Oh, but I was bad for a while this winter, doing nothing but smoking weed and listening to Pink Floyd on headphones, spacing out, adrift at the Internet sea, sailing from site to site. For the extra intrepid listener, I recommend the unreleased songs "Vegetable Man" and "Scream Thy Last Scream" (they're on the Internet, idiot), and the box set Crazy Diamond, accurate portrayals of tripping after the laughter has ended. Unlike any of the other Floyd, Syd Barrett could actually write lyrics Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Saucerful of Secrets are the only Pink Floyd albums which hold up as literature. Syd Barrett fit in quite all right with my Arthur Rimbaud/Charles Baudelaire sell-your-soul-for-poetry myth. The discerning Pink Floyd scholar will note that the early Floyd far surpasses the later Floyd in terms of altered-state soundtracks, in favor of that sleek '70s sound which sold all those records. I majored in Syd Barrett (the original lead singer/guitarist of Pink Floyd who did too much acid and broke down, got fat, quit music, and moved in with his mother), the heart and soul of Pink Floyd. I picked up the Pink Floyd studies where my schizophrenic friend left off. That sounds like stoner blather, but someone's got to keep buying Dark Side of the Moon after all these years someone's got to fill the Pink Floyd laser shows every week at the Seattle Center someone has to keep renting The Wall (and that movie's so bad when you're sober) someone has to keep plastering posters on the walls of so many stoners. It does something, stretches things a bit, takes people further out of their heads, into inner space. What that little anecdote illustrates is that there's something rather intense about the Pink Floyd experience, especially when their discovery by kids coincides with the kids' first drug experiences. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and lived with his parents, never leaving the house, doing nothing but reading The Chronicles of Narnia and the Bhagavad-Gita over and over again. I wanted to bring it to my old friend, to show him that the mirrors did eventually end, but it was too late. Leafing through the special booklet of my 25th anniversary edition, I found the end of the image, the tiny speck in the mirror where the fuzzy original image resided. My irrational fear of Pink Floyd began to fade, and I finally mustered up the courage to buy Ummagumma for myself. Months later, after the fallout from the trip was clearing up, I began listening to Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The debate grew so fierce that he kicked me out of his house. If this cover held the secret of the universe, I wouldn't accept it. "But it has to end," I cried, refusing to admit that the image went on forever. It scared me and I began to panic, not yet ready for the other side. "It never ends," he said, as I began to disappear into the void of the third-eye infinity. #PINK FLOYD UMMAGUMMA LYRICS SERIES#We were on LSD when he passed me the cover of Pink Floyd's Ummagumma, which features a series of mirrors refracting themselves into infinity.
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