I remember when I first fell in love with The Dark Side of the Moon. I had recorded my father's LP on cassette so I could listen to it on my Walkman, and I played the whole album after a long day's work at Six Flags Great America. The bus trip home was nearly as long as the album itself, so that was perfect. Also the mood was fitting in that it was a rainy midnight ride. I was exhausted, so the music just melted into my soul. It was a mystical experience that was difficult to recapture. Believe me, I tried to recapture it many times. This may have lead me to collect all the Pink Floyd albums up through The Wall.
Looking back at those 5 or 6 years when I collected to and listened to those albums, I realize that I was very much into the otherworldliness that I thought drugs could take a person. I guess this was some people in the 1960s would call "mind expanding," but it also seemed to be replacing a social life, although I had little of one prior to getting into Pink Floyd.
Also during the first half of this time period, I was very much into analyzing and interpreting my dreams. I believed that some of Pink Floyd's songs helped induce lucid dreaming. In fact, in my first year at college, my friend and I successfully hypnotized a classmate as a demonstration for our Introduction to Psychology with a song from the Ummagumma album.
I look back at the years pretty harshly now because all this mind world exploring was get me no where socially. And socialization was what I really needed to get out of my funk. When I got out of this funk in 1996, I realized that the major theme of my dreams was a mild depression: gray skies and being alone, a gem in a dismal world. OK, so it was a combination of egocentrism and depression. When I came to this conclusion, I did not want to shine on like a crazy diamond.
Two Pink Floyd albums, Animals and The Wall were emotionally too pessimistic and depressing for me. I could feel myself spiral downwards when in fact my social life was improving. I am thankful that I was in college where I had an incredibly strong social life to prevent me from going into clinical depression. I have always wondered how I would have turned out if I didn't go to college, and this may have been a clue.
While I was in college, I had a year or two when I was very much into Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's lead singer during their early years. I liked him because he wasn't as morose as Roger Waters and I saw him as kind of role model. Before he lost himself through LSD, I thought he was a lot like me with his gift of writing and fondness for cats. In fact, my fondness for Syd Barrett replaced my fondness for John Lennon. Oh why, these ill-fated figures, I ask myself.
Anyway, my short-lived goal was to be Syd Barrett without the LSD. I was reading a lot about Pink Floyd, and his colleagues wished he hadn't gotten into the stuff because it took a negative toll on his songwriting, then his friendships, and then ultimately his independence. In college, most of my friends were talented musicians, so I could see myself being caught up writing songs for them. But after a couple of years, this lifestyle was no longer appealing to me.
My Pink Floyd phase ended when I completed the collection and found that half of it only depressed me. I had just found a wonderful girlfriend and was having a wonderful time with my college friends, I didn't need Pink Floyd to bring me down. Except for a few albums, I rarely pick up and listen to their albums anymore. I only do if I want to remember how miserable and misguided I was in the 90s.
I'd say the happiest moments I have concerning Pink Floyd is singing along with my best friend to some of the songs written by Syd Barrett. Our small band of friends would also sing "Vera" to taunt one of our colleagues who had a similar sounding name. At first, she thought we were serenading her, and we loved that irony.
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