Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (1975)

The opening synthesizer lines of the magnum opus that dominates Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here album, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," are light and pulsating, transporting the listener into a false sense of serenity before changing direction and allowing guitar notes and heavy drums to call out cries of desperation.  The piece continues to morph as it goes along, with one suite of music dissolving into another, finally making way for bassist Roger Waters' lyrics - sung by Waters himself - offering a romantic vision of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's co-founder and original guitarist, before fading out with a saxophone solo that suggests a mother weeping for a lost son.  As the guiding force of Pink Floyd in the band's early years (it was Barrett who named the band, after two Georgia bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council), Barrett was known for his enigmatic, psychedelic lyrics and his innovative, distorted guitar technique; he was celebrated as an charismatic artist with great promise. He was driven to madness, though, by his increased drug use and erratic behavior, and he proved to be too gentle a soul to survive the increasingly commercial demands of a record business that valued hit records over artistic innovation.  (Barrett died in 2006.)  Though the band went on without Barrett - and with ace guitarist David Gilmour, a childhood friend of Barrett, in his place - his subsequent absence stood as a testament to how the record business and the rock culture could and did destroy a unique artist of such original vision.

Wish You Were Here is an album of loss, a loss of a gifted musician and the loss of artistic integrity in the cutthroat culture that was the record business of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as an acknowledgment of possibilities in rock and roll that were never realized.  Gilmour, Waters, keyboardist Rick Wright, and drummer Nick Mason try to connect with Barrett and their audience less with words than with sounds; when "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," divided into five distinct parts on side one, resumes with a second suite of four parts on side two after a three-song interlude, the music is more violent, with a wash of white noise and guitar lines that scream like ghosts,  brittle synthesizer riffs and strong bass undercurrents.  It all finally dissolves into a mournful piano and electronic keyboard requiem that ends on the same note that the record began on.  Gilmour has noted that the pressure from their record company to follow up The Dark Side Of the Moon with an equally worthy album fueled Pink Floyd's playing, which dovetailed with the band's increasingly negative attitude toward record company executives; the result is fascinatingly compelling.

Lyrically, Wish You Were Here concerns the artist as the second person; the words in the songs address and speak to "you," and the second party presented is the tormented artist who is cynically manipulated and by record companies while celebrated by his peers.  It's Barrett, but it's also any artist whoever dared to dream.  "Welcome To the Machine," carried along by tape loops, Gilmour's acoustic guitar and Wright's explosive keyboard fills, finds the young rock musician sold dreams of stardom that are meant to turn him into a company man doing the bidding of the music "industry."  The blistering rocker "Have a Cigar" - with a comically devastating performance by guest vocalist Roy Harper - skewers haughty music moguls who profess to love music they don't even understand from bands they know nothing about ("Which one's Pink?" Harper's clueless A&R man asks of the band).

The most astonishing track on Wish You Were Here, however, is the conventionally arranged title song.  Carried by a mostly acoustic guitar line rich in treble that vaguely recalls the Beatles circa Rubber Soul, "Wish You Were Here" is a loving, highly emotional open letter from Waters (with Gilmour's vocals as the medium) to Barrett that expresses solidarity between kindred spirits ("We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year") and even as it mourns the turn of events that allowed Barrett's spirit to be broken ("Did you they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?").  It's hard for me to listen to it without tearing up, and the opening guitar riff, transmitted through a tinny speaker, is chilling.  It's the most personal expression that Pink Floyd, famous for having hidden behind its music and surreal album covers, ever offered from their side of a wall Waters would spend the next several decades trying to tear down.