DISGRACELAND - Pink Floyd: Acid Overload, a Psychotic Breakdown, and a Crazy Diamond

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Pink Floyd’s original frontman, Syd Barrett, did so much LSD that he experienced a mental breakdown just as the band began to achieve mainstream success. His drug use began as mind-altering inspiration for his art, but quickly became a coping mechanism for the demands of commercial success. He became paralyzed in front of television cameras. He detuned his guitar until it was literally unplayable and refused to perform alongside his band. Then he stopped showing up at all. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠. This episode was originally published on August 9, 2022. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠ ⁠TikTok  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things, Tanna Mongeau, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history,

including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis.

The stories about Pink Floyd are insane. Their original frontman, Sid Barrett, did some. so much LSD that he experienced a mental breakdown just as the group began to achieve mainstream appeal. Sid's drug use began as a mind-altering inspiration for his art, but quickly became a coping mechanism for the demands of commercial success. Sid became paralyzed in front of television cameras. He detuned his guitar until it was literally unplayable and refused to perform alongside his band. And then he stopped showing up at all. And even though Pink Floyd's Legacy largely focuses on the years after Sid Barrett left, Sid Barrett made great music with

Pink Floyd, some of the trippiest, most expansive mind-altering music of all time. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Clandestine Procession, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to light my fire by the doors. And why would I play you that specific slice of funeral pie or cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on August 5th, 1967. And that was the day that Pink Floyd released their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a moment that would have an immediate impact on its frontman, Sid Barrett, and changed the trajectory of the band forever.

On this episode, LSD, mental breakdowns, funeral pyre cheese, Sid Barrett, and Pink Floyd. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. It was around one in the morning when the house lights went down. The sound of a heartbeat throbbed in the darkness. The capacity crowd at Radio City Music Hall basked in quadraphonic sound. A clock began to tick from the same.

stage, another from the back of the room, and then more, stage left and stage right, all of them clacking out of sync. The clock suddenly rang out in ear-splitting dissonance. The kids in the audience tripping on blue sunshine already knew the sound collages from Pink Floyd's brand-new album, Dark Side of the Moon, by heart. But this was better than listening to the LP on headphones in a dank bedroom. Louder, more immersive. A sphere dangled from the ceiling. Its mirrored exterior sent flashes of light into the audience.

It shot red lasers. It oozed in condescending smoke. A mechanical platform on the stage began to rise. It got higher and higher until it finally revealed the four figures standing on it. Four skinny psychedelic messiahs. Prague prophets, clad and worn jeans and tight t-shirts. Roger Waters, David Gilmore, Richard Wright, Nick Mason. It was March 17, 1973, and Pink Floyd had arrived.

They had literally arrived in New York City as part of this massive tour, but they'd also arrived as a massive force on the churns. Dark Side of the Moon was only a few weeks old, but was already approaching gold in the United States. They didn't know it yet, but Dark Side of the Moon would go on to enjoy a historic run of 959 weeks on the U.S. charts, go 14 times platinum in the UK, and sell upwards of 45 million copies in counting. But in 1973, the band previously known as the Pink Floyd Sound,

or simply the Floyd, were taking their first step towards becoming an honest-to-god worldwide phenomenon. It had taken them a decade to get there, eight albums into their career. but they got there without someone. A crucial piece of the Floyd's DNA was missing. The four on stage all knew they had lost him forever, and they didn't know if they'd ever seen him again. As they looked out at the stoned audience, all four of them thought the same thing.

