Pink Floyd offers fans quite a few items to be excited about in the new Wish You Were Here 50 box set, commemorating the golden anniversary of the British band’s ninth studio album — and follow-up to the standard-setting classic The Dark Side of the Moon.
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In addition to the demos, outtakes and previews of songs that wound up on subsequent Animals, the most intriguing bonus from the set (out now) may be a fan bootleg from an April 26, 1975 concert at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, four and a half months before Wish You Were Here’s release, recorded while the band was still in the midst of making the LP. Captured by the legendary late bootlegger Mike Millard and well-known in the grey market, it’s been spruced up by Steven Wilson for inclusion on the set, marking its first-ever official release.
“The great thing about Dark Side was it launched us from being a theater-sized operation to an arena, possibly even a stadium one,” drummer Nick Mason reflects about Pink Floyd’s burgeoning status at that time. Wilson tells Billboard that he hears the sound of a transition on the Millard recording that makes it a fascinating historical document for the Floyd faithful.
“I think one of the really interesting things is to hear how much the dynamic within the band and the relationship between the band and audience had changed — and not actually always for the better,” explains Wilson, who remixed the Pink Floyd at Pompeii — MCMLXXII soundtrack that came out during May. “When you listen to something like Pompeii, you’re listening to the sound of a band that developed an incredible chemistry from playing relatively small venues night after night over a period of years. So they’d developed this intuitive chemistry. Then suddenly Dark Side of the Moon explodes and they go to…playing missive arenas and massive stadiums, and I actually feel sometimes they’re not enjoying it. They’re still playing amazing, don’t get me wrong, but can hear the frustration, you can hear the sense of disconnect, that, of course, Roger (Waters) would famously channel into creating The Wall, that sense of alienation he felt from the audience.”
The bootleg features previews of three Wish You Were Here tracks — “Have a Cigar” and the nine-part “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” that was divided in two for the eventual album. The show also kicks off with “Raving and Drooling,” which later morphed into “Sheep” on Animals, and “You Gotta Be Crazy,” which became “Dogs.” Recordings of the those two from London’s Wembley Empire Pool the previous November were featured on a 2011 reissue of Wish You Were Here, but Wilson feels the Los Angeles renditions are notably different.
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“I do think they’re superior,” he says. “These versions are more feisty. What’s fascinating is they’re still trying to be, at this point at least — and I don’t think it really changes until the Animals tour — a kind of exploratory, improvisational band. Those pieces…are still very loose. They’re still quite extended. There’s still quite a lot of what you might call the ‘psychedelic’ spirit.
“It’s fascinating to hear them still trying to pull that off in front of an arena crowd. But I can hear the audience get impatient — I don’t mean literally, but when I listen to the recording I can feel the sense of impatience the audience is having with these 14-, 15-minute pieces. And I wonder if the band learned from that experience and started to dial that back when you go forward to the subsequent albums.”
Wilson had, in fact, purchased a cassette version of the Millard bootleg when he was 14, from a market stall in Camden. For the Wish You Were Here 50, release, meanwhile, he “basically went out and got hold of every single version of this recording that is out there” in the Pink Floyd archive (the group famously did not professionally record shows during the Wish You Were Here or Animals tours), from fans and from the Internet. He chose the most recent transfer, known as the JEMS Version, as his primary source material but notes that “it had the best fidelity but it had a lot of dropouts,” owing to how many generations of upgrades it had been through. “Each time it’s been transferred with slightly higher resolution and slightly better equipment, the tape has been degrading,” Wilson explains. “So what I was spending a lot of my time doing was patching over the dropouts with other versions, trying to create a version of it which had the best possible fidelity but with the least amount of audio degradation.”
He stresses that the idea was not to create a pristine or polished live album, however.
“I think it is what it is — it’s a bootleg and it sounds like a bootleg, albeit a very, very superior quality,” Wilson says. “I think some people thought I was going to go down the route of artificial intelligence and extract it and do all the sort of jiggery-poo, and I didn’t want to do that. It was just a question of applying a little fairy dust on it, increasing the stereo image, taking out some of the nastier frequencies, boosting the bottom end a little bit, leveling up the inconsistencies but not trying to do too much with it because it’s actually a pretty famous recording.” He also removed some of the protracted instrument tuning that was done between songs on the show.
“I just tried to make it a more pleasant listening experience, something you’d want to listen to more than once…without trying to disguise the fact that this is essentially an audience recording.”
The bootleg is among a treasure trove of extras on Wish You Were Here 50, including the previously released version of the title track featuring Stephane Grappelli on violin along with an unreleased instrumental version of the song featuring pedal steel. A couple of Waters’ demos for “Welcome to the Machine” are included as well, while longtime Floyd engineer James Guthrie put together both halves of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” into one 25-and-a-half-minute opus.
The latter, of course, is the song that saved Wish You Were Here.
Mason acknowledges that while Pink Floyd was “really beginning to get to grips with how to use a recording studio and how to play the instruments by that time,” working on Wish You Were Here “were probably the most unstructured sessions that we’d done, up until then…. Compared to Dark Side, it’s such an unfocused picture. With Dark Side it was really easy to see how it fitted together…. This felt like harder work because we didn’t really know what we were going to do next.” Wilson elaborates that “Dark Side had been written during that period when they were still…essentially an underground band. Then Dark Side goes stratospheric, so Wish You Were Here is the first album they create and developed the material for where they were an acknowledged arena band. They talk about sessions for the album being very awkward, very robotic.”
With “Shine On,” according to Mason, “that’s when we finally felt we were actually going to get a record out of this. Once we’d got that we knew we had a record, and we could fill in the rest.” Part of the album’s legend, meanwhile, was that the song’s subject, original Floyd frontman Syd Barrett, turned up while the group was working on it even though he’d been ousted from the group during 1967.
“I think he did come for two days,” Mason recalls, “but my version of event is that I was working on a drum track. I went into the control room to listen and there was this guy sitting on the couch who I didn’t recognize. I think Dave said to me, ‘Do you know who that is?’ ‘No.’ ‘That’s Syd.’ I couldn’t believe it; he’d gone bald, gained a lot of weight, looked completely different. It was very…sad to see. I think he said something and eventually left. The whole thing was just shocking.”
Wish You Were Here 50 comes in multiple formats, including a Blu-ray edition with films the group showed during the 1975 tour and a short film by the late Storm Thorgerson, whose design firm Hipgnosis worked on a number of Pink Floyd projects. The deluxe box set also includes a vinyl Live At Wembley 1974, a hardcover book with previously unpublished photos and text from Wilson and Erik Flannigan. British poet laureate Simon Armitage wrote a poem of appreciation for Pink Floyd to accompany the reissues, and the band has created a series of branded, limited-edition merchandise available via PinkFloyd.com and at pop-up shops that will be open in Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Barcelona and Milan from Dec. 12-15.
