Posted 12:24 PM by Alfred

When I was in high school, I got pretty deep into Pink Floyd. The first Floyd album I ever picked up was Animals, which I just happen to be bumpin' right this very minute. The interesting thing is that I saw the factory or whatever it is that's on the cover of Animals in real life, from a train in England, before I ever even listened to any of their music.

I was on a month long trip around Europe with one of my best friends and a group of about 25 high school students, "chapperoned" by a few adults from the school district. Chapperoned gets the quotation mark treatments because, basically, these people let us run around Europe like a pack of wild dogs with practically no supervision. It was truly a beautiful experience for an experience-hungry 16 year old. My buddy and I were the youngest on the trip, it was the summer between our sophomore and junior years. Everyone else had just graduated. So we were like the little runts, but it was all good.

Anyway, sidetracked again, goddammit. We're on this train going through England, and some guys point out this big factory and they're like "holy shit! That's the factory on the cover of that Pink Floyd album!" And I'm like, who the fuck are Pink Floyd? So I look at this factory and it looks fukn trippy, like haunted or some shit, and I'm like dude, that's pretty damn cool. And then they explained how on the album cover there's a pig flying through the air between the two smokestacks, or whatever the fuck those things are. If you look on the wrap around of the picture on the inside sleeve you can see the train tracks that I must have been on. Chug a chug a chug a.

So anyway, cut back to the USA. Over the course of a month in Europe I had gotten drunk for the first time (Lucerne, Switzerland), hung out in a den of smoked out pot puffers watching a reggae show and wandered through the infamous red light district (Amsterdam, and no, I didn't partake, of either vice), barfed out of my first upper story window (more stories in the future on that front maybe, I could go on and on, well, let's not), hung out on my first nude beach (Nice, France), participated in fraudulent money exchange for goods - basically full on larceny (Greece). Ok that's kind of a funny story, I kind of feel bad about it now, but well, the things you do when you're a kid. Ok, well, no, later, somebody, remind me to tell the story about the Yugoslavian money and the greek merchant. No really, it'll kill you. Seriously, it's a winner. Ha ha, just thinking about it. Damn I could go on and on and on and on about that Europe trip, but I was talking about Pink Floyd.

ANYWAY - damn I hadn't delved into those memories for a while. The thing about going crazy places like Europe, especially when you're that young, is you think, oh, I'll be back pretty soon, but here it is, 13-14 years later, and I ain't been back yet (but we're going next year - gyeah!)

Fuck I can't get back to my Pink Floyd story and I really can't recall why it was interesting. Anyway. Oh yeah. I'm back in Glendale, California, after all my experiences in Europe, I think I'm a man of the world, you know, a Big Tymer. And I'm like, remembering the feeling of connectedness to that factory that I saw from the train, and I'm at a used records shop, and I find the vinyl, for like really cheap, and I pick it up, and I'm being branwashed by the imagery and I take it home and put it on my record player in my room and lay in my bed and look at the ceiling, and it's like, so, so deep. (Sidenote - one thing I thought, and still think, about the vinyl of this album, is that if you look at the cover of the sleeve, it's just the picture, no "Pink Floyd" no "Animals" no nothing. I thought that was fukn raw, to not even have the name of the band on the album cover. The CD cover sells out and puts the name of the band and album, which pisses me off, but well, the music is the same, but without that friendly record player hum and background distortion, and well I'm babbling like an idiot again, back to your regularly scheduled program.) I felt like the original philosopher that first discovered total consciousness. For those that haven't heard Animals, thou shalt pull thine head from thine arse and goeth to thy local music merchant and invoke the name of Roger Waters and cry forth "Bring me Animals by Pink Floyd, foul knave, for thine heart is a wretched entanglement of Orc brains and toadstool stew!" Animals rules in so many ways, the music, the intro, the tuneage, the lyrics, the subject matter, shit! It is good stuff.

That should hook you up with the discount. Werd. So as I was saying, I was opened up into Pink Floyd-ville. And it was a good place. Not always a happy place, but an introspective, out there, cosmic karmic wonderland of sonic wa-wa. So Pink Floyd is good stuff. Soon after I picked up Atom-Heart Mother (which I thought was cool as goddamm hell, for Pink floyd to have the balls, as a big time band with big-time front men, to come out with an all instrumental album that fukn ROCKED but was so psychadellically mellow), Works (kind of a collection type thing), Final Cut (crazy war stories about roger waters' dad), Dark Side of the Moon (their all-time classic, but oddly, not really one of my favorites of theirs), Wish you Were Here (probably my second favorite after animals), and a bunch of others. I was partial to the stuff with Roger Waters singing, but, hey that other dude (Dave Gilmour?) he's aiight. Pink Floyd came back in the late 80's with that album with like 100 beds on a beach (Momentary Lapse of Reason, yeah that's the ticket), which was pretty cool, but I don't know, Pink Floyd and no Roger Waters just ain't the same cup o tea for me, at least, it's like good, but not, like great, as in a great sandwich.

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