They wished Sid was here. 1967, Pete Townsend was tripping his balls off. The sham rocks painted on the walls spun like a kaleidoscope. The colors coming from the liquid producing. objections were so vibrant they were nauseating. The people dancing next to Pete cascaded into infinite people every time they hopped into the air like playing cards spilling out from a shaken deck. He wondered if they were all as high as he was. Probably. LSD was easy enough to score down here in the basement of 31 Tottenham Court Road,

but only once a week when the pedestrian Blarney Club was transformed into the way-hip UFO Club. It was spelled like the Flying Saucers UFO, but if you pronounced it that way, you weren't in the know. And if you were in the know, the bouncers might slip you a tab at the door. Pete Townsend brought his own LSD like a proper London rock star, but now he was regretting dropping acid at all. Because every time he locked eyes with Roger Waters, wielding his Rickenbocker bass up on UFO's stage with the Floyd, Pete freaked out. He knew the handsome and charming bass player had a thing for his girlfriend, that the LSD had rendered Pete defenseless, and that now Roger Waters, a guy who was staunchly anti-acid, even though his band rep the psychedelic scene,

stood there with that shit-eating grin of his, the one that said that, I'm going to steal your girlfriend, happy Jack. It wasn't just his love that Pete Townsend worried about. It was his professional life, too. Pete was a guitarist in the loudest band in London, the bloody who, But tonight, Pink Floyd were loud as fuck. Their instrumental song, Interstellar Overdrive, was past the 20-minute mark. It put the Who's ear-shattering 14-minute live version of My Generation to shame. The song opened with a descending guitar riff before descending into utter madness. The Farfisa organ whined and, was that a cigarette lighter the guitarist was running up and down his strings?

As if the eerie sounds coming from his fender weren't enough. The guitarist had glued small metal discs to the instrument's body, which absorbed every beam of light and shot it back out to the audience. Pete now had this psychedelic sage to contend with. The guy with a reflective and refractive guitar, Sid Barrett, the Floyd's de facto leader and primary songwriter. He was the most popular guy in any given room, and for the Floyd's female fans, the dreamiest. Sid wore velvet trousers, yellow shoes, paisley shirts, and a turquoise waistcoat. He stood on his tiptoes hovering in mid-air, whiffs of his wild, long, curly hair suspended as well like the heavens had begun hoovering him up.

Unlike Roger and the other members of the Floyd, Sid was the one who talked the talk to talk and walked the walk. The talk being the creation of songs that defined the far-out vibe of London in circa early 1967, and the walk being a steady diet of LSD. There was a sound that only Sid heard, and he chased it in the rest of the band. they followed him. When he was on stage at the UFO singing about kings, unicorns, and dandelions,

with the primitive light show conjuring hallucinations all around him, Sid Barrett was in his element. Sid closed his eyes and found himself in the middle of one of his favorite books, Kenneth Graham's, the wind, and the willows. Never had Sid noticed the roses so vivid, the willow herbs so riotous, the meadow sweet so odorous and pervading. In his element,

surrounded by the elements of sound and vision, Sid was transported back to a time of childlike wonder. Songs like The Gnome, The Scarecrow, and See Emily Play were candy-coated funhouses mixing pastoral Englishness with an acid-expanded consciousness. Even Arnold Lane, a song about a creep with a fetish for stealing women's underwear, was less creepy and more catchy in Sid's hands. Sid wasn't the only one tripping on fairy tales and fantasy in London circa 1960. Seven, the Beatles got back to Penny Lane in strawberry fields. The stones got their nursery rhyme on with Dandelion.

Even the holly sang about riding on a flying horse and Pegasus. But Sid was better than boast of tapping into his inner child. The acid helped, one bore of perception leading to another and all that. Pretty soon, the doors the band found themselves walking through were bigger than ever before. They outgrew the underground scene at UFO that they had helped to foster. And next, they signed the EMI Records. Sid was beside himself. He had practically worn out his copy of Revolver.

Sid and the band had to pinch themselves while they recorded their debut album in Abbey Road's Studio 3, knowing the whole time that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were rapping Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band in the adjacent room. For Sid, however, the experience at Abbey Road didn't have a fairy tale ending. Any Kenneth Graham vibes at the start

gave way to Grim Brothers' fatalism at the end. He watched as his artistic, vision went pop. The band was assigned one of Abbey Road's white coats, Norman Smith, as their producer. Smith had experience as an engineer on the Beatles recordings, but he was as pragmatic as Sid was idealistic. Smith neutered the group's 20-minute-plus interstellar overdrive down to under 10 minutes. In Sid's eyes, Smith watered down their single, see Emily play into commercial track. The debut full-length album that followed in August of 1967, the Piper at the Gates of Dunnard. John bore no resemblance to the loud, dynamic band that had been rattling eardrums around London

