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Two men, one of them in flames, shake hands in a studio back lot. The image of a nude woman emerges from a red veil. A diver breaks the waves of a lake without creating a splash or ripple in the water. Those evocative images form the elements of the album art for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, released 40 years ago September 12. Wish You Were Here, a rueful meditation on absence and loss, is as memorable for its artful packaging as it is for its music.
Pink Floyd released Wish You Were Here in the wake of the massive commercial success of TheDark Side of The Moon, released in 1973. By the time the band started recording Wish You Were Here, the Floyd (David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright) was experiencing enormous pressure and dissolution. Before TheDark Side of the Moon, the Floyd was a popular progressive rock band with a cult following. TheDark Side of the Moon made the Floyd mainstream rock superstars. The band struggled with all the demands that fame thrust upon them, including the rigors of touring, making their fans happy, and living up to the expectations of record executives. An inability to handle fame contributed to an internal dissension that began to slowly destroy Pink Floyd (although the collapse of the Roger Waters-era Floyd would not occur for years yet).
Wish You Were Here is Samiyam's first release with Leaving Records & Stones Throw. It's sixteen tracks instrumentals with three rap tracks featuring Evidence, The Alchemist and Samiyam, making his debut on the mic. My high school days were full of PINK FLOYD and 'Wish You Were Here' played a big role and still remains one of my all time most beloved albums. What a great introduction! And what a great ending! 'Wish You Were Here' is really an epic album which blends all the right elements mixing blues and psychedelia with that classic PINK FLOYD space.
The Floyd responded with an album that is both a sarcastic slap in the face to the music industry (through songs such as “Have a Cigar” and “Welcome to the Machine”) and a sad farewell to the band they could never be again (“Wish You Were Here” and “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” understood to be about ex-Floyd member Syd Barrett but also having broader meanings about the loss of a different time in the band’s history).
As was the case with The Dark Side of the Moon, the album packaging was (and remains) a sensory experience, including a black shrink-wrap, stunning front-and-back covers, mysterious inner sleeve, sticker, and a postcard. The theme of absence unified most of the elements. For instance, the woman in the inner sleeve is absent from first viewing. You must strain to find her form in the image of a red veil.
The diver in the postcard insert is mostly absent from view, and ripples are absent from the lake where his body breaks the water.
In the book 100 Best Album Covers: The Stories Behind the Sleeves, Wish You Were Here designers (and long-time Floyd collaborators) Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson provided more insight into the connection between the postcard and the theme:
The title clearly derives from the theme of absence. It is an ironic request that implies the opposite, referring to postcards sent from abroad by people who are probably rather pleased that you’re not around. Your absence is what is wished for, not your presence. Accordingly a postcard came with every vinyl package.
In the context of an insincere postcard greeting, the album title indeed can be interpreted as a kiss-off to everyone that Pink Floyd wanted to keep at arm’s length as the pressures of fame began to crush the band. “Wish you were here” could easily mean, “Wish you were not part of my life anymore. Wish I could turn back the clock when I could make myself absent from you.”
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The most famous element of the album packing consists of the front cover, which depicts two men shaking hands in a studio back lot. They both symbolize stereotypical corporate executives — the type who ignorantly ask, “Oh by the way, which one’s Pink?” in the song “Have a Cigar” which opens Side 2 of the album. They are dressed in conservative suits and dark shoes. Both of the white men have well coiffed hair. But one of them is in flames. As Powell and Thorgerson explained,
The theme of the album duly surfaced as “absence” — emotional and physical absence. In relationships, when people withdraw their commitment — their emotional presence — and become absent, it is often for fear of getting hurt or being “burned.” Hence a burning man — a man on fire.
To create the effect of the burning man, the design team doused stuntman Ronnie Rondell (wearing an asbestos suit and wig) with gasoline and set him on fire. According to Powell and Thorgerson, the wind blew the flames against his face, burning his real moustache. Rondell was philosophical about the shoot, saying, “It was pretty easy to do, not too life threatening, and paid well.”
