#41 Pink Floyd – Meddle
Pink Floyd –Meddle
One of my great WXRT moments in my life was listening to the station when they played the 23 minute ’Echoes’ after midnight. This has to go back at least 20 years and it was one of those moments where the DJ must have thought that getting in a 23 minute track at the 1 o’clock hour would be clever. (No, this was not the “Midnight Album”).
I think that when most people think of the band Pink Floyd, they think ‘The Wall’ or ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and to be honest with you these albums only scratch the surface about Floyd’s legacy. The Wall, the brainchild of Roger Waters is such a departure from their earlier material playing the role of the Rock Opera but not necessarily a progressive one. ‘Meddle’ is one of these tweener albums between the Sid Barrett psychaedelic days to the point where they get to ‘Dark Side’. I have to admit that this period has always been the most interesting in my opinion where they are still finding themselves out.
To give you an idea of how different the band was, Roger Waters was only the lead singer on 1 track on ‘Meddle’ and generally speaking his singing output on many of the albums during this period was fairly sparse.
‘Meddle’ always had a chilling effect on me, as if the album should be listened to in the autumn. I do have to admit that I am one of those fans that generally abides by seasonal rules when it comes to listening to certain music. For example, the opening track “One of These Days”, where you hear the blowing wind to the bass line, it just felt to me like a blustery November. And while ‘Fearless’ doesn’t evoke the transient nature of an album like “Dark Side of the Moon”, the album did provide a semblence of what Pink Floyd meant to me.
‘Dark Side of the Moon’ was an album that is almost too perfect, there are no crevices to explore. Sonically it is perfect, and I might say just a bit too perfect to end up among my 60 albums on this list. Putting something on a list is also saying that there is part of me that is part of this album. I can see places and streetcorners and people.
There are foreign elements as well. ‘Fearless’ has European football fans singing and a track of this singing is playing in the background.
The albums epic song is ‘Echoes’, a 23 minute long expedition that look the entire second side of the lp when it came out. It has elements of a deep sea dive or 2001: A Space Odyssey in its sparseness at moments and begins to show those elements Pink Floyd becomes masters at and that is arrangements.
The legacy of the album is probably underappreciated in my opinion but at times it’s better to sometimes call albums your own rather than having to share them with everyone else.