Racin' and Rockin'..."JB's Take"

[WildcatOne]

Tonight I’m doing a tribute to the great Quad Cities fuel bike drag racer Terry Noth, from LeClaire, Iowa. It was not an easy year for our friend Erik Carlson in Geneseo, Illinois. His wife Summer Noth Carlson’s father and Erik’s father-in-law and mentor Terry Noth passed away in September of 2014. Terry was known in the Quad Cities region as not only a creative and innovative drag racer, but he was also the toughest hombre who ever set his boots on a drag strip. His shop was visited by biker gangs and he would fix their bikes but everybody knew you didn’t dare mess with him. Over the years, Terry Noth’s personality came to become one of endearment to the folks who knew him. He was a loving and caring father to Summer and one of Erik’s best friends. His loss was felt not only by his family but by the entire Quad Cities drag racing community. They carried on, as we all do, after losing one man who was respected and revered, with his memory remaining with them all. His good heart would always override the hard-as-nails exterior he projected. He will never be forgotten.

On the first run of the first day of the new season at Cordova, Erik’s “Plan A” ’53 Stude took flight after he crossed the finish line, got sideways, and went into a series of barrel rolls, destroying the car but thankfully sparing Erik, who was badly shaken up in the wreck but in a couple of days he was back up on his feet and with his Dad, checking the wreckage that he had to be cut out of but the roll cage and chassis they built did their job. He put his ’62 Chevy bubbletop, the “Vulgar Display of Power” Top Sportsman hot rod back out there and raced the season and is now making plans to come up with a new car in the future. I’m going to include now some things that Erik has written about the crash and about how Terry’s spirit is still with him.

Erik wrote this September 27th:
It is that time of year again..well almost.. where we are all winding down and thinking already of next season....we have one more race to go to.....I blew the motor up at the World Series so I put the motor out of the Stude in the ‘62......this weekend a bunch of locals went to Earlville to run the quick 16 up there..I was planning on going but dad had other plans and Summer did as well so I had no help....I went to the shop to finish up the car for this weekend...I guess I was having one of those days that we all have where I was questioning my sanity on even attempting to keep racing..."why do I do this to myself??..in the name of "Fun"....I went out back and looked at the remains of the wrecked Stude....I am not sure how long I stood there but it was awhile....a few things crossed my mind in that time...one was as badly bent as this thing is...I walked away from it, two was and my dad and I built it..we must have done a good job... another thought was the next one will be even better and faster!...then the last thought maybe going this quick is not for me?? I think I know what I am doing but maybe I do not??...it was at that moment..I kid you not the breeze came up and part of the mangled body fluttered as it went past....the hair on my neck stood up and I heard Terry's voice in my head. It was him telling me like he told me a thousand times..."Bleep what everyone else thinks. You do this for YOU and no one else!"....I stood there for a bit longer...looked up and said "thanks buddy"....the breeze died down and I went back inside and worked on the car.

September 28th, 2015: tomorrow is going to be a hard day....in some way every day is hard but this one will be harder than most..it will mark 1 year since my father in law, and buddy Terry Noth passed away....Terry was many things depending on who you were to him..he either really REALLY liked you or he really HATED you there was not much in between... I am lucky to have been one of the ones he really liked....I kind of think it was partly because he knew my dad and he really liked my dad, part of it is I totally "got it"....by that I mean I knew he had some odd ways of thinking when it came to how to live one's life..but I got it..it didn't bother me....now that is not to say that sometimes he did things i didn't understand why..he did that a lot....one thing I always knew was how much he loved his wife Pat and his daughter, my wife, Summer..he was not always good at showing it, but he sure thought the world of those two....as i have heard from many over the past year the good times outweighed the bad ones.....the one shot is Terry doing what he did best ..telling a story..holding court as it were....and if you took the time to listen you would always learn something from him..whether it be a quote from Pulp Fiction, or the proper way to fit a piston in an ironhead......you always learned and if he picked up on the fact that if you honestly were listening you learned a lot..if he knew you didn’t care..he'd change the subject and you never would hear the end of the story!...Terry could be quite maddening as well....but again you still learned .....

I had a horrible racing season starting off with me crashing the Stude first time out, then it was one and done usually good races but I just couldn't get past first or second round...then I blew it up at the series...through all of that every time I got down I'd get some sort of sign that Terry was still there, still watching from behind the car like he always did...I miss the Sunday night debriefings.....I have to say when I met Terry it was because he was building me a motor for my Sportster......I met my wife that day but didn't know it..I think he did though.... he knew me and of course who my dad was and I think him knowing my dad was the only reason he ever worked on my stuff in the beginning....he knew I raced a car but was mostly disinterested in that....he was a bike racer..period....it wasn't until Summer told him how much fun our first real date was that he went to see me race....see I picked Summer up at 7 am we went to Cambridge for a car show with the car..it got over early enough that we went out to the track and I made it in time for the first round..no time run and I went to the semis!...she got home at 2 am or so!....we pulled in the drive and she says "you know I have a midnight curfew"..OOPS! He stepped out of the shop and smiled and waved..later he said I knew she was in good hands...after he saw me run a few times he decided that me running a car was not too awful and he became really interested in it....and came out almost every time we ran at Cordova....if you knew Terry, he didn't always make it in time to see me run!..but he came, that was what counted....when dad stopped driving and started helping me he came more often....now sometimes you had to watch for what Terry said to people..but other than that it was great having these two guys helping "the kid" as Terry would say....

I know this is long but I need to say it....I miss this old man way more than I ever thought..he was the smartest person I ever met and also the most stubborn, a couple of the things I will always remember and always make me smile is one when he restored the fueler and we fired it for the first time in his shop...now anyone else would probably fired it on a small percent..not Terry...98% is how he ran it and that is how it was. He showed me how to mix the fuel, and there were four big burly bikers there that had helped him with money to buy fuel for the bike. We fired it in a huge yellow nitro haze and about 2 seconds into it all those bad ass bikers were outside there's Terry and I standing by the bike grinning like little girls!...about that time Summer pulls in and starts to walk in and one of the guys says "Missy you might wanna stay out here, pretty fumy in there.." she laughed and said I grew up smelling Nitro! in she walks in and there we stand....PRICELESS!...the other is my buddy Rhett had Terry build him a cool 60's Panhead we are in the final stages of the build and in the shop....BS ing and Rhett says something about it being the new millennium or something Terry walks over to the stereo, turns it up and it is Robin Trower..Rhett had no clue who it was but I did!.. Terry says .."it might be 2000 and points out there....but it is 1969 in here!".....and that is how I leave this....I hope I make you smile and laugh, Terry. You sure made me!..

I have to wonder what the first one of the season would have been like after I wadded up the car on the first pass....I know Summer has had a hard time missing her dad as well obviously, but seeing her go through watching me crash hard was heartbreaking .....she knows I am going to go back out and race again ..and she also knows that the first guy that would have said "get back out there' would have been Terry ......the last time he ever really rode a drag bike was when he crashed on someone else’s ride....I know that was probably about the only regret he ever had or at least admitted to was that he never got back out there in the saddle..there were more factors than just crashing and getting hurt but it was a big regret he had....he always thought he could have run with all the guys he admired and I think he was probably as good or better rider than a lot of them..he made riders out of novices just by telling them how to do it..that is not easy to do...but he did it.

That’s Erik’s words on Terry Noth, folks. Terry, we know you’re riding high in Harley Heaven, and we wish good luck, safe racing and the best of times ahead for Erik and Summer.

Next week I’m going to resume the history of Pink Floyd. I’ll have updates and tidbits on the band as it went through some major changes in the late 60s.

Y’all be sure to tune in tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern on Racers Reunion Radio for Racing Through History. It’s Thee Goat Rodeo you don’t want to miss! Thanks, I’ll see y’all next week.

[WildcatOne]

My pick for Racers of the week are the sisters, Sam and Nikki Garrano from Horsham, Pennsylvania. These ladies were recommended to me by our friend Rich Panicaro. Thanks, Rich! Sam and Nikki come from a drag racing family, with their step-grandfather being the great Joe Gerdelmann, the legendary drag racer from the 1950s and 60s, about whom Nikki sent a great story to me that I will read at the end of their feature.

Sam’s car is an ‘87 Camaro, powered by a 468 big block Chevy. Carl Hines is her engine builder. Carl was with Jenkins competition for 20 years. Sam’s best on-track performance is a 9.67 ET at 143 mph. Sam races at Atco Raceway.

Sam has been drag racing, starting with Junior Dragsters since the age of 11. She has been around the sport of drag racing her whole life. She’s been to many final rounds while racing Junior Dragsters. She started out running 10.00 in the 8th mile at age 11. By the time Sam was 16 she was running 7.90. She has traveled a lot to many different racetracks. Competed at the Eastern Conference Finals in Bristol, Tennessee for several years.

Sam has been racing her ‘87 Camaro for 2 years now in the Pro ET class. She’s been to one final round this year. Overall, Sam said she had a pretty good season! She also runs the 10.0 index. Sam finished 12th in points at Atco Raceway this year.
Her goal is to win a championship! Sam also asked me to add a special thanks to her dad Frank Garrano for bringing her up in the sport of drag racing and for all his love and support to her throughout the years!

Nikki is 25 years old and is from Horsham, Pennsylvania. Her sister Sam and she grew up watching their dad race at Atco Raceway. Nikki started racing junior dragsters at the age of 12. They did a lot of traveling and competed in a few series on the East Coast. When Nikki turned 18 she got a "big" car. It’s an ‘86 Camaro (which is now currently her sister’s). She got her NHRA competition license in 2011. Pat Musi was at the track rental that day and signed off Nikki’s license which she told me was pretty cool!

