Pink Floyd's Richard Wright, forgotten genius?

Agreed totally about RW. Love those songs...

Moreover, like Michael Anthony in Van Halen (unfortunate comparison, I know), `tis Wright's vocals (usually harmonizing with Gilmour) that helped define the sound of the Floyd.

http://www.acuterecords.com

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nyhappenings/

http://www.villagevoice.com/nightguide/evening.php?eventID=38875&slcategory=music&sldate=2003-10-30

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http://www.razorwire.com/real-goth-faq/

Likewise, I assume you're Matt Weiner of Nozzle fame.

but I have no idea what Janine is talking about. Except in regards to BoCoCa. That's the area of NYC that I live in, and if she stops using that term, maybe it will go away.

Ironically, though, Dan is known for his tantric proclivities as well. Those relate to expounding on music, however...

Btw. "Corporal Clegg" was the greatest song Roger Waters ever wrote :-)

There's three of them actually.

Ack, correcting myself. There two Wright solo albums and then the Zee album.

wright does kinda get left out in discussions about synth-players. not as technically proficient or over-the-top as wakeman or emerson, not as inspired or futuristic as eno or kraftwerk -- an influence of sorts on techno and electro, yes, but certainly not a major one to be mentioned in the same breath as kraftwerk/eno/numan/vince clarke/tangerine dream (the orb notwithstanding). in the end, he was a perfectly competent keyboardist/synth-player who at his best added just what was needed for PF at a given moment.

Amazingly I find myself in agreement with Geir - tho there's a possibility he might be joking (there's no possibility that i'm joking by the way). I don't know about Rick Wright's synth playing but he was a great organ player and was the only other person in the original band, other than Syd, who had any musical talent or imagination. When Syd left the Floyd, Peter Jenner asked Wright to come with him - why would he ask waters or Mason? Of course, after Syd left, Roger Waters went off and, being the diligent hard-working bore that he is, studied his Lennons and Townshends and Dylans long and hard until he learned how to write boring songs. And then, being a blustering egotistical bully, had no problem squashing the meek Wright and making him pay for all those nights in the early Floyd when Wright (or Peter Jenner) had to tune Waters' bass for him because he didn't know how to.

I can understand immigrants in the UK are not too keen on copying "white" styles such as Music Hall (which makes it impossible for them to sound English anyway), but why on Earth do they have to ape American styles. It was a lot more natural when bands such as UB40 did reggae in the 80s - at least reggae was based on the music from where they originally came from, not some imported US crap.

Looking at the ethnic origin of most immigrants in the UK, reggae elements and Bollywood elements would be the most natural elements in their music - besides typically English elements such as Music Hall, of course...

Wet Dream really has "several very substantial songs"? As much as I like him, I almost find that hard to believe...

This was always my impression too, that Mason was only along for the ride (and to keep every amused with his tonsorial shenanigans). That said, he plays a surprisingly central role in the recently re-released Live at Pompeii.

The drugs really must've taken a big toll on those guys though, as he sounds like a totally different and much more energetic drummer on, say, a Saucerful of Secrets.

as substantial as the ones he gave to the band, anyways... it's a fluffy album. but it's got moments, especially for those pre-inclined.

yeah, I'd say the Who is a pretty good reference point for those More tracks ... hmmm .. the guitar tone even sounds like Townshend (did he and Gilmour play the same model? maybe it's just that attack)

I had that Dark Side of the Moo boot as well. It's flabbergasting that they still haven't given those stray single tracks an easily obtainable release! In the early 90s I stumbled into this generally crappy used CD store just looking to kill some time, and lo and behold they had a copy of the bonus early Singles CD that accompanied the Shine On box! I couldn't believe it, and snapped it up. I don't know if some deluded soul just sold it out of the box cuz he disliked it .. or maybe there was in fact some kind of individual promo issue of it or something.

They could have totally tacked all that stuff onto Relics when they finally - after a ridiculously long delay - gave that one a CD issue. What a joke. Relics by the way was I think the first Floyd record I ever owned. "Remember a Day" was always one of my favorite songs on there; just loved Wright's piano lines on the song.

"Bridges Burning" from Obscured by Clouds is him too, isn't it?

Assuming that it WAS, indeed, Rick Wright playing those squigglies (and with Roger Waters' increasingly controlling ways around that time, you never really know), I suppose it can be said that RW made quite the impression on the our Gary — and, by association, perhaps chilly-synth New Wave...

