Quote of the Day: Steve Albini

I'm a big fan of musician and sound engineer Steve Albini, partly for his band, Shellac, and partly for what he's said about the music business. (See my post from last November about his article "The Problem With Music".)

So I was delighted to read an interview with Albini on GQ.com. He's articulate and opinionated, and not entirely negative about the state of the music business today.

But the best part was his response to the very last question, How would you describe your fashion?

"I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse. I think it plays to the most superficial, most insecure parts of human nature. I hope GQ as a magazine fails. I hope that all of these people who make a living by looking pretty are eventually made destitute or forced to do something of substance. At least pornography has a function."

Quote of the Day: Bill Withers

“You gonna tell me the history of the blues? I am the goddam blues. Look at me. Shit. I’m from West Virginia, I’m the first man in my family not to work in the coal mines, my mother scrubbed floors on her knees for a living, and you’re going to tell me about the goddam blues because you read some book written by John Hammond? Kiss my ass.”

That's singer/songwriter Bill Withers, from a 2005 interview referenced this week by New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones.

A & R

When a friend used the term A&R in conversation to refer to a record company's talent scout, we realized that neither of us knew what the A and the R actually stood for.

"Artists and Repertoire," says Wikipedia. Scrolling down, I see that this particular page has been vandalized by someone who doesn't like American Idol. Right below the heading for the job description, someone entered:

SIMON COWELL IS A TOTAL SPOILT WANKER.

But scrolling down further, I see a reference to an old article from The Baffler, a great but now defunct periodical out of Chicago that was started by Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America".

The article, called "The Problem With Music," is by Steve Albini, a musician who's been in bands like Shellac and Big Black. He's also an audio engineer and a producer.

This excellent (but depressing) critique of the music business, circa 1993, starts like this:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”

And he does, of course.

Obituary: Lux Interior

Lux Interior, lead singer for the punk band The Cramps, has died. He was 62.

Interior, born Erick Lee Purkhiser, started the band with Poison Ivy Rorschach (formerly Kristy Wallace) in about 1976. As Camille Dodero noted in the Village Voice on Friday, The Cramps basically had three songs that they re-wrote over and over. But who could resist songs like "Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?" and "Bend Over, I'll Drive"? Or "Jackyard Backoff"? It wasn't all juvenile sexual references -- those just make the most amusing song titles. The Cramps were a rockabilly mixture of campy pop culture references and bad horror movies. Picture Elvis crossed with Iggy Pop.

The Cramps played an infamous free show at the Napa State Mental Hospital in California in 1978. "We drove 3000 miles to play for you people," Interior says as he takes the mic. "Fuck you!" yells a patient. "Somebody told me you people are crazy," he patters. "But I'm not so sure about that. You seem to be alright to me." Watch the video below. The action starts 20 seconds in.



Henry Rollins, the former singer for Black Flag, remembered the first Cramps shows he saw in the 70s in Washington D.C.:

I grew up in Washington, D.C., in the '70s, and when punk rock came along, I realized that my ship had come in. The Cramps would come down to D.C. and I would see them play in a space about the size of your living room. It was kind of scary being in the front row. Lux would find something to swing from -- if there were ceiling tiles, they'd all be on the floor by the end of the thing. Lux would somehow find his way out of his pants and be down to a pair of bikini briefs twitching all over the floor. He's a very large man, very tall and very pale and very sweaty. They all looked so amazing. Each one could have been a movie star.

Rollins reminisced at length in an article in Saturday's Los Angeles Times.

And see also this performance of The Cramps' classic "Human Fly." About a minute and seven seconds in, he pours a can of beer into his shoe and drinks out of it. Then he kicks the shoe into the audience and starts taking his pants off.



The Cramps' best-known song may be their cover of "Fever," which appeared in the gruesome bar scene in Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 vampire movie Near Dark. Fast-forward about 6 minutes into the segment below for the song.

Near Dark Bar Scene
by CreatureCorner

The band never stopped playing in more than 30 years, with Interior singing and his wife Poison Ivy on guitar. He died of a heart condition.

