How to Listen to Meddle

Meddle is considered by many the beginning of a string of classic albums running throughout the 1970s, but it is not commonly thought of as the best within that line-up, even though half of the album consists of “Echoes,” which not a few fans would maintain is Floyd’s greatest single song.

I would argue that Meddle is their best studio album, not just because it contains some classic songs, but because it is their best concept album. Admittedly, the idea that Meddle is a concept album at all is not obvious, as it is with the parade of albums that followed it (the sole exception being Obscured by Clouds, which is, after all, a film soundtrack).

Meddle as an organic whole makes sense as soon as we recognize that its six songs are in fact three pairs of stark contrasts, adding up to a unified statement about . . . about what? Life. Reality. Human experience. About everything, really.

It’s rather obvious once you see it. What is “One of These Days”? Pure menace, aggression, alarm, horror. It’s an axe murderer thumping on your front door. (A fraternal twin to “Eugene,” really.) “Days” is immediately followed by “A Pillow of Winds,” which is all comfort, tranquillity, sleepiness, security. "Run-for-your-lives" segues into a soft, whispering lullaby! The contrast between songs one and two is impossible to miss, what with the cross-fading wind effect, and it isn't even that original (think "Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man" followed by "I Talk to the Wind"), but what many don’t seem to notice is that the pattern continues.

“Fearless” is all about noble aspirations, courage in the face of challenge; in other words, it's exactly what the song title says it is. Let nothing deter you in your task. Go on, go on, with hope in your heart, etc., as the interpolation says.

Once again, the song is followed by exactly the opposite. “San Tropez” is frequently dismissed as one of the album's weaker tracks, pleasant but trivial. And that's precisely the point. There are no "hills too steep to climb" in the south of France. "Tropez" is about farting around on your vacation, with nothing important to do, out on the sand, sunscreen in one hand, champagne in the other. It’s about consciously and deliberately doing nothing important at all. (Fraternal twin: “Biding My Time.”) With Meddle’s third and fourth songs, we go from climb-every-mountain heroics to a three minute paean to sheer laziness. Noble self-sacrifice vs. unapologetic self-indulgence.

That leaves us with the much-despised “Seamus” and the much-admired “Echoes” as our third and final pair, the shortest and longest songs on Meddle. Why is a towering masterpiece like “Echoes” prefaced by a silly hound dog joke?

Because it’s 1971, that’s why. With this album Floyd has well and truly transitioned from psychedelic to progressive rock. The previous album, Atom Heart Mother, still retained psychedelic elements: the “weird” section of the AHM suite looks more backward to their previous work than forward to where they are going, and of course, you’ve got "Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast" making the point explicitly. But Meddle is not psychedelic. Even the central portion of “Echoes” flows seamlessly in and out and makes organic sense as part of the song in a way that its counterpart in AHM does not. But to be called “progressive rock” in 1971 was not necessarily a compliment. Most critics and not a few fans detested the genre as a crime against rock ’n’ roll. The adjectives of choice were “bombastic” and “pretentious,” and let’s face it, a lot of early prog deserved the labels, musical offerings too obviously spoiling for recognition as “serious” art, as if rock and roll somehow needed legitimation. Ptttth. What would Chuck Berry say? If you don’t believe in what we’re doing here, why are you bothering? That was 1971.

Pink Floyd had and always has had this marvelous sense of humor: subtle, dry, very English. I think it is no accident that they prefaced their most ambitious musical composition to date with a piece of Hee-Haw whimsy. “Seamus” is straight, twelve-bar blues, nothing at all mysterious about it, and it sounds like some old hayseed sittin’ on his dusty front porch, pickin’ at the old gee-tar and letting his hound dog provide the vocals. “Seamus” is a disclaimer, strategically placed immediately before Pink Floyd’s most progressive (or Progressive) offering. It's all the proof anyone needs that these guys don’t take themselves too seriously, deliberately placed right before their greatest masterpiece.

With its three pairs of contrasting songs, Meddle invites us to embrace the whole of human existence. Life . . . the world . . . human experience . . . the cosmic theater in which we find ourselves is legitimately the abode of violence and tranquillity, noble cause and lazy indulgence, stupid dog jokes and soul-inspiring voyages through the cosmos. The album as a whole embraces life as a whole, in a way that no other Pink Floyd album will ever do.

Meddle is Pink Floyd's last wholly upbeat, life-affirming statement, the last glimpse of the innocence and wonder of Syd Barrett before plunging into the bleakness and bitterness of Roger Waters. (I should add that it isn’t necessary to argue that any of this was consciously thought out by the band. Music is something felt, intuited.)

Meddle invites us to embrace opposites and exclude neither, affirming all of experience as something true and real. It is Pink Floyd's greatest concept album.