The cows on
the cover of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother are far more
famous than the music within. Pink Floyd was a band of stages. The Syd years (Piper
at the Gates of Dawn and Saucerful of Secrets), the
impossible years (how could one band create four such monumental LPs?), the
Roger Waters "solo" LPs (The Wall and The Final
Cut), and the non-Roger Years.
There are
those albums we skim over like the soundtracks for More and Obscured
By Clouds, and then there's Atom Heart Mother. EMI records
under L.G. Wood signed off on the LP which didn’t have the album's title or the
name of the band, just pictures of cows, and still, the album made it to No, 1
on the British Charts.
Side One is
the monumental title cut (23 minutes worth) which is unlike anything else Pink
Floyd ever did, filled with orchestrations and experimentation; indeed it is
the apogee of the experimental years. Pink Floyd by Atom had nixed the pop
philosophy and until "Money" didn't release a single from 1978 to
1973.
Prior
to Atom Heart Mother, the band had another soundtrack
offering, Zabriskie Point, this time with odd bedfellows The
Grateful Dead. Most of PF's material was cut from the soundtrack and that,
mostly the creation of Gilmour, was the catalyst for the "Atom Heart
Mother" suite.
Pink Floyd
entered Abbey Road in early March to record on the studio’s newly installed
state-of-the-art eight-track recorders. Waters and Mason recorded the backing
track in one 23.44-minute take. "It demanded the full range of our limited
musicianship," said Mason. "We added, subtracted and multiplied the
elements, but it still seemed to lack an essential something." That
“something” was the orchestration and choir, the work of Mason friend, Ron
Geesin.
Waters'
called the opening movement "plodding," but three minutes in,
Gilmour's slide takes over, underpinning a mournful cello. Here one gets a
taste of what Pink Floyd would soon achieve on Meddle and Dark Side. On
the fourth movement, "Funky Dung," the guitar and Hammond organ play
tag on what sounds a bit like "Any Colour You Like," while the
choir's gospel-like vocals evoke those heard on "Eclipse." The
suite’s fifth section, "Mind Your Throats Please," combines Nick
Mason’s gruff "Silence in the studio!" warning with Rick Wright's
piano as played through a Leslie speaker, a trick later used on "Echoes."
Side two is
Pink Floyd at their most merry and poppy, more so even than the hit days of
"See Emily Play" and "Paint Box." Side two concludes with
the odd "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast," with its run-on groove of a
dripping faucet.
Tape operator Alan Parsons said, "Floyd had a general aversion to record
company people," Parsons said. "An A&R guy showed up and Roger and Ron
said, ‘We’ll play you a bit of the album.'" Prior to his arrival, they hid a
turntable under the desk and proceeded to play an old 78rpm disc through the
studio speakers. The A&R man looked baffled and walked out. "But we were
all unable to keep a straight face."
Nick Mason said Pink Floyd "never threw
any musical ideas away," and Ron Geesin recalls the four songs on the album's
second side developing from "scraps of things they had lying around".
It's the lyrics that make Roger Waters' "If" so
charming. "If
I were a good, man I'd understand the spaces between friends." Ironically, Geesin was there the day Barrett appeared at Abbey Road. He sat there staring at his old bandmates, then disappeared.
Next up was Rick Wright's Summer ’68, a song
about a casual encounter with a groupie, featuring the EMI Pops Orchestra’s
buoyant brass. "In the summer of '68 there were groupies
everywhere," Wright said. "They’d come and look after you like a
personal maid… and leave you with a dose of the clap."
My favorite is Gilmour's "Fat Old Sun." "It's fantastically overlooked," he said Gilmour. "[I] tried very
hard to push the others… but they weren’t having it."
The album end, of course, with "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast,"
a meandering instrumental augmented by the sound of Floyd roadie Alan Styles
cooking bacon, eggs and toast, and rendered in sumptuous quadrophonic sound. "One take went, ‘Egg Frying Take One,’ followed by, ‘Whoops!’ as the egg
dropped," Alan Parsons recalled.
Atom
Heart Mother is
one of those deep Pink Floyd listens, but everyone should hear it once to see
the direction the band would take with Meddle, and then, of course,
with Dark Side of the Moon. You may even find yourself
gravitating back to it – it does have an odd musical spell.
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