The ‘86 Camaro weighs 2970lbs. It has a 555 Big-Block Pat Musi Chevy Engine. The trans is a turbo 400.

Nikki’s best ET is an 8.88 at 154 mph. Her greatest accomplishment is winning the Super Pro Junior Dragster Track Championship at Atco Raceway in 2008, which was Nikki’s last year racing Junior Dragsters).

First and foremost, Nikki thanks her dad for getting her and her sister involved in the sport of Drag Racing. She thanks her family for their support, and her fiancé , Zach for giving up some of his races to support her! She gives special thanks to John Burke from Warrington Collision for the paint, and to Paul's converters.

Nikki sent this on Joe Gerdelmann. It will override the Pink Floyd chapter I had ready to go for tonight, but Joe deserves the recognition for his legendary racing career.

Nikki said: During our Jr. dragster career, my father met my step mother, Connie, daughter of Joe Gerdelmann, Sr. He began racing in1958. He ordered a chassis Research dragster while still in the Army. The "dragster" was delivered to his house in a long box of tubes and axles. He had to weld it together himself. He put a 392 blown gas hemi. He began at Atco Raceway--winning many events. He travelled from Ontario Canada to Miami Florida racing against the likes of Don Garlits, Connie Kalitta and TV Tommy Ivo. In 1961 on his honeymoon with my now step grandmother, Gail, he set the NASCAR speed record for Top Gas at 176 mph, which still stands today. (At that time NASCAR was involved in drag racing). In 1962, he built another Chassis Research car with two blown 392 Hemis. Although it took many awards for best engineered and best appearing car, he said he almost went broke keeping it together.

In November 1962, he bought Connie Kalitta's first Bounty Hunter. He had great success with it and it is now in the Don Garlits museum in Ocala Florida. We went to the museum when it was added and Don Garlits gave us a personal tour. In 1970, he decided that his towing and repair business and family responsibilities did not afford drag racing. At this time NHRA began Nitro classes and top gas was disbanded. With no sponsors he knew he could not do both. He continued a successful business for 30 years. He was inducted into the NHRA Hall of Fame for Division One and is in East Coast Drag Times Hall of Fame. He now is 82 and retired. He comes to most of our races and cheers us on from the starting line.

That’s Sam and Nikki Garrano, Racers of the Week. Ladies, we wish you good luck, safe racing and the best of times in the future.

Time is running out, and I want to give the Pink Floyd story the time it’s due, so I will wait till next week to pick up where I left off and go from there, folks. I want to thank Danny White for his input and collaboration with me on the Pink Floyd Story. You’d think we were right there with ‘em when the history of the band was being made. The last chapter ended when the band returned to England after an overall fail at their attempt to tour the US to promote their first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. We’ll start again at that point.

Y’all be sure to tune in tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern for Racing Through History on Racers Reunion Radio. It’s Thee Goat Rodeo you don’t want to miss! Thanks, I’ll see y’all next week.

[Wheelzman]

That's a cool thing having sisters as racers. Also, the story of Joe Gerdelmann and his racing career from the past. Good job John.

[WildcatOne]

Thanks, Wheelz! That was one of my favorite features.

I want to send a Big Shout-Out to our buddy Rich Panicaro, from Mercerville, New Jersey. Rich ran the Buick, Olds and Pontiac event at Atco yesterday. He made the Quarter-Final in Pro and he won Super Pro! Rich said he was footbraking…way to go, Rich! That’s great Drag Racing!

Rich mentioned that he’s open for sponsorship for next season, and I’d like to suggest that if there are any companies looking to back a hard-charging winner, Rich Panicaro’s your man.

My pick for Racer of the Week is Thomas White, from Hilo, Hawaii. Thomas was recommended to me by our friend Michael Baba Balbarino, of the 808_FUEL page. Thanks, Michael! Thomas’ ’74 Datsun 210 is an excellent example of a great hot rod that gets Thomas in the running for a championship every time he takes it to the track. Almost all of the racers at Hilo are family projects, and the Whites are no exception. Here’s Thomas’ own words to me about his car:

"My car was put together by a 16 yr old kid whose name is Riley. He is now 18 and is at UTI in Arizona. My Datsun is a street legal car but I only race it on the strip. It has a rotary 13b a small street port stock Mazda trans, Toyota truck rear end with 8:86 gears with 13/22 8.5 slicks . it ran 13.0 all motor. With the nitrous it runs low 12’s and the mph is 112 . I hope to have a second chance at racer of the week with my new car when it’s done. It's a 1971 Toyota Corolla 2-door wagon. It's the new camaro green. Well I need to get my butt in gear and get it done! We just painted it two days ago and now to put it together. It’s going to be rotary, too. a 13b with a turbo. I feel like trying something new.”

Thomas, when you do get that Toyota wagon done, you’ll be a Racer of the Week again. I’ve seen pictures of it and it is a breathtakingly gorgeous car with that fabulous green paint job.

Thomas White, we wish you good luck, safe racing and the best of times in the future.

Tonight I’m going to do Chapter 2 of the Pink Floyd story. Danny White and I have been collaborating on it and between the two of us, we’ve come up with what we think is a good version of this great band’s history. Where I left off 3 weeks ago was when the band returned to England following a failed first American tour to promote their first album. The erratic and sometimes maddening behavior of the great Syd Barrett, which had become progressively worse since their album was released a few months earlier, had made it just about impossible for the band to play live anymore without him screwing it up. Dick Clark interviewed them on American Bandstand, and he put the microphone in front of Syd and he said “So, which one’s Pink?” His question was met with a cold, dead stare. He did the same thing to Pat Boone when they were on his show, too. Now, during those heady times of Psychedelia, it was often trendy and fun to feign madness, but Syd Barrett wasn’t kidding. His anti-participation in band activities and gigs was having a seriously damaging effect on the band’s success.

It was time to have a meeting.

The band unanimously decided to bring in their friend Dave Gilmour, who was also a friend of Syd’s, from the band Joker’s Wild to play guitar and sing Floyd’s songs to help Syd with his parts. For a brief period in early 1968, Pink Floyd was a five-piece unit. The idea was for Syd to concentrate on songwriting, and have Dave cover for him onstage, but after a few gigs with that arrangement, it became clear that this was an unworkable situation, and one night when they were on their way to a gig, somebody spoke up in the van and said “Should we pick up Syd?” Another voice answered, “Why bother?” and thus began a new chapter in the story of Pink Floyd and in the history of Modern Rock.

The guy who founded the band, named it and wrote all their songs was now officially kicked out of it. The last straw was the last practice they had with him following a disastrous gig. At this practice, he came in, plugged his guitar in and played a hundred chords in a row at top volume, and screamed over and over into his microphone: “Have you got it yet? Have you got it yet?” After that incident, the band pretty much decided to call it quits with Syd and continue with Dave from then on. As much as they loved him, they had to move on, and I have to painfully agree with that decision.

Syd’s star status and his involvement with the band was actually far from over, however. His legend as the James Dean of Psychedelia continued to grow as time went on. Although the band made what is in my opinion an outstanding follow-up to Piper At The Gates Of Dawn with the title A Saucerful of Secrets, on which Syd made minimal contributions, it was the debut of Dave Gilmour as a full-fledged member, and it was the first Pink Floyd album I ever listened to. I found out later about the Syd Barrett-led Floyd, but what is there is in my opinion the logical extension of what was established with their first album, with elements of Gregorian Chant set against tribal rythyms, free-form jazz, wailing vocals and the hardest rock I’d ever heard at that time. Their record company made the wise decision a few years later to package both of the early Floyd albums together as a double and they named it “A Nice Pair”. Needless to say, I highly recommend this purchase, as it is an accurate document of this incredible band’s roots.

It turned out to be an amazing stroke of fate to get Dave Gilmour in the band. He immediately proved himself to be not only a capable replacement for Syd, but a fantastic musician, songwriter and singer, in many ways an even more dynamic front man than Syd had been. The band played on. Their time with Syd Barrett had effectively established an ongoing theme in the band’s material from then on. Loss, madness and inexplicable circumstance. Syd Barrett’s influence and legacy became a touchstone to their art.
After Floyd dumped Syd, he went off on a wild trip around the English countryside in his Cooper mini and ended up back in Cambridge getting treatment at a hospital for mental and physical exhaustion.

The record company immediately signed him as a solo artist and he returned to London to attempt to get his act back together and make a solo album. Dave Gilmour signed on as the producer. He played bass on the record and hired Jerry Shirley from Humble Pie to provide drums for Syd’s songs. They just let the tapes roll when Syd was there with his guitar. What came out of him was later assembled, processed, arranged and made into songs by Gilmour and Shirley.

I’ll detail this project in the next segment, but I thought a good way to end tonight’s chapter is to relate a scene that happened in London right after Syd was given the boot from the band. At that time, the well-known British singer, Terry Reid had just turned down the gig as vocalist with Jimmy Page’s new band. He recommended a kid from Birmingham to Page named Robert Plant to take the gig. Reid was hanging out in a pub in London and Dave Gilmour walks in. He said “I’ve just got the gig with Floyd and I’m making 300 pounds a week!” Terry Reid turned around and said under his breath: “Enjoy it while you can, Dave, because without Syd Barrett, that band is going nowhere.”

