While so many other products of the Summer of Love were positive and unifying, Piper was fractured and scary. has been either indifferent at best (or hostile at worst) to the notion of managing its legacy- especially its formative years- and has only reluctantly taken up caretaking duties as part and parcel of cordoning it off.įew would criticize the merits of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn itself (as reflected in the rating above)- it's an essential album. From a fan's perspective, Pink Floyd, Inc. Only "Matilda Mother" and one take on "Interstellar Overdrive" are previously unreleased.Ī special edition of Piper was inevitable, but so was the failure of any reissue as incomprehensive as this one: This new edition underscores the reality that EMI and/or the surviving members of Pink Floyd- especially since they shifted from band to de facto corporation- have been either downright stingy with their unreleased archives or hopelessly coy about what may lie in there, leaving fans to settle for second-hand scraps like those on A Treeful of Secrets, a 17xCD fan-made rarities compilation. The 3xCD edition includes an extra disc covering the group's classic 1967 singles "Arnold Layne" and "Apples and Oranges", their respective B-sides "Candy and a Currant Bun" and "Paintbox", an alternate take of "Matilda Mother", two alternate versions of "Interstellar Overdrive", and a stereo version of "Apples and Oranges".
The former includes both the stereo version of the album as well as the mono version (which many Floyd fanatics find superior). The 40th anniversary edition of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn- overseen by producer James Guthrie, who engineered and co-produced The Wall and who first cleaned up Piper for its 1994 reissue- is now available as either a 2xCD or 3xCD set, but don't get your hopes up for a bounty of rarities or other goodies.
Their catalog remains an AOR goldmine, the gift that keeps on giving for the band's principals, who, all said and done, released relatively few records during their heyday, but who have benefited a thousand fold from their efforts. Of course, while Barrett lived out the remainder of his life as one of the psychedelic age's walking wounded, Pink Floyd went on to much bigger (if not necessarily) better things. Less than a year after the release of Piper, in 1967, Barrett was out of the band, one of the most prominent and tragic casualties of the rock era. It didn't hurt that the band's primary songwriter and visionary Syd Barrett was on the verge of permanently losing control himself. Where the Beatles exerted complete control over the tools of the studio, Pink Floyd used the studio to lose control.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but the results couldn't have been more at odds with one another. Piper was recorded at Abbey Road at the same time the Beatles were there recording Sgt. They weren't leaders but fellow travelers- at least until their epochal debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Granted, they were fixtures of the infamous UFO Club and the toast of no less than Paul McCartney (allegedly a recent convert to the powers of psychotropic drugs), but the band never claimed to be spokespersons for the revolution.
By 1967, year of the Summer of Love, the counterculture made a valiant bid to supplant the dominant culture, and in retrospect a strong case can be made that the counter-culture won.Īt the forefront of this battle, in Britain, were acts like Pink Floyd, fixtures of the nascent underground psychedelic scene. By the tail end of the 1960s, something was already in the air (and water) marking a radical cultural shift recreational drugs were just one part of the anti-establishment equation. They say legendry lysergic prophet Timothy Leary used to dose the drinks at parties with LSD, but it might not have been necessary.