for the better part of a year. The crowd back at the UFO agreed. Someone scribbled pink-finks in the underground club's bathroom. The venue's former house band were a sellout. Even worse, they were accused of turning their backs on the psychedelic scene. When the UFO's co-founder, John Hoppy Hopkins, was nabbed at a drug bust and sent to jail on the day Sergeant Pepper's hit shells, London's underground drug scene huddled,

but Pink Floyd simply distanced themselves from the drama. Meanwhile, Pete Townsend grew a pair big enough to say what he really felt about the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. His review, I thought it was fucking awful. Sid couldn't blame him. The record wasn't what he imagined. It wasn't that sound he heard in his head. And maybe they were right.

Maybe he was a cello, a shill, a pink-fink. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, it was too polished. too polite, too pop. Even worse than the sullying of his artistic vision, however, was the increased attention he was now receiving, the concerts, the television appearances, the expectation at EMI that Sid and the band go right back into the studio and do it again.

But Sid Barrett, just 21 years old and with his debut album at number six on the UK charts, didn't think he could do it again. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that, trust your girlfriends.

I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no.

I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance.

Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashians family over there, everybody's going. And the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that. I've better sleepwalk. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or

you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kimman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over?

Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Santa M'Ju, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast.

Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods, with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone.

She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it, and you're like, I can't believe that really happened.

Join me and step inside the investigation. new episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The mode of transportation wasn't the issue. Albert Hoffman knew what he was going to use to get himself back home. His bicycle. This was April of 1943 in Switzerland, after all, and due to wartime vehicle restrictions, personal cars were forbidden from driving on the roads.

The problem was how? he was going to navigate his way to his house on his bicycle, given his current condition. He was dizzy, anxious. The horizon quivered in a rainbow of colors. He couldn't move his arms. He felt like laughing for the next 12 years. Albert Hoffman was a chemist at Sandus Laboratories. In the mid-30s, Hoffman began work on synthesizing compounds and medicinal plants to suss out their benefits for the pharmaceutical industry. In the process, he unintentionally created numerous lysurgic acid compounds. He named his 25th attempt LSD 25 and put it on the shelf.

It sat there for five years, until now, April 19, 1943. Just days earlier, Hotheta re-synthesized the long dormant compound in hopes that it could provide some benefit in his ongoing research. He accidentally got a little of it on his skin. What he experienced was indescribable, but he knew he wanted to experience it again. And so, on April 19th, that yes, 420 in the afternoon, Albert Hoffman diluted 250 micrograms of LSD 25 and 10 cc of water and drank it.

At first, he felt nothing. And then the dizziness set in. He felt strange. It was late, time to go home, but he wasn't sure he could find his way. He looked out at the road and all he saw. saw where circles and spirals rotating, fountains of collar exploding from the vortex of rotating shapes. He called out for his assistant who helped to get on his bicycle seat, that he was immediately struck by how he didn't hear the sound of the pedals and of the bicycles spitting tires.

He saw the sound of the pedals and the tires. How was he seeing sounds? It didn't make any sense. No matter. The dizziness had subsided, and the wind on his face was a religious experience. When he arrived at his home, Hoffman couldn't remember the path he took to get there, but he'd never forget his trip. Twenty years after Albert Hoffman dosed himself for the first time,

the drug he created was still legal and plentiful. An intellectual stronghold like Cambridge, a city on the river Cam north of London, known for its universities, centuries-old architecture, and bucolic scenery, was right for psychedelic exploration. In the early 1960s, middle-class Cambridge-Denberg, were reading on the road by Jack Carowac, listening to Bebop and jamming in R&B bands. Intellectualism was sexy, and so were non-conformists in anti-authoritarians.

