The Floyd: A new box set collects the eclectic output of rock’s unlikeliest teen idols

Piper is largely the product of Barrett’s acid-fried imagination, as interpreted by three architecture students who were as interested in the artistic possibilities of rock ’n’ roll as they were in getting audiences off. Barrett’s friend Gilmour was brought in for 1968’s A Saucerful Of Secrets when the frontman began behaving erratically, and once Barrett left for good, Pink Floyd became more of a proper collective, with each member contributing ideas. For the next five years, the band developed a reputation as one of the most powerful live acts around—at once exploratory and muscular—while its recorded output tended to be eclectic to a fault, mixing winsome folk with avant-garde noise and noodly soundtrack music. Various members of the band have pointed to the 23-minute song “Echoes” on 1971’s Meddle as their real creative breakthrough, proving that they could stretch out and simplify simultaneously, making trippy, ambitious music that had genuine flow. The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals—my favorite three Floyd albums, along with Meddle—followed the “Echoes” blueprint, minimizing waste and maximizing impact.

Discovery is somewhat disappointing as a consumer item. The remastered albums all sound terrific, and the just-under-$200 price point isn’t too unreasonable for 14 albums (on 16 CDs). But the box itself isn’t especially attractive, and the accompanying booklet offers only previously unseen album and tour art, with no information about the music within. The CDs too are bare bones, replicating the original liner notes but offering nothing new: no bonus tracks, no commentary.

For bells and whistles, fans will have to spring for the series of “Immersion” box sets that the band is releasing. The Wall will be out next year, and Wish You Were Here next month, but currently available is a six-disc Dark Side box that comes with replica memorabilia, coasters, a pouch of marbles, a scarf, and an assortment of Dark Side-era audio and video. Again, the actual booklets in the Immersion Dark Side are scant on behind-the-scenes info, and all told, there’s not much in the way of new music here either. The box contains a complete 1974 live performance of the album, and a complete 1972 mix (which is mainly noteworthy for having a spoken-word segment in the place of Clare Torry’s vocals on “The Great Gig In The Sky”), along with a few live recordings and outtakes. Video-wise, the Immersion set features a couple of 1972 concert excerpts (under 20 minutes total, covering only two full songs), and examples of the films that were shown behind the band during their 1974-’75 world tour. Again, there’s not much here to cast new light on a group of musicians who’ve tended to maintain an air of mystery.

The major exception: a 30-minute 2003 documentary about the making of The Dark Side Of The Moon, which features insights from Waters, Gilmour, Mason, and Wright about their eagerness to tackle big subjects with this album, and how the various songs—as well as the record’s packaging—sprung from this notion to do something grand. In some ways, Dark Side was to be the last Pink Floyd album that was a democratic collaboration. In the documentary, Waters’ mates praise his lyrics, which became at once more sophisticated and more direct with Dark Side. But in the years to come, they’d start to resent the way Waters alone would decide what a Pink Floyd album would be, effectively turning his fellow band members from co-creators to sidemen. Waters’ dominance is a major problem with 1979’s The Wall, which features some of the band’s most brilliant and emotionally overpowering songs—especially “Comfortably Numb,” which is one of the few tracks on the album co-written by Gilmour—alongside some of the most self-indulgent. (For more on the making of The Wall and its cultural impact, I refer you to Steve Hyden’s excellent “We’re No. 1” column of a few months ago.)

And yet, given Pink Floyd’s post-Wall work, it’s hard to be too annoyed with Waters for botching what had been a superior run. Pink Floyd’s 1982 Wall follow-up The Final Cut is a complete Waters-fest, building out from a few Wall leftovers into a thoughtful (if too tuneless) exploration of World War II and its relation to the modern military mindset. Then Waters parted ways with the band, and Gilmour took the lead for 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason and 1994’s The Division Bell, two solid but largely personality-free arena-rock albums. None of these three records features the musicianship and rich interplay of the Dark Side/Wish You Were Here/Animals trifecta, but The Final Cut is at least idiosyncratic and often quite potent.

In retrospect, the creative and commercial success that Pink Floyd had is unusual, though understandable. Waters and company were an arty bunch, but rarely obscure. They weren’t singing songs about ancient myths, and weren’t aping the structures of classical symphonies. No, Pink Floyd mostly sang about lust and pain, set to music rooted in the blues and trance-y Euro-folk. Even what would seem to be the band’s quirkiest trait—Waters’ obsession with how WWII transformed notions of British manhood—weren’t too far removed from other products of UK pop culture at the time. (See: Side one of The Who’s Tommy, the movie Hope & Glory, et cetera.)

Mostly, Pink Floyd became huge because of a thematic arc that saw them contemplating the cosmic at the dawn of the ’70s, and then hunched in a chair and staring at a dingy mirror by decade’s end. In their particulars, Pink Floyd’s songs are concerned with problems that have little to nothing to do with the lives of any ordinary teenage rock ’n’ roll fan. But kids do know what it means to be awed by the sight of a flaming gong, and they also know how if feels to whisper to themselves in a cracked voice that one of these days they’re going to cut everyone around them into little pieces.