Y’all be sure to tune in tomorrow night at 7 PM Eastern for Racing Through History on Racers Reunion Radio. It’s Thee Goat Rodeo you don’t want to miss! Thanks, I’ll see y’all next week.

[WildcatOne]

My pick for Racer of the Week is Craig Wright and the Damn Good Racing Team from Earls Barton, England. Craig and his team with their Honda Civic named "Wrighty's Wagon" have completed their 5th season and have won the 2015 UK National Sportsman ET Drag Racing Championship. They raced at Santa Pod Raceway and also Shakespeare County Raceway and won the championships at both tracks as well as the National series.

Craig lives 5 miles from Santa Pod and his Father was the Fire/Safety Chief at the track when he was a kid. He grew up right there and lives there today. Ian Marshall is the Chief starter at Santa Pod, Paula his wife worked with Craig’s dad in the fire engine years ago....Ian then built a SG '92 Camaro called Highlander, his Dad became crew chief..that’s how he cut his teeth and learned the craft...Sadly Paula passed away a few years back. Rest in peace.

Damn Good Racing runs a 1995 EG Honda Civic and the specs are:
a Honda 1500 Block with a1600 Vtec Head, a 4-2-1 Manifold, Twin Carbs, Trumpets and 1 off airbox. An Auto Trans. The car makes 138hp and uses 13" Hoosier Slicks on the front.
Craig’s personal bests are a16.147 ET at Santa Pod, Easter 2015,
85.24mph at Shakespeare County Raceway in May of 2015.
CREW: Crew Chief - Chris "Hardy" Hardinges, Sam Innes, Kat Rudd, Katie Weller
The Bottle Technician is Harrison Rudd-Wright

Craig sends thanks also to The Redneck Racing Team, Anais Sheperd, his Mum and Dad, and the Team Ethers Boys at AES Rescue.
The Sponsors are Damn Good Creative and Exhibitions, Team Topspeed Automotive, Lloyd T's Recovery, Custom Pipeworks, and CMC Northampton.
From 2011 – 2015, Craig has lit up the awards process in UK Drag Racing. I have an entire page of wins and awards that he has amassed with the outstanding performance of the car, his team’s preparation and his natural driving talent. The entire list of honors (which totals 5 paragraphs) that this great team has won will be included in the feature that I post in the DragList.com forum after the show tonight. It’s enough to make the top teams in drag racing all over the world envious. These guys have it going on.

Craig’s list of AWARDS: 2011: First full season in Drag Racing, BugJam 25 Sportsman ET Winner, SPRC Sportsman ET Champion

2012: BugJam 26 Sportsman ET Winner, Open Sports Nationals No 1 Qualifier, SPRC Sportsman ET Champion, UK/National Sportsman ET Champion, Shakespeare County Raceway Sportsman ET Championship Runner Up, McDonald Ireland "Most promising newcomer" to Shakespeare County Raceway

2013: Festival Of Power Sportsman ET Winner, Big Bang Sportsman ET Runner Up, Springspeed Nationals Sportsman ET Winner, Summer Nationals No1 Qualifier, Open Sports Nationals Sportsman ET Winner, Shakespeare County Raceway Sportsman ET Champion, SPRC Sportsman ET Championship Runner Up, UK/National Sportsman ET Champion

2014: Festival Of Power No1 Qualifier, Springspeed Nationals Runner Up, Bug Jam 28 Runner Up, Perfect Reaction 0.0000secs, Semi Final at Bug Jam 28, National Finals Sportsman ET Winner, Shakespeare County Raceway Championship Runner Up, UK/National Sportsman ETChampionship RunnerUp, SPRC Sportsman ET Champion (Triple Champion)

2015: Festival of Power Runner Up, Big Bang Sportsman ET Winner, Springspeed Nationals Winner, Summer Nationals #1 Qualifier, Summer Nationals Winner, Perfect ET winner @ The Summer Nationals, Bug Jam Winner, Shakespeare County Raceway Champion, SPRC Sportsman ET Champion, UK/National Sportsman ET Champion

Craig’s new ride for the 2016 season is the Paul Marston Racing, Miller 4-link Super Pro ET Dragster Capable of 150mph in 8secs. Craig will be piloting this car, currently at the 2 FIA Rounds in 2016 but if he can find the backing and the budget, the team is hoping to do the full 2016 SPRC Championship series.

If you would be interested in advertising on this car and being part of their 2016 venture, Craig said they have a few very good marketing/advertising deals, so please contact Craig on the damn good racing page if it's something you would like to be involved in. This car promises to be another championship ride for Craig.

That’s Craig Wright, 2015 triple-crown champion in the UK sportsman ranks, and the first team to ever do it in that class. Craig, we wish you good luck, safe racing and the best of times in the future.

Picking up with Chapter 3 of the Pink Floyd story, at the end of last week’s segment, the band had made the painful and difficult decision to move on from Syd Barrett and completed their second album. Their connection and involvement with the mad genius behind their initial success was far from over, but the band personnel from then on was solidified and working together.

They entered a period between 1969 and 1972 that I have often referred to as the doldrums. Not that they weren’t playing, because they were playing as good or as anyone else, but although I have the albums they released during those years, I can’t find any hits anywhere. You could line up those albums and play them one after another in chronological order, and it sounds to me like one, long, brooding study of a band seeking its own identity after their guiding light was removed. Of the albums they released, which were titled Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Umagumma (which was my favorite), Obscured By Clouds, as well as the soundtracks to 2 movies, Meddle (not like steel, rather like being unnecessarily involved in somebody else’s business) was a complete and fully functioning statement as a band, but even with David Gilmour’s excellent playing, writing and singing, Pink Floyd seemed to be drifting, but it was drifting forward at least.

The very fact that they were still together, touring and recording is pretty amazing, considering what all they had been through. They had to completely rebuild their material, their sound, their style, their attitude and their image after having already been to highs and lows that other bands had never been confronted with, but they hung in there and by 1971 into 1972, they started work on their eighth album; the one that would redefine and reinvent their legacy and create a new template for their career.

They came up with solid content, and a concept that created not just an atmosphere, but a complete and fully-realized state of consciousness. Pink Floyd decided to call the album Dark Side Of The Moon. The ongoing lyrical theme that ran through the whole album dealt with issues of alienation, greed, conflict and madness. Much of Floyd’s work thereafter would contain direct references to their former colleague and leader, Syd Barrett.
They worked on the album for the better part of 1972, and in early 1973 it was released.

World domination was soon to follow. It was an immediate hit, number 1 worldwide and it stayed on the charts for the next 15 years, becoming one of the top selling albums in history. As I look back on that album, I personally see it as the last album the band made that was a full-team, united effort. The recording engineer, Alan Parsons, created an amazing sound using the latest in analog technology, and each band member contributed parts to the songs and the album as a whole that made it something that really nobody had ever imagined or heard before.

The first time I heard Dark Side Of The Moon was in a set of brand-new stereo headphones that a friend put on my head, and I listened to it from start to finish as it was played for the first time by our local FM Rock station. Many times during that experience, I was not sure if what I was hearing was the band playing or if it was what was going on in my mind. There is no question that this album was a landmark not only in the history of Pink Floyd, but it opened a new chapter in the history of Rock music.

For the Floyd, it was an artistic and emotional triumph, and for everybody else, it offered a window to another world. At this point in time, it was a band running itself, and you can hear it in the grooves that it was a singular focus by all the members creating synergistically a product whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That doesn’t happen but once in a lifetime, and it would prove over the next several years to be impossible to duplicate.

Meanwhile, the mad genius Syd Barrett was having a great deal of difficulty trying to continue his shattered career with a shattered mind. While Pink Floyd was working on making Dark Side Of The Moon, Syd was making his second solo album, titled “Barrett”. This time, Richard Wright was involved with David Gilmour and Jerry Shirley again in trying to assimilate and construct a cohesive sound out of Syd’s totally untogether song forms. I admire these gents for their effort in trying to help their friend do something positive, but listening to this record and the one before it, in spite of the favorable reviews, for me it is tragic to hear compared to his work on Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

Syd Barrett, for all intents and purposes, effectively dissolved into mythic status after this album was completed, but in the years to come he would repeatedly shock the band with unexplainable phenomena. After playing some David Peel and BBC sessions, and one concert at the Olympia Theatre in London, where Syd performed 4 songs into a poorly mixed PA system. After the fourth song, Syd politely and quietly took off his guitar, set it down on the stage and walked off. He walked the 50 miles all the way back to Cambridge, and he moved in at his mother’s semi-detached cottage, never to perform or record anything of substance in London again. His legend would continue to grow from then on, spiced here and there by various Syd Barrett sightings over the next few years, but wow...what sightings they were. More on that later.

Y’all be sure to tune in tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern on Racers Reunion Radio for Racing Through History. It’s Thee Goat Rodeo you don’t want to miss! Thanks, I’ll see y’all next week.

[WildcatOne]

My pick for Racer of the Week is Jeff Weets, from Morrison, Illinois. Jeff's one of the most popular and successful drag racers in the Quad Cities area. He is the 2015 track champion at Cordova. He won the World Series this year and raced at the US Nationals as well. Jeff is not one to speak of himself much. His on-track performance is what merits his feature tonight. I've talked some with Jeff and he gave me some highlights, which I will relate from him:

I do run both S/G and S/ST depending on what's available at the race. I was runner-up to Troy Coughlin Jr in S/G at the 2014 US Nationals at Indy. I've had an outstanding 2015 season bracket racing capturing the Track Champion title at Cordova International Raceway. I also won a Mega Mopar meet at US 131 Raceway in Martin Michigan along with a Pro AM win in IHRA Hot Rod at CIR as well.

