Echoes (Pink Floyd song)

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"Echoes"

Song by Pink Floyd
from the album Meddle
Released	October 30, 1971 (US) November 5, 1971 (UK)
Recorded	January 1971 Abbey Road, London March, April 1971 AIR Studios, London May 1971 Morgan Studios, London June, July 1971 Morgan Studios, London AIR Studios, London August 1971 AIR Studios, London
Genre	Progressive rock
Length	23:30
Writer(s)	Roger Waters Richard Wright Nick Mason David Gilmour
Meddle track listing
Seamus (5)	"Echoes" (6)

This article is about the Pink Floyd song. For the Bennie Benjamin and George David Weiss song, see Echoes (1950 song)

"Echoes" is a song by Pink Floyd, including lengthy instrumental passages, sound effects, and rock improvisation. Written by all four members of the group (Roger Waters, Richard Wright, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason), "Echoes" provides the extended finale to Pink Floyd's album Meddle. The track has a running time of 23:31 and takes up the entire B-side of the vinyl recording. It also appears in shortened form as the fifth track on the compilation album which took its name, Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd. "Echoes" is the third-longest song in Pink Floyd's catalogue, after Atom Heart Mother (23:44) and the combined segments of Shine On You Crazy Diamond (26:01). Unlike those pieces, it is not explicitly divided into separate parts; however, the composition was originally assembled from separate fragments, and was later split in two parts to serve as both the opening and closing numbers in the band's film Live At Pompeii.

1 Composition
2 Early versions
3 Live Performances
4 Synchronization
5 Plagiarism
6 Personnel
7 References
8 External link

[edit] Composition

"Echoes" ranks among the most ambitious and musically diverse Pink Floyd songs. The lyrics begin with a marine theme, inspired by the sonar-like sound created by Wright when his grand piano's high B (C# in some live performances) was sent through a Leslie rotating speaker (this was reportedly done as an experiment at the very beginning of the Meddle recordings). Ad lib notes on the same Leslie-inflected piano fade in and gradually build up from seemingly random notes into a backing harmony. Gilmour then enters with a soft, mid-tempo guitar solo that features extensive use of his trademark expressive bends. Bass and then drums enter, as guitar and the Leslie-piano continue through the vocal passages of the first verse. These are harmonized by two voices, Gilmour's and Wright's, and assume a leisurely delivery. The opening lyrics place the listener at an underwater location where 'everything is green and submarine'. A chord progression of C#m, G#m, F#m, G# hints at musical themes explored in later albums.

Gilmour plays a chromatic riff between verses, accompanied with A and C#m chords, which eventually segues into his second solo. This contains more of his conventional trademarks, featuring multiple guitars harmonizing at various points. The drumming becomes more energetic and the guitar is in a higher register than in the introductory passage. This second solo eventually gives way to the song's first break. The guitar solos and backing riffs are replaced by a drum and bass groove with an almost funk-like chordal backing.

The third guitar solo begins over this with a less controlled feel and more prominent improvisation. Then, a distant second guitar starts accompanying the first with distortion, feedback, wah pedal and whammy bar effects. The latter technique provides this solo with exaggerated pitch bends that resemble those of a slide guitar (Gilmour did use some slide for sound effects on the studio recording and for the intro in live performances from 1971 to 1975). Wright plays brief phrases on the Hammond organ, which slowly increase in intensity.

These organ fills, along with the bass and drum groove, begin fading away as the lead guitar gradually becomes more distant. A throbbing wind-like sound is introduced, created by Waters vibrating the strings of his bass guitar with a steel slide and feeding the signal through an Italian tape echo unit called the Binson Echorec. This starts increasing in volume as high pitched guitar 'screams' enter, resembling distorted whale song. They were actually created when Gilmour discovered the sound by accidentally reversing the cables to his wah pedal^[1]. Early live recordings of Pink Floyd performing the song "Embryo" in 1970 also feature this noise. This section in "Embryo" seemes to have inspired the "seagull" section.

