Reinventing Pink Floyd

In celebration of the 45th anniversary of The Dark Side of the Moon, Bill Kopp explores the ingenuity with which Pink Floyd rebranded itself following the 1968 departure of Syd Barrett. Not only did the band survive Barrett’s departure, but it went on to release landmark albums that continue to influence generations of musicians and fans. Reinventing Pink Floyd follows the path taken by the remaining band members to establish a musical identity, develop a songwriting style, and create a new template for the manner in which albums are made and even enjoyed by listeners. As veteran music journalist Bill Kopp illustrates, that path was filled with failed experiments, creative blind alleys, one-off musical excursions, abortive collaborations, general restlessness, and—most importantly—a dedicated search for a distinctive musical personality. This exciting guide to the works of 1968 through 1973 highlights key innovations and musical breakthroughs of lasting influence. Kopp places Pink Floyd in its historical, cultural, and musical contexts while celebrating the test of fire that took the band from the brink of demise to enduring superstardom.

DIV Johann Sebastian Bach – celebrated pipe organist, court composer and master of sacred music – was also a technical pioneer. Working in Germany in the early eighteenth century, he invented new instruments and carried out experiments in tuning, the effects of which are still with us today. Two hundred years later, a number of extraordinary musicians have utilised the music of Bach to thrilling effect through the art of recording, furthering their own virtuosity and reinventing the composer for our time. In Reinventing Bach, Paul Elie brilliantly blends the stories of modern musicians with a polyphonic account of our most celebrated composer’s life to create a spellbinding narrative of the changing place of music in our lives. We see the sainted organist Albert Schweitzer playing to a mobile recording unit set up at London’s Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach’s organ works to the world beyond the churches, and Pablo Casals’s Abbey Road recordings of Bach’s cello suites transform the middle-class sitting room into a hotbed of existentialism; we watch Leopold Stokowski persuade Walt Disney to feature his own grand orchestrations of Bach in the animated classical-music movie Fantasia – which made Bach the sound of children’s playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike – and we witness how Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations made Bach the byword for postwar cool. Through the Beatles and Switched-on Bach and Gödel, Escher, Bach – through film, rock music, the Walkman, the CD and up to Yo-Yo Ma and the iPod – Elie shows us how dozens of gifted musicians searched, experimented and collaborated with one another in the service of a composer who emerged as the prototype of the spiritualised, technically savvy artist. /div

Profiles rock musicians from the 1950s to the 1990s who never made it big, including the Collins Kids, Graham Bond, Duffy Powder, the Remains, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Martin Newell, and the Free Spirits

Syd Barrett was the lead guitarist, vocalist, and principle songwriter in the original line up of Pink Floyd. During his brief time with the band (1966-68) he was the driving force behind the unit. After he left the band he made just two further solo albums which were both released in 1970, before withdrawing from public view to lead a quiet, and occasionally troubled life in Cambridge, the town of his birth. Rob Chapman's book is the first authoritative and exhaustively researched biography of Syd Barrett that fully celebrates his life and legacy as a musician, lyricist and artist, and which highlights the influence that he continues to have over contemporary bands and music fans alike.

Carmine Appice has enjoyed a jaw-dropping rock-and-roll life—and now he is telling his scarcely believable story. Appice ran with teenage gangs in Brooklyn before becoming a global rock star in the Summer of Love, managed by the Mob. He hung with Hendrix, unwittingly paid for an unknown Led Zeppelin to support him on tour, taught John Bonham to play drums (and helped Fred Astaire too), and took part in Zeppelin's infamous deflowering of a groupie with a mud shark. After enrolling in Rod Stewart's infamous Sex Police, he hung out with Kojak, accidentally shared a house with Prince, was blood brothers with Ozzy Osbourne and was fired by Sharon. He formed an all-blond hair-metal band, jammed with John McEnroe and Steven Seagal, got married five times, slept with 4,500 groupies—and, along the way, became a rock legend by single-handedly reinventing hard rock and heavy metal drumming. His memoir, Stick It!, is one of the most extraordinary and outrageous rock-and-roll books of the early twenty-first century.

For disgruntled music fans wondering why music played on the radio is not only worse now than in the past but also not nearly as revelatory as it once was, this book presents a detailed discussion of how the record business fouled its own livelihood. This insightful dissection covers numerous aspects of the industry's failures and shortcomings, including why stockholders play an important role, how radio went from an art to a science and what was lost in that change, how the record companies alienated their core audience, why file sharing might not be the bogeyman that the record industry would have people think, technology's effects on what and how music is heard, and dozens of other reasons that add up to the record industry's current financial and artistic woes. With eye-opening observations culled from extensive interviews, this expose offers insights into how this multi-billion-dollar industry is run and why it's losing so much money.

With their early experiments in psychedelic rock music in the 1960s, and their epic recordings of the 1970s and '80s, Pink Floyd became one of the most influential and recognizable rock bands in history. As "The Pink Floyd Sound," the band created sound and light shows that defined psychedelia in England and inspired similar movements in the Jefferson Airplane's San Francisco and Andy Warhol's New York City. The band's subsequent recordings forged rock music's connections to orchestral music, literature, and philosophy. "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall" ignored pop music's ordinary topics to focus on themes such as madness, existential despair, brutality, alienation, and socially induced psychosis. They also became some of the best-selling recordings of all time. In this collection of essays, sixteen scholars expert in various branches of philosophy set the controls for the heart of the sun to critically examine the themes, concepts, and problems—usually encountered in the pages of Heidegger, Foucault, Sartre, or Orwell—that animate and inspire Pink Floyd's music. These include the meaning of existence, the individual's place in society, the interactions of knowledge and power in education, the contradictions of art and commerce, and the blurry line—the tragic line, in the case of Floyd early member Syd Barrett (died in 2006)—between genius and madness. Having dominated pop music for nearly four decades, Pink Floyd's dynamic and controversial history additionally opens the way for these authors to explore controversies about intellectual property, the nature of authorship, and whether wholes—especially in the case of rock bands—are more than the sums of their parts.