Jeff Weets' '72 Barracuda is impossible not to see when he's out there, and it's set to run the numbers. He does that better than anybody. He's one of the most well-known and likeable guys at the track, and the 150-plus likes and shares when his feature went on Facebook backs that up. Jeff, we wish you good luck, safe racing and the best of times in the future.

Chapter 4 of the Pink Floyd story begins with the band touring the world twice in support of their huge hit album Dark Side of the Moon, which ended up being one of the best-selling albums of all time. Fame, wealth, groupies, notoriety and cheap thrills all came with it. While on tour, the band began composing songs for their follow-up which certainly was not a let-down, but there were beginning to be cracks in the armour that they wore. A sense of apathy set in among the band. All of their lifelong dreams had been more than realised, and they were all set for life. There was no motivation to work hard anymore. The spoils of their success came easy now, and it was hard to resist the temptation to abstain at that point.

There was one giant ten-ton elephant in the room that was still yet to be dealt with, however...Syd Barrett. For seven years, Syd had been out there on the fringe, bizzarely appearing and disappearing at various times, which only added to his legend. However, nobody had seen Syd for a few years except for the band to reminisce and wonder whatever happened to the madcap genius who gave them their name, their style, their sound, everything, then after his monumental meltdown, he vanished. The band met with the record company and made certain that Syd received the songwriting, publishing and record sales royalties that he had earned when he was leading and guiding the band. Reports came in that he put a band together in Cambridge and played a few gigs with them but he walked out on them after the press gave them an unfavorable review. The last anybody knew of him, he was holed up in a London hotel room living off his royalties and not going out at all for a very long time.

The next album the band made was a tribute to Syd Barrett that also dealt with familiar themes from previous albums. They titled it Wish You Were Here. The album is considered by many to be the band's Magnum Opus, reaching artistic peaks that even Dark Side of the Moon only hinted at. Dave Gilmour and Rick Wright have both said that Wish You Were Here is by far their favorite Floyd album. The album contains a song that Roger Waters wrote to Syd called "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". Other than the songs Syd Barrett wrote in the early days of Floyd, Shine On is my favorite Pink Floyd song. They had completed the song in August of 1975 and were in the studio mixing it. While they were at work, a stranger drifted into the studio. He had a shaved head and eyebrows, he was plump and disshevelled, he wasn't making any sense when he spoke, and he was brushing his teeth all the time. He'd been in there with them for about an hour before they found out who he was. He was Syd Barrett.

The shockwave that went through the band at that moment cannot adequately be described, except to say that they broke down in tears after seeing him. This was beyond anything they had imagined about Syd. He listened to the song, made rude comments to them about it, and left without saying goodbye. It was the last time any of the band members saw him.

Wish You Were Here went platinum and further moved Floyd to the top of the Rock World. But during the construction of the album, Roger Waters began his quest to take full control of Pink Floyd. He began having ideas...concepts...methods. The rest of the guys in the band agreed with some but not all of it, and some of his ideas were voted down, as were Gilmour's. This system would become more apparent as time went on, and by the time the next album titled "Animals" was begun, Roger Waters had come to name himself as the leader and owner of Pink Floyd. I have opinions about his takeover of the creative process, but I'm gonna hold them back until the next chapter of this incredible band unfolds.

Thanks to Danny White for his valuable input and advice to me in putting this story together. I'm saving each segment into a separate document and will post it when the story is complete.

It was 14 years ago yesterday when George Harrison died. I wrote a poem that day and I'd like to share it with you tonight.

I was awakened from a deep sleep
At three-fifteen A.M.
To the sound of a distant, gentle, slow
Echoing cloud of thunder
As it rolled across the distance
In the totally dark and silent landscape.
In my blackness, free of form or substance
And familiar objects that I could see and feel
I laid there and the sound of the cloud
became a vision in my mind.
It was a fifty-thousand-foot-tall giant
Dressed in tassles of red and gold and black
sweeping his footsteps across the horizon
As he strode Southward to the sea.
He was leading a legion of mourning souls
Following the slow and deliberate pace
Of the funeral procession he led.
As he would beat his drum, I heard the echo
Ringing in hollow, breathless tones across the sky:
"George......................George......................George"

Y'all be sure to tune in tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern on Racers Reunion Radio for Racing Through History. It's Thee Goat Rodeo you don't want to miss! Thanks, I'll see y'all next week.

[WildcatOne]

My pick for Racer of the Week is Mike Beck, from South River, New Jersey. Mike has had an unbelievable year.
He's had highs and lows that most of us will never experience and I'm proud to feature him tonight. Mike was
recommended to me by our associate producer, Barb Santuccci. Thanks, Barb! You got us a real winner!

Mike's car is a 1988 Firebird. It had about 10k miles on it before he made it into a drag race only car.
His best ET is an 8.80 @ 156 mph @ 3400 lbs. With no more nitrous, it goes mid 9s @ 142 now.
The car has a 421 SBC built by Jeff at JTL Automotive, power glide from trans specialties,
torque convertor from ATI 6600 stall, fab 9 rear, 4.88 gears, 30x10.5 Hoosier slicks, ladder bar setup with AFCO
coil overs done by Mike and Bobby Carroll at Carolls Rides and Customs.
Mike runs the Holley Dominator EFI system, which was one of the test mules from many years ago.

Mike fought cancer for the last year so he put a restrictor plate on it from EZ Plate so he could go 10.00 racing.
He won a bunch of races this year going slow.
They only had Four 10.00 Index Races this year at E Town and Mike won them all!
He won some Top Street and Mean Street races too. Mike finished second in points in Top Street again;
he was actually tied for first, but his buddy won one more rating points than Mike did.
Mike said "I can't complain, to be on chemo and out there racing and winning was incredible.

This season's accomplishments
4 10.0 Index wins. Undefeated
2 mean street wins
1 top street win with two runner up finishes.
1 modern muscle win and 1 runner up finish
10.00 Index points champion this year as well as Top Street points runner-up

Track championships Mike has won over the past years are
He's a 2-time NHRA King of the Track at Raceway Park
Top Street once, RU 3 times. 10.00 twice. Pro Dial once.
These are the only 2 classes he signed up in points for this year since he didn't know how he would be going through
chemo during the season.
Ironically every race day that he would not been able to race in the points classes due to surgeries, were cancelled
due to weather this season.
It has been a long, tough year for Mike, but racing and playing tennis (when he was allowed) is what has gotten him
through it.

He had radiation and chemo before the surgery in January and March and then from April to August he had More
chemo. Post ct scans showed his cancer is gone.
He then had a rare problem and had an additional surgery in October.
Hopefully at this point he is done with all of it.
Mike turned 50 this year and his wife Cheryl had already planned on having a surprise party. So even with everything
going on, she still had it and over 100 people showed up and a lot more that could not make the date.
That's a great indication of the type of guy Mike Beck is.

Mike said "Thanks to my family; my wife Cheryl, my children Carolyn & Michael Jr. His 4 legged children -Pirate
and Cali the dogs, Jeff at JTL Automotive for building the engine. John Sawicki for the transmission.
Bobby Carroll at Carrolls Rod & Racecraft for the suspension work.
Rick Constable and Larry Pappas for talking me into taking the nitrous off and making it into a bracket car.
Doug Flynn at Holley for all the support and Steve Johnson at Induction Solutions for the nitrous setup,
when I used to run it."

"Let's also thank my nurses at Outpatient Infusion; Joanne, Terry, Alicia and Lori.
Thanks to all the nurses and techs at Centra State Hospital.
Thanks to Dr Silberberg, Dr. Pepek, Dr. Sojka (Pronouced Soy ka), Dr Deluca,
and special thanks to Dr Kayal for taking me apart and putting me back together correctly!"

That's Mike Beck, Racer of the Week, folks. Mike, we wish you good luck, safe racing, good health and the best of
times in the future!

The plot of the Pink Floyd story thickens as time goes on with the band. At this time, in 1976m they're recording their
tenth album. they had just finished building their own recording studio, and by this time they were all world-famous
multimillionaires and rock stars living the good life. And by this time, one member of the band had developed a
personal agenda that would overtake their future recording projects and concert appearances. Roger Waters started
not only having ideas that had totalitarian vibes to them, he also started dictating not just his songs, but his methods
and attitudes to the rest of the band.

By this time, Rick Wright and Nick Mason were pretty much complacent, and they went along with whatever Waters
was telling them. David Gilmour, however, stood toe-to-toe with Waters and more often than not, got his way. This
was an era of transition for the gigantic stadium rock shows that were beyond anything even the band had ever
imagined. The album that was promoted by the 1977 tour of the world was titled Animals, a concept by Waters that
was loosely based on George Orwell's novel, "Animal Farm", whereby people from different classes of society are
portrayed as animals. The album had 5 songs on it. The one song that Gilmour co-wrote is over 17 minutes long,
and it features his finest moment as a musician, singer and songwriter. Otherwise, the album is not rated among
the Floyd's finest work, and internal tensions were extremely high during the recording and the tour that followed.

At one point, Rick Wright got fed up and split, but he came back and finished the tour. On the final date of the tour, at
Montreal, the band was heckled by punks who tried to climb over the fence separating them from the stage. Roger Waters walked
over and spat at them. Now, I remember back then that spitting was part of a rock show, especially a punk show. But
Pink Floyd was beyond huge at this time, and they were being condemned by the young, hungry punks who targeted
them and other bands at their level of success as dinosaurs who were not relevant or useful to their lives.

