Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason called an alternate take of ‘Wish You Were Here” recorded with the great jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, “the jewel in the crown” of the band’s (as then) unreleased recording archive. In it, Grappelli takes a soaring solo at the end of the song. His playing was actually there on the original album, but so low in the final mix that the band opted not to credit him, thinking it would be insulting.

The master tape of the Grappelli solo was presumed to have been wiped, as Mason told BBC radio:

“My understanding was that we’d had to record over it in order to put on other sections. It still astonishes me that we didn’t use it originally, didn’t realise what a wonderful thing it was.”

In “A Rambling Conversation with Roger Waters Concerning All This and That,” that was published in the Wish You Were Here Songbook, Roger Waters was asked about the Grappelli session by Nick Sedgewick:

Nick Sedgewick: Didn’t you also use Stephane Grappelli on the album somewhere?

Roger Waters: Yeah. He was downstairs when we were doing Wish You Were Here. Dave had made the suggestion that there ought to be a country fiddle at the end of it, we might try it out, and Stephane Grappelli was downstairs in the number one studio making an album with Yehudi Menuhin. There was an Australian guy looking after Grappelli who we’d met on a tour so we thought we’d get Grappelli to do it. So they wheeled him up after much bartering about his fee—him being an old pro he tried to turn us over, and he did to a certain extent. But it was wonderful to have him come in and play a bit.

Nick Sedgewick: He’s not on the album now, though?

Roger Waters: You can just hear him if you listen very, very, very hard right at the end of “Wish You Were Here,” you can just hear a violin come in after all thewind stuff starts—just! We decided not to give him credit, ‘cos we thoughtit might be a bit of an insult. He got his 300 pounds, though.

After 36 years in the EMI vaults, the alternate “Wish You Were Here” recorded with Grappelli was finally released on the Wish You Were Here Immersion box set in 2011.
 

I can’t even give an ‘A’ for effort for this (obviously sincere) rock shit sammich. What were they thinking?!
 

 
Thanks, Linus Robinson!

 
The 1968 British cult film The Committee starred Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones (who was in Peter Watkins’ better known UK cult classic Privilege the year before) in a Kafkaesque (some might say Pinteresque) tale that also put me in mind of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner and Albert Camus’ The Stranger with a hefty dollop of R.D. Laing thrown in for good measure.

Jones may have been the star of the film, true, but today The Committee is remembered, if it is remembered at all, for featuring some of the earliest recorded work of David Gilmour with The Pink Floyd. Originally the film was to have been scored by Syd Barrett, but when that proved impossible, Roger Waters stepped in and offered the band’s services to director Peter Sykes and producer Max Steuer.

On the Pink Floyd fansite Brain Damage, writer David King offers a brief description of what happens in the film, which was based on a dream that Steuer had turned into a short story:

Briefly, a hitchhiking draughtsman (the ‘central figure’) accepts a lift from a Mercedes-driver. Perceiving the latter to be entirely vacuous - to be ‘not really alive at all’ - the hitchhiker seizes the opportunity, when the driver is looking under the hood of the car, of using the hood to behead him. After due reflection and contemplation, he sews the head back on, at which point the driver, slightly dazed, drives off. Back at work, the draughtsman receives a summons to a mysterious Committee, the function of which is to mediate with regard to the problems of the world. The draughtsman is taken by the Director on a nighttime stroll through the grounds of the institution, and it is at this point that philosophy - the raison d’être of the film - takes center stage. Issues discussed include alienation; the assumption that all faceless committees must be hostile; and the responsibility we have to our own future self. (The head which was removed then re-attached to the driver’s body is a metaphor for the learning process - the sudden change in perspective we receive at various points in our lives.) The film ends with a wiser and more enlightened central figure, presumably able to profit from his encounter with the Committee.

The Committee features an unhinged performance—perhaps the best ever caught on film—by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, flaming headdress and all. You can also spot an uncredited Peter Asher in a party scene.

’Blood on the Tracks’ - Robert A. Zimmerman

Fast-paced 1958 thriller: a jilted train driver hi-jacks his New York subway train to exact revenge upon his love rival, only to threaten the life of his ex-lover. The last 30 pages are missing. Don’t know if she survives.

