Straight Greats No. 6: Pink Floyd Had Four Perfect Albums in a Row
Pink Floyd made four perfect albums in a row from The Dark Side of the Moon through The Wall. Of those four monsters, Animals is still the one I pick.
STRAIGHT GREATS
FOUR STRAIGHT
☠☠☠☠ 4 CERTIFIED
PINK FLOYD
The Dark Side of the Moon · Wish You Were Here · Animals · The Wall
Straight Greats is the series for artists who put together runs of nearly perfect albums, one after another. Some make it to three. A few go further. The point isn't whether every sane person on earth has to agree. The point is that a run holds up start to finish, album after album, with no dead weight and no charity required.
If you're new to the series, here's how the Straight Greats scorecard works.
Pink Floyd is almost too obvious for this. From The Dark Side of the Moon through The Wall, I don't have a mercy ruling to make. I don't have a song I tolerate because everything around it is so good. I wouldn't cut one, move one, shorten one, or explain one away.
Four albums. Four certified skulls. Pink Floyd can fill out the contact form whenever they're ready to collect the badge.
I knew the songs before I knew the albums
I grew up hearing Pink Floyd on AOR radio in the 1970s, so by the time I really got into them I already knew a lot of the music. I probably knew The Dark Side of the Moon better than the others. I knew Wish You Were Here. By the time The Wall came out, Pink Floyd wasn't some band I was discovering.
What I hadn't really done was buy the albums.
That sounds strange now because Pink Floyd is one of the clearest examples of a band where the album matters as much as the songs. But that wasn't how I first knew them. The radio had already pulled pieces out for me.
It wasn't until later, when I started buying CDs, that I really heard the records straight through. That's when I realized how much I had missed. I knew Pink Floyd songs. I hadn't really understood Pink Floyd albums.
And the one the radio had given me the least of ended up being the one I liked most.
The one I barely knew: Animals
I didn't know Animals the way I knew the other three. It felt much more like finding another Pink Floyd record than filling in gaps on one I already knew.
For me, it's the best of the four.
The two “Pigs on the Wing” pieces that bookend it are beautiful in this vulnerable, longing kind of way. Then “Dogs,” “Pigs,” and “Sheep” take off into something political, social, sociological—whatever the right word is. I don't really need to pin that down. It hits me on all of those levels.
But that isn't why it's my favorite. The music is just fucking amazing.
Those three long middle songs can become places. That's the part that's hard to explain if you haven't had that kind of relationship with music. You can get far enough into them that you're not waiting for the next song anymore. You're just in there.
That mattered a lot to me in the late '80s and early '90s, when I was following the Dead around and doing my share of psychedelics. Animals was phenomenal for that. You could get completely lost in the middle of it.
I was getting heavily into the Doors around the same time too, so for me there were three different bands that could do that in completely different ways: the Dead, the Doors, and Pink Floyd.
The Dead crowd, at least around us, wasn't always thrilled with my broad definition of acceptable psychedelic music. We'd be at Dead shows blasting Pink Floyd—especially Animals—and people would get shitty about it. For a scene built around freedom and exploration, some of those people had a remarkably strict playlist. The Dead was good. More Dead was also good. Apparently we had found the available options.
I kept playing Animals.
The Wall showed up when I was fourteen
The Wall came out in December 1979, when I was in ninth grade, which is about the most efficient age possible for “Another Brick in the Wall” to find you.
The song was huge. We were right in the middle of school, and of course we heard it as being about us. I don't think any of us were running some serious critique of education. We weren't overthrowing anything. Mostly we were going to class and doing what we were told.
But there was this enormous song that, to us, was saying teachers, school, adults telling you what to do—fuck all this. That was enough.
My first real listen to the album got tied to a much more specific ninth-grade memory.
Eighth grade had been pretty awkward for me socially. I wasn't really somebody who had friends in the normal social way, and ninth grade was the point where I was trying to change that without having much idea how any of it worked.
A kid invited me over to his house to listen to The Wall. I didn't have it yet, and I really wanted to hear it. At the same time, I kept getting the feeling that he was hitting on me.
Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn't. I was fourteen and not remotely qualified to interpret what was happening. But once the idea got into my head, the whole listening session became pretty awkward. So my first experience of one of the greatest albums ever made was partly me trying to hear Pink Floyd and partly me sitting there wondering what exactly this kid thought we were doing.
The awkwardness eventually passed. The album was pretty amazing.
The education part became funnier later. I didn't understand what Roger Waters was getting at in any deep way when I was fourteen. I understood the part that sounded like school sucked. Then I went on to become a teacher and spend a ridiculous amount of my adult life thinking about what exactly is wrong with education.
There are worse ways for a song to follow you around.
Welcome to the Machine
Wish You Were Here picked up a completely different meaning for me when I worked for Arthur Andersen.
Andersen brought people in from all over, and the training center in St. Charles was its own little world. The company had bought the old St. Dominic College campus and turned it into a place where people came in for training, stayed there, ate there, drank there, and generally got introduced to Andersen as a culture instead of just a job.
I remember talking with some guys from the London office there. One of them told me about being picked up for the whole Andersen experience, and “Welcome to the Machine” was playing as he got in.
He got the joke immediately.
I got it too, sort of. I knew the song well enough that we could talk about it. The difference was that I was still pretty excited about getting on the train.
He was already hearing the machine while I was still impressed by it. It didn't take all that long before I understood what he meant a lot better.
Four records with nowhere to hide
The case for the streak isn't that these are four famous Pink Floyd albums. It's that none of them needs the reputation of the other three to survive.
The Dark Side of the Moon works all the way through. It's been praised so much for so long that saying it's great almost feels useless now, but that's not the album's fault. “On the Run” isn't something I endure until the songs come back. It belongs exactly where it is. The whole record moves like one piece.
Wish You Were Here is only five tracks. There isn't anywhere to hide. “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” takes up an enormous amount of the album, and if that doesn't work, the album doesn't work. It works.
Animals is five tracks too, three of them huge, and nothing on it feels like filler between the important parts.
Then The Wall gives itself every opportunity to fail the test because it's a double album. Twenty-six tracks means twenty-six chances for me to reach for the button.
I don't.
Even the tracks somebody might nominate as the dispensable ones—“Vera,” “Bring the Boys Back Home,” “The Trial”—are doing work that the album needs done. I wouldn't put them on a Pink Floyd greatest-hits record. That's not the test. Take them out of The Wall and you damage The Wall.
All four records hold on their own terms.
And that's the run
What's on either side mostly helps show how strange these four are sitting together.
Pink Floyd was already a great band before Dark Side. Meddle has music I absolutely love. “One of These Days” is one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs, “Fearless” is great, and “Echoes” is enormous. But the whole album isn't in the same conversation for me, and neither is Obscured by Clouds. Then Dark Side starts and, for four albums, they are somewhere else entirely.
After The Wall, The Final Cut makes the other boundary just as obvious. I'm not saying it's weak because it has the misfortune of following four monsters. Take the four albums before it away and I still wouldn't be having a Straight Greats conversation about The Final Cut.
I'm mostly leaving it alone to be nice.
And of those four fucking monsters, I still pick Animals.
Which one is your favorite? Let us know through the contact page.