Too bad. Definitely a fine player. He managed to be very artsy without being excessive. Coincidentally I had just been watching some of the videos of Floyd from the 60's.
Which brings me to a question I meant to ask you Laker Fan as obviously know a lot about all things Pink Floyd. Is there a special connection between Syd Barrett and the date June 23? I bought an album recently that has a tribute song to Syd on it and it keeps referring to that date. A google search didn't help.
As to David Foster Wallace I really enjoyed his short pieces in A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never do Again. Never managed to get through Infinite Jest. By all accounts it's brilliant but I couldn't plow through 1100 pages about isolation and addiction.
Can't really say what the connection is jn, perhaps an inside reference which the tribute band alone is privy to.
As far as songwriting is concerned, Rick's contributions were more musical than lyrical. He played so many instruments beyond keyboards that his focus was truly the surrealistic sound that came to personify the Floyd, perhaps as much as Syd Barrett himself. 2 songs do spring to mind though, The Great Gig in the Sky, and Us and Them, both from the quintessential Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon, the longest charting album in history, just over 1,000 weeks on Billboards hot 200, nothing comes within even 400 weeks of this amazing accomplishment.
Rick was the only founding member of the band to appear on every album ever made with one exception, 1983's The Final Cut, which was the result of a long time feud with, who else? Roger Waters, who seemed to feud with everyone except Nick Mason.
My personal favorite Wright piece is his long, totally psychedelic work on Interstellar Overdrive, a real work of art. With the exception of Gilmour, Rick was easily the most accomplished Floyd musician, in fact, the band focused far more on production than genuine musical quality in the early days, Gilmour's addition went a long way toward changing that methodology for producing music, and IMO made them the band we know today.
Whether people realize it or not, it was Pink Floyd, to a somewhat lesser extent than the Beatles, that made multi-track music production the standard of the industry and changed the way studio work was done to this day, and it was Rick Wright, as the silent professional he was in those early years, that drove Pink Floyd toward such an incredibly polished production standard. I hate giving Waters that much credit but as much as he and Rick bickered, it was their intensity that made it all possible, and along with those 4 lads from Liverpool, changed music forever, pity they didn't get the same acclaim the Beatles did, they both deserved it.