Punk in general had a love/hate relationship with floyd, maybe because they loved the early stuff so much and hated the later stuff so much. John Lydon would wear his "I Hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt while the Damned would try to get Syd to produce their second record, but settle for Nick Mason, who admitedly did a terrible job. I'm sure Lydon/PIL loved early Floyd...

Thee exact same thing happened to me, and of course I snapped it up pretty quickly as well. I don't think there was a seperate promo release of it, a lot of places part stuff like that out when they get it in, like at the same shop I got the cocteau twins cd single box, b/c i went in just after they parted one out and put it all on the racks - they gave me discount for buying all the discs, and threw in the box as well.

wright is rad! i think lots of proggy bands would've benefitted from someone like this guy, who wasn't into flash so much as mood/heaviness.
is this good?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/db/Rick_Wright_Wet_Dream_album_300.jpg

oh, see there's some discussion up thread

this sounds tight. representative of the rest of the record?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEISO8cGKyo

Summer '68 is my jam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNvEWtNa33c



This is really gorgeous.
--Euler

New web site that his family put up. Worth checking out if you're a PF fan.
https://rickwright.com

All the interviews on this site make me wonder whether someone was working on a documentary film at some point. It's interesting to hear the perspectives of collaborators like Manzanera and Anthony Moore, who are sort of tangential to the conventional Pink Floyd story.

I'm puzzled, though, why there aren't any pages specifically about his solo albums. I guess there are fan sites that have that information, but it seems disrespectful somehow to deal with his work so obliquely. Incidentally, it seems that the Zee album was reissued last year as Identity 2019, credited to Wright and Harris. Despite the "new" title, it seems to be the original album with bonus tracks.

I only recently discovered Wet Dream, it's a really good record and probably has more of the flavors that make Pink Floyd great than anything Gilmour or Wright ever did separately.

yeah I think Wet Dream has aged well - when I was a teenager it seemed unlistenably smooth but 2020 ears are much more forgiving - lyrically there’s a sense of someone with not much to say making a solo album because “the others are”, but I guess I find that charming now as well! and yep there’s plenty of lovely Floydy chord sequences (& high end production)

heh I just posted abt that record today

Pink Floyd - Animals (Poll and discussion thread)

Full 80min interview unearthed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URbiyWY-szY

Details on the reissue of Wet Dream, obligatory Steven Wilson remix, etc.
https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/latest/richard-wright-wet-dream-reissue-with-steven-wilson-remix-release-de.html

When "balearic" was originally described to me, my first thought was, "Oh, like Richard Wright's Wet Dream record?"

All I've ever really known about this record is that he recorded it while he was on vacation or living in the Mediterranean -- something the pool suggests. I remember listening to it and hoping it would sound like the synths on DSOTM/WYWH/Animals, with his pillowy "Summer '68" vocals and being mostly disappointed.

I've been telling myself for a while (...years) that I should give Broken China proper attention someday -- like, play it ten times in two weeks and see what happens. It goes unmentioned in this thread. Any admirers?

sorry, I have never heard it,

but I was listening to DSOM and WYWH recently, Wright really got such beautifully simple poignant sounds out of those synth solos, seems like a lot of thoughtful work had to be put in to get tones so warm and gentle.

broken china RULES

I still mean to hear Broken China. An acquaintance who was in a Pink Floyd tribute band used to play and sing one of the songs from it (in private, at least, I don't know if there was any call for it onstage).

Ms. T's first comment after leaving the Pompeii IMAX screening: "Rick Wright really is the secret glue that keeps all this together"

Yeah, no lie. Those moments of him doing "Us and Them" in studio combined with the fact that he was NOT one of the talking heads says a lot.

My ex gf thought he was even hotter than Gilmour in this movie fwiw

Wright is key to Floyd sounding way less dated in 2025 then any/most of their contemporaries. Sound design is the new Chops.

i was always a bit bummed by the farfisa to B3 transition...in an interview Gilmour commented on that, the idea that you use a combo organ because you don't have the space or budget for a hammond. The music "matures" a bit with that transition, but you lose a key early floyd sound. Maybe it's dated, but it's what I'm here for.

Wright is key to Floyd sounding way less dated in 2025 then any/most of their contemporaries. Sound design is the new Chops

Depends on who you consider their contemporaries.

