Remembering Rick Wright

I would be remiss to not say something about the death of Rick Wright. He was not a personal friend of course, but stil,l as a founding member of Pink Floyd, he certainly had an impact on my life and has made many, many moments of it more enjoyable.

Anyway, I can't say anything significant about Rick that hasn't already been said by the various critics and fans. And I'm sure I can't say it nearly as well as many of them have said it. All I can offer is my own personal perspective of the beauty and warmth that I think his work brought into my life.

I never put a lot of thought into where the sound that was Pink Floyd really came from. I always knew that it was Roger who wrote the complex, depressing, "the world is out to get us all" lyrics and that David Gilmour's guitar could take me places that I never even imagined existed. And that, as with many great bands, the synergy of what the group produced far surpassed anything that any one of the individuals might be capable of on their own.

However, for some reason, it's Pink Floyd's music, of all the rock that I cut my teeth on back in my younger years, that still sticks with me today; that I can still listen to and feel the same sort of excitement and anticipation as I did when I was younger. Don't get me wrong, I still love Zeppelin, The Who and Rainbow, but it's not the same. (Ok, The Stones I still dig in a big way too, but that's a different kind of trip; and they were post-high school anyway). I know every lick of every song. But even so, with Floyd the music can still carry me to places that are somewhere else, somewhere outside of my body and provide me the opportunity to touch the cosmos, if only for a moment. (And I don't even need any sort of extracurriculars to help me get there any more.)

I never really put a lot of thought into it, other than the idea that Floyd had more elements of classical music than any other band I listened to. And I think that that sort of underlying structure of musical complexity ahead of any lyrical content is really what I'm getting at, or what I react to. (In fact, in some early Floyd I am still convinced that the actual content of the lyrics was secondary to the sound of the words, almost as if they were another instrument to be played as a part of the musical whole. Think "Mathilda Mother" or "Echos:"

Overhead the albatross
hangs motionless upon the air
and deep beneath the rolling waves
in labryinths of coral caves...

And with "The Great Gig in the Sky" they took this to its logical conclusion where the lyrics aren't even actual words, just another instrument in the mix, taking you to places of which actual words could only dream.)

But in reflection over the years, I realized that it was Wright who was probably in many ways responsible for this underlying depth and colour of the music. His palette of different sounds and moods created the complex underpinnings and backdrop against which all of Floyd's various melodies, whether soaring, gripping, majestic or just plain trippy could do their thing. I still want to have "A Saucerful of Secrets" played at my funeral.

Now, to be honest, I'm a huge Gilmour fan. And his guitar is like a force of the cosmos to me; I'm not sure that there's ever been a better guitar song in the history of the planet than "Comfortably Numb." (It's a dream of mine still to see him live in concert some day.) But I think that for the continuing depth of experience that I get out of Floyd's music, I owe much to Rick Wright.

Rest in peace, Rick. May your soul soar through the universe for eternity, the way your music allowed the rest of us to feel what that's like...