An out-take from the album cover shoot.
On the album’s back cover, another corporate type — this time a businessman in a suit and a hat — offers a copy of Wish You Were Here, leaving no doubt as to how Pink Floyd felt about the record company machinery the band was feeding. In the words of Powell and Thorgerson, “[The image] embodied Floyd’s critique of the corporate side of the music business. Biting the hand that feeds, perhaps.”
Wish You Were Here became Pink Floyd’s fastest selling album ever. In the United States, the album shot to Number One on the Billboard charts in its second week of release. The album received a mixed reception, as some critics did not know what to make of the sprawling, epic sound of lengthy tracks such as “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” (clocking in at 25 minutes and broken into two parts). But like the best of Pink Floyd’s albums created during the 1970s, Wish You Were Here would gain a place in the pantheon of great rock albums, routinely making “greatest album of all time” lists from publications such as Q and Rolling Stone. By 2004, the album had sold 13 million copies. In 2011, Wish You Were Here was released in the form of a lavish box set that included a version in 5.1 surround sound.
When I listen to Wish You Were Here today, I feel sadness, absence, and loss in the music and lyrics, especially the title track:
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
By expressing the vibe of the songs through visual storytelling, the album packaging endures as a powerful complement to the music. Think about how Pink Floyd intended to tell its story through music, words, and artwork the next time you reduce Wish You Were Here to a digital commodity on Spotify.
Here are other albums I’ve profiled in my series on memorable album covers:
Ray Charles: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel
Al Green: Greatest Hits
Led Zeppelin: Houses of the Holy
Led Zeppelin: Untitled
Willie Nelson: Red Headed Stranger
Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon
Rolling Stones: Sticky Fingers
Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run
Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part 1-5, Welcome To The Machine (21:03)1a – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 1)1b – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 2)1c – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 3)1d – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 4)1e – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 5)1f – Welcome To The Machine2. Have A Cigar / Wish You Were Here / Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part 6-9 (23:10)2a – Have A Cigar2b – Wish You Were Here2c – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 6)2d – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 7)2e – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 8)2f – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 9). As the follow-up to the Floyd’s iconic, record-breaking 1973 concept album The Dark Side Of The Moon, this album is often unfairly overlooked. With the benefit of hindsight, Wish You Were Here has the same faultless pacing and sequencing of its predecessor, but a more coherent musical narrative, structure and tone, as well as greater lyrical sophistication.
Here, the ‘concept’ is more down-to-earth, since much of the record is an extended tribute to the late Syd Barrett the genius behind their early works, who flew too high and burned too bright, becoming one of rock’s most infamous drug casualties before Pink Floyd emerged from London1s psychedelic underground scene to become one of the biggest success stories of the 1970s. It’s also the last great album by a band that would produce something as adolescently puerile as The Wall by the end of that decade.Barrett is the subject of the epic “Shine On You Crazy Diamond, parts One and Two” of which take up more than half the playing time and bookend just three other shorter tracks.
Despite some questionable keyboard tones from Richard Wright, the majestically unhurried instrumental intro is a triumph of suspense. It1s nearly nine minutes before Roger Waters starts singing and the effect is startling, as are the words: ‘Remember when you were young?/ You shone like the sun / Shine On You Crazy Diamond!/ Now there’s a look in your eye / Like black holes in the sky’. It’s debatable whether the ‘iPod generation’ will get all of the eerie, almost visual sound detail in the more melodramatic “Welcome To The Machine”, which presages some of the pomp of their later work. Guest vocalist Roy Harper is a gritty presence on the music industry-bating “Have A Cigar” and the breathless title track finds Waters’ lyrics at their most soul searching. Some may baulk at Dave Gilmour’s long, bluesy guitar workouts, which form the backbone of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and crop up throughout the album.
Hey, these were the dying days of prog. Punk was just around the corner and it’s easy to see why, but mid-seventies post-psychedelic angst seldom sounded so chilled.BBC Review by John Lusk.
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