I’m in the middle of creating my latest music collection – the music of Pink Floyd, and am smiling as I hear their music and all the happy memories they bring back. My brother Mark and I discovered the Floyd in a PBS special broadcast back in 1971 or 72, and we quickly became huge fans. (This was well before Dark Side Of The Moon and the astronomical success the band achieved as a result, BTW.) One of our favorite tunes from the pre “Dark Side” years was from their album Meddle, the opening track called “One Of These Days”. As William Ruhlman of allmusic.com writes:
“One of These Days” is an instrumental composition. It begins with the sound of wind and two alternating bass guitars playing single-note parts through an echo chamber and expands to include a recurring organ figure, drums, and finally aggressive lead guitar playing. Three and a half minutes into the six-minute track, drummer Nick Mason is heard declaring, “One of these days, I’m going to chop you into little pieces” in a distorted voice as the music builds ominously, only to recede back to the sound of wind.
What Mr. Ruhlman fails to mention is that between that ominous build and before the recede into wind the song breaks loose into a wild joy-filled romp of searing, spacy slide guitar and soaring organ in front of crashing cymbals (recorded forwards and backwards) whooshing from one left to right across the stereo spectrum and back again. A must listen with quality headphones!
Whether you like it or not (and I hope you do) I’ve got three versions of this tune for y’all to hear. First, let’s start with the original track off of Meddle. Still pretty awesome after all these years, I’d have to say.
Our next version comes from a live performance from 1971. It’s almost indescribable in its psychedelic and ominous near-lunacy. I heard it for the first time today and was just shaking my head throughout. Nowadays you make a lot of those sounds with synthesizers and computers (hell, there’s probably an app you can download to your Internet-smart keyboard!), but this is just four guys on guitar, bass, keyboards and drums playing with the equipment and technology they had at the time. Amazing.
And finally, there’s a live performance of the song from the band’s “Division Bell” tour of 1994. The concert we attended in Washington, D.C. at RFK Stadium remains the absolute best concert I ever attended. Put the video at full-screen setting to truly appreciate the experience, although it still won’t do justice to the mind-blowing experience it was in both sight and sound. But at least you can see those threatening warthogs with the laser-like eyes.
