collected as “Biding My Time” on 1971’s Relics), the two suites are first drafts. That the band scrapped them and moved along to the next ambitious projects in the queue is yet another testament to their developing editing skills.

As career periods go, the seven years of Pink Floyd’s Early Years don’t exactly match other intense eras of classic rock creativity, like Bob Dylan from 1961 to 1968 or the Beatles from 1962 to 1969. But this set illustrates something about both Pink Floyd’s own path and the rewards of resilience. While remembered for their outsized onstage gestures like inflatable pigs and the disassembly of a giant wall, the real revelation of The Early Years is to hear exactly how slowly and modestly Pink Floyd came into themselves; despite the scale of their ambition, the box feels less a blueprint than a scale model. While Barrett’s contributions remain singular, the development of the band over these years wasn’t so much genius than inspired workmanship, not all of it successful. David Gilmour’s “Fat Old Sun,” appearing first on a July 1970 Peel session, is less compelling in its 15-minute jammed-out incarnation the following year. “Embryo,” though, develops from a three-minute post-Barrett psych-folk bauble on a 1968 BBC session to a fully realized 10-minute prog arrangement by 1971, the band’s restlessness apparent and worthwhile.

There’s plenty to gnaw on, from Barrett’s whimsy to the formless countercultural yearning of the middle years to the emergence of Waters and Gilmour as songwriters to the brilliant suite-making of 1971’s “Echoes.” While the band would shatter amid acrimonious lawsuits a decade after this set’s conclusion, the music is the sound of musicians working in concert towards an unseen and unknown goal. In the modern age of oversized vault-clearing and copyright-protecting box sets, there is something resoundingly human about The Early Years, which only makes the achievements more extraordinary. Concluding with a new mix of 1972’s Obscured by Clouds (excluding bonus material), one can hear all the pieces of their more iconic future albums clicking into place and the sound of space closing around them into something more fixed. But that’s the topic of another box set.