27 janeiro 2008

Money: It's still a hit

On July 24, 1968, in an event still shrouded in mystery, Pink Floyd appeared onstage at the Summer Music Festival at cavernous Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They were not onstage for long.

The lineup that night, at least as it is reported officially, included the Troggs, two forgettable folk-pop ensembles, and the Who, who were not yet huge stars (that would come the following year, after Tommy was released). I attended the concert with bandmates from the Phase Shift Network, a tragic, acid-pop ensemble in which I, like current Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee and Sting, played bass. But I have no recollection of the Troggs, Mandala or the Friends of the Family being there that evening.

As I recall it, the lineup included the Box Tops (headed by future Big Star cult hero Alex Clilton), Country Joe & the Fish (good-natured Frisco weirdos) and the soulful, homegrown Delfonics, with Pink Floyd the headliners who took the stage immediately after Wilson Pickett wrapped up his scintillating rendition of Mustang Sally. I have no recollection whatsoever of the Who being part of this extravaganza. But in saying this, it is possible that I have conflated one, two or even 30 events, in the way that people who may have attended one too many Pink Floyd concerts so often will. For those steeped in the lore of Pink Floyd are nothing if not addled.

Municipal Stadium, later re-christened John F Kennedy Stadium, then finally torn down to make way for a sports complex, was viewed as a white elephant from the moment it was built in 1925. Hideous, vast, hard to get to, the faux gladiatorial venue was a promoter's nightmare; except on rare occasions, like the day Gene Tunney fought Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship of the world in 1926, or the night Phil Collins sang In the Air Tonight at the end of Live Aid in 1985, its 110,000 seats were never filled. Though the Rolling Stones played there quite often - presumably because they could sell a lot of tickets - it was a terrible place to hear music even in the best of times. And on July 24, 1968, it rained.

The Who, whether they were ever even slated to appear, did not perform that night, but Pink Floyd did. Armed with enough equipment to be heard on Alpha Centauri, the band launched into a loving, deafening rendition of one of those trademark Floydian numbers that started on Tuesday and ended at Christmas. It may have been Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun or Interstellar Overdrive, as the band was touring behind its Saucerful of Secrets LP, but I cannot say for sure, as I could never tell any of Pink Floyd's songs apart. Pink Floyd started playing the song around nine in the evening and would have finished it seven weeks later except that the rain intensified to the point that the feisty lads had to wrap things up and vacate the stage. It was a truly unforgettable concert, though most of the details provided here are gleaned from interviews with old friends and Google searches, as I remember nothing about the show except that folks all the way out in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, could hear the guitars, and Wilson Pickett, who was probably not there, gave a performance I will never forget.

Pink Floyd, more than any other arena act, more than any other of the great dinosaur bands of the Sixties, achieved titanic success without having the things in place that were seemingly needed to achieve success on that level. They did not write catchy tunes. They did not have a flamboyant showman fronting the band. Their lead guitarist was a bit puffy. They were neither lovable like the Beatles and the Beach Boys, nor saucy and irreverent like the Stones, nor did they evince an air of danger and menace like the Doors and Led Zeppelin. They were spooky, enigmatic, strange, recording songs with names like Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk.

As the psychedelic era that spawned them faded and the West's mood and values shifted, theirs did not. They continued to make somber, ethereal music you could not dance to, putting the "lug" back in "lugubrious". True, they gradually became less eerie and weird and pretentious and daring than they would have been had the whack-job visionary Syd Barrett stayed in the band, but his exit did not precipitate an overnight sellout like Genesis, a snooty art band that went completely mainstream and down-market a minute-and-a-half after Peter Gabriel scooted out the door.

There was always something resolute, uncompromising, implacable about Pink Floyd. They started out as the kinds of guys who would come to gritty places like Philadelphia and play their rambling, otherworldly, interstellar overdrive material in a blue-collar city where intergalactic zaniness was frowned upon, and they pretty much stayed that way. The most remarkable thing about Pink Floyd, a band whose actual name may be The Pink Floyd, is that they didn't go in much for fast songs, and didn't sound like they'd listened to much black music, at a time when everyone played fast songs and everyone tried to sound like they were black. Well, everyone except the Grateful Dead.

This is what makes Pink Floyd's 1973 hit Money such an oddity. The highest-charting single from The Dark Side of the Moon, the brooding concept album that would stay on the Billboard charts for 14 years, Money isn't like any other song on the album and isn't really like anything else Pink Floyd ever committed to vinyl. Though it is not truly fast, and is played in a choppy time signature, it is, by the standards of Floyd's dozy catalogue, so zippy it almost seems that Jerry Lee Lewis was filling in for the band the day they recorded it. Sung by David Gilmour, but written by Roger Waters, Money does not deal with such perennial Pink Floyd themes as paranoia, insanity, the meaning of life, the passage of time, or how long it's going to be before the band finally breaks up; it deals with crass materialism. It is to the Pink Floyd canon what Ruby Tuesday is to the Stones' songbook: it may be a great song, but it doesn't quite fit. Money is the only Pink Floyd song I can identify as soon as I hear it on the radio, and it is the only Pink Floyd song my kids do not hate.

Even though the permanent damage to my hearing probably resulted from the three Pink Floyd concerts I attended between 1968 and 1973, and even though I never really cared all that much for the group, I will never forget the performance they gave at Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium on July 24, 1968. They were almost as good as Wilson Pickett.

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