The career of Pink Floyd can be broken down into distinct sections. For example, there’s the brief Syd Barrett era, and then the superstardom era spearheaded by The Dark Side Of The Moon. You can break it down even more than that if you wish once you head to the late 70s and beyond.
But our focus here is on the area between the start and the stardom. The song that helped begin that transformation was over 20 minutes long and took up an entire album side in 1971.
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In Search of a New Direction
Syd Barrett did just about everything for Pink Floyd on their first few singles and their debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, in 1967. Barrett wrote most of the songs, sang lead on the majority of them, and dominated the spacey sound with his squalling guitar.
But Barrett was out of the group by early 1968, a victim of both his own mental issues and excessive drug use. David Gilmour replaced him, but, at least at that point, he didn’t have the experience to assert himself in an artistic sense. Pink Floyd wandered about for a few years, looking for direction.
As they settled in to make a new album in 1971, they still hadn’t figured out a lot of the issues that had plagued them since Barrett’s departure. Specifically, what was their musical identity going to be? In one fell swoop, a song called “Echoes” answered that question and many others.
A Song About “Nothing”
Its original title was “The Return Of The Son Of Nothing”. That name nodded to both the song’s sci-fi leanings and the fact that Floyd came into the process for making the album Meddle with little in the hopper. Their idea was for each of the four members to go off and compose different mini-sections, ultimately trying to bring it all together.
Many of these smaller portions of songs didn’t amount to much. But while undertaking this process, a piano note that reverberated within a speaker evoked something special to the band. That note is what you hear at the start of the song that would eventually be titled “Echoes”.
The band built from there, piling layer upon layer. There were musical sections separated by ambient sound. Happy accidents like the way David Gilmour’s guitar rang across a specific amp as crying seagulls abounded. Pink Floyd connected all this into one elongated piece that comprised the entire second side of the Meddle album.
Waking the “Echoes”
“Echoes” was also important in that it was the song that helped the band realize that Roger Waters should be handling all their lyrics. Waters’ words for the track were subtly poetic and slightly opaque but displayed a genuine longing for connection amidst the canyons of sound that the band created.
Speaking of that sound, it was spacey but engaging, forward-thinking but still accessible. Gilmour’s skyscraping guitar and Rick Wright’s magisterial organ were the dominant forces. Meanwhile, Waters on bass and Nick Mason on drums proved invaluable for the way their instruments formed a solid foundation so that the others could take their flights of fancy.
“Echoes” didn’t necessarily send Pink Floyd to another level in a commercial sense. But it paved the way for what they’d achieve on The Dark Side Of The Moon two years later. However, don’t simply dismiss it as a stepping stone. It’s a monumental achievement regardless of the context of where it fell in Pink Floyd’s career.
(Photo by Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images)