The spitting incident inspired Roger Waters. He began to work on Pink Floyd's next great triumph after that, which
would be finished two years later and titled "The Wall". Meanwhile, there was going to have to be a Pink Floyd to make
the album, and after the Animals tour, the band was seriously damaged. I works like that, when a band gets big.
Stuff that wouldn't otherwise bother anybody when they were struggling turns into problems between bandmates
that can tear the band apart behind the front image.

Thanks to Danny White for helping me put this story together. His input and knowledge of so much of rock history
has been most helpful. We pretty much go non-stop back and forth on various subjects, but rock history and this
band in particular, has been our main topic over the last month or so. But Danny's given me some ideas for future
projects in the Rockin' department of this show.

By the way, nobody had heard from Syd Barrett in a long time by then. He was last seen back in his cottage in
Cambridge, tending to his first love, painting. In the next couple of segments I'll give a review of Syd's artwork, his
style and his method of producing his art.

Y'all be sure to tune in tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern on Racers Reunion Radio for Racing Through History. It's
Thee Goat Rodeo you don't want to miss! Thanks, I'll see y'all next week.

[WildcatOne]

My pick for Racer of the Week is Mark Caires. Mark was recommended to me by our friend Michael Baba Balbarino in Hilo, Hawaii. Thanks, Michael! Mark is the last Racer of the Week for 2015 and we're happy and proud to have him join the club. Mark is at the age of Age 45, his home town is Makawao on the ilsand of Maui, Hawaii. He's a State of Hawaii Auto Shop Supervisor / Custom painter/ Builder @ Caires Motorsports. His wife's name is Deanna. Mark is an NHRA Silver level tech inspector at Maui raceway park and he's a Track Specialist. He's the Valley isle timing association Treasurer.

Mark's Racing accomplishments:
4 Time NHRA National Dragster Challenge Champion
3 time Valley Isle Timing Association points champion.
Frank Hawleys Drag Racing School Graduate.
His Future racing goals: Race a little more than I've had in the last 2 years. My duties at MRP doesn't allow me to race as much as I would like to.
Mark plans to debut his new 1963 split window Top Sportsman Corvette in 2016. His Home Track: Maui Raceway Park.
His Current ride is a 1966 Chevy II Nova SS which is street legal. Its name is Black Ice. The car is owned by Mel & Shirley Caires. It was built by Mark Caires @ Caires Motorsports. The class it runs in is NHRA Super Street or VITA Pro Sportsman.

The Engine is a 565 cube BBC built by Smeding Performance. The Transmission is a 400 turbo with trans brake. The Rear end is a Strange 9 inch, with Richmond pro gears, Mark Williams spool and axles, Koni shocks, and Rj Race Cars top gun 4 link. The wheels are Weld Aluma Stars. It has Goodyear slicks and front runners. The Front end has TCI Pro Series independent suspension, QA1 shocks, and rack and pinion steering.
The paint is by Mark Caires using PPG Black urethane and it is absolutely gorgeous. The interior is made of Carbon fiber panels, Sparco race seats, using auto meter gauges, and an 8 point chrome moly cage, with a performance products air shifter. Mark said Special thanks go to Mom and Dad (Shirley & Mel), My babes, Deanna, Reggie & Yolanda Caires, S4 Performance, Don Tavares, Ernie Amoral, Rick Domingo, Audrey Glassen,
Valley Isle Timing Association, Maui Raceway Park, and Mike Balbarino @ 808 Fuel for nominating me for this prestigious award.

The Car is currently set up for NHRA Super Street which is a 10.90 index. Early testing had the car running 10.50's at 127 mph on a soft tune. Mark said We are currently turning the car for non throttle stop racing, so a best ET and mph is still to be determined.

Mark, we look forward to seeing that new '63 split-window vette out there in the coming year! That's Mark Caires, Racer of the Week. Mark, we wish you good luck, safe racing and the best of times in the future.

Getting into the late 70s with Pink Floyd, what I've found is that it had become a completely different band with a completely different style by the time they recorded The Wall, their 11th studio album. Much of last week's description of complacency and apathy applies here, except that Roger Waters had decided that he was the leader of the band and the album The Wall was entirely his idea and concept. If I may get just a little left of the main story here, I have to admit that concept albums, and as we all know, there were many, more often than not didn't impress me. This was one of them. I don't want to put a negative slant on Waters' abilities and ambitions, but in my opinion The Wall would have been a great Roger Waters solo album and not a Pink Floyd album. If they could have worked that out before it got made as The Wall by Roger Waters with Pink Floyd. It got political, and it got ugly between Waters and the band because of all that. The movie was great, I enjoyed it, but I listened to the album once all the
way through and never went back.

There were major, serious internal issues in the band during this time. Gilmour did the right thing and made a solo album. So did Rick Wright. The relationship between Waters and Wright became increasingly strained until he left the band. He returned to play tours and record with Floyd after Waters was gone, but they didn't perform together for 25 years after The Wall. Waters decided that Wright wasn't contributing enough to the material to be entitled to his equal share of recording royalties and he wanted to sue him, but instead he fired him. That was just one of the things Roger Waters did to drive a stake into the heart of the band. There is a litany of insults, legal wranglings and pronouncements that Waters committed during the late 70s and early 80s that led to his departure from the band and making the announcement that Pink Floyd were no longer in existence since he wasn't in it anymore.

See, I'm not talking about the music, am I. I'm talking about what happens when one guy decides that he's the only reason the band is still popular. I don't like it, I don't think it's fair, and neither did Gilmour, Wright and Mason. Lawsuits were filed. Friendships were ruined. Gigs were cancelled. Sides were chosen. It ended up with Pink Floyd carrying on as a band with the 3 guys who Waters left behind to pursue his solo career, and to this day Roger Waters is still recycling The Wall. He's stuck with it, and he'll have to live with it for the rest of his life. He released a solo album called The Pros And Cons of Hitchhiking in the early 80s. It had a cover of a naked girl hitchhiking on a desert road. The album, in my opinion, had one great song, the title song of the album, with Eric Clapton guesting on guitar, but other than that, it didn't even hint at the power and glory of Pink Floyd. It got worse, too. I'll get to that next time.

Meanwhile, Syd Barrett was back in Cambridge living in the semi-attached cottage behind his Mom's house. He let go of the name Syd and referred to himself as Roger Barrett from the late 70s on. He spent his days living on an invalid's pension and received regular royalty payments from his recorded
work both as a solo artist and from his work with Floyd. He returned to his first love and in my opinion, his greatest talent, which was painting. A gallery of Syd's surviving work is on his website, which is sydbarrett.com. If you decide to check out his artwork, be sure you're strapped in and ready to face it. It's a rollercoaster ride into the dark soul of someone who could not express himself in this world and his paintings say more than his music ever did. He took up gardening. He wanted to be left alone, and for the most part, folks did leave him alone, but if you ask me, during this time his story was more interesting. He's been a major topic of discussion with Danny White in putting this history of Pink Floyd together, and he should never be forgotten. If not for Syd Barrett, none of it would ever have happened, and they'll be the first ones to tell you that.

I'll kick off 2016 with my take on the next couple of Pink Floyd albums, The Final Cut and A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. I'd like to wish everybody Happy Holidays and a happy, prosperous, healthy and safe 2016. Y'all be sure to tune in tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern on Racers Reunion Radio for Racing Through History. It's Thee Goat Rodeo you don't want to miss! Thanks, and Merry Christmas, everybody!

[WildcatOne]

My pick for Racer of the Week is Buddy Loeffler, from Hilo, Hawaii. Buddy was recommended to me by our friend Michael Baba Balbarino. Thanks, Michael! Buddy recently won a double victory at Hilo, both in Top Eliminator and in Pro Nostalgia, in the 2nd Annual Nostalgia Drags that was dedicated to Gary Mizuno.

He drove his way though two extremely tough fields driving his departed friend's '55 Chevy BelAir. Buddy has his own Yellow '67 Chevy Nova that he races regularly at Hilo, but for this race he drove his friend's car and the victories he scored were a very emotional couple of moments for everybody. I highly recommend visiting Michael's 808_FUEL page on Facebook. It has the latest news and pictures of the great drag racing community in Hawaii. They are some of the hardest-working and tightly-knit group of racers you'd ever want to find. Buddy, we wish you good luck, safe racing and the best of times in the future with your Nova.

I don't know about y'all, but by now I'm burned out on the Pink Floyd Story. Mainly because it got to the point to where it was all about the band's internal problems, with Roger Waters making himself the name and the face of the band after they made an album called The Final Cut, and the following years were a series of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits between the band members. There were a few bright spots. Gilmour, Mason and Wright recorded the album "A Momentary Lapse Of Reason" in 1985, which I thought was their best effort since Wish You Were Here; 9 years later in 1994 they did The Division Bell, which was a tribute to their departed bretheren Barrett and Waters, and finally an album of unreleased material and outtakes in 2014 called The Endless River.

These last 3 Pink Floyd albums span a period of close to 30 years, and there's not a whole lot I can say about either the music or the band during that time that doesn't involve Waters vs Floyd and Floyd vs Waters. They all made solo albums, took time to do some record producing and collaborating with up and coming artists, and after 15 studio albums, 12 world tours and hundreds of millions of records sold, by 2014 there was no more Pink Floyd. They were offered 100 million dollars to do one final tour, but David Gilmour declined to participate. I wonder if Roger Waters can tell me, would it be Pink Floyd without Dave Gilmour on guitar? I didn't think so. Pink Floyd is a memory now, and they are letting it rest.