Six Seconds That Changed Popular Music

This 18-minute mini-documentary explains the history of one of the most recognizable breakbeats in popular culture. It's been sampled by everyone from hip hop artists to pharmaceutical advertisements. "It's been used so much," narrator Nate Harrison says, "that I might argue it's entered the collective audio unconscious."

Harrison's dry narration accompanies what must be looped video of a scratchy record turning. The six second break beat, or drum beat, is called the "Amen Break." It came from a 1969 B-side called "Amen Brother" by The Winstons, a Washington D.C. soul act that had but one single.

To hear the break, scroll through to 1:19 into the video. To hear it in the context of its original song, scroll through to 2:25 into the video. It really is one of the most-heard pieces of song. The "Amen Break," was "one of the first drum samples to be experimented with" in the 1980s, Harrison explains.

It's been used famously by N.W.A. in their hit "Straight Outta Compton" (1989), and a whole slew of other rap and hip hop acts. It gets more complicated from there. The whole musical genre of jungle is practically based upon the 6-second break.

About seven minutes into the video, Harrison reveals that the record we see periodically isn't playing a loop as I though in the beginning (it is actually moving), nor is it just for effect. The record is actually a dub plate of his entire monologue and music samples. A dub plate is "an exclusive, 'one-off' acetate disc recording pioneered by Reggae sound systems but also used by drum and bass and other dance music artists, DJs and sound systems." (Wikipedia)

I love Harrison's irate summation of the music of Squarepusher (aka Tom Jenkinson) and Hrvatski (aka Keith Whitman):

With jungle's popularity, what you got in reaction was this sort of chin-stroking art crowd, who took the "Amen" as their own in the name of a sort of -- as some might say -- highbrow posturing. They proceeded to push the levels of absurdity with its use, really tweaking the arrangements beyond the point of danceability and syncopation, and into a realm of fetishization and self-indulgence."

And then he gets into television ads. One, for the "Extreme Jeep Snow Event," uses the break as punctuation, signifying the sort of playful possibilities one has with a Jeep in inclement weather.

But what I like the most about this video is that it's essentially a spoken-word essay, illustrated with very simple video. You don't have to watch it to get it, but it's a nice feature. It's very well done. I'd like to find more little essays or "meditations" like this, particularly about the history of music and popular culture.

The essay has a message, of course. It is that copyright laws are becoming so stringent that phenomena like the "Amen Break" may no longer be possible.

Art For Business' Sake

In the previous post, I showed a page from Chairman Mao's Red Book that said that "There is in fact no such things as art for art's sake." Mao sees everything in terms of class and politics. "Our purpose," Mao is quoted a couple pages later, "is to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part."

What if art were self-consciously working -- or employed -- to fit into the commercial machine? In the latest (and maybe last) issue of The Baffler, Catherine Liu is skeptical of business' embrace of the "creative class," especially in Singapore:

"Today it is creativity, not eugenics, that fires the fancy of Singapore's rulers. But the hyper-rational logic remains the same. The government still wants to engineer social progress and prosperity -- only the new maxim is art equals money."

Apparently, some Singapore government research proved that art and culture bring greater returns than banking or petrochemicals these days. Introducing: "Art for Business' Sake." No one has spelled it out so explicitly before. Liu continues:

"Thus the winding path by which art for art's sake has become an official initiative of an authoritarian government."

So Mao's idea of art for revolution's sake, is turned into a much more insidious project. But as Liu points out, Singapore got the idea from America.

But the idea of an authoritarian government taking control of art as a way of taking control of people is not new, nor necessarily American. In Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'N' Roll, now in previews on Broadway, Jan (played by Rufus Sewell on Broadway and in London last year), a Czech intellectual and rock connoiseur, had served some prison time after being arrested with the Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe in 1976 -- the band was accused of "spreading anti-socialist messages in their songs."

In one scene, Jan is talking to a British journalist (Nigel) in Prague in 1987 -- more than 10 years after the Plastics did prison time. He is explaining "Rockfest," a government-sponsored music festival:

Nigel: Rock Fest . . .?