 
Christophe Gowans is a Graphic Designer and Art Director, who once designed for the music industry (with Peter Saville Associates, Assorted Images, amongst others) and has since produced some stunning work for Blitz, Esquire, Modern Painters, Stella and The Sunday Telegraph.

Christophe is also the talent of a series of fun, collectible and original art works that re-imagine classic albums as book covers.

These fabulous Record Books are on display at his site and are also available to buy at The Rockpot.
 

’Abbey Road’ - The Beatles

Classic paperback. The story of two catholic sisters growing up in a swiftly changing post-war Britain. Guess what? It doesn’t end well.

 

’The Dark Side of the Moon’ - Pink Floyd

Alternative scientific textbook from the 60s. Californian professor Floyd achieved enormous success with this study of the moon’s influence on the menstrual cycle. Indeed, he was able to found his own college, specialising in the study of women’s fertility. The college no longer exists. It was shut down in 1972, having been razed to the ground by a mob of angry husbands.

 
More of Christophe’s ‘Record Books’, after the jump…
 

 
One of the odder Pink Floyd oddities one can find out there, a Christmas song recorded in 1975.

That’s Nick Mason singing, btw. I think this comes from a BBC radio program.
 

 
Pink Floyd performing an avant garde instrumental—sometimes bootlegs title the number “Corrosion,” other times it’s called “Corrosion In The Pink Room”—on a sound-stage without an audience. It segues into “Embryo” with snatches of “Heartbeat Pigmeat” and “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict” along the way.

Originally broadcast ORTF1 in France, January 2, 1971 (filmed the month prior) as part of a TV special featuring the work of celebrated dance choreographer, and frequent Pink Floyd collaborator, Roland Petit.
 

 
Pink Floyd’s debut 1967 long player, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, came out 45 years ago this week in the UK. A stereo mix of the album came out a month later and the American version of the album was released in October of that year. The US version had a different track listing that omitted “Flaming,” “Astronomy Domine” and “Bike,” if you can imagine such a travesty, while the “See Emily Play” single was added.

Piper was recorded off and on February through July of 1967 at Abbey Road Studios (while the Beatles recorded “Lovely Rita” in the studio next door) and featured mostly songs written by the group’s founder Syd Barrett. By the time the album came out, however, Barrett’s behavior had become increasingly erratic and David Gilmour was soon after brought in to augment the group. It was the sole Pink Floyd album to be recorded under Barrett’s musical leadership of the band.

Although today Piper is justly considered a classic, indispensable album, it was not a commonly encountered record until after Dark Side of the Moon became such a monster hit, in the US at least, and it was re-released as part of the A Nice Pair two-record set (which included Piper along with the restored tracks and A Saucerful of Secrets).

The startling lead off number on The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is the tremendously tremendous “Astronomy Domine” as seen here in this wild clip from The Look of the Week BBC television series. Includes the hilariously contentious interview with classical music critic Hans Keller, who introduces the group with the faintest of feint praise. In fact he more or less tells the TV audience that what they are about to see is going to suck! Imagine how completely INSANE this would have seemed beamed into your home in 1967. Keller’s bewilderment at their music is a pretty clear indicator of how such a performance would have been regarded back then. Speaking of, notice how far ahead of his time human beat box Barrett is at the start of this clip:
 

 
After the jump, more early Pink Floyd performances and videos with Syd Barrett…
 

 
Last night I watched The Story of Wish You Were Here, the new Blu-ray documentary release from Eagle Rock Entertainment about the creation of Pink Floyd’s landmark 1975 follow-up to their monster-selling Dark Side of the Moon album. I loved it, but then again, I’m one of those Pink Floyd fans who can hear the same damned stories repeated over and over again without ever getting bored of them. In truth, there is not all that much ground covered here that’s not been covered in past Pink Floyd documentaries, but it’s so well done that this is in no way an impediment to enjoying the film. It certainly wasn’t for me.

Wish You Were Here was released in September 1975, and considered by band members Richard Wright and David Gilmour,to be their favorite Pink Floyd album. The recording of the album seemed to be somewhat of a tortured affair for the band—Roger Waters has said several times that he felt like the group was exhausted, creatively drained and perhaps should have just broken up—but slowly a powerful album came together, inspired by the band’s debt to its tragic founder, Syd Barrett and the album’s lead-off cut, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” The story of an unrecognizable Barrett showing up for an impromptu visit at the recording studio as the song was being mixed is a harrowing anecdote indeed. Several present broke down in tears at the sight of their old friend.