They couldn't open their minds wide enough. It's like LSD was made for them. Not that every kid in Cambridge was dropping acid in the 60s. Roger Waters famously took only one trip, because Roger Waters was less of an artist seeking transcendence and more of a career-oriented taskmaster. But that's a whole other story. Similarly, fellow Cambridge kid and guitarist David Gilmore took LSD only a few times, but found that he, too, wanted more control over his mind than the drug would allow.

When he joined Joker's Wilde, the band he played in from 1963 to 1967, Gilmore approached the gig as a gig, not an outlet for stoned artistry, and he knew that art didn't pay the bills, so he picked up side jobs to supplement his income. He delivered wine, worked a hot dog stand, carried sheet metal, and thanks to his Adonis Good Looks, modeled for photographers. Gilmore's Cambridge friend, Roger Keith Barrett, couldn't have been more or different. He lived the artist's lifestyle. Sleep until noon, don't hold down a real job, chase the muse, chase that sound, always create, nothing else matters. His sister claimed that he cried nonstop as a baby until around 18 months when he learned out to hold a pen and draw.

He continued to live the restless artist's lifestyle as an end. adult, and when he moved to London at age 18 for art school. It was at this point, around 1964, that he stopped going by his given name, Roger, and was calling himself Sid. Accounts differ as to exactly why he settled on the name, but some suggest that it gave him the air of a working class beatnik. Accounts also vary when it comes to just how much acid Sid consumed, first in Cambridge and then in London. But what was clear was that he was the only blotter-carrying member of Pink Floyd, the band he joined, named and begrudgingly led after Roger Waters first met Richard Wright and Nick Mason in London. The band went through a few

lineup and name changes before Sid joined. Sid mashed up the names of American bluesmen, Pink Anderson, and Floyd Council, and steered the group away from R&B covers and into a psychedelic forest. It suited the band just fine. To be honest, they were remedial musicians. They caught flack from other bands for not being able to play well, for not paying their dues on the road. Under Sid, Pink Floyd, used these weaknesses to their advantage. Instead, a virtuosic guitar solos like those

that Hendrix and Clapton peddled, the Floyd leaned into reverb, echo, and distortion, sonic sleight of hand, and the music sparkled with childlike wonder, and they had Sid Barrett to thank for that. But once EMI commercialized his artistic vision, Sid felt like a little kid being taken to task by an adult, an artist demoted to a commodity. He continued taking LSD, but now he did it to cope with the anxiety.

Anxiety around the fear that EMI was dumbing down his vision, and anxiety over having to repeat the commercial success of their first recordings. Audiences at the Floyd's live shows didn't offer much relief. I'm not just talking about the UFO, but when the band toured out of town to promote the Piper at the gates of Duff, On, fans expected the condensed pop nuggets they knew from the album, not the 20-minute space rock epics that they received, and they responded by pelting the band with beer bottles. Sid soon moved into a flat at 101 Cromwell Road in London, an address that, according to photographer and friend Mick Rock was a major burnout giant. Acid Overload Central.

In the Cromwell Road flat, Sid wrote, he drew, he strummed his fender guitar with the reflective metal discs, and he'd chase the sound, the muse. He'd rather do that alone and go appear on the BBC's top of the pops again. The band had done it twice at this point, two times too many in his opinion. They didn't even play their instruments or sing on the show. They lip-sync the whole thing, mimed along to the recording, and it was bullshit, it was all a lie, and they were like fucking car salesman. What was the point to sell more records? That wasn't her. Left alone in his flat, Sid could focus on art, Pure, synthesized art, as pure as the LSD, Albert Hoffman, synthesized in his Swiss lab.

Sid chased it like mole and rat chased the sounds of Pan's pipes in the children's story that gave the Floyd's debut album its name. But in the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, one of the many stories in Kenneth Graham's book The Wind and the Willows. Mole and Rat don't just find the mythical piper. They also find Little Portly, the missing member of the Otter family, safe and sound.

Sid may have fancied himself like mole or rat, a searcher of the sound, but as 1967 wore on, he became more like Little Portly. He was the one who went missing. He was the one that others struggled to find. First, his heart wasn't in it, then his head. Sid Barrett just stopped showing up altogether. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that, trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by it.

a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. Like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in.

Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going. And the Air Marshal is trying to. grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been at sleepwalk.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kimman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Madarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a host of the Wicked Words podcast.

Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it, and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation.

New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sue Kingsford barely recognized her friend. Sid Barrett stood in the doorway of Sue South Kensington flat. His bare feet were bleeding. He wasn't talking. He wasn't standing up on the tips of his toes in his usual way. His feet were flat on the floor, grounded.

Sue guided Sid inside, where she gave him sugar puffs and coffee. It was the same greeting that David Gilmore had received earlier in 1967 when he dropped in to visit the Floyd during the recording session for See Emily Play. David wasn't town to buy equipment for a residency with his band Jokers Wild in Paris. Sid didn't acknowledge that his old Cambridge mate had stopped by to say hello. He didn't even seem to recognize him. Now, in South Kensington, if Sid knew that he was at a friend's house, he didn't show it. He sat at the table, in silence, and sipped his coffee.

Then came another knock at Sue's door. It was them. The Floyd. They'd searched for Sid for hours, and they were booked to perform on top of the pops for a third time that afternoon, but Sid had gone AWOL. He was over it. Roger Waters and the others didn't give a shit what he was over. Sid was going with him now. And they dragged him back to the BBC studio, where he sat on a cushion and struggled to get through his third appearance on British television, so fucked up that he couldn't even stand on his own two feet, uncomfortably numb.

The Floyd thought their inaugural tour of the United States in the fall of 1967 were fair better. A change of scenery would do sit some good. But the omens were bad from the start. Their work visas were late. Their U.S. label capital failed to secure instruments, so they had a beg and plead with local music. shops to loan them gear. The California grass was high test, not cut with tobacco like it was back home. One toke sent Sid into interstellar overdrive. There's a long-standing story, likely apocryphil, that at a show in California, Sid rubbed, crushed up Mandrix

tranquilizer tablets and bril cream in his hair on stage. In reality, Sid did very little on stage that night. He detuned his guitar until the strings wobbled like wet spaghetti. And then he just stood there, like if he didn't make a move, perhaps, he would cease to exist. But he couldn't miss him. He loomed like a cautionary tail. His fender hung from the strap around his neck like a concrete block. Roger Waters looked over at his bandmate and felt the anger bubble up again. The anger he felt when Sid bailed on the top of the pops. He wanted to punch sit in the face. Maybe that would wake the stupid get. Instead, he took it out on his base. He gripped his left hand tight around the neck and imagined it was Sid's neck. He dug the fingers of his right hand into the nickel-plated

strings, harder, and he slapped the strings with his thumb. And the more Sid did nothing, the more Roger attacked his instrument. Suddenly, his fingers ached in intense pain. He looked down, and blood was everywhere. Fuck this, Roger thought. He just want to play, he doesn't want to have to play. Sid Barrett can fuck right off and do whatever he wants to do. The remaining U.S. tour dates were canceled. The band knew they couldn't carry on like this with Sid. Something in him had changed, for good. He wasn't the person they once knew. Whether LSD was solely to blame, and they had their suspicions but couldn't be sure. Roger, for one, began to suspect that perhaps the drug had awakened along dormant mental illness. What they were sure of was that the band needed someone

dependable if they were going to last. Someone who wasn't afraid of commercial success. Someone who treated the gig like what it was. A bloody gig. And this was, this was. wasn't a fairy tale, this was real life. And so, Roger, Richard, and Nick nodded in agreement. It had to be done. They picked up the phone and called the one guy who was the exact opposite of Sid Barrett in every way. Sid flashed back and forth. The camera captured shots of him in and out of understanding his reality. In one shot, it looks like he can actually see those heavens trying to hoover him up. His eyes set somewhere else from those of his bandmates. In another, Sid is barely visible in the background, peeking out behind the shoulders of Nick and Roger.

