The movie theaters were dominated by parables of corruption (“The Godfather” won a best picture Oscar the same month that “Dark Side” was released) and demonic possession (“The Exorcist” was out by the end of the year). military involvement in Vietnam had ceased in January, but the bombing of Cambodia continued for months. The Watergate scandal was a spreading stain leading to the door of the Oval Office U.S. Fellow musician John Etheridge later remembered thinking that Gilmour should “enjoy it while it lasts, because without Syd that band’s going nowhere” - one of the great wrong calls in the history of popular music. He was barely present on the follow-up, “A Saucerful of Secrets” (1968), and got jettisoned from the band shortly thereafter, with guitarist David Gilmour already drafted to take his place. The magic lasted through the group’s eclectic first singles, but as early as the tour for the 1967 debut album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” an LSD-addled, mentally ill Barrett was staring into the middle distance and playing one note for entire sets. As the new documentary makes clear, The Pink Floyd (as they were originally called, fusing the names of Barrett’s favorite American blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council) was very much a product of Barrett’s visionary acidhead whimsy, with bassist Roger Waters, keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason supporting the leader’s singing, songwriting and lead guitar. “Dark Side” represented the culmination of the group’s struggle to extricate itself from the long shadow of original leader Syd Barrett, the textbook case of a 1960s rocker who went the chemical distance and never returned.
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