Here's a nice article about Roger
Wed: 07-12-06
Appreciation: Syd Barrett
Story by Joe Tangari The recent death of Syd Barrett will lead to talk about his drug abuse, his retreat from music, and his legend. Strange that a key role in one of the most successful bands of all time should cast him as a cult figure, but such was his life. In the eyes of many, he became something of an abstraction, a figurehead or a symbol more than an artist, and as such his death feels confusing, as though it’s now happened for a second time.
The details of Barrett’s life and too-brief time at the pinnacle of British psychedelia have become so clouded in myth and rumor in the past 30 years that it can be difficult to extricate nuggets of fact from the fiction. Born Roger Keith Barrett in Cambridge, he acquired the nickname Syd-- a poignant reminder of the two very different lives he lived-- around age 15.
Barrett was a founding member of Pink Floyd, who in their early r&b days went under an assortment of names such as Sigma 6, the Tea Set, and the Screaming Abdabs, until he rechristened them after blues musician Floyd Council and medicine show singer Pink Anderson in 1965. As Pink Floyd made the transition to psychedelic and improvisatory rock pioneers, Barrett emerged as the natural leader and songwriter.
Even as the band toiled in obscurity, Barrett took strange, relatively lo-fi risks with his music, sliding ball-bearings down his guitar strings while the Beatles were constructing
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band down the hall. On Pink Floyd's debut album,
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, songs like “Astronomy Domine” and “Interstellar Overdrive” greatly pushed the boundaries of rock music, while “The Gnome”, “Bike”, and “Lucifer Sam” helped define British psychedelic whimsy.
Outside of the studio, however, Barrett’s unpredictability had fellow Floyd bandmates Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Rick Wright at wit’s end. As 1967 drew to a close, they hired David Gilmour to take Barrett’s place on stage, with the intent of turning Barrett into a Brian Wilson figure-- writing the songs and gracing the records but staying far away from the live setting. This proved singularly unworkable. In early 1968, they stopped picking Barrett up for gigs, leading to the final split. Managers Peter Jenner and Andrew King, who had founded Blackhill Enterprises as a partnership with Pink Floyd, stuck with Barrett, whose heart-breaking final contribution to the band, “Jugband Blues”, closes their sophomore album,
A Saucerful of Secrets.
Pink Floyd, of course, went on to sell hundreds of millions of records, but never quite shook Barrett’s legacy, essentially composing an entire album around his story in 1975’s
Wish You Were Here. While the title track longs for the company of a man who no longer existed at that point, the other songs attack the irony of wanting fame you’re unable to handle when you obtain it head-on. Without overtly admitting it, Waters wrote of Barrett: “Now there’s a look in your eye/ Like black holes in the sky.” It echoed the sentiment of famed Brit folk producer Joe Boyd in June 1967, who seeing Barrett for the first time in months noted a change. “He just looked at me,” said Boyd, who had produced Pink Floyd's "Arnold Layne" single. “I looked right in his eye and there was no twinkle, no glint. You know, nobody home.”
Barrett, meanwhile, recorded two shambling solo albums,
The Madcap Laughs and
Barrett, with assistance from Waters and Gilmour. Both were released in 1970 and showcased the troubled songwriter in different settings.
The Madcap Laughs is intimate, mostly Barrett and his guitar with occasional augmentation, while the other album was more fleshed-out, with plenty of psychedelic flourishes. These records represent the last time Barrett had any involvement in a record bearing his name. Many other compilations, including the essential
Opel, have popped up over the years, though, and archive diggers seemingly haven’t exhausted the cutting room just yet. A short-lived band called Stars, featuring ex-Pink Fairy Twink on drums, barely even existed before flashing out.
After the abortive attempt at regaining his form with Stars, Barrett left music and faded from public view, living with his mother Winfred, though he never truly became a recluse as many have claimed. He dropped in on Pink Floyd’s
Wish You Were Here sessions quite unexpectedly (and confusingly) in 1975, and could be seen quite often in his Cambridge neighborhood bicycling or buying the paper and cigarettes. He unfortunately never did see the end of harassment from obsessives, tabloid creeps and nosy reporters who couldn’t accept that Syd Barrett was now just plain old Roger again and wished to be left alone. He stopped answering to Syd decades before his death.
Barrett spent brief stints in institutions during the 1980s, but always on a voluntary basis. In his later years, he was said to have taken up painting, though he simply stacked up the ones he was happy with in his home and never made any moves toward displaying them or regaining a public profile. His recordings, though, leave a legacy that still rings strongly through popular music and likely always will.
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