Something Else

In this definitive deep dive into Ummagumma, Scott Meze reveals a band and an industry poised on the edge of the prog rock that will change everything. It shows how the album was fundamental to developments inside Pink Floyd, and had an inestimable influence beyond it.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO PINK FLOYD'S FORGOTTEN DEFINING CLASSIC

Ummagumma is the most polarizing album in Pink Floyd's career, and the most radical platinum-selling LP ever released.

In 1969 it was sanctioned by a major popular music company, EMI, best known for the Beatles, and recorded right there at Abbey Road. It was marketed successfully as pop. People bought it, played it, and enjoyed it.

Today the album has fewer friends, proportionally speaking, than it did at the time of its release. Its sales performance has been fueled by legions of completists. They buy it because it's a Pink Floyd album, even if they rarely actually put it on. Ask these fans as a mass to rank the band's works from best to worst and it's somewhere right down there at the bottom.

You'll get as little respect from the remaining band members, who dismiss the live disk as substandard and the studio disk as the dregs of their collective output. Nothing on that studio disk was still played live six months after the album's release, and none of the members has ever played any of it live since.

Ummagumma isn't comfortable in the rock marketplace, you won't find any classical listeners defending it, and it's shunned by the fringe. Where it doesn't fit into the narrative commentators want to tell it is mentioned grudgingly and always as a failure with lessons to learn. Where it does it is only as a first attempt at themes and structures that will be refined and perfected later.

Yet Ummagumma is more separate, more experimental, and more adventurous than any other mainstream album. It flung open the doors for the abstractions of the West German, electronica, noise, and other scenes. It formulated the multi-part classic rock suites, guitar techniques, and sound spaces that would carry Pink Floyd to domination of a genre built solely for itself.

Its live disk is the best ever document of underground British psychedelia in its shift from 1967's acid eruption to 1970's cannabis trance. Its studio disk displays a depth of creativity that both beds it into the prog rock experiments of 1969 and sets it apart from the currents of its year.

As music, as a package, as an idea, as an execution, as a consequence, Ummagumma was central to everything that followed.

In Something Else, Scott Meze celebrates an overlooked album and offers a chance to explore again exactly what is on those troublesome four sides of vinyl. More widely, he places Ummagumma not into the standard Pink Floyd narrative but into the narrative of its age and of its year, when British bands in particular were stretching out their hands to push at the limits of the business they were in.

No other pop group ever traveled as far as Pink Floyd did from 1965 to 1969, let alone in so short a time. None pushed so far, or tried to rupture that business so decisively.

Like stepping back one more frame from its cover image, Something Else reveals a whole new Ummagumma, one that is more curious and exciting than you remember. One that may well be the greatest album ever made -- and is surely the most singular.