And in perhaps the saddest shot, Richard is wearing flying ace goggles, seated on a bicycle in center frame. Perhaps a nod to Sid's song, bike. It's a goofy photo. And the other band members stifle smiles, but Sid doesn't have to try. He looks a good 20 years older than everyone else in the band. His dark eyes look like he's having a grim realization. Was he actually standing next to his old man? from Cambridge, David Gilmore?

Was this another hallucination? It was January 1968. The Piper was at the gates of Adon of a new year, and the Piper was about to call a different tune. Sid glanced over at David, the long-haired Adonis, who was as much a clean-cut preppy as Sid was a burnt-out hippie, and it all came back to him, bad trip. This was reality.

He remembered everything he'd forgotten about, all over again. The band had hired David as a second guitarist after that disastrous U.S. tour. Months later, after recording their sophomore album, a saucer full of secrets, and after they had stopped picking up Sid on the way to gigs, Pink Floyd made it official. In April, 1968, Sid Barrett was no longer in the band. Sid understood he didn't want to be there. And if he didn't want to be there, why would the others want him to be there? But just because Sid was done with Floyd didn't mean he was done chasing the sound

in his head. He convinced EMI to allow him to return to Abbey Road Studios to make a solo record. The new songs were scatterbrained. The sessions were all starts and stops. In the resulting album, The Mad Cap Laughs, was released in January 1970. Alternately inviting and impenetrable, the album's fractured psychedelia would eventually become a Rosetta Stone for artists like Robin Hitchcock, guided by voices and all the bands in the Elephant Sixth collective of the late 1990s. Sid's second solo album, simply titled Barrett, arrived later in 1970. Sympathetically produced by David Gilmore and featuring both David and Richard Wright, it felt a bit more cohesive, like Sid was actually getting a shit together.

The two solo albums made Sid feel creatively renewed. He returned to his child at home in Cambridge, where he lived the quasi-hermetic life in the windowless cellar. And the isolation helped keep the distractions of the world at bay and helped him follow. focus on one thing, that sound. Soon he was playing in a band again, a trio called Stars. In February 1972, Stars announced a show at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. Word quickly spread that everyone's favorite ex-Floid frontman was once again performing live for the first time in four years.

The show quickly sold out. Sid hoped for the best. He even bought a new pair of velvet pants. But as soon as he strummed the night's opening chord, Sid thought about the U.S. tour all over again. The sound in the venue was muddy. He could barely make out what he was singing into the microphone. The bass player's amp went dead.

Sid sliced his finger on a guitar string. Before long, Sid was looking for a quiet spot on stage where he could nurse his wound and just disappear. A few days later, Melody Maker published a less than flattering review of the show. The article confirms Sid's suspicions that he was a shilp, that he wasn't a true artist, that he was a has-been who, frankly, never was. And he'd never find that fucking sound. He went back to his family house on Hills Road.

He descended into the cellar where he could be alone, and the door slammed behind him. What a bloody mess. He looked up at the low ceiling, and it hung there, flat, a clean slate, what ridiculed him. Everyone had an opinion, even the fucking ceiling. He stood on a chair and had to scoge. down because the ceiling was right there. And then, he just did it. He thrust his head into the ceiling. It hurt like hell. And he did it again. The second time it hurt even worse. And he did it a third time. And then a fourth, over and over again and soon. He felt nothing at all. He knew blood was

running down his head now, but he didn't care. He just kept smashing his head into the ceiling. If he hit it hard enough, maybe he'd lose the sound had been chasing for. for good, just knock it clean out. He opened his eyes wide as he continued to hit his bashed and bloodied head over and over again. He wanted to see it, see it with his own two eyes, the sound, that fucking sound, a fleshy bashed out piece of him. And when it came tumbling from his brain, he would be ready, ready to pounce on it and kill it once and for all.