Also featured in The Story of Wish You Were Here are sleeve artist Storm Thorgerson of the legendary Hipgnosis design firm, Roy Harper who did the sarcastic vocal for “Have A Cigar” (many people assume this is Roger Waters, it’s not), Hollywood stuntman Ronnie Rondell (the “burning man” of the album jacket), backing vocalist Venetta Fields (The Blackberries) and others, including photographer Jill Furmanovsky who documented some of the sessions. Wish You Were Here recording engineer Brian Humphries also reveals some of the secrets of the master tapes at Abbey Road Studios, illustrating how certain sonic elements were constructed [for instance the shimmering “singing” wine glasses sound that opens the record, was reused from the aborted Household Objects recording sessions.

In the final cut: If you’re a big Pink Floyd fan, The Story of Wish You Were Here is worth getting your hands on.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Shine On You Shitty Diamond: Worst Pink Floyd cover band, ever
 

 
The great French choreographer Roland Petit’s “Pink Floyd Ballet” saw the group performing live onstage in 1972 and 1973 with the dancers of Le Ballet de Marseille, Petit’s company.

Oddly, the original idea for the ballet was to do a version of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past!

Quotes taken from various sources about the experience and sourced by the Moicani blog:

Nick Mason: “But nobody read anything. David did worst, he only read the first 18 pages.” [Miles]

Roger Waters: “I read the second volume of Swann’s Way and when I got to the end of it I thought, ‘Fuck this, I’m not reading anymore. I can’t handle it.’ It just went too slowly for me.” [Miles]

Later Petit wanted to do A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Nick Mason: “Proust has been knocked on the head.” [Miles]“Originally he was going to do a complete program: a piece by Zinakist, a piece by us, and a new production of Carmen. I think he has now decided to do just two pieces — Zinakist’s and ours — which has meant doubling the length of the thing we are going to do.” [Miles]

Nick Mason [February 1972]: “We haven’t started work on it yet. We’ve had innumerable discussions, a number of lunches, a number of dinners, very high powered meetings; and I think we’ve got the sort of storyline for it. The idea is Roland Petit’s and I think he is settled on the ideas he wants to use for the thing so I think we’re going to get started. Ballet is a little like film actually. The more information you have to start with, the easier it becomes to write. The difficulty about doing albums is that you are so totally open. It’s very difficult to get started.” [Miles]

Roger Water and Nick Mason discussed the experience in retrospect, in 1973:

Roger Waters: “The ballet never happened. First of all it was Proust then it was Aladdin, then it was something else. We had this great lunch one day [4 December 1970]: me, Nick and Steve [O’Rourke]. We went to have lunch with [Rudolph] Nureyev, Roman Polanski, Roland Petit and some film producer or other. What a laugh! It was to talk about the projected idea of us doing the music, and Roland choreographing it, and Rudy being the star, and Roman Polanski directing the film and making this fantastic ballet film. It was all a complete joke because nobody had any idea of what they wanted to do.”

Interviewer: “Didn’t you smell a rat?

Roger: “I smelt a few poofs! Nobody had any idea — it was incredible.”

Nick Mason: “It went on for two years, this idea of doing a ballet, with no one coming up with any ideas. Us not setting aside any time because there was nothing specific, until in a desperate moment Roland devised a ballet to some existing music which I think was a good idea. [Referring to the winter ‘72-‘73 performances] It’s looked upon a bit sourly now.”

Roger Waters [still on about the 4 Dec lunch]: “We sat around this table until someone thumped the table and said, ‘What’s the idea then?’ and everyone just sat there drinking this wine and getting more and more pissed, with more and more poovery going on ‘round the table, until someone suggested Frankenstein and Nureyev started getting a bit worried, didn’t he? They talked about Frankenstein for a bit — I was just sitting there enjoying the meat and the vibes, saying nothing, keeping well schtuck.”

Nick: “Yes, with Roland’s hand upon your knee!”