Yeah. Im thinking post Sid here. The big prog bands had keyboardists with chops but frequent and huge lapses of taste when picking sounds, even on the records that are great. I suppose this doesnt apply as much with the more art-rock or mainstream acts you might compare them to.

What im saying is Wright had great taste in sound and thats a skill that serves him well to 2025 listeners while the value of the other skills you might have has faded.

No argument from me there!

i was always a bit bummed by the farfisa to B3.

It's just telling hearing Gilmour say that, it may have been on that jools holland clip where they did Remember a Day, something about finally being able to move on from the farfisa, like a farfisa was just the cheap organ garage bands used when they couldn't afford a b3. BOLLOCKS as they say over there.

I have two combo organs in my parents basement in NJ. Maybe one day I'll live somewhere where I have enough space to bring them back. One is a classic Farfisa Combo Compact which I bought at a music store in Cleveland for 200 bucks while at Oberlin because I wanted to sound like Stereolab. The other is a borrowed elka panther. They are both...worth more now. The Farfisa needs fixing. It's claim to fame though? You can hear it on Metro Area's Caught Up.

there is nothing i love more about ilm than knowledgeable people complaining about/discussing antique keyboards

<3

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Right, what I’m saying is more that keyboardists play the Farfisa and Hammond in completely different ways.

For instance, I’m not sure I’ve ever really heard a somebody play one of those noodly psychedelic arabesques that Wright plays on Arnold Layne or Scream Thy Last Scream on a B3.

Speaking of which, I just learned today that Nick Mason sings all but one line of the latter? Wild.

Well, kind of declaims rather sings!

I miss when bands actually dragged out shit like Farfisas to shows.

We just need Dan to go to his folks’ house to bring back the good times.

yes, the farfisa has a distinct sound, but that doesn't make it a good keyboard... it's like Mike Ratledge's lowrey, the lowrey is a shit keyboard. people did some cool shit with them, though. there's this '72 concert by khan in frankfurt (it's on youtube) where val stevens gets this amazing sound out of his organ by fucking with the voltage. _that's_ the thing about these early bands, just the problems getting consistent voltage to these things.

nah the all-time kind of "unique electric organ sounds" is hugh banton in van der graaf generator... kinda like how tolkien was a philologist who wrote books in large part to explore his love of language, it feels like a large part of banton in first generation VDGG was the opportunity to make and test a really cool custom organ.

there's this '72 concert by khan in frankfurt (it's on youtube) where val stevens gets this amazing sound out of his organ by fucking with the voltage.

to be clear it's not a lowrey, i don't think, idk what organ it is, i'm not _that_ au fait with early electric organs

Val Stevens...

"We rehearsed for several days and although I learned the majority of the album I felt quite uncomfortable because I was given a cheap little organ – a Hammond but only a consumer home version – to play on, and it sounded awful to me. I was used to playing a Hammond B3 with 2 Leslies, a Fender Rhodes piano and so on, and now I was reduced to playing this dinky little organ !"

there is nothing i love more about ilm than knowledgeable people complaining about/discussing antique keyboards

Ooh, that looks great!

I actually started a ChatGPT prompt session on Hammond B3 techniques in rock and Richard Wright's during the 1970s as a result of this thread. I find it's often pretty good for this kind of thing.

It can be found here, if anyone's interested: https://chatgpt.com/share/6820da0e-01d4-8013-bab5-baac56ee0194

"Wright is key to Floyd sounding way less dated in 2025 then any/most of their contemporaries. Sound design is the new Chops."

I can get behind that. Few things have dated more badly than early-70s rock organ. I'm thinking of Atomic Rooster, Deep Purple, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Bear in mind that I wasn't even alive when those bands had their heyday, so in theory I should approach them with a fresh ear. The rock organ should not repulse me. I should not mentally associate rock organ with bedwetting and humiliation. But something about it just sounds millions of years out of date to my ears. I just can't get into it. And I suspect that I'm not alone because rock organ never came back into vogue.

Unless you count mid-90s house records by e.g. The Nightcrawlers etc. In which case rock organ did come back into vogue. Literally every record that reached the top ten in the UK in 1992-1994 - literally every single one - had a boop-boop, boopaditty-boopaditty organ bassline from a Korg M1. But rock organ solos that quoted classical works were dead. They did not come back into vogue. No sir.

