Winged Swine and Synchronicity
For no reason I can really put my finger on, something I heard last week reminded me of the old Pink Floyd oddity "Pigs on the Wing." I've had the song stuck in my head off and on since, which hasn't been helped by that bizarre Time Warner Cable commercial with the flying pigs. Finally, yesterday, I dug the tape of Animals out, and listened to it on the way to work. Where a later blogroll turned up (via Blogcritics) Laurence "Amish Tech Support" Simon referencing the lyrics of "Pigs on the Wing" regarding the story of an inflatable tank gone astray. Winged swine, everywhere I look.
I used to be a big fan of Pink Floyd (yet another reason why I'd never make it as a rock critic...), but mostly stopped listening to them somewhere around my junior year of college. It was interesting to learn that, despite not having listened to the record in ten years or more, I still know as many of the lyrics as I ever did (I bought it on cassette, and thus didn't get the lyric sheet, and Roger Waters doesn't enunciate as clearly as one might light...), and still know most of the guitar solos.
I read a biography of the band once, which mentioned that Animals was, in part, the band's reaction to the rise of punk music (which was, in turn, a reaction against bands like Pink Floyd. Johnny Rotten famously wore an "I Hate Pink Floyd" shirt, about which David Gilmour (I think) remarked "He never would've gotten as much mileage out of an 'I Hate Yes' shirt." (*). When I first read that, it didn't seem to make a lot of sense-- there's only five songs on the album, and "Dogs" pushes twenty minutes. But then, on reflection, it does make a certain amount of sense-- it's a very angry record, and there's also a certain ragged quality to the songs, quite unlike the almost antiseptic precision of Dark Side of the Moon. There's still plenty of weird synthesizer noodling filling space in the songs, but the guitar noodling at least is some of the least pointless in their catalog.
That raggedness may be part of why this was always one of my favorite Floyd albums (and Dark Side one of my least favorite). It's an odd transitional album for them-- wedged in between Wish You Were Here and The Wall, it's a big, bitter concept album, but Roger Waters hasn't reached the absolute pinnacle of his rock-opera madness yet, and there are still some rock-star flourishes from David Gilmour (the solos in "Dogs" are among his best work).
It's also held up better than I would've expected, after all these years. I'm no longer as impressed by weird synthesizer noodling as I once was, so a lot of the songs seem to sag in the middle (there's also a perfunctory quality about some of the syth breaks-- you can sort of imagine Roger Waters sighing heavily, and saying, "Oh, all right. Rick, diddle around on the keyboards for a while. I'm off for a smoke."). I was never wild about Waters's voice, which hasn't improved, but it's well suited to these songs, and the lyrics are pretty sharp, with some nice touches. And there's some great guitar stuff on this record.
Having mostly lost patience with the extended synth breaks, I'm not likely to put this one back in the regular rotation. But it's been interesting to hear this record again, and see how the songs sound after all this time. It falls somewhere in between "enduring classic" and "fuzzy nostalgia material." When I've listened to this one enough to get "Pigs on the Wing" out of my system again, I'll have to dust off some other old favorites, and see how they are.
Note: I couldn't find that specific quote in the vast wealth of Pink Floyd material on the Web, but I did turn up an interview where Gilmour is asked "Be honest. When listening to the 'Great Gig In The Sky', have you ever thought, 'Oh put a sock in it, you silly cow?'" That ought to be worth something.)
Posted at 8:42 AM | link | follow-ups |