I have never understood…

 …the allure of Pink Floyd.

This band seems to be popping up a lot lately. I saw a list of the top six classic rock bands, and I agreed with all of them, but Floyd. I saw an elderly woman (anyone older than me is elderly haha) wearing a Pink Floyd shirt. And then yesterday I heard a song of theirs called “Fearless” on the radio. 

My friends and I never listened to Floyd. It always felt like background music for people that liked to get seriously high. To me, the band has no personality. You think of The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin, and they exude personality. The members make an impression.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t pick Roger Waters out of a line-up and I don’t even know the other band members’ names.

Am I to assume that people still listening to a Floyd still like to get seriously high? 

The only memory I hold of listening to Pink Floyd was in the spring of 1975. I was going to a computer school, and we had to write codes, type them on punch cards, and run them through a computer that was so large it filled a room. The school only had one computer, so when the end of the quarter came, everyone was vying for computer time to be sure their program ran efficiently. It was our “final.”

Our young teacher, Gary, decided we should spend a Friday night in the gloomy building downtown Cleveland so we had total access to the computer ourselves. We weren’t required to come, but he made it like a party. Lots of snacks. And a record player.

Gary was always competing with the other teachers to prove we were the smartest. 

Someone had brought a Pink Floyd album, and that is the only time I listened to Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. It really fit with being on the second floor of a grungy building at 2 o’clock in the morning, Euclid Avenue below being fairly devoid of traffic, and the streetlights shining through dirty windows. (In the 1970s, no one went to Cleveland at night.)  In that atmosphere, I thought the music as pretty good. However, I never bothered to listen again, not even when it was rumored you could put it on and watch The Wizard of Oz and it was a perfect soundtrack.

So yeah, all these years later I still do not get the allure. I do, however, like the cover.  It’s pretty darn cool.