pink floyd - 1968-07-27

besides my current obsession with electronic music, i've had a long love affair with the psychedelic sounds of the 60s and 70s. over the years i've collected a bunch of live recordings from a bunch of bands, and a huge share of my collection comes from pink floyd... and i'm not talking about your goddamn dark side of the moon floyd. while that album is good and historically important, and i agree that it is one of the tragedies of modern music that no video exists of a full 1970s performance of the DSOTM set, i feel that the band was way more interesting in the years before DSOTM. originally started as a white-boy blues band, songwriter/guitarist/singer syd barrett steered pink floyd toward a 'progressive pop' direction with their essential first album, piper at the gates of dawn, released in 1967 and recorded at abbey road studios, down the hall from where the beatles were finishing sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band. few recordings exist of syd playing with the band, and none that i've found are of particularly good quality (another tragedy, methinks).

while syd was 'replaced' by dave gilmour in mid-1968 due to drug problems and an increasing lack of focus, his whimsical influence was felt for a few more years, and expanded upon by gilmour's calculated guitar attack, before roger waters took the helm with DSOTM. before the relatively polished presentation of that album and its live tour, pink floyd in concert was a raw psychedelic beast, capable of steering through mind-shattering walls of sound and, moments later, descending gently back down to earth with pastoral odes and falsetto choral sections, and even some ridiculously funky, bluesy jams. i can only imagine that a pre-'72 pink floyd show was the psychedelic experience par excellence...

this is a short recording, but definitely a good one: two 15-minute long mindfuck jams with exceptional sound quality. in my opinion this is a good representation of the early live floyd sound, immediately after the syd-led 'pop' phase and before the composed, theatrical feel of DSOTM.

pink floyd - 1968-07-27 - los angeles, CA
1. interstellar overdrive
2. a saucerful of secrets

as i consolidate my live cd collection, i'll occasionally post an old recording which i think deserves to be heard. i'll upload ~224 kb/s vbr mp3's, directly from the wav files i have. since we're indebted to the tapers and sharers of these treasures, i must say: individual use only--please do NOT pass these along as lossless/wav files. lossless files are available all over the internet, particularly via torrents, if you're interested in getting this in wav quality.

enjoy! there is much more to come...