The director who turned down a Pink Floyd masterpiece
For all of the great music that has come and gone in rock, the album has never created the ideal medium for bands. Even though two sides of vinyl may have been all that artists could work with, the advent of channels like MTV broadened the horizons of what could be done when adding a visual element to the song. While Pink Floyd was about expanding their visual style whenever they took to the stage, one acclaimed director didn’t like working with the industry giants.
Before the band had become progressive rock legends, they had already started toying with the idea of what the live show could be with Syd Barrett. Born out of the psychedelic movement of the late 1960s, many of their club shows were punctuated by various flashing lights meant to simulate the group soaring through the cosmos, playing the kind of space rock that Barrett had envisioned.
When Roger Waters took over as bandleader after Barrett began losing his battle with mental health, their approach to the live show began to change as well. Even though they fumbled around to find the sound they wanted on albums like A Saucerful of Secrets, they also lent their skills to various movie soundtracks, contributing to the psychedelic film More in the late ’60s.
Even though their first stab at soundtrack albums would feature landmark tracks like ‘The Nile Song’, their next option for scoring a film wouldn’t be as amicable with the director. When working with director Michelangelo Antonioni for the film Zabriskie Point, the band was commissioned to write tracks that reflected the kind of violence onscreen when depicting various riot footage.
While Waters went along with the concept, he maintained that Antonioni wasn’t that interested in getting any original compositions from the band, telling Classic Albums, “I think he only really wanted ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’.” Even though the pure mayhem going on in the group’s live staple fit the theme nicely, Richard Wright had created an equally moving piece based on a handful of chords.
Juxtaposing the footage of violence with soft piano stabs, the song would be titled ‘The Violent Sequence’ for the longest time before being shot down by Antonioni again. When asked why the director turned it down, Waters remembered the director saying that the sound didn’t fit the theme, explaining, “He said, ‘It’s beautiful, but it’s too sad. It makes me think of church.’”
Although the band ploughed ahead with their contributions to the soundtrack, they also refined the material to accompany their next handful of albums. Having a better grasp on what they wanted to do by the time they started work on Meddle, ‘The Violent Sequence’ would morph into the sounds of ‘Us and Them’ from Dark Side of the Moon, laying the basis for Waters talking about the idea of two people taking on the world together.
That wouldn’t be the last time that Floyd experimented with motion pictures, though, creating an entire movie to tell the story of The Wall years later. Even though ‘Us and Them’ may not have worked in Antonioni’s mind, the sparse instrumentation and Waters’ blunt lyrics are the perfect musical example of ‘Show Don’t Tell’.