Jan: Sure. Even a Communist government wants to be popular. A few years ago life was getting better, everybody could have a refrigerator, okay, but the West was going to hell with Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, the Sex Pistols . . . But now economically we are behind Nepal, it's embarrassing for the leading role of the party, and rock 'n' roll costs nothing so we have rock festival at the Palace of Culture.
[...]
The Plastics were invited to play if they changed their name to PPU. There was an argument in the band. Well, it's a question. If you play your music and hide your name, are you making fools of the government or is the government making fools of you? Finally they agreed PPU was not exactly changing their name. They got a girl singer, like Nico, and rehearsed. But the police found out and cut off the electricity.

Nigel: When was this?

Jan: Then they were offered to play in a club in Brno if they agreed to be on the poster as 'A Band from Prague'. It was a crisis. Some said yes, some said no. Bad things were said between the band. Terrible things. It finished the Plastics. There is no Plastics now, after twenty years, it's over.

And so a quasi-dissident rock band was made inneffective by mild government pressure, in the guise of a loosening of the rules.

We act horrified by this brand of culture control by a government, but we used to do it all the time. We -- the U.S. -- would export our abstract art, our anti-communist intellectuals, all fully sponsored by U.S. intellegence services. It's not a conspiracy theory, nor is it an unproven technique. It worked. We remade Germany and Japan in our own "free-market" image after the War.

The only question is: Why the hell aren't we doing it in the Middle East and Iraq today? Surely it would be better than paying private military contractors loads of dough to hide the fact that it takes a shit-ton of guys to pacify an angry and unstable post-dictatorship country.

Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian cultural critic, used to joke about how much more free he felt under the grip of Eastern European communism before the Wall and the Soviet Union fell. Back then, the enemy was not subtle. In his 2002 book of essays on the September 11 attacks, he wrote in a footnote that when he was involved in Slovene politics in the early 1990s, he was considered for a government post:

"the only one which interested me was that of the Minister of the Interior or head of the secret service -- the notion of serving as Minister of culture, education, or science seemed to me utterly ridiculous, not even worth serious consideration."

But are they not the same posts from different ends? The one pretends it doesn't have an influence on culture and the other pretends it does -- at least in a "free" society.

And this why Zizek had the odd nostalgia for totalitarianism: because the rules were clear, the roles were clear, and the rebellion was a fight by good (the people) against an obvious evil (the government).

So when the government -- and in America, this means business -- starts telling you that it's interested in your art, something is very, very wrong.

Authenticity and Pop Music

The question of authenticity in popular music is a gnarly one. What's more real: Bon Jovi or Skid Row? Skid Row or Mötley Crüe? Mötley Crüe or Metallica? Metallica or Megadeth?

When I was in high school I asked myself those questions, opting to advertise my choices of the last two bands in black t-shirts and keep my Skid Row and Mötley Crüe to myself. Bon Jovi was too wimpy to bother with.

Add the element of race to the question and it gets gnarlier still. No white hip hop fan can ever feel quite as authentic as any black fan. Suburban white kids may argue about how race is a state of mind to justify and increase the legitimacy of their fandom. What they are trying to say is that race is cultural, and they may be right, but unless their peers are mostly black and their home is in the city, they share none of the culture promoted by their hip hop heroes. They have to manufacture it.

And in a way, that's what all fans are doing -- manufacturing culture. Punk rock was one of the most nakedly manufactured subcultures we've ever had. Was it any more or less authentic than hip hop in or out of suburbia?

What qualifies anything as authentic?

Last weekend I saw Kevin Spacey, Colm Meaney, and Eve Best in Eugene O'Neill's Moon for the Misbegotten. All three actors were superb, especially Ms. Best, but what moved me most was to see Best crying when she came out for a bow. She so obviously believed in what she was doing, believed her part so completely that the tears were real. She wasn't faking it. That's authentic.

The question came up among a couple of my friends when I e-mailed them a review of Faking It: the quest for authenticity in popular music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor in The New Statesman.

The title of the book, the review tells us, comes from a suicide note that Kurt Cobain wrote. By the time Cobain did himself in, I had relegated him to a has-been category of musicians whose public persona and self-indulgences eclipsed their music. Like Madonna or Michael Jackson.

