Longtime Pink Floyd keyboardist and Roger Waters’ kicktoy Richard Wright is dead at 65.

I’m a longtime Pink Floyd non-fan – but not because weren’t amazing musicians in their way. Pink Floyd in its prime was like The Who, in the sense that it was four distinct musicians who were very different, but depended on each other.

Behind David Gilmour’s languid, fluid guitar, filling up the spaces behind Roger Waters’ indifferent thumping and scowling and in front of Nick Mason’s dirgeline plodding lay Wright’s keyboards, especially his work on the Hammond B3.  Gilmour – either the world’s slowest great guitarist or the world’s greatest slow guitarist (and no insult is intended, because I play a lot like Gilmour) was the band’s outcry; Mason and Waters were the cholesterol-clogged heartbeat; Wright, like the late Danny Federici and the still-thankfully-alive Benmont Tench was the atmosphere; where that atmosphere for Federici was the big roaring heart of Jersey Shore soul, and with Tench was the tear in Tom Petty’s beer, in Wright’s case it was usually foreboding and menace.

Wright was almost always in the background – never moreso than when Waters engineered his ouster from the band, demoting him in effect to a paid sideman for the band’s last tours in support of The Final Cut.

One of my favorite Wright moments.  Hard to concentrate, given the dynamic stage performance, but the song is mostly Wright, and it’s one of Pink Floyd’s best moments.
(Via Flash)

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 5:22 am and is filed under Memoriam, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.