When I was alone you promised a stem from your heart
My head kissed the ground
I was half the way down
Treading the sand
Please
Please lend a hand
I'm only a person
Whose armbands beat
And his hands hang tall
Won't you miss me?
Wouldn't you miss me at all?
The Crazy Diamond is dead.
He was already dead, some say. His mind was fried by electric flashes of insanity and chaos, or perhaps too much LSD, or maybe the Xanax was much stronger in the '60s... nevertheless, Roger "Syd" Barrett ceased being much of anything as the '70s trudged on, content to eat pork chops at his mum's countryside home while painting in the garden.
He grew old and fat, like Elvis. But all eyes were on Elvis, making him paranoid. Syd never attained even a fraction of the overwhelming fame that The King received, but apparently that short yet mercurial brush with stardom did a number on him.
Don't cry for Syd, because like I said, he's been dead for some time. Cry instead for the man who disappeared from sight decades ago, the sparkling personality that created the first incarnation of Pink Floyd in 1966, the whimsical flower child who not only wrote songs about gnomes and scarecrows and mice named Gerald but mothers telling bedtime stories to their children, mischievous cats, voyeurs stealing women's undergarments off of laundry lines, and the Universe.
Pink Floyd after Syd's departure was an entirely different entity. Their music was popular and epic and cerebral, with Roger Waters taking the reins and composing rock operas using the latest technology and with the cutting edge in sound electronics at his disposal. It barely resembled the acid-party Britpop of the Syd years.
I love Pink Floyd's music after Syd, but there is a special place in my heart for the Barrett era.
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In his prime, Syd Barrett was an artist, a writer, a singer and a musician. He was handsome and witty and terribly charming. He was fashionable and hip and mysterious.
He taught David Gilmour, the man who took Syd's place in the later line-up, how to play blues guitar. He inspired Roger Waters to write lyrics (it should be noted that Waters has gone on to pen some of the finest lyrics in all of rock music) and he loomed so large in the lives of his peers that, years after his mental collapse, his former band found themselves paying him a tribute with the album Wish You Were Here.
Oddly enough, during the sessions for that classic album Syd showed up unexpectedly. He was overweight and balding. He looked disheveled and unkempt. And he wanted to jam with his old buddies again.
But nothing materialized. Syd may have wanted to play again, but he was in no shape to do much of anything. It was depressing rather than inspirational for the rest of the band. In their eyes, it must have seen like such a huge fall from grace: going from hippie saint to clueless vegetable in the course of six years.
It haunted Waters often enough that he found himself lyrically invoking the ominous imagery of madness time and again. References to going insane and lunatics and hollow-eyed shells of men permeated his later opuses. The character of "Pink" in the rock opera The Wall (portrayed by Bob Geldof in the movie adaptation) is based on Waters but there's a lot of Syd in there too.
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Roky Erikson. Arthur Lee. Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Skip Spence.
"The acid casualties", as they are known, if anyone knows them at all.
And by anyone, I mean people who obsess over the most esoteric and obscure artists, out-of-print limited edition rare vinyl, and the footnotes of pop music history.
Compared to artists like Elvis, Madonna, The Beatles, or Michael Jackson, Syd Barrett is nothing. He's barely visible on the map. But the question is not how big could he have been but rather what happened to make such a promising young artist wig out?
People always blame drugs, which doesn't wash with me. I've heard countless stories about Keith Richards' drug abuse but never heard one single story about him getting paranoid and going insane.
I blame his temperament and general disposition. Unlike Richards, who has the physical constitution of an elephant and the lucid-eyed perspective of a man who knows his own strengths and weaknesses very well, Syd was a bit of a delicate flower. He wasn't rugged or macho-- he was sensitive, and inquisitive. He had a boyish charm and a likeable presence; there was never any danger present in his music. Only when he started going into catatonic fits and forgetting how to play his own songs onstage did he ever come close to being dangerous... and that's a relatively benign kind of danger because it doesn't hurt anyone except for the other guys in the group.
So they kicked him out. But they didn't one day say to him, "Syd, you're out." They eased him out, which is worse. It's the polite way, and it sucks because there's nothing polite about being told, "We don't need you anymore", no matter how many smiles and spins you put on it.
I used to listen to his solo albums all the time, the ones that Waters and Gilmour produced for him as some sort of amends or atonement for their shabby treatment. The albums were haphazardly produced, almost as an afterthought. Syd sounds bad, like a man on the verge of crumbling.
But underneath the false starts, strained vocals, and dodgy performances lies the last gleaming twinkle of his magic. No illness or condition could squelch the fire burning inside of him, even as he started to realize himself just how bad things had gotten.
He married a beautiful James Joyce poem ("Golden Hair") to music. He sang songs about rats and terrapin and Bob Dylan and Native American folklore-- he even wrote a song about the song he was singing at the moment!
I don't know why I identify with the burnouts. Is it because I see myself becoming a burnout? Maybe there's some romantic notion in all of it that I am gleaning. Possibly, I see their disintegration as some sort of transcendence. Rather than go the traditional route (money, girls, accolades, fame, and the inevitable downfall, followed by a comeback perhaps), these rock and roll suicides jump right into the fire that heats the frying pan.
Theirs was not a pose. They were not people who put on masks to perform, only to take them off when they left the stadium. They were not actors. They were real... and they were really weird too!
I think it's the weirdness that endears these types to me, because I know that I am weird to the bone, if not as weird as the Madcap himself, the late great Syd Barrett.
To paraphrase the ever-elegant (and disgustingly rich) Roger Waters: You crazy diamond, oh how you shined, for that one brief little moment, before I was even born, there you were singing your songs and playing your instrument, and even though you are long gone now your music is still around, fractured and frail but also trailblazing and bold.
This is the fate of the True Originals. They are not long for this world.
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