Roger: “And when Polanski was drunk enough he started to suggest that we make the blue movie to end all blue movies and then it all petered out into cognac and coffee and then we jumped into our cars and split. God knows what happened after we left, Nick.” [Miles]

Dave Gilmour: “In fact we did that ballet for a whole week in France. Roland Petit choreographed to some of our older material . . . but it’s too restricting for us. I mean, I can’t play and count bars at the same time. We had to have someone sitting on stage with us with a piece of paper telling us what bar we were playing…” [Miles]

“The Pink Floyd Ballet” has been performed all over the world since its debut. Aside from the Pink Floyd, Petit also worked with Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Saint-Laurent, David Hockney, Jean Cocteau, Rudolf Nureyev and artist Niki de Saint Phalle. Roland Petit died last year at the age of 87.

The videos below were shot on November 22 and 26,1972 and January 12,1973 at Marseille Salle Valliers, France and Le Palais des Sports de la Porte de Versailles, Paris for various French TV networks. Dig how fluent David Gilmour is, seen suavely speaking French here with a passable accent.
 

 
“The Actuel Rock Festival,” sponsored by the fashionable Parisian magazine Actuel (along with the BYG record label) was to be the first ever major rock festival in France, and was heralded as Europe’s answer to Woodstock. French authorities, still smarting from the riots of May 1968, forbade it and the festival, which was originally going to take place in or near Paris, was held just a few miles beyond the French border, in Amougies, Belgium.

The festival took place over the course of five freezing cold days in late October (24-27) of 1969. The audience numbered between 15-20,000 people who were treated with performances by Pink Floyd, Ten Years After, Colosseum, Aynsley Dunbar (this is allegedly where Zappa met his future drummer), former Yardbird Keith Relf’s new group Renaissance, blues legend Alexis Korner, Don Cherry, The Nice, Caravan, Blossom Toes, Archie Shepp, Yes, The Pretty Things, Pharoah Sanders, The Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart and many more.

From the notes of the 1969 The Amougies Tapes Zappa bootleg:

Frank Zappa was present at the festival in a twofold capacity. First, as Captain Beefheart’s road manager; secondly, as M.C., assisting Pierre Lattes, a famous radio/TV presenter at the time (and the pop music editor for Actuel magazine). The latter task proved problematic given Zappa’s limited French, the prevailing language among the audience, who themselves didn’t seem to understand much English. Instead, Zappa relinquished his M.C. job for one of occasional guest guitarist. He plays with almost everybody, especially with Pink Floyd, Blossom Toes, Archie Shepp and Aynsley Dunbar, a fabulous drummer he will hire shortly thereafter. He introduces his friend Captain Beefheart and provides a powerful stimulant to all the other musicians. Most legendary, of course, is Frank Zappa’s jam with Pink Floyd on a very extended “Interstellar Overdrive”. The festival was filmed by Jerome Laperrousaz, and the film was to be called MUSIC POWER. Due to objections from various bands (most notably Pink Floyd) whose permission hadn’t been properly secured, the film was never officially released.”

Simpsons creator Matt Groening asked Zappa about the festival in a 1992 interview, but he doesn’t mention Pink Floyd:

Frank Zappa: I was supposed to be MC for the first big rock festival in France, at a time when the French government was very right-wing, and they didn’t want to have large-scale rock and roll in the country. and so at the last minute, this festival was moved from France to Belgium, right across the border, into a turnip field. they constructed a tent, which was held up by these enormous girders. they had 15,000 people in a big circus tent. this was in November, I think. the weather was really not very nice. it’s cold, and it’s damp, and it was in the middle of a turnip field. I mean mondo turnips. and all the acts, and all the people who wished to see these acts, were urged to find this location in the turnip field, and show up for this festival. and they’d hired me to be the MC and also to bring over Captain Beefheart. it was his first appearance over there. and it was a nightmare, because nobody could speak English, and I couldn’t speak fFench, or anything else for that matter. so my function was really rather limited. I felt a little bit like Linda McCartney. I’d stand there and go wave, wave, wave. I sat in with a few of the groups during the three days of the festival. but it was so miserable because all these European hippies had brought their sleeping bags, and they had the bags laid out on the ground in this tent, and they basically froze and slept through the entire festival, which went on 24 hours a day, around the clock. One of the highlights of the event was the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which went on at 5:00 a.m. to an audience of slumbering euro-hippies.

