Pink Floyd’s First Masterpiece: An Audio/Video Exploration of the 23-Minute Track, “Echoes” (1971)

Of the many things that can and have been said of Pink Floyd’s 1973 mas­ter­piece, The Dark Side of the Moon, one con­sis­tent­ly bears repeat­ing: it set a stan­dard for how a rock album could func­tion as a seam­less, uni­fied whole. There have been few releas­es since that meet this stan­dard. Even Floyd them­selves didn’t seem like they could mea­sure up to Dark Side’s matu­ri­ty just a few years ear­li­er. But they were well on their way with 1971’s Med­dle.

Med­dle is real­ly the album where all four of us were find­ing our feet,” said David Gilmour. The obser­va­tion espe­cial­ly applied to the 23-minute odyssey “Echoes,” the “mas­ter­work of the album — the one where we were all dis­cov­er­ing what Pink Floyd was all about.” All four mem­bers of the band learned to com­pose togeth­er in the rehearsal room, Nick Mason recalled, “just sit­ting there think­ing, play­ing… It’s a nice way to work — and, I think, in a way, the most ‘Floyd-ian’ mate­r­i­al we ever did came about that way.”

“Echoes,” indeed, was the band’s “first mas­ter­piece,” argues Noah Lefevre in the Poly­phon­ic “audio/visual com­pan­ion” above. The song was orig­i­nal­ly titled “The Return of the Son of Noth­ing” because the band had gone into the stu­dio with “noth­ing pre­pared,” Nick Mason remem­bered lat­er that year. As they strug­gled to find their way for­ward after the exper­i­ments of Ummagum­ma and Atom Heart Moth­er, tour­ing con­stant­ly, they felt unin­spired, call­ing all their ideas “noth­ings.” They expect­ed lit­tle from inspi­ra­tions like the “ping” sound that opens “Echoes.”

Instead, they cre­at­ed the most sub­stan­tial mate­r­i­al of their career to date. Inspired by Muham­mad Iqbal’s poem “Two Plan­ets,” Roger Waters “wrote lyrics to an epic piece” about being at sea, in every sense, yet glimps­ing the poten­tial for res­cue and con­nec­tion. Richard Wright wrote “the whole piano thing at the begin­ning and the chord struc­ture for the song,” he told Mojo in his final inter­view, show­cas­ing his seri­ous com­po­si­tion­al tal­ents. And the range of tones, effects, and styles that Gilmour pio­neered on “Echoes” have become leg­endary among gui­tarists and Floyd fans.

“Echoes,” says Lefevre above, changed the band’s direc­tion lyri­cal­ly and musi­cal­ly, help­ing them break out of the crit­i­cal box labeled “space rock.” Instead of  “anoth­er song about look­ing upwards to the stars, Waters looked down into the cold, strange depths of the ocean.” It wasn’t the first time rock and roll had vis­it­ed what Lefevre calls the “psy­che­del­ic under­wa­ter.” Hen­drix was there three years ear­li­er when he turned into a mer­man. But Floyd found some­thing entire­ly their own in their explo­ration. Learn how they did it in the styl­ish video above, clev­er­ly synced to the whole of “Echoes.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Last, Tran­scen­dent Per­for­mance of “Echoes” by Pink Floyd Key­boardist Richard Wright & David Gilmour (2006)

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Pro­vides a Sound­track for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Watch Pink Floyd Play Live Amidst the Ruins of Pom­peii in 1971 … and David Gilmour Does It Again in 2016

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness


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