As with almost everyone my age, Pink Floyd hovered over significant parts of my childhood. Our local rock station, Wichita’s T-95, played Floyd constantly. Sometimes (and the station was fantastic), T-95 would play just a part or all of DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. The same was true of THE WALL. Never would a day go by without hearing at least one song by PF.
Kids wore PF buttons on their denim jackets and wore a variety of different PF t-shirts. The planetarium in my hometown even hosted a number of shows of Laser Floyd, the music of the band set to the then extremely high tech flashes of light and image.
Continue reading “A Bright Ambassador of Morning: Remembering Rick Wright”
There were only a handful of them, American rock bands in the late 1960s who sunk the kind of roots that North American progressive rock could grow from. Spirit was one of them, and by the time they released their fourth album in 1970, they’d covered enough territory that they managed to have both a pop single, in the garage rock monster “I Got Line On You,” and a back catalogue of albums critically respected for their sophistication in arrangement and playing. Although recently dwarfed by the attention given to their instrumental “Taurus,” which Led Zeppelin may have heard and used, probably unwittingly, for “Stairway to Heaven,” Spirit’s albums up through Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus are rich canvases that, some have observed, may seem too eclectic, don’t always sum the band’s talents as they could. So that when you look for a definable Spirit sound, it eludes definition. I can see this, but at the same time Spirit’s appetite for musical movement was its guide, a definable point not being the point at all.
When the Polish band 
Progarchy 