June 5th, 1975, Abbey Road Studios, London. David Gilmore and Roger Waters were arguing again. David wanted the sound of the new album to be warmer. Roger wanted it to sound raw. David wanted to include the songs that Roger didn't want to include. Pink Floyd were back in the studio recording Wish You Were Here, the follow-up to the critical and commercial smash Dark Side of the Moon. Tensions were higher than ever.

tensions between David and Roger had been high ever since Sid Barrett left the group. Maybe Roger just needed someone to battle, they all thought. One day it's Sid, the next day it's David. David had proved a major asset for the band. Not only did he coax a molten tone from his Stratocaster, but he had the focus and drive that his predecessor lacked. And while Pink Floyd Mark II sounded nothing like the band of old,

that didn't mean the band had stopped thinking about the guy who used to be their leader. Darkside at its themes of anxiety, fear, and madness was very much a record consumed with Sid Barrett's absence. And now they were once again making a record that was haunted by his presence. Both Wish You Were Here's titled track and Shine On You Crazy Diamond were unabashed tributes to Sid, songs of sentimentality, reverence, and loss. The band was listening to a rough mix of Shine On You Crazy Diamond in Abbey Road's control room

when David noticed a man walking around the studio. He looked out of place, strange. His eyebrows had been shaved off, and so at his hair. He was overweight. He wore a white t-shirt that appeared one size too small, and the waistband of his pants was pulled up over his stomach, plastic shopping bag in his hand. David had to admit,

the man looked like a crazy person who walked in off the street. The rest of the band now took notice. The playback of Shine on You Crazy Diamond and continued from the monitors in the control room. The strange-looking man slowly made his way into the room with the others where they looked up at him from where they all sat, not exactly sure what to say. Suddenly, Roger's face went from confusion to epiphany.

He shuddered. His jaw sank. He could hardly believe what he was seeing. Roger felt his eyes well up. He brought a hand up to catch a tear before it had a chance to roll down his face. The man stared back at Roger and didn't say a word. Gone was the gleam in his dilated eye. Gone was the long hair of the pretty bohemian face that drove many a girl wild back at the UFO club.

Bald, eyebrowless and overweight, Sid Barrett now looked, as one of the Floyd's former managers would later put it, like the type of bloke who serves you in a hamburger bar in Kansas City. Sid broke his silence. He asked when he could overdub his guitar part. The band gave him confused looks and response. Sorry, Sid, they told him.

The guitar's all done. Sid stood still and listened as the song's chorus welled up like the tears in Roger's eyes. David's guitar cut through the mix so clean and so clear, it left no trace of psychedelia in its lucid wake. Shine on You Crazy Diamond was eons from See Emily Play. If Sid realized that, he gave no indication. And if he knew the song was about him, he made no mention. He simply pulled a toothbrush out of the bag

and began to brush his teeth in the middle of Abbey Road's control room. When playback was finished, Sid put the toothbrush back in the bag and left. His friends in Pink Floyd never saw him again. Sid returned to Cambridge. He known who wrote songs, but he still created. A paintbrush or a pen in his hand provided a conduit to creativity and a cure for restlessness,

just like when he was a toddler. According to his sister Rosemary, Sid would take a photograph of something, say a flower, and then he would create a large painting of that flower, and when he was finished, he would take a photograph of the painting and then destroy the painting. Once something was over, it was over, as sister said. He felt no need to revisit it. Sid's bandmates, on the other hand, they continued to revisit his descent into madness for inspiration throughout their career. Sure, the main character of Floyd's 1979 concept album, The Wall,

features a lot of Roger Waters' biographical details, but the one with the swollen hand blues and pinhole burns all down the front of his favorite satin shirt, that's pure Sid, comfortably numb to the end. When Sid died in 2006 at the age of 60 from pancreatic cancer, his former band revisited his music once again, performing Arnold Lane and Bike contribute to their former leader a year later in 2007. To date, this was the final gig billed as Pink Floyd, meaning they began Pink Floyd with Sid songs and ended Pink Floyd with Sid songs. But Sid never got to appreciate how much his old bandmates owed to the Crazy Diamond to inform some of their best work. And that is a disgrace.

I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland. ad-free. Plus, you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month. Weekly unscripted bonus

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He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that, trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests.

Like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yelloo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gait and Moderato from Stranger Things.

Tena Monjeu. Camilla Morone. Mary Kenny Silver and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history, including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed.

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