But there's one last item in this story that deserves telling. After 35 years in seclusion, Syd Barrett died in July of 2006 at the age of 60. He had been living quietly and privately in the cottage behind his mother's house since the early 1970s, dedicating himself to painting and gardening. Public sightings were extremely rare, and he declined all offers for interviews. He went back to his birth name of Roger, and his income consisted of regular royalty payments that the band had arranged for him, as well as a meager invalid pension from the government. He had health problems for the last 20 years of his life, and the cause of his death was attributable to complications from diabetes.

The album he made with Pink Floyd, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, has stood the test of time, and to listen to it now, it still is an incredible blast of pure inspiration and magic. His two official albums that he made after leaving Floyd in the late 60s and early 70s, called The Madcap Laughs and Barrett have been consistenly selling every year since he made them, but other than a compilation of outtakes and false starts that never made it onto a record before, titled Opel, any scrap of material from him has been highly sought-after and his story is one of the most romantic and fabled stories in the history of rock.

But David Gilmour corrected that. When Syd died, in an interview David said that there was nothing romantic or glamorous about Syd's story. It was a sad and hopelessly screwed-up situation, and although people should not forget the greatness of Syd's contributions, which are now considered precious relics of a mythical time, what happened to him was tragic and lost. The saddest part of the Syd Barrett story for me is that he died twice. Once in the bloom of his youth with the world at his feet, when his spirit, his will and his mind departed him, and again, 39 years later when his body finally gave out. He leaves a legacy of beauty, art and creativity that has never been matched since he left the public eye, and his lasting and eternal legacy is the band he founded, named and wrote the songs for that launched them into worldwide fame and fortune, Pink Floyd.

We were fortunate to have them. I can't imagine what my life would have been like if I didn't have the Floyd to remind me of the other side of things. All I can say to all of them is thank you and best to you all. And a special thanks to Danny White for his input, insight and advice for me on Pink Floyd throughout the ongoing construction of this tribute.

Over the last few weeks, we've lost some truly great music artists. Natalie Cole, Lemmy and Scott Weiland. Of the three I just mentioned, I'd only seen Lemmy play live once with Motorhead. They were part of a 5-band show I went to in 1990 featuring Metal Church, Dangerous Toys, Motorhead, Alice Cooper and Judas Priest. Alice Cooper stole the show, but what stood out about Motorhead was they had no stage props, no pyrotechnics, no video screen, no stage costumes and no lighting effects at all. They just walked in, played and walked off. Lemmy was one-of-a-kind. He was a gnarly, hard-living Rock n' Roll guy who made no apologies or excuses for his appearance and behavior. There will never be another. I can say that about Natalie and Scott as well. Natalie made some of the most beautiful songs I ever heard. The videos she made using vintage footage of her Dad, Nat, mixed in with her modern duet that she sang with him were truly unforgettable. I always saw Scott Weiland as the Bobby Darin of the modern age. He did complete style changes that I would never have known were him, and he pulled it off effortlessly. His talent and artistry were features of his presence in a modern form of expression that only come along once in a very long while. I was sorry to lose him. He had a very difficult life, and I hope he at last will find peace.

Y'all be sure to tune in tomorrow evening at 7 PM Eastern on Racers Reunion Radio for Racing Through History. It's Thee Goat Rodeo you don't want to miss! Thanks, I'll see y'all next week.

[WildcatOne]

The following is the text file I compiled from of a series of essays I delivered over the last couple of months on the internet radio show of which I am the music consultant, "Racin' and Rockin' with DragList.com". My friend Danny White and I have been discussing music and one subject we keep coming back to is Pink Floyd. This write does not go into microscopic detail; rather it gives an empirical overview of the band, hitting on the high spots and mentioning some of the lowest. There were many of both. I'd call it an easy read, so if you have time to spend half an hour or so, kick back and enjoy.

Love to all, JB

After chatting with Danny White over the last few weeks, we concur on almost all points of Rock n’ Roll. We’ve been great sounding boards for each other, and we’ve shared countless points of interest in the history of this incredible art form. Our conversations drift from drag racing to rock n’ roll and back, and we both share opinions on the current state of affairs of both.

We’ve been all over Rock n’ Roll and its related fads, but one subject that we keep returning to and examining in great detail is the rise and fall of Psychedelic Music in the mid-to-late 60s. One group has stood out above all the others in that discussion. Over the next few shows, it is my intent with Danny’s input and imprimatur to relay some of the most important points that defined the era of psychedelia, which for all intents and purposes began and ended with the strange and inspiring story of Pink Floyd.

By the time their classic album “Dark Side Of The Moon” was released in 1973, the band had already been together for over 10 years, with their beginnings in the early 60s R & B fad having molded and shaped their internal chemistry.

There were personnel changes that happened in the band over time, but the most significant, and as it turned out, world-changing addition to the band was when one fine day in 1964, a kid showed up and introduced himself to the band. He had an aura around him that everybody could see. He was more than special; he was a force of nature that immediately had an impact on the band and the way they played from then on.
His name was Roger Barrett, from Cambridge, a mutual friend with the band of David Gilmour, and his lifelong nickname was Syd. Tall, outgoing, incredibly talented and handsome, Syd had charisma that without question put him on a par with Elvis, but he had a style and a sound all his own, and the band quickly absorbed and got in line with his incredible personality and musical excellence. He was an art college student, situating himself in a band full of architecture majors.

He played a combination of rythym and lead guitar in a way that nobody had seen before, like he was playing two guitars at once, and he was intent on creating a new, different and intriguing style of music that went above and beyond anything that had ever been done before or would not be done since. Around this time, Rick Wright moved over from guitar to keyboards full-time, and the original guitarist Bob Klose moved on, remaining true to his blues roots. After a period of woodshedding and collaborating, with Syd ultimately having the last word, the band changed their name several times from the Megadeaths, the Abdabs, then the Screaming Abdabs, Leonard's Lodgers, the Spectrum Five and the Tea Set.
Finally Syd created a name for the band that stuck, using the first names of his two favorite Piedmont Records Bluesmen from the USA, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. He named the band The Pink Floyd Sound, and later shortened it to just Pink Floyd.

By 1966, Pink Floyd was playing all the time in Swinging London, creating a new and exciting sound that often bordered on total insanity, but didn’t quite go there altogether. Science-fiction outer space sounds blended in with spooky, swirling riffs played by what sounded like inside-out guitars, enhanced by what became known as a light show, something that hadn’t been done with a live rock n’ roll band. The music transported the audience to nirvana, and before hardly any time, the band Pink Floyd became the most popular and sought-after band in England.

When they recorded their first album, titled Piper at the Gates of Dawn at EMI studios at Abbey Road in London, they were next door to the Beatles, who were recording Sgt Pepper. There was no doubt that the Beatles heard what was going on with Floyd next door. The album was essentially written, produced and performed by Syd Barrett, and to this day it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Sgt Pepper as an all-time psychedelic masterpiece.

Otherworldly sounds that still sound shockingly fresh to this day are mixed in with the most beautiful, cracked songs that Syd had written, and were performed perfectly by the band. They were picked to headline an event known as the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream in London. They brought in their light show and set up a quadraphonic sound system, and by the time it was over, Pink Floyd had re-written the book of rock n’ roll and had transformed proper English society into a legion of blissful, wide-open people who saw the light and joined together to change the world through music, peace and love.

Just at the peak of the band’s popularity while all this was going on, something happened to Syd. What exactly it was that happened to him is still being debated today nearly 50 years after it happened, but one thing was for sure: Syd Barrett wasn’t Syd Barrett anymore. He appeared as a hollow shell of himself, with no explanations given. His personality had disappeared and he was what everyone described as “gone”. The band kept on, but Syd’s condition was seriously affecting what they were doing. He was totally wiped-out

A US tour to promote the album had to be scrapped halfway through, as Syd had finally become impossible to work with onstage. He’d show up and stand there onstage and not play or sing, just stare out into space, or he’d strum one note on his guitar all night long. When they played in Los Angeles, they stayed at the Alice Cooper band’s house. Alice recalled that the band was fantastic on stage, including Syd, but back at the house, he said he came downstairs one morning for breakfast and Syd was sitting at the table, staring at a box of cornflakes. He said it was like Syd was watching something on that box that nobody else could see…when they were having dinner there, Glenn Buxton said that he automatically passed the salt to Syd but Syd didn’t actually ask for it. He just knew that’s what he wanted. Syd was on another wavelength altogether. I’m running out of time, so this will conclude part one of the Pink Floyd story.

Tonight I’m going to do Chapter 2 of the Pink Floyd story. Danny White and I have been collaborating on it and between the two of us, we’ve come up with what we think is a good version of this great band’s history. Where I left off 3 weeks ago was when the band returned to England following a failed first American tour to promote their first album.

The erratic and sometimes maddening behavior of the great Syd Barrett, which had become progressively worse since their album was released a few months earlier, had made it just about impossible for the band to play live anymore without him screwing it up. Dick Clark interviewed them on American Bandstand, and he put the microphone in front of Syd and he said “So, which one’s Pink?” His question was met with a cold, dead stare. He did the same thing to Pat Boone when they were on his show, too.

Now, during those heady times of Psychedelia, it was often trendy and fun to feign madness, but Syd Barrett wasn’t kidding. His anti-participation in band activities and gigs was having a seriously damaging effect on the band’s success.

It was time to have a meeting.