In the second half of the "Echoes" interlude, the screams die down to become background noises under the sound of rooks, which were added to the music from a tape archive recording (as had been done for some of the band's earlier songs, including "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun"). Eventually, the entire ensemble is faded into a sustained Farfisa organ chord underneath a reprise of the sonar-like 'pings' from the introduction. Volume swells on the guitar accompanied by sustained organ chords combine to create a stark contrast to the screams of the previous interlude. This texture strongly suggests the feeling of clearing air and receding winds after a violent storm. Gilmour starts strumming muted notes from B to F# to D to E (rhythmically reminiscent of Another Brick in the Wall) on a guitar tuned to drop D over a slowly-building organ solo (this distinctive guitar part was reportedly inspired by the Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations"^[2] where similar muted triplets are used, albeit played by cellos.) The drumming becomes a combination of quick ride cymbal work and tom-tom fills.

Eventually, a glissando guitar riff with echo and distortion create a massive buildup of melodic tension, and in an anticlimactic moment, this segues into the soft vocal strains of the third verse. Unlike the previous verses, this is accompanied by intermittent guitar fills. After a final refrain, the song recedes into another wind-like noise: a tape loop of multi-tracked ascending male voice glissandos, similar to the effect of a Shepard tone. A soft call-and-response passage between guitar and keyboards retreats into more improvised phrases, before the chaotic 'winds' finally take over to end the song (and the album).

[edit] Early versions

The piece had its genesis in a collection of musical experiments written separately by each band member, referred to as "Nothing, Parts 1-24".Subsequent tapes of work in progress were labelled "The Son of Nothing" and "The Return of the Son of Nothing"; the latter title was eventually used to introduce the as-yet unreleased work during its first live performances in early 1971^[3].

During this stage of its development, the song's first verse had yet to be finalized. It originally referred to the meeting of two celestial bodies, but perhaps because of Waters' increasing concerns that Pink Floyd was being pigeonholed as a space rock band, the lyrics were rewritten to use underwater imagery instead. The title "Echoes" was also subjected to significant revisions before and after the release of Meddle: Waters, a devoted football fan, proposed that the band call its new piece "We Won the Double" in celebration of Arsenal's 1971 victory, and during a 1972 tour of Germany he jovially introduced it on two consecutive nights as "Looking Through the Knothole in Granny's Wooden Leg" and "The March of the Dam Busters", respectively. ^[3]

[edit] Live Performances

The song, then entitled "The Return of the Son of Nothing", was first performed in public on April 22, 1971 with the unrevised 'planetary' lyrics. These remained in place until sometime in late July of that year, when they were replaced by the more familiar 'albatross' lyrics. The song was first introduced as "Echoes" on the sixth of August, 1971. It was a staple of Pink Floyd's live performances from then until 1975 and was also played eleven times in 1987, near the beginning of the A Momentary Lapse of Reason tour. Most recently, David Gilmour has performed the song on his 2006 solo tour.

Unlike the Atom Heart Mother suite, it was relatively easy for Pink Floyd to reproduce "Echoes" onstage (as can be seen in the Live at Pompeii film) without requiring additional musicians, though the swapping of keyboard sounds during the piece sometimes proved problematic in live performances. Originally, Wright would start the song by playing his grand piano through a Leslie speaker, then switch to the Hammond organ just before the first verse, switch again to the Farfisa organ during the 'seagull' middle section, back to the Hammond again for the last verse, and finally to piano for the outro. This required Roger Waters to provide the piano 'pings' at their re-entry after the middle section. The Farfisa was later dropped from the band's live keyboard setup and all its parts were played on the Hammond instead. The 1987 performances had synthesizers replacing the Farfisa. Unlike Pompeii, regular live performances played the song as a whole - the bridge between "Part 1" and "Part 2" was simply done by Waters stopping the bass riff of the jam section in the former and starting to play the wind sounds of the latter. The rest of the band would just play quieter and quieter until silent.

Starting in 1974, the musical arrangement was augmented by backing vocals from Venetta Fields and Carlena Williams and saxophone solos by Dick Parry added directly after the second verse and at the song's finale. All three of these additional artists joined Pink Floyd's touring party to take the latter Dark Side of the Moon performances, and added their own parts to the remainder of the concert (largely because the former artist was reluctant to leave and re-enter the stage throughout the show). ^[4] The last time the song would be played by all four members of Pink Floyd was at the concert in Knebworth closing their 1975 world tour. During performances given by the 'three-man' Pink Floyd in 1987, "Echoes" was played in a much shorter form than usual (with Gilmour singing the higher harmonies instead of Wright and Wright singing Gilmour's original harmonies). It was ultimately dropped from the set (and replaced with "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-5) because Gilmour did not feel 'right' about singing the lyrics at the time, and his backing artists played its music without the touches of improvisation that make "Echoes" a powerfully affecting piece.

On Gilmour's 2006 tour in support of On An Island, Wright plays a key part in the touring band, performing the vocals and keyboard parts on "Echoes" (he sang in the same pitch as Gilmour originally did (this time melding with Gilmour) and Jon Carin singing the higher harmonies that Rick originally sang in 1970s performances). This new arrangement of the song is close to full-length (Often clocking at 22 minutes at the beginning of the tour, later performances even outlengthed the studio version by sometimes three minutes.) It also saw the return of Rick's Farfisa organ, which was pulled out of storage and brought on tour specifically for "Echoes."

[edit] Synchronization

It is rumoured^[5] that "Echoes" synchronizes with Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey when played concurrently with the final segment (entitled "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite").

"Echoes" was released 3 years after the film and is 23 minutes and 31 seconds in length, the same as the "Infinite" segment. Sounds in the middle part of the song suggest to some listeners the feeling of travelling through an alien world. The drone vocalizations heard in the final scenes of 2001 seem to match with the discordant bass vibrations in the middle of "Echoes" as well the choral glissandos of its finale. Some argue that there are moments when the song and film soundtrack are nearly indistinguishable. Another notable link occurs during a change in scene at precisely the moment when guitar and keyboards crescendo as the lyrics re-enter for the final verse. Almost as a bonus, the early lyrics contain references to planets, which seems entirely suitable for the film's depiction of Jupiter and its moons. Adrian Maben re-created this marriage of music and image in his director's cut of Live at Pompeii using CGI.

Although no member of the band has ever declared the synchronization intentional and the technology to play back film in a recording studio circa 1971 would have been expensive and difficult for the band to acquire, Roger Waters is sometimes quoted as saying that the band's failure to contribute music on 2001's official score was his "greatest regret"^[5]. Kubrick would later ask the band if he could use portions of the Atom Heart Mother Suite in his film A Clockwork Orange. Pink Floyd turned him down on the grounds that the music would sound silly if excerpted out of context; nevertheless, a copy of Atom Heart Mother is displayed behind the counter of a record shop in the film.

Years later, in an interesting postscript to the Kubrick/Floyd connection, Roger Waters asked the filmmaker's permission to include sound clips from Space Odyssey into his 1992 album Amused to Death. Waters' intention was to sample the dialogue and breathing sounds from the scene immediately prior to "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite", when Dave Bowman deactivates the computer HAL 9000. These were to be mixed in during the instrumental introduction to "Perfect Sense, Part One". After much deliberation, permission was declined in the interest of upholding Kubrick's own precedent of not granting such requests. Instead, Waters inserted his own shouting, whispering and breathing in a backwards message that refers to Kubrick by his Christian name. However, a live recording from his 2000 solo tour uses the original film dialogue as Waters intended.

The 1973 George Greenough film "Crystal Voyager" concludes with a 23 minute segment in which the full length of "Echoes" accompanies a montage of images shot by Greenough from a camera mounted on his surfboard.

[edit] Plagiarism

In interviews promoting Amused to Death, Waters asserted that Andrew Lloyd Webber had plagiarized themes from "Echoes" for sections of the musical The Phantom of the Opera; nevertheless, he decided that life was too short to bother filing a lawsuit regarding the matter.

Yeah, the beginning of that bloody Phantom song is from Echoes. *DAAAA-da-da-da-da-da* [sic]. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. It's the same time signature - it's 12/8 - and it's the same structure and it's the same notes and it's the same everything. Bastard. It probably is actionable. It really is! But I think that life's too short to bother with suing Andrew f---ing Lloyd Webber.

^[6] Waters "got even" by adding a slightly mean-spirited reference to Webber into the song It's a Miracle on the Amused album ("Lloyd Webber's awful stuff runs for years and years and years / An earthquake hits the theatre but the operetta lingers / Then the piano lid comes down and breaks his f---ing fingers.").