So what can that big phony tell us about authenticity? The first chapter of the book discusses Kurt Cobain and Leadbelly, the blues legend. Reviewer Jeff Sharlet describes it:

Cobain's companion is Leadbelly, a favourite of folk aficionados who to this day perceive him as a giant of "black music", even though the vast majority of his fans were white. (When white producers brought Leadbelly to New York City in 1935 to play "traditional" music, Life magazine declared in a headline: "Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel".) Cobain's swan song, performed on MTV's Unplugged a few months before his suicide, was a cover of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", about a woman who wanders into the woods after her husband is hit by a train. Cobain, so deep into the authenticity trap by then that he'd never escape, seemed to be making one last attempt not to "fake it", by reviving a song by his "favourite performer", and exiting the stage without an encore.

It would be inauthentic for a presumably rich white musician to sing soulfully -- as if he'd had a hard life -- a song written by a black man whose life presumably was hard, a song about tragedy. But Leadbelly himself wasn't what he seemed. His white manager had him perform in prison clothes to make him look more ... authentic. Was he playing real "black" music, or was his music what his white manager thought white people would think sounded like "black" music?

When I e-mailed the article to my friend K, he questioned the very idea of criticizing pop music:

I like criticism, but I think it has little business framing low culture as something fixed and serious. Low culture is about simple pleasure, not engaging our highest faculties for mechanical introspection. Low culture can be quite introspective, but it is personal and attached instead of impersonal and detached.

Good point. Where is the listener in all of this talk of authenticity? When I'm moved by a song, what does it matter what the musician was thinking? Or where he or she came from?

I've found myself (inexplicably) moved by songs from artists as diverse as Ozzy Osbourne, Cyndi Lauper (why does "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" sound so sad to me?), the Rolling Stones, 60s pop princess Linda Scott, jazz legend Ornette Coleman, and the Norwegian electronic/folk singer Erlend Øye.

A search for meaning that doesn't take the artist into account has more weight in a world with fewer and fewer live performances. When the gulf between musician and audience is as huge as it seems to be today, it's easier to say the author's dead.

But don't we get something more out of learning about an artist's development? K thinks so:

Articles about the inspiration for music are my favorite music writing. I love hearing how much Catholicism has influenced James Mercer of The Shins. Tom Morrello of Rage Against the Machine has a Kenyan father, who owns a tea plantation. Duncan Shiek is a prep school kid. These facts about their lives let me make inferences about the art. It seems more fitting and more personal. Assessing authenticity is much easier when the artist's style correlates well with their history. Mercer's contemplative style fits the expanse of Catholicism. Morrello's elite father is the epitome of what Rage railed against.

Shiek's music is overly folksy and I bet it's a response to his stuffy prep school. You can't fix the flux of low culture. I hate when critics even try. Their rule is too straight and only their mass of previous work can give them authority. I'd rather hear it from the horses mouth.

Inauthentic would be if the musicians told us what we wanted to hear in an interview. If the musician didn't believe what he or she was saying. If the musicians weren't genuinely moved by their own music.

My other friend, I'll call him A, didn't like the review. The premise seemed pointless to him:

I think anyone chasing (or claiming to chase) (big-A) Authenticity as a record collector, critical listener, reviewer, etc. is after something that never existed in the first place. I thought the article was headed that direction with "great popular music is always a collage of cultures" but it was a dead-end. There are many ways to judge music, but this is not one of them.

That quote he refers to is the part of the review that I thought made the most sense, too:

The strongest argument of Faking It is for the endless "miscegenation" of music. Great popular music is always a collage of cultures, while the quest for authenticity all too often functions as a means of policing racial boundaries.

Or of collecting money from plagiarism suits.

To be fair, none of the three of us have read this book. We're all reacting to an article about the book. But isn't that just like pop music's development? Leadbelly plays a song he learned from black musicians who learned from white musicians who were imitating something they heard once from a black musician who would have played differently if he only had a better guitar. And then Kurt Cobain thinks he's playing something purely, authentically real decades later -- something more real than he could come up with on his own. In fact, he chose this song by this musician to cover because he thought it might lend him a little authenticity.

None of this is real. My friend A says it's safest to assume all rock stars are motivated by trying to earn a buck and impress the opposite sex. He wrote:

Why does anyone do anything at all? The whole world is fake...

It's not fake or inauthentic, it's self-interest. And it can be a powerful motivator to produce great art.

