Syd Barrett
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PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN: Barrett wasn’t long for this rock world. |
Some of rock’s recluses are lucid individuals who don’t care to synch their output to the time clocks of the media and the record industry. This year alone, both Tom Verlaine and Scott Walker are coming out of hiding to end decade-plus silences with new studio albums. Other figures, driven from the spotlight by various combinations of drugs, paranoia, and emotional instability, attempt comebacks that are sometimes triumphant (Brian Wilson’s reconstructed Smile), more often disastrous, as in the case of Sly Stone’s abortive attempt to get through a single song at this year’s Grammy Awards.Rarest of all is the artist whose public withdrawal is complete, permanent, and apparently irreversible. In this category, Pink Floyd co-founder Syd Barrett (born Roger Keith Barrett) — who died of unstated causes on July 11 in his birthplace of Cambridge, England — has few equals. Without meaning to, Barrett invented one of rock’s enduring archetypes: the visionary who burns brightly just long enough to become a bona fide star before plummeting into introversion and, in this case, a silence lasting more than 30 years. Despite this long absence — or more likely because of it — Barrett has exerted a fascination over several generations of musicians, some massively successful and some resolutely “underground,” as an unwilling symbol of an artistic purity too fragile to thrive for long in the straight world, or even in the alternative culture that rock has long claimed to represent.
His reputation rests on one of the slimmest discographies of any major rock figure. Only the Pink Floyd’s 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (the definite article was dropped from the band’s name around the time of his departure), and the related singles (“See Emily Play”) show him at the height of his powers as a songwriter and guitarist. (There are no recordings of Floyd’s early, free-form performances at the UFO club and other Swinging London flashpoints, only their audiences’ utopian memories.) Barrett contributed just a single song, “Jugband Blues,” to the band’s second album, plus two outtakes, one of them the all-too-revealing, oft-bootlegged “Vegetable Man.”
Ousted for his erratic behavior, on stage and off (the rest of the band simply decided to stop picking him up for rehearsals), Barrett made fitful attempts at a solo career that resulted in The Madcap Laughs and Barrett (both 1970). It’s hard to hear these recordings as anything but documents of a mind coming loose from itself, with flashes of his lyric and melodic gifts emerging from a fog of marginal rhythm guitar and half-hearted vocalizing. Overdubs from various members of Floyd and the Soft Machine give some tracks a semblance of coherence, but just as often, songs that he wouldn’t — or, by this time, couldn’t — play the same way twice are left as hesitant acoustic sketches, complete with false starts.
An attempted third album in 1971 didn’t even get this far; Barrett never added vocals, and the sessions were scrapped. He soon retreated from the rock world entirely, settling in Cambridge with his mother and subsisting on publishing royalties and, according to some obituaries, some form of disability. Floyd biographer Nicholas Schaeffner quotes a statement by a family member, on the occasion of the 1988 release of the outtakes collection Opel: “He doesn’t play musical instruments anymore.” Nothing indicates that this changed in the years since.
Although much of the interest in Barrett is focused on his personal trajectory, it would be unfair to leave the music out of the equation. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn remains a touchstone, marking even more decisively than the post–Revolver Beatles the transition from “rock and roll,” with its pronounced roots in British R&B, to “rock” as an autonomous form. (This is also related to the respectable family backgrounds of Pink Floyd’s line-up, Barrett included; they dropped even the Stones’ pretense to being pub-crawling working-class toughs.) Well aware of the non-jazz improvisation of London’s AMM, Barrett and company didn’t invent the kind of free-form experimentation harnessed, most famously, on “Interstellar Overdrive.” And they certainly didn’t invent the mystic, mythic whimsy of the album’s lyrics, which as far as British pop goes extends as far back as Beatrice Lillie’s “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.” But Pink Floyd synthesized them — on Piper’s best tracks, Barrett’s eccentric but tuneful popcraft and his echo-laced guitar adventures co-exist with little evident tension.
It’s this combination, along with Barrett’s pre-burnout personal charisma, that influenced British rock. David Bowie once said, “When Syd Barrett left, there was no Pink Floyd for me anymore,” and Bowie’s first self-transformation, from polite popster Davy Jones to the scarves-and-flowers groove child of Space Oddity, owes much to Barrett’s example. Marc Bolan was another follower, codifying Barrett’s lyrical concerns and proto-glam image into a hitmaking formula soon after the original had left the scene.
Another wave of Barrett reference came soon after punk, as musicians began to pick through the psychedelic rags that had been dropped into the dustbin. Vocal doppelgänger Robyn Hitchcock has made a career of spinning out the sort of material a less-addled Barrett might have produced. Julian Cope cultivated the persona of a Syd-styled acid-damaged “nutter” after his split from the Teardrop Explodes, especially on his fragmentary 1984 album Fried. Even the resolutely unmystical (but plenty mysterious) Jesus and Mary Chain covered “Vegetable Man” as the flip of their debut single.
Barrett’s spectral presence exercises a current pull on the American lo-fi underground’s latest manifestation as the so-called “freak-folk” movement. Wooden Wand and Animal Collective partake of both Barrett’s any-world-but-this obscurity and early Floyd’s effect-laden dislocations of pastoral melody. What’s oddest, though, is the extent to which the tragic legacy of Barrett’s solo output has itself become a model. Gemlike and meandering by turns, the acoustic noodles and doodles that pepper Devendra Banhart’s career-making releases pursue the incoherence of The Madcap Laughs as an end in itself. The difference is that, for many current artists, this is a choice, as much a matter of self-presentation as æsthetics. Banhart is now accompanied by a band, and output has grown more coherent, not less.
In The Dark Stuff, UK rock writer Nick Kent describes encountering Barrett at the offices of an underground newspaper, during the brief twilight between the golden years with Floyd and his final self-imposed exile. “Less than five years earlier, I’d stood transfixed, watching him in all his retina-scorching, dandified splendor as he’d performed with his group the Pink Floyd, silently praying that one day I might be just like him. Now, as he stood before me with his haunted eyes and fractured countenance, I was having second thoughts.” Who wouldn’t? No one wants to be burdened with Barrett’s disabilities; many have wished to possess what he touched, if only for a moment. But can you have one without the other?
