The Magic and Majesty of Pink Floyd

After that, the first phase of the Pink Floyd story played out quickly — for better and worse. The better part came out of a confluence of the band's ambitions and the fast-rising movement in London's youth culture. Experimentation and a daring new sense of social play increasingly became a part of not just popular culture in Britain but also daily life. In London, from 1965 to 1968, this all became enmeshed in a movement known as the London Underground. Whether they intended to or not, Pink Floyd, more than anybody— more than the Beatles, for example— became the sound, the central house band, of the movement. That's because Pink Floyd, billed sometimes as "London's farthest-out group," developed themselves and their music in the midst of it all, live, night after night, at events made up of a participatory audience that included many who were experimenting with marijuana, hashish and psychedelics. There were other acts popular in this circuit, including Soft Machine, Arthur Brown, Procol Harum, Tomorrow and the jazz group AMM, but Pink Floyd set themselves apart with two features: an increasingly complex and resourceful display of light projections that appeared to envelop and react to the band as it played, and their abstract style of improvisation that could appear formless and unruly one moment, then precise, pounding and exhilarating the next. Artist Duggie Fields, who was a close friend of Barrett's, said that "suddenly they got an enormous following in a very short space of time, shorter than it took for the Rolling Stones to happen."

By the end of 1966, Pink Floyd had signed a rather lucrative deal for the time with EMI (5,000 British pounds), which allowed them unlimited time to record their first album at the label's Abbey Road Studios. (They ended up recording during the same early-1967 stretch that the Beatles spent making Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.) EMI assigned the group to Norman Smith, who had been the Beatles' sound engineer. Smith appeared a strange fit — reportedly he wasn't initially fond of the band's instrumental experiments in "Astronomy Domine" and "Interstellar Overdrive" — and in later years he disparaged the group in unnecessarily unkind terms. "I could barely call it music," he said.

Still, what resulted from those sessions was something wonderful and enduring. With Pink Floyd's debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the band loomed as a potentially matchless force in British rock, though Barrett was clearly the group's imaginative center. he wrote Lewis Carroll-indebted wordplay in songs about fantasy and childhood and horror and the I-Ching, all paired with remarkably intuitive melodies. He was the reason Pink Floyd were now the most notable new band in Britain, and he oved being a part of the cultural adventure that surrounded them. Jenny Fabian, who has done some of the best writing about the London scene, later told Mason in his book Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd that Floyd "were the first authentic sound of acid consciousness...They'd be up on stage like supernatural gargoyles playing their spaced-out music, and the same color that was exploding over them was exploding over us. It was like being taken over, mind, body and soul."

This matter of the band's psychedelic effect was about to take on a painful resonance. At the peak of Pink Floyd's early creative powers, with a remarkable album now finished and set for a summer 1967 release, Syd Barrett began to fall apart. The onset was sudden. As the group's second single, "See Emily Play," vaulted into the Top Ten, Pink Floyd were set for three consecutive July appearances on a weekly British program, Top of the Pops. Barrett looked haggard and wary as the weeks progressed, until finally he walked off during the third show, frantic and angry. That was just the start. In the beginning of August, just as The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was being released, Pink Floyd's managers, Peter Jenner and Andrew King, canceled the band's English tour due to Barrett's "nervous exhaustion," and sent the singer on vacation with a doctor to a Spanish island. While there, Barrett spent some nights sleeping in a graveyard. Come November, during tours in America and Britain with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Barrett only grew worse. At too many shows, he stood on stage staring at some unknown space beyond the heads of the audience, not touching his guitar. Years later Mason told Barry Miles, in Pink Floyd: The Early Years, "You're trying to be in this band... and things aren't really working out and you don't really understand why. You can't believe that someone's deliberately trying to screw it up and yet the other half of you is saying, This man's crazy— he's trying to destroy me!' "

There has been a lot of conjecture and mythmaking over the years about what went so terribly wrong for Barrett in such a short amount of time. Many have attributed his disintegration to a steady overconsumption of LSD. He had taken the drug since his days in Cambridge, and in 1966 he lived in an apartment with people who ingested acid regularly and purportedly fed it to Barrett whether he was aware of it or not. ("We never ventured inside," said Mason. "It was not a world the rest of us frequented.") Others — including Waters — believe that the psychedelics triggered a dormant schizophrenia in Barrett. However, author Tim Willis, when researching 2002's Madcap: The Half-Life of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's Lost Genius, discovered that Barrett had never been diagnosed with schizophrenia nor given medications, "on the grounds that he has an 'odd' mind rather than a sick one."