The only real thing we can each rely upon is what we feel when we hear the music. Even if it changes all the time.

If that sounds too wish-washy, try this:

1. Spending too much time criticizing ephemeral pop music is missing the point of pop music.
2. Looking too long for authenticity in popular music, a theatrical enterprise full of posturing and costumes, is silly.
3. All art inherits something from its predecessors.
4. There's no accounting, as they say, for taste. While I may hear something deeply sad and true in Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," A and K may dismiss it as pap.
5. To elaborate on the point above, as much as any artist brings to a song, both in its conception and performance, we as listeners bring our own set of experiences and preferences and predilections when we hear that song.
6. Any time we can learn about the artist and his or her artistic process, we add another layer to our experience of the art.
7. Even the phoniest artist can move us if his or her art is well-crafted.

Quote of the Day: Keith Richards

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father."

Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist legendary for his capacity for chemicals and bacchanalia, confessed this strange inhalation to the British magazine New Music Express. He's saying that he took a bit of the ashes of his cremated father's corpse and snorted them as one would a line of cocaine. In fact, he cut a bit of his father into his own stash of coke.

The NME article, now being quoted with abandon all over the Internet, isn't an interview, or even a true question-and-answer; it's more a fill-in-the-blank, presumably because Keef's mind tended to wander. One can imagine the interviewer jotting down Richards' rantings like an acolyte in front of a great seer:

They forgot the roll and they only kept the rock. The roll's the whole damn thing dude, the rock is nothing, deal with it, the roll is king. Unfortunately most cats don't get behind the roll.

'Right,' mutters the young acolyte, as he jots it down, 'there ... is ... no ... roll.'

That young acolyte is writer Mark Beaumont, who happens to be amazed by the publicity his interview got. He says he didn't even meet with Keith. "I may have only interviewed him over the phone," Beaumont said in NME's blog, "but he totally lived up to my expectations and he had so many stories to tell." Now Beaumont's getting calls for television interviews of his own.

Snorting dead people isn't unheard of in entertainment -- some clubbers did it in an episode of HBO's Six Feet Under. Anytime you've got powdered substances around coke fiends, bad ideas germinate. "You'd expect nothing more from a hedonistic legend like Keith Richards," Beaumont said. You wouldn't expect anything less, either.

I saw a photo of Richards with his father once. He was a jolly looking round-faced man with a white beard, and he had a healthful well-fed glow about him -- in stark contrast to the thin, leathery, cadaverous Keith. He also looked very proud of his son, whose arm was around him.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow," Richards told NME. "My dad wouldn't have cared, he didn't give a shit. It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive." Indeed. An old Kentish factory worker -- in powdered form -- ain't going to gum up the works of Keith Richards.

There's a rich tradition of stars snorting foul things in rock and roll. It will take a lot more than inhaling your old man to top Ozzy Osbourne's doing a line of ants. Devotees of VH1's Behind the Music will recall the Mötley Crüe episode, in which a flabbergasted (and shockingly articulate) Nikki Six describes Osbourne's approaching a line of ants emanating from a melting Popsicle in the street. And then Ozzy snorts it. Ants.

And then there's the story -- which I'm almost certain Stevie Nicks denies -- that she had some lackey assist her in her cocaine addiction by blowing the powder, via straw, up her rectum. Some say it was to save her singing voice. Other say it was because her nose was already too ruined by the substance.

Rolling Stones spokespeople are now telling the media that Keith was actually joking, which, I suppose they are obliged to do. I don't have any proof, but I choose to believe Keith was telling the truth. Why would he make that up? It's like what Keith said about having brain surgery, after the incident where he may or may not have fallen out of a coconut tree, severely injuring that otherwise durable brain: he's got to try everything once. "Yes, I've been trepanned," he told NME:

That's quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain. I've got pictures of it mate, yeah. They cut my head, brain, skull open, went in and pulled out the crap, and put some of it back in again. But that's the way it is, I mean, shit, Keith Richards has got to do everything once.

And I don't think any of us wants to see a list of the other things Keef's tried once.

If there's a punchline to this whole affair, it's that NME is asking the big question: Who gets to snort Keith Richards when he's dead?