Pink Floyd was different though. Rick Wright played the organ slowly, as if he was in church. He used the Binson Echorec to make the sound ethereal. He used the organ as a great shimmering celestial cloud. There's a neat demo here of someone plugging their Farfisa into an Echorec, which sounds fantastic and also looks very expensive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOwE0ZFnZAI

On "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" he overdubbed the heck out of the organ and strings machines etc. The droning chords on that still sound awesome today. Keith Emerson would have filled that song with diddly-diddle solos, which would have been bad and wrong.

And then there was a little bit of conventional rock organ on Animals, but it's tolerable. And then the band sacked him because cocaine is a hell of a drug. I remember listening to Broken China once, long ago, and it reminded me of Karl Bartos' Elektric Music, e.g. it resembled Pink Floyd but weak. "Holiday" from Wet Dream has nice chords. It's odd that a man who apparently had such a huge cocaine habit seemed so relaxed. But given that he was a keen yachtsman perhaps he took out his rage on the waves. I can see Rick Wright, stripped to the waist, standing on the prow of his boat, screaming at the clouds, screaming at an imaginary whale, screaming at the water to get out of his way.

While writing the first paragraph I was given yet another reason to dislike Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. The commas make it hard to include them in a list with other bands. Consider the following sentence. "There are three bands I particularly dislike - Deep Purple, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and St Etienne". How would an alien from space interpret that sentence? Probably correctly, but the alien would be annoyed, which would be a bad start to our relationship.

Just call them ELP then, most people do. I think I posted something about them recently, I saw a live concert and, yes, Emerson's Hammond organ playing was a major negative.

Wright gets a Minimoog for the 1973 tour and his approach to it reminds me much of the way John Paul Jones uses synths in Led Zep - forming and framing a soundscape for the band (including himself as Hammond player) to play in. Keith Emerson fundamentally can't do this.

The opening 1-2-3 of Obscured By Clouds, When You're In, and Set The Controls... here rules so much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SZGBA5hpzY

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Or use the colon and semi-colon listing format (“There are three bands I particularly dislike: Deep Purple; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; and St Etienne.”) or bulletpoints.

There was never an Oxford comma in their name, so the problem doesn't arise.

And then the band sacked him because cocaine is a hell of a drug.

Come to think of it, being raised on rock and roll CAN be a wholesome influence. You learn pretty quick that not even achieving the pinnacle of awesomeness, musicality, and song keeps you from the lip of the abyss for long.

As to the title of this thread ... I have been something of a champion for Wright over the years -- having great affection for his early songs including loving Summer 68 to pieces, being a fan of his harmony vocals with Gilmour and synth/organ work on the big 3 albums in the 70s.

But nearly four decades (gah) after I started listening to him, I'm pretty certain in saying Wright was not a genius or even especially talented. He did have good taste and some arranging skill tho was never in demand as a sideman. And as Wet Dream suggests but his overall body of work really confirms, he was not a guy who came to the table with many ideas or was ever particularly motivated by them.

None of this is to diminish his moments of good work and quiet influence on PF -- just rather not to overly inflate it either. In many ways, Wright shares a lot in common with others from his 60s pop band brethren who rose to fame on the coattails of a genius, enjoyed a few resulting moments that otherwise never would have happened before kind of fading away in a haze of wealth, drugs and divorce.

that’s silly, nobody was a “genius" in PF. nobody had an obvious aptitude for songwriting other than Syd. they were always much more ambitious than capable or proficient. In a sense they were very creative, but otoh they resorted to things like extended techniques out of necessity, because they didn’t have chops or material. They are a great example imo of a band that consistently rose to the occasion of having slightly premature, runaway success that they had to grow into and live up to. Waters eventually wrote great songs, but it doesn’t seem to have come easily or naturally to him at first; He must have worked very hard at it. Music eventually flowed from Gilly, but would you say that he’s virtuosic or even particularly “creative”? Didn’t he just make the most of having great judgement, taste and “feel”? wtf even is “talent”?

Wright was the one who set the precedent of rising to the occasion when Syd joined the band, by creating that brooding, ominous, bombastic sound that became PF’s identity to frame Syd’s otherwise rather bouncy songs.
the others, possibly including Syd, were still thinking in terms of Stones-y r&b afaict.

He is for sure more responsible for the band’s core sound and identity than generally recognized and imo maybe more than anyone else. I mean what is more quintessentially PF than the verses of Echoes.

He was never the most ambitious or sensitive to pressures and demands, he was also clearly not the most assertive personality- and I would

...assume that this is a big part of why his voice was ultimately less dominant

(submitted by accident)