Jeff Miers' Sound Check: Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright leaves a powerful legacy
Being in a band for any length of time is a tough row to hoe.
Inevitably, the person with the biggest mouth, the greatest force of will and often, but not always, the most clear and abundant talent climbs over his band mates to plant his flag at the top of the hill. If there has ever been a true, equal-footed democracy in a band for any considerable length of time, I’m not aware of it. There’s always someone pushing his will on someone else, forever and ever, Amen.
Sometimes, this is for the greater good. As much as I and so many love and respect George Harrison, for example, he was never going to be as strong a songwriter as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, even if he came awfully close on several occasions. This was hard for Harrison to endure, on a personal level, but we have to face the fact that the Beatles’ canon of work doesn’t really suffer for it, and most listeners are probably perfectly happy with the way things turned out, even if “Only a Northern Song” was banished to the wasteland of the “Yellow Submarine” soundtrack instead of being granted greater pride of placement. For every Mozart, there is, alas, a Salieri.
But imagine the Beatles without George Harrison. Imagine “Let It Be” without that stellar guitar solo; picture “Abbey Road” without “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something”; “Revolver” without “Love You Too”; “The White Album” minus “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” They wouldn’t be anywhere near the same, would they?
Now picture “The Dark Side of the Moon” without “The Great Gig in the Sky” and “Us and Them.” It’s a three-legged dog, to be sure.
When Richard Wright succumbed to cancer Monday, at age 65, he forever snuffed out the candle of hope held aloft by fans of progressive music for decades — that the band he helped form, Pink Floyd, would bury the hatchets and hammers long enough to get it together for one last go-round. One hopes that, in death, Wright is granted the respect and bestowed with the stature that, in life, he never actively sought.
Like Harrison in the Beatles, Wright worked in the considerable shadows cast by his partners in Floyd, Roger Waters and David Gilmour. And like Harrison in his band, Wright rather quietly contributed some of the most indelible moments in Floyd’s storied recording career. Here are but a few of them.
• “Welcome to the Machine,” from “Wish You Were Here”: “Wish You Were Here,” the whole album, is Wright’s masterpiece. On the dark, foreboding Waters tune “Welcome to the Machine,” it is indeed Wright’s synthesizers that add to the sense of dread, isolation and alienation that so ably mirrors the lyric. It’s absolutely stunning work.
• “Echoes,” from “Meddle”: This early epic encapsulates Wright’s abilities as psychedelic/ cinematic sound effects man, funky Hammond organ player and purveyor of the grandiose coda. Again, breathtaking. He shared the lead vocal with Gilmour on this slab of genius, too.
• “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” from “Animals”: This is a song of disgust and righteous indignation, penned by Waters, but anchored by Wright’s opening arpeggio, which returns as a theme throughout the piece.
• “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” from “Wish You Were Here”: No one else could make a synthesizer sound as achingly human and organic as did Wright. Many tried. But “Shine On” is a master class in part-writing, texture, tone and note choice. It’s a testament to the perfection of Wright’s playing here that everyone who has played the song in various post-Floyd incarnations since has pretty much repeated Wright’s original performance note for note. It is as it should be.
• “Us and Them,” from “Dark Side of the Moon”: Laid-back and firmly in the Romantic school, this beautiful Wright-penned chord progression sits at the heart of one of Pink Floyd’s five greatest songs.
• “The Great Gig in the Sky,” from “Dark Side of the Moon”: Again, a Wright chord progression was the leaping-off point for this yearning- drenched explosion of sound.
• “One of These Days,” from “Meddle”: Here , Wright’s playing brings a disconcertingly subtle sense of thinly veiled menace to the proceedings. He provides the hook that makes the song memorable.
• “On an Island,” from “David Gilmour: Live in Gdansk” (out next Tuesday): A heart-rending epitaph for Wright, who toured as part of Gilmour’s solo band last year, lending his gorgeously atmospheric keyboards and ethereal singing to what was praised the world over as a transcendent success. When he and Gilmour harmonize during “On an Island,” all seems right in the world, for a time, at least.•