 

 
Although Frank Zappa himself had apparently forgotten that he had once jammed with the Floyd, the photos don’t lie and neither does the recording. Who else could that be on guitar at approx 4:15 in? Clearly it’s not David Gilmour:
 

 
Asked about jamming with Zappa, Nick Mason has this to say in 1973:

Frank Zappa is really one of those rare musicians that can play with us. The little he did in Amougies was terribly correct. But he’s the exception. Our music and the way we behave on stage, makes it very hard to improvise with us.”

The really frustrating thing about all of this is that the visual documentation (as well as superior sound recordings) of this collaboration MUST exist (or at least did at one time). Pink Floyd forbade Jerome Laperrous to use his footage of their performance from the Actuel Festival for his Music Power documentary of the event, but that still hasn’t stopped it from escaping to YouTube (see below), so where is the Zappa footage???

As the audio recording didn’t really show up and circulate until 2006, there is still hope. Another of the groups who Zappa sat in with at the festival were British psych rockers Blossom Toes, who released a CD in 2009, Love Bomb: Live 1967-69, that included Zappa’s participation in their Amougies set.
 

 
Shit, another legend bites the dust.

On the surface Dick Clark looked about as hip as Dick Nixon and as a kid I thought Clark was somewhat dubious as a purveyor of youth culture, but over the years I’ve come to appreciate his massive contribution to rock history, particularly when he went out on the limb and booked edgy acts on American bandstand, including Pink Floyd Public Image, Captain Beefheart, Bubble Puppy, Love, and X.

Here’s something I’d never seen before and I think it demonstrates just how on top of the rock scene Clark could be. Pink Floyd on American Bandstand
 

 
Pink Floyd performing (literally) explosive versions of “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” and “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun” onstage at The Dome, Brighton, June 28 or 29th, 1972. Turn your speakers up LOUD, sit back and prepare to be pulverized. This is truly one of the most epic moments of the rock era ever captured on celluloid.

What an insane show this must have been to have attended.

I’ve been an avid Pink Floyd bootleg collector for 20 years and this is one of the best clips of them in concert that I’ve ever seen. It’s fucking mind-boggling. I’ve scoured record stores, flea markets, then eBay and torrent trackers in pursuit of Pink Floyd boots and I’ve got just shitloads of stuff, but this clip is one of the jewels in the crown of the Pink Floyd cannon, capturing the band at the height of their power.

It finally came out as part of the elaborate Dark Side Of The Moon Immersion box set in 2011. Both of these numbers are on the Blu-ray DVD of that set looking even better than they do here.
 

 
“Corporal Clegg” is widely considered by Pink Floyd fans as one of their worst songs (well at least until the 1980s).

The first of many numbers in his catalog referring to World War II, Roger Waters told MOJO:

“Corporal Clegg is about my father and his sacrifice in World War II. It’s somewhat sarcastic—the idea of the wooden leg being something you won in the war, like a trophy.”

One Internet wag called the song “the anti-‘Yellow Submarine’.” It even features a kazoos and a penny-whistle. Note that it is Nick Mason who sings most of the lead vocals here.

Never performed live, this appearance was shot in February,1968 for Belgium’s RTB TV. The group is miming to a work-in-progress version of the song that has a different ending from the one found on A Saucerful of Secrets (i.e. it’s lacking the marching band).
 

 
Barbet Schroeder’s La Vallee (aka The Valley or The Valley Obscured by Clouds), his second film, is a cinematic curio about a materialistic Frenchwoman who throws her lot in with a group of free-thinking hippies who are searching for a mythical valley of paradise somewhere deep in the bush of Papua New Guinea.

La Vallee is a bit long, but it’s stunning to watch. If you are in the mood to kick back and space out with a trippy film that you can kind of half pay attention to, it’s not a bad choice.

The original soundtrack by Pink Floyd was released as their seventh album, Obscured By Clouds in 1972.
 
Below, a beautifully odd scene from La Vallee with the song “Mudmen” by Pink Floyd accompanying the visuals.
 

 
1970 Pink Floyd set from French television program, Pop 2. The band was shot live at the “Saint Tropez Festival de Musique” on August 8th, 1970.

Le set list:
Atom Heart Mother
The Embryo
Green is the Colour
Careful with that Axe, Eugene
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

Nick Mason is really, really amazing in this set. He’s on fire here.