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Pink Floyd Research Paper

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Today (March 6) is the birthday of legendary Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. Gilmour replaced founding member Syd Barrett on guitar after Barrett left the band due to mental illness exacerbated by excessive psychedelic drug use.

The band went on to become one of the most phenomenally successful groups in history, selling over 250 million albums world wide.

Though Gilmour is mum when it comes to the band’s personal drug usage, the music of Pink Floyd remains heavily drenched in psychedelic overtones.

In celebration of David GIlmour’s birthday, we present to you the 10 most psychedelic Pink Floyd songs.

Let’s start with the first track off of Pink Floyd’s 1967 debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Written and composed by Syd …show more content…

A personal favorite of mine, Remember A Day evokes imagery like a sonic painting, rendered by the likes of someone such as Salvador Dali.

Bike is a Syd Barrett masterpiece which appears on The Piper At the Gates of Dawn (1967).

Ostensibly written for Syd’s then girlfriend “Jenny Spires,” we take a quixotic notion that the song references, if not deliberately, then synchronistically, the first self administered dose of LSD.

In 1943, inventor of LSD Albert Hoffman intentionally ingested 250 micrograms of LSD to determine its effects. He subsequently took a bicycle ride during which he succumbed to the drugs effects causing him to feel anxiety, a sense of going insane, and the belief that his neighbor was a malevolent witch.

The events of this first LSD trip have come to be known as “Bicycle Day.”

Like the black monolith discovered on the moon in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the album Dark Side of the Moon (1973) stands as a monolith to all of psychedelic rock. The record is one big acid trip from start to finish, but we will choose one song, The Great Gig in the Sky, as representative.

This particular version did not appear on the record and features recordings of NASA astronauts communicating during space missions, sans Clarry Tory’s excellent

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