The band unanimously decided to bring in their friend Dave Gilmour, who was also a friend of Syd’s, from the band Joker’s Wild to play guitar and sing Floyd’s songs to help Syd with his parts. For a brief period in early 1968, Pink Floyd was a five-piece unit. The idea was for Syd to concentrate on songwriting, and have Dave cover for him onstage, but after a few gigs with that arrangement, it became clear that this was an unworkable situation, and one night when they were on their way to a gig, somebody spoke up in the van and said “Should we pick up Syd?” Another voice answered, “Why bother?” and thus began a new chapter in the story of Pink Floyd and in the history of Modern Rock.

The guy who founded the band, named it and wrote all their songs was now officially kicked out of it. The last straw was the last practice they had with him following a disastrous gig. At this practice, he came in, plugged his guitar in and played a hundred chords in a row at top volume, and screamed over and over into his microphone: “Have you got it yet? Have you got it yet?” After that incident, the band pretty much decided to call it quits with Syd and continue with Dave from then on. As much as they loved him, they had to move on, and I have to painfully agree with that decision.

Syd’s star status and his involvement with the band was actually far from over, however. His legend as the James Dean of Psychedelia continued to grow as time went on.

Although the band made what is in my opinion an outstanding follow-up to Piper At The Gates Of Dawn with the title A Saucerful of Secrets, on which Syd made minimal contributions, it was the debut of Dave Gilmour as a full-fledged member, and it was the first Pink Floyd album I ever listened to. I found out later about the Syd Barrett-led Floyd, but what is there is in my opinion the logical extension of what was established with their first album, with elements of Gregorian Chant set against tribal rythyms, free-form jazz, wailing vocals and the hardest rock I’d ever heard at that time. Their record company made the wise decision a few years later to package both of the early Floyd albums together as a double and they named it “A Nice Pair”. Needless to say, I highly recommend this purchase, as it is an accurate document of this incredible band’s roots and Syd Barrett's finest hour with them.

It turned out to be an amazing stroke of fate to get Dave Gilmour in the band. He immediately proved himself to be not only a capable replacement for Syd, but a fantastic musician, songwriter and singer, in many ways an even more dynamic front man than Syd had been. The band played on. Their time with Syd Barrett had effectively established an ongoing theme in the band’s material from then on. Loss, madness and inexplicable circumstance. Syd Barrett’s influence and legacy became a touchstone to their art.

After Floyd dumped Syd, he went off on a wild trip around the English countryside in his Cooper mini and ended up back in Cambridge getting treatment at a hospital for mental and physical exhaustion. The record company immediately signed him as a solo artist and he returned to London to attempt to get his act back together and make a solo album. Dave Gilmour signed on as the producer. He played bass on the record and hired Jerry Shirley from Humble Pie to provide drums for Syd’s songs. They just let the tapes roll when Syd was there with his guitar. What came out of him was later assembled, processed, arranged and made into songs by Gilmour and Shirley.

I’ll detail this project in the next segment, but I thought a good way to end tonight’s chapter is to relate a scene that happened in London right after Syd was given the boot from the band. At that time, the well-known British singer, Terry Reid had just turned down the gig as vocalist with Jimmy Page’s new band. He recommended a kid from Birmingham to Page named Robert Plant to take the gig. Reid was hanging out in a pub in London and Dave Gilmour walks in. He said “I’ve just got the gig with Floyd and I’m making 300 pounds a week!” Terry Reid turned around and said under his breath: “Enjoy it while you can, Dave, because without Syd Barrett, that band is going nowhere.”

Picking up the Pink Floyd story, at the end of last week’s segment, the band had made the painful and difficult decision to move on from Syd Barrett and completed their second album. Their connection and involvement with the mad genius behind their initial success was far from over, but the personnel from then on was solidified and working together.

They entered a period between 1969 and 1972 that I have often referred to as the doldrums. Not that they weren’t playing, because they were playing as good as anyone else, but although I have the albums they released during those years, I can’t find any hits anywhere. You could line up those albums and play them one after another in chronological order, and it sounds to me like one, long, brooding study of a band seeking its own identity after their guiding light had been removed. Of the albums they released, which were titled Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Umagumma (which was my favorite), Obscured By Clouds, as well as the soundtracks to 2 movies, Meddle (not like steel, rather like being unnecessarily involved in somebody else’s business) was a complete and fully functioning statement as a band, but even with David Gilmour’s excellent playing, writing and singing, Pink Floyd seemed to be drifting, but it was drifting forward at least.

The very fact that they were still together, touring and recording is pretty amazing, considering what all they had been through to that point.
They had to completely rebuild their material, their sound, their style, their attitude and their image after having already been to highs and lows that other bands had never been confronted with, but they hung in there and by 1971 into 1972, they started work on their eighth album; the one that would redefine and reinvent their legacy and create a new template for their future career.

They came up with solid content, and a concept that created not just an atmosphere, but a complete and fully-realized state of consciousness. Pink Floyd decided to call the album Dark Side Of The Moon. The ongoing lyrical theme that ran through the whole album dealt with issues of alienation, greed, conflict and madness. Much of Floyd’s work thereafter would contain direct references to their former colleague and leader, Syd Barrett.
They worked on the album for the better part of 1972, and in early 1973 it was released. World domination was soon to follow. It was an immediate hit, number 1 worldwide and it stayed on the charts for the next 15 years, becoming one of the top selling albums in history. As I look back on that album, I personally see it as the last album the band made that was a full-team, united effort. The recording engineer, Alan Parsons, created an amazing sound using the latest in analog technology, and each band member contributed parts to the songs and the album as a whole that made it something that really nobody had ever imagined or heard before.

The first time I heard Dark Side Of The Moon was in a set of brand-new stereo headphones that a friend put on my head, and I listened to it from start to finish as it was played for the first time by our local FM Rock station. Many times during that experience, I was not sure if what I was hearing was the band playing or if it was what was going on in my mind.

There is no question that this album was a landmark not only in the history of Pink Floyd, but it opened a new chapter in the history of Rock music. For the Floyd, it was an artistic and emotional triumph, and for everybody else, it offered a window to another world. At this point in time, it was a band running itself, and you can hear it in the grooves that it was a singular focus by all the members creating synergistically a product whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That doesn’t happen but once in a lifetime, and it would prove over the next several years to be impossible to duplicate.

Meanwhile, the mad genius Syd Barrett was having a great deal of difficulty trying to continue his shattered career with a shattered mind. While Pink Floyd was working on making Dark Side Of The Moon, Syd was making his second solo album, titled “Barrett”. This time, Richard Wright was involved with David Gilmour and Jerry Shirley again in trying to assimilate and construct a cohesive sound out of Syd’s totally untogether song forms.
I admire these gents for their effort in trying to help their friend do something positive, but listening to this record and the one before it, it is tragic to hear compared to his work on Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Syd Barrett, for all intents and purposes, effectively dissolved into mythic status after this album was completed, but in the years to come he would repeatedly shock the band with unexplainable phenomena.

After playing some David Peel and BBC sessions, and one concert at the Olympia Theatre in London, where Syd performed 4 songs into a poorly mixed PA system. After the fourth song, Syd politely and quietly took off his guitar, set it down on the stage and walked off. He kept walking, and he walked the 50 miles all the way back to Cambridge. He moved in at his mother’s semi-detached cottage, never to perform or record in London again. His legend would continue to grow from then on, spiced by various Syd Barrett sightings over the next few years...and wow, what sightings they were! More on that later.

Chapter 4 of the Pink Floyd story begins with the band touring the world twice in support of their huge hit album Dark Side of the Moon, which ended up being one of the best-selling albums of all time. Fame, wealth, groupies, notoriety and cheap thrills all came with it. While on tour, the band began composing songs for their follow-up which certainly was not a let-down, but there were beginning to be cracks in the armour that they wore. A sense of apathy set in among the band. All of their lifelong dreams had been more than realised, and they were all set for life. There was no real motivation to work hard anymore. The spoils of their success came easy now, and it was hard to resist the temptation to abstain from anything at that point.

There was one giant ten-ton elephant in the room that was still yet to be dealt with, however...Syd Barrett. For seven years, Syd had been out there on the fringe, bizzarely appearing and disappearing at various times, which only added to his legend. However, nobody had seen Syd for a few years except for the band to reminisce and wonder whatever happened to the madcap genius who gave them their name, their style, their sound, everything, then after his monumental meltdown, he vanished. The band met with the record company and made certain that Syd received the songwriting, publishing and record sales royalties that he had earned when he was leading and guiding the band. Reports came in that he put a band together in Cambridge and played a few gigs with them but he walked out on them after the press gave them an unfavorable review. The last anybody knew of him, he was holed up in a London hotel room living off his royalties and not going out at all for a very long time.

The next album the band made was a tribute to Syd Barrett that also dealt with familiar themes from previous albums. They titled it Wish You Were Here. The album is considered by many to be the band's Magnum Opus, reaching artistic peaks that even Dark Side of the Moon only hinted at. Dave Gilmour and Rick Wright have both said that Wish You Were Here is by far their favorite Floyd album. The album contains a song that Roger Waters wrote to Syd called "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". Other than the songs Syd Barrett wrote in the early days of Floyd, Shine On is my favorite Pink Floyd song. They had completed the song in August of 1975 and were in the studio mixing it. While they were at work, a stranger drifted into the studio. He had a shaved head and eyebrows, he was plump and disshevelled, he wasn't making any sense when he spoke, and he was brushing his teeth all the time. He'd been in there with them for about an hour before they found out who he was.

