Best Pink Floyd books?

There's an excellent book called Embryo which focuses on pre TDSOTM PF. Concert dates, tapes (this was from before the web sites but is still a terrific read and probably goes into the best detail about dates, sessions. Lots of references, it's just about academic except it's readable.

My favourite entry has to be Guy Fawke's Night, 5 November 1966 Watford Nudist Colony.

Dig if you will, the depths of winter (brr), loads of acid, pot etc (far out man), firecrackers (ouch), nudity (ye gods). Needless to say the inferences are all that of yours truly.

My favorite bit of all, is in the Robert Wyatt book ... about playing with Syd .... and in one rehearsal section, someone asks Robert ... what key is he playing in? ... and Robert says ... "he doesn't know the keys, he just plays!".

Of course, that means that you have to play to what you hear, and this is where so many musicians differ from each other. Robert's "Different Every Time", is not about "music" or about "the art", or about ... something that makes us feel that they are stars ... it's about the very person that has an instrument and does something with it ... and sometimes it is different, because it is a different time and place ... and at that time, in many places around the world, there WAS a HUGE APPRECIATION for many experimental things, and how people reacted to that ... and I would love to see someone break down Syd's guitar playing ... maybe it's me, but I do not "recognize" known chords and keys in his playing ... and things like "Interstellar Overdrive", "Astronome Domine" and those experimental cuts were just that ... an experiment, that worked because some far out and valuable music came out of those sounds. 

To me, that is the main "source" of any artistic process ... in developing something that comes out of what would be considered "nothing" musically, and all of a sudden ... you have something ... and this was, in many ways, what helped define and create things like "krautrock" later ... it was almost all of it about the feeling and the touch ... had nothing to do with "music".

In this sense, it might be OK for Roger and Dave to kinda thrash that early stuff since they were learning also, but I don't see the big deal in admitting that at 19/20, they did not have the musical knowledge that they do now ... but saying that it was ... nothing ... is really disrespectful to the youthful desires and thoughts that ended up being so creative and important in the life of Pink Floyd ... and sadly, that they are not capable of appreciating those early days and where it got them!

I've been with this band since 1971, and been around a lot of its articles (I still have a large amount of them), mostly from their earlier days, since after DSOTM, the whole thing was out of control and the "news" was all "old news", and by that time, the PF that had the real nice music shows with different versions of ECHOES, or STCFTHOTS, and such, all of a sudden was a mechanical juggernaut that was repetitive, and had no freedom for them to improvise and have some fun, and for me, it killed a lot of the PF that mattered to me.

And of course, now you hear the ugly comments about those early albums (specially Ummagumma and ATH), and it is not fair ... what they did, is what made their shows special on stage, and created the atmosphere that helped develop and define DSOTM and later walk into TW. This, if you don't see it in the larger context, is the use of sound effects in between songs in the early days, which helped create an atmosphere that helped develop their later material. DSOTM incorporated the vignettes into film and music, and then in THE WALL it became a full fledged story and piece of work, that had its foundation some 20 years earlier.

A whole lot is not studied and discussed in those books, and Nick, which has the most pictures, is probably the least helpful of them all ... too many chips and beans, is all I can think of!

The artistic concept, I think ... to see it like a film, might even go back to the days of Syd Barrett and how he tells his stories ... we remember those stories and the songs, and how they stood out. 20 to 25 years later, the lyrics were a part of the story ... not the story itself, since the lyrics were now "moments" in the whole story and not the story by itself.

Because the majority of these books are done by fans, that just like the band and their music, a lot of the questions are just fan stuff and not specially artistic and valuable as some informative detail about the band and its development ... and all you get is stupid comments about Antonioni, and even worse comments about Schroeder, and really sad appreciation for the fact that they did something different that most rock bands did not have the guts to do. 

The pictures are nice ... specially of all the light shows and such ... but I never once (5 times) went to see PF/Roger because of the lights ... I went because the music and the artistic design of the work was valuable and important to me, and I think that this is the part that is laughable to many "fans" when looking at some of these books and what they tell you ... in essence, they tell you nothing, except create a bunch of slides/slices of different times and places, and lets you create your own idea ... you still don't know what the whole thing was about. 

Because almost all of the books are about the fame and its stars ... and the art? Who cares?

Or better yet ... a Syd snipet on many bootlegs ... "some people have stood and cheered ... for something they did not understand!... " ... I did not write it, but look at how prophetic it really is!