A long time ago, I lived with my best friend. I was going to college to try and glean the nuances of the human condition expressed in some of the most treasured writing devised (English major), while on the side study up on the influential doings of our species's elite members (History minor). My best friend was not. He was minimally employed and mostly hung out in his bath robe, playing 7th Saga on SNES and renting cool movies that serve as the rays of the rising dawn of many people's early 20s, often as dawn is truly rising.
One day, as I sat on my bed churning out a paper on the American Gilded Age, I heard giggling coming from the living room. My friend had come home with a film called 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he intended to check out this touted supposed masterpiece that evening. He and my girlfriend at the time were tittering with expectation. I was like, "Super, I'm going to make a burrito and go back to my room to write more about the Panic of 1893." As the sun sank and the moon rose, they began their viewing experience while I absently chewed a burrito. I had music on headphones to keep me focused, but I'd hear the occasional whinnying laugh of my friend that he only made when was truly bemused.
He came running in at one point, informed me that the movie was awesome, grabbed his book of CDs, and pranced back out to his evening. I paused my music to listen to them for a minute. My friend was describing how he intended to run the movie while simultaneously playing some song. A classic case of early 20s credulity. Jesus Christ, I muttered, replacing my headphones and returning to my composition. I worked deep into the night, finishing in the gray pre-dawn, and caught a few hours of sleep.
The next afternoon, after a morning of classes, I returned to my empty apartment. I saw the DVD there on the coffee table. It was then, on a few hours sleep at best, alone, that I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time.
This post simply cannot encompass how seminal that event was in my life. I will painfully have to just suppress those thoughts and feelings.
Later that evening, my friend drifted in. We talked at length about this fantastic film we had both seen. And then I asked him if playing whatever music along with it was interesting, knowing what the answer would be. "Oh dude, awesome!" Fine, so I wanted a demonstration. He set it all up for me, a day after his breakthrough, with experienced steadiness.
The music was a song I'd never heard, Pink Floyd's "Echoes." I liked Pink Floyd but had never felt super-fandom pulling me into their wider work. (Still not truly on a first-name basis with them.)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a four-part movie. Apparently, when the title card of the fourth part appears, the song "Echoes" can be initiated (conveniently starting with a "ping" sound to align with that title card), and the two sync to compelling effect. It sounds so goddamned stupid. I goddamned hate believing in tripe like this.
But I'll be god damned.
The running time of "Echoes" is a labyrinthine 23 minutes, 32 seconds. This is almost identical to the running time of the fourth section of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The song was written and recorded three years after the release of the film. The themes of the lyrics match uncannily with the messages and images of the film. I have attached an example of the two synched on this post. Enjoy it for yourself.
Anyway, this silliness is what brought me not only to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also to "Echoes," one of the great, great epic rock songs ever.
So now that I've inextricably linked the song and Stanley Kubrick's film, I'm going to ask you to forget about all that nonsense for a moment and consider the music all on its own.
I may not be overly fanatical about Pink Floyd, but my...
I usually start talking about musical ideas, but I have to go straight to the lyrics with this. While Pink Floyd may be best known as incessantly gritty social critics in their songs, "Echoes," maybe their best song, aims for radiance. The images are actually fairly simple and concrete. The total of these simple images is wildly evocative.
The first image is the albatross hovering almost motionless above a sea. For connotations, I suggest reading the amazing poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Coleridge. Then the images dip below the sea as some kind of unknown intelligence brews.
Moving beyond these oppositions of sky and sea, the speaker now sees another person who is also him. This scene is almost literally portrayed in 2001. A possible way to understand both the film and these lyrics is that we are as much other people as we are ourselves, simply experiencing the universe from separate bodies and collective experiences.
By the time we get a third verse, we have traversed through a stupendously huge sound and instrumental section. The subject has transformed to a meditation on the sun, a waking, inspiring, freeing force, appearing through a "window in the wall." The concept of walls would develop rather radically in later Pink Floyd music.
The last line returns us again to the sky, where the song started. The epic scope of the song itself gives weight to these lyrics, but they do a fantastic job developing between related ideas in tantalizing glimpses. Superb, full lyrics.
The music?
The music is blues, right? That is the theoretical basis of this song, with a shout-out to "Phantom of the Opera" in the main instrumental refrain. The blues began as this African American folk tradition, but by the late 1960s it had mutated into this abstract theoretical construct to be applied in settings totally unhinged from its origins. Here we have blues as the soundtrack to deep ocean exploration, which may or may not represent interstellar travel, with implications of transcendent consciousness expansion - and it works!
Formally, just buckle up.
The chord progression and performances of the first and second verses, I just adore. Floyd-ian vocals with a super melody. Unparalleled guitar and organ layering. Casually excellent drumming. A bass line that determines this song's entire spacey aura. There are no actual choruses, just the "Phantom of the Opera" instrumental refrain. I love songs that find a way to rely strictly on verses.
David Gilmour's guitar solo is languid, defiantly magnificent, and eventually stretching up into peaks of divine howling. So blues. So intergalactic. One of the great guitar solos, from the era of the guitar solo as Statement.
Then the song departs. The next few major movements all cross-fade in/out of each other. They are modular sections recorded, perhaps, to be edited to fit a certain structural need. I will point out that each musical section cross-fades into the next at oddly coincidental moments in the final sequence of a simultaneously running 2001: A Space Odyssey. You just take it from there.
From the long, long chord and melody phrases of the verses, we switch up to a guitar progression consisting of two notes repeated into the infinity of a cross-fade. The drums and bass hold the groove. The free-form organ and guitar flourish around each other. I can just fall into the fun of that drum part, confidently repeating, holding true.
And then suddenly there is just un-Earthy noise. The guitar shrieks into a shimmering void. We are beyond the infinite.
The following section is my favorite. The organ begins holding a chord. At first, it is imperceptible. The noises in the foreground are more demanding. But at an incredibly slow rate, the sound of the organ chord continues to grow in volume. As the noises begin to fade, suddenly the organ is all there is. Just a single chord, like a shard of light off a distant star. Until one note in the chord shifts down. The music begins to move. More instruments join, soft to the point of being delicate: Guitar picking, cymbals and drums beginning to set a pulse within the drone. The left hand of the organ begins to repeat the root notes of four chords. The softest of melodies begins with the right hand. The bass begins holding the root notes too. The sounds grow.
At the peak of this spellbinding instrumental build, Gilmour's guitars create constellations of melodies, chiming out into the void sitting between our atoms. The key has modulated. We are now different people.
The final verse reappears like it has just popped in from hyperspace. It takes us out through more great heights before a haunting, dying ending.
Hmm....
So good.
Play it with 2001 for a fun bit of goosebumps. But play it on its own on a long drive, as the sun sets. Play it at dawn.