Album Cover Art

One of the more creative album cover designs I've seen lately. Swayzak is two DJs -- James Taylor and David "Brun" Brown -- and their music is "minimal house." This album is okay, if you're into this sort of thing, but the cover art is much more satisfying. It's those little plastic things that hold bags of bread closed -- like twist ties, only with a space to display the expiration date.

Roger Keith Barrett: 1946-2006

Roger Keith Barrett, also known as Syd Barrett, the founder of the band Pink Floyd died recently.

Syd Barrett left the band before I was even born -- he barely lasted through Pink Floyd's debut album in the late sixties. A few years ago I had assumed, as many people did, that Barrett was actually already dead, that he had been dead since the sixties. And then I read rock critic Nick Kent's book The Dark Stuff and discovered through his article "The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett" (based on an article Kent wrote for New Music Express in 1974) that I was confusing him with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. I think Jones died in a swimming pool.

I also discovered that, like the case of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, everything I liked about the band had to do with its charismatic but mentally unstable genius founder, and everything I hated had to do with -- well, the whole rest of the band.

So I learned that Barrett wasn't in fact dead, and that he'd actually put out a few solo albums. His first, "The Madcap Laughs," is brilliant. The second to the last song, "If It's In You," sums up Barrett's music for me. It's short (less than two minutes), too short -- like his musical career, and it begins with him wailing "Yes I'm thi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-inking of this, yes I am." Only each "i" is a different note, all over the scale. It's weird. At first it sounds terribly off key, like some awful amateur yodeller, but if you keep listening, you start thinking maybe he's on to something. "The Madcap Laughs" is a spare album, and poor Barrett needed two of Pink Floyd mates to help him make it. It came out in 1972 and his music career was done by 1975.

Another song on that album, "Late Night," was a favorite of mine when it was covered by the 4AD project This Mortal Coil for the third and final album, "Blood" (1991), which I discovered a few years after its release. A woman, Caroline Crawley sang it beautifully, and I thought it was her song until someone pointed out the writing credit: S. Barrett.

Here, in honor of Mr. Barrett, I have transcribed the beginning of Nick Kent's superb article "The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett." It describes an infamous scene from one of the band's early shows:

The rest of the group were actually all three standing on the stage, ready to begin, when Barrett finally awoke from his numb narcissistic reverie in front of the dressing-toom mirror. First he roused himself to action by emptying a bottle of strong tranquilizers known as 'Mandrax' of its contents and breaking the pills into tiny fragments on a nearby table. He then produced a large bottle of Brylcream, an extremely greasy form of British hair gel, and emptied the whole jar on to the pills. Next, taking the main residue of this gunk in both hands, he lifted it aloft, dumping the whole filthy mess on top of his head, letting it slowly seep on to his scalp and duly down his neck. Then he turned, picked up his white Telecaster with the groovy mirrored discs reflecting out, and stepped uncertainly towards the stage.

A quarter of an hour later, as the tom-toms were thumping their way into trance-time, the bass began booking out low ominous frequencies and the organ arched off into a tentative solo full of spicy Eastern cliches. But anyone could tell that Syd, once the leader, was no longer inhabiting the same planet as the other three. Sometimes he'd twang a few desultory notes, sometimes he'd run his slide up and down the strings, but everything sounded so random and fragmented now that nothing he did really connected with the overall sound. Meanwhile the lighting had grown hot enough for Barrett's acid-casualty hair remedy to start running amok in several grotesque oily streams down his neck and forehead while the residue of the broken pills was being deposited all over his face. It was then that everyone could see how desperately things were going wrong, for he looked like some grotesque waxwork of himself on fire, a blurred effigy of melting flesh and brain tissue coming apart in front of his peers, his fans, and his followers.

Nick Kent wrote an obituary for the Guardian here. If you hadn't heard, Barrett's "meltdown" and career collapse has been blamed on his legendary LSD habit. Also interesting to note, is that Barrett named the band, as Kent writes, "taken from a blues album he owned involving two obscure musicians known as Pink Anderson and Floyd Council." Here's novelist Rick Moody on Barrett, also from the Guardian, and better still, David Bowie on Barrett in New Music Express -- he says Barrett was one of the first guys he'd ever heard singing pop with a British accent.