Contributor John Cavanagh

Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.

“We didn’t start out trying to get anything new, it just entirely happened. We originally started as an R&B group,” Roger Waters told a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), around the turn of the year 1966–67. Syd Barrett continued, “Sometimes we just let loose a bit and started hitting the guitar a bit harder and not worrying quite so much about the chords…” Roger: “It stopped being sort of third rate academic rock and started being intuitive groove.” Syd: “It’s free-form.”