Albums I Wish I Would Have Brought With Me to Prison :

Piper at the Gates of Dawn - Pink Floyd

By Whitey McGee

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I'm really bugfuck insane. Also, I happily remain in the friendly confines of state prison, where I was shockingly turned down for parole last month. This was more than moderately surprising since I had the good manners to sing "Ziggy Stardust" and "Good Vibrations" with my own special four part harmony to the review board while accompanied by a tin pail and a gaggle of broomsticks. What more could they fucking want ? I'll rehabilitate you.

Ahem. Good news for you though, loyal Deek readers, since you will continue to be supplied with monthly snippets of my wild lunacy and pristine analysis on records that you don't care about.

My focus this month is on another fantastical rock mind that has been incarcerated for nearly forty years in a place that I can only assume is more dreadful than this one - Syd Barrett of the original Pink Floyd. His freshman, and only, effort, Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a forgotten masterpiece of the Floyd catalogue because Roger Waters is an egotistical fucker. Or maybe it's because no one really knows how to deal with themselves after listening to it. I mean, personally, I used to have a whole Piper ritual: I'd stand on my head in room lit only by the moon shining through a hole in the roof while lambasting the wall with rancid cantaloupes and snapping my fingers every 47 seconds, thus accomplishing this special feat only 84 odd-times throughout the entire album. Oh, and I'd do acid too. Lots and lots of acid.

So like I said before, Syd was a twisted bastard who may have done some drugs or whatever, but it takes a special kind of loony toon to write shit like "Lazing in the foggy dew/Sitting on a unicorn" and "The black and green scarecrow is sadder than me," or even "I know a mouse, and he hasn't got a house/I don't know why. I call him Gerald." There are also liberal uses of "Yippee!" and "Hoooooray!" with an arbitrary number of "o"s.

See why I love this harebrained mendicant?

Regardless, I bet those guys in Pink Floyd, even with all of their money and trophy wives and giant balloon animals wish they had Syd back. Apparently, Wish You Were Here is for him. Glad that someone's standing up for all us crazies out there.