He was Syd Barrett. The shockwave that went through the band at that moment cannot adequately be described, except to say that they broke down in tears after seeing him. This was beyond anything they had imagined about Syd. He listened to the song, made rude comments to them about it, and left without saying goodbye. It was the last time any of the band members saw him.

Wish You Were Here went platinum and further moved Floyd to the top of the Rock World. But during the construction of the album, Roger Waters began his quest to take full control of Pink Floyd. He began having ideas...concepts...methods. The rest of the guys in the band agreed with some but not all of it, and some of his ideas were voted down, as were Gilmour's. This system would become more apparent as time went on, and by the time the next album titled "Animals" was begun, Roger Waters had come to name himself as the leader and owner of Pink Floyd. I have opinions about his takeover of the creative process, but I'm gonna hold them back until the next chapter of this incredible band unfolds.

The plot of the Pink Floyd story thickens as time goes on with the band. At this time, in 1976, they're recording their tenth album. they had just finished building their own recording studio, and by this time they were all world-famous multimillionaires and rock stars living the good life. And by this time, one member of the band had developed a personal agenda that would overtake their future recording projects and concert appearances. Roger Waters started not only having ideas that had totalitarian vibes to them, he also started dictating not just his songs, but his methods and attitudes to the rest of the band.

Rick Wright and Nick Mason were pretty much complacent and distracted by personal issues, and they went along with whatever Waters was telling them. David Gilmour, however, stood toe-to-toe with Waters and more often than not, got his way. This was an era of transition for the gigantic stadium rock shows that were beyond anything even the band had ever imagined. The album that was promoted by the 1977 tour of the world was titled Animals, a concept by Waters that was loosely based on George Orwell's novel, "Animal Farm", whereby people from different classes of society are portrayed as animals. The album had 5 songs on it. The one song that Gilmour co-wrote is over 17 minutes long, and it features his finest moment as a musician, singer and songwriter. Otherwise, the album is not rated among the Floyd's finest work, and internal tensions were extremely high during the recording and the tour that followed.

At one point, Rick Wright got fed up and split, but he came back and finished the tour. On the final date of the tour, at Montreal, the band was heckled by punks who tried to climb over the fence separating them from the stage. Roger Waters walked over and spat at them. Now, I remember back then that spitting was part of a rock show, especially a punk show. But Pink Floyd was beyond huge at this time, and they were being condemned by the young, hungry punks who targeted them and other bands at their level of success as bloated, boring dinosaurs who were not relevant or useful to their lives.

The spitting incident inspired Roger Waters. He began to work on Pink Floyd's next great triumph after that, which would be finished two years later and titled "The Wall". Meanwhile, there was going to have to be a Pink Floyd to make the album, and after the Animals tour, the band was seriously damaged. I works like that, when a band gets big. Stuff that wouldn't otherwise bother anybody when they were struggling turns into problems between bandmates that can tear the band apart behind the front image.

By the way, nobody had heard from Syd Barrett in a long time by then. He was last seen back in his cottage in Cambridge, tending to his first love, painting. In the next couple of segments I'll give a review of Syd's artwork, his style and his method of producing his art.

Getting into the late 70s with Pink Floyd, what I've found is that it had become a completely different band with a completely different style by the time they recorded The Wall, their 11th studio album. Much of last week's description of complacency and apathy applies here, except that Roger Waters had decided that he was the leader of the band and the album The Wall was entirely his idea and concept.

If I may get just a little left of the main story here, I have to admit that concept albums, and as we all know, there were many, more often than not didn't impress me. This was one of them. I don't want to put a negative slant on Waters' abilities and ambitions, but in my opinion The Wall would have been a great Roger Waters solo album but not a Pink Floyd album. If they could have worked that out before. It got made as The Wall by Roger Waters with Pink Floyd. It got political, and it got ugly between Waters and the band because of all that. The movie was great, I enjoyed it, but I listened to the album once all the way through and never went back. It's just not something I could relate to.

There were major, serious internal issues in the band during this time. Gilmour did the right thing and made a solo album. So did Rick Wright. The relationship between Waters and Wright became increasingly strained until he left the band. He returned to play tours and record with Floyd after Waters was gone, but they didn't perform together for 25 years after The Wall. Waters decided that Wright wasn't contributing enough to the material to be entitled to his equal share of recording royalties and he wanted to sue him, but instead he fired him. That was just one of the things Roger Waters did to drive a stake into the heart of the band. There is a litany of insults, legal wranglings and pronouncements that Waters committed during the late 70s and early 80s that led to his departure from the band and making the announcement that Pink Floyd were no longer in existence since he wasn't in it anymore.

See, I'm not talking about the music, am I. I'm talking about what happens when one guy decides that he's the only reason the band is still popular. I don't like it, I don't think it's fair, and neither did Gilmour, Wright and Mason. Lawsuits were filed. Friendships were ruined. Gigs were cancelled. Sides were chosen. It ended up with Pink Floyd carrying on as a band with the 3 guys who Waters left behind to pursue his solo career, and to this day Roger Waters is still recycling The Wall. He's stuck with it, and he'll have to live with it for the rest of his life. He released a solo album called The Pros And Cons of Hitchhiking in the early 80s. It had a cover of a naked girl hitchhiking on a desert road. The album, in my opinion, had one great song, the title song of the album, with Eric Clapton guesting on guitar, but other than that, it didn't even hint at the power and glory of Pink Floyd. It got worse, too. I'll get to that next time.

Meanwhile, Syd Barrett was back in Cambridge living in the semi-attached cottage behind his Mom's house. He let go of the name Syd and referred to himself as Roger Barrett from the late 70s on. He spent his days living on an invalid's pension and received regular royalty payments from his recorded work both as a solo artist and from his work with Floyd. He returned to his first love and in my opinion, his greatest talent, which was painting. A gallery of Syd's surviving work is on his website, which is sydbarrett.com.

If you decide to check out his artwork, be sure you're strapped in and ready to face it. It's a rollercoaster ride into the dark soul of someone who could not express himself in this world and his paintings say far more than his music ever did. He took up gardening. He wanted to be left alone, and for the most part, folks did leave him alone, but if you ask me, during this time his story was more interesting. He's been a major topic of discussion with Danny White in putting this history of Pink Floyd together, and he should never be forgotten. If not for Syd Barrett, none of it would ever have happened, and they'll be the first ones to tell you that.

I don't know about y'all, but by now I'm burned out on the Pink Floyd Story. Mainly because it got to the point to where it was all about the band's internal problems, with Roger Waters making himself the name and the face of the band and then announcing that there was no more Pink Floyd after they made an album called The Final Cut, and the following years were a series of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits between the band members. There were a few bright spots. Gilmour, Mason and Wright recorded the album "A Momentary Lapse Of Reason" in 1985, which I thought was their best effort since Wish You Were Here; 9 years later in 1994 they did The Division Bell, which was a tribute to their departed bretheren Barrett and Waters, and finally an album of unreleased material and outtakes in 2014 called The Endless River.

These last 3 Pink Floyd albums span a period of close to 30 years, and there's not a whole lot I can say about either the music or the band during that time that doesn't involve Waters vs Floyd and Floyd vs Waters. They all made solo albums, took time to do some record producing and collaborating with up and coming artists, and after 15 studio albums, 12 world tours and hundreds of millions of records sold, and with Rick Wright dying in 2008, by 2014 when The Endless River was released, there was no more Pink Floyd. They were offered 100 million dollars to do one final tour, but David Gilmour declined to participate. I wonder if Roger Waters can tell me, would it be Pink Floyd without Dave Gilmour on guitar? I didn't think so. Pink Floyd is a memory now, and they are letting it rest.

But there's one last item in this story that deserves telling. After 35 years in seclusion, Syd Barrett died in July of 2006 at the age of 60. He had been living quietly and privately in the cottage behind his mother's house since the early 1970s, dedicating himself to painting and gardening. Public sightings were extremely rare, and he declined all offers for interviews. He went back to his birth name of Roger, and his income consisted of regular royalty payments that the band had arranged for him, as well as a meager invalid pension from the government. He had health problems for the last 20 years of his life, and the cause of his death was attributable to complications from diabetes.

The album he made with Pink Floyd, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, has stood the test of time, and to listen to it now, it still is an incredible blast of pure inspiration and magic. His two official albums that he made after leaving Floyd in the late 60s and early 70s, called The Madcap Laughs and Barrett have been consistenly selling every year since he made them, but other than a compilation of outtakes and false starts that never made it onto a record before, titled Opel, any scrap of material from him has been highly sought-after and his story is one of the most romantic and fabled stories in the history of rock.

But David Gilmour corrected that. When Syd died, in an interview David said that there was nothing romantic or glamorous at all about Syd's story. It was a sad and hopelessly screwed-up situation, and although people should not forget the greatness of Syd's contributions, which are now considered precious relics of a mythical time, what happened to him was tragic and lost.

The saddest part of the Syd Barrett story for me is that he died twice. Once in the bloom of his youth with the world at his feet, when his spirit, his will and his mind departed him, and again, 39 years later when his body finally gave out.

He leaves a legacy of beauty, art and creativity that has never been matched since he left the public eye, but his lasting and eternal legacy is the band he founded, named and wrote the songs for that launched them into worldwide fame and fortune, Pink Floyd. We were fortunate to have them. I can't imagine what my life would have been like if I didn't have the Floyd to remind me of the other side of things. All I can say to all of them is thank you and best to you all. And a special thanks to Danny White for his input, insight and advice for me on Pink Floyd throughout the ongoing construction of this tribute.

Pictures: Syd Barrett, 1967, and Pink Floyd, 1977: