On November 1, 1967 the Pink Floyd left Britain for an eight day mini-tour of America to launch their album.
Roger Waters: “That was an amazing disaster. Syd by this time was completely off his head. We did Winterland, San Francisco. We were third on the bill to Big Brother and the Holding Company and Richie Havens. When Big Brother went on I couldn’t believe it. I was expecting something way out and it was bluesy country rock. I was amazed. I expected them to be much more different. It was kind of chunka, chunka, chunka with Janis Joplin singing the blues. I was expecting something really extraordinary and mind-blowing and tripping. Compared to some of the things that English bands were doing at the time it was boring. For example the Who in a good mood or the Cream.”
The group found that they had been billed as ‘The Light Kings Of England’ but Winterland was enormous and the tiny little lighting rig they had with them couldn’t possibly fill the space so they used the same lighting men as Janis Joplin. Bands did not have their own lights in America; lighting crews were independent outfits contracted to ballrooms and clubs under their own name; the Fillmore used Joshua Lights, who were often advertised on the posters as if they were an added attraction.
Co-manager Andrew King: “I remember the projectionist saying to me, ‘Hey, there are such strange animals in your music!’ I was thinking, ‘You’re fucking right, mate!’” Fortunately Syd managed to play reasonably well in San Francisco, and initially the band was able to enjoy the easy-going Californian hippie scene. At that point any band from England was regarded as visiting aristocracy and the group and their road crew found themselves surrounded by enormously friendly Californian girls and plied with more pot than they had ever seen in their lives while non-smokers Nick and Roger were introduced by Janis Joplin to the sweet-tasting delights of Southern Comfort.
As the tour progressed, however, it began to take on nightmarish aspects as Syd began to disintegrate before their very eyes. Things got off to a bad start when the group arrived in Los Angeles and found that Syd had forgotten his guitar which had to be flown up at great expense and bother from San Francisco. The Floyd’s record company was Tower Records, a wholly owned American subsidiary of EMI and housed, along with EMI’s main American label, Capitol Records, in the famous circular glass building at Sunset and Vine which resembled a stack of 45s on a spindle, waiting to drop onto the turntable. A Tower Records A&R man proudly showed them their HQ building, announcing “Here were are, at the centre of it all: Hollywood and Vine.” Syd showed that he was still functioning with his deflating reply: “It’s great to be in Las Vegas.”
The group played the newly opened Cheetah Club, housed in the old Aragon Ballroom on Pacific Ocean Park in Venice. Before they left for the States Syd had had one of his £20 perms done at Vidal Sassoon to make him look like Jimi Hendrix but he thought they had done a bad job and decided that he wanted to straighten out his curls. In the dressing room at the Cheetah, just as they were preparing to go onstage, Syd took a jar of hair gel and tipped the whole lot on his head. Next he produced a bottle of Mandrax (or more likely quaaludes, as methaqualone was called in the States) and rubbed them into his hair. He was sitting in front of the dressing room make-up lights which caused the gel to began to melt and run down his face and neck until, as Roger put it, Syd looked like “like a gutted candle”.
The band took the stage and apparently girls in the front row screamed with horror as Syd’s lips and nostrils bubbled and ran with the gel as rivulets oozed down his cheeks, the mixed-in sleeping pills looking like tiny gobbets of flesh as if he was discomposing before their eyes in the moving lights. He detuned the strings of his guitar and stared out into space, his right hand hanging limply at his side, too out of it to sing any of the lyrics. Roger, who had to deliver the vocals for him, was so angry afterwards that he demanded that Syd be thrown out of the group on the spot. In fact Syd was probably very into the music: he detuned the strings to emulate Keith Rowe, listening to each one, blew on a whistle, and possibly thought he was participating in a free-form concert; he had always been allowed to improvise at will. I saw many AMM concerts and long periods of time often passed before anyone made any noise at all. It is possible that Syd strummed a few times during the concert, which would have seemed like a proper contribution to him in AMM mode.
For many of the crew, and some of the band, this debacle was the final straw and they abandoned themselves to the pleasures of the road, which in Los Angeles were many. They were not sleeping much because of jet lag and were staying at the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Blvd, home of many rock and roll groups including half of the Mothers of Invention, and very much groupie central in the days before the Hyatt House hotel on Sunset Boulevard became ‘the Riot House.’ It was always interesting to see who accompanied members of the band and crew to breakfast at Duke’s 24-hour coffee shop next door for breakfast. As a consequence, some of the band and crew had to report to James Pringle House’s VD clinic as soon as they returned to London.
While in Los Angeles, Floyd were invited to stay with the Alice Cooper Band, in the group’s shared apartment on Beethoven Street in Venice Beach. “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn was already a mainstay of our listening,” Cooper told this writer in 2020. “We totally got it, because it was like us, so weird and left-field – we didn’t think anyone else knew who they were. I remember that Glenn Buxton, our guitar player, really bonded with Syd Barrett, because they both used to play guitar through an Echoplex unit: they’d sit in Glenn’s room and get high and play guitar together all night.” As Cooper recalls, it soon became apparent to all that Syd Barrett was having some mental health issues, which would ultimately cost him his place in the band. “Syd was in a different headspace,” he recalls. “One night he got onstage, strummed one single chord, and got a shock from his guitar and mic: he stood there like a statue for an hour while the other guys just played around him.” “I remember one morning I walked into the kitchen and Syd was sitting with a box of cornflakes in front of him, laughing, and he goes, ‘This is really cool, watch them!’” Cooper continues. “I’d no idea what he was talking about, there was nothing to see, but he was so high that he thought that the cornflakes were putting on a little show for him, singing and dancing, and he was having the best time watching them, he thought it was the most entertaining thing on the planet. I left the room and I could hear him laughing to himself for ages. At that point, I kinda had the feeling that he may be on the way to losing his mind.
Reports of the Pink Floyd’s stay with the Alice Cooper Band are sketchy, although Glen Buxton, the guitarist with the Alice Cooper Band at the time, stated in an interview for Trouser Press magazine that he couldn’t remember Syd Barrett ever saying two words. Buxton explained, “He never talked, but we’d be sitting at dinner and all of a sudden I’d pick up the sugar and pass it to him, and he’d shake his head like ‘Yeah, thanks.’ It was like I heard him say ‘Pass the sugar.’ It’s like telepathy, it really was. It was very weird. You would find yourself right in the middle of doing something, as you were passing the sugar or whatever, and you’d think ‘Well, damn, I didn’t hear anybody say anything!’ That was the first time in my life I’d ever met anybody that could actually do that freely. And this guy did it all the time.” Buxton also gave some insight into the state of Syd Barrett during the tour. He said, “The crew used to say he was impossible on the road. They’d fly a thousand miles, get to the gig, he’d get up on stage and wouldn’t have a guitar. He would do things like leave all his money in his clothes in the hotel room, or on the plane. Sometimes, they’d have to fly back and pick up his guitar. I didn’t pick up that he was a drug casualty, although there were lots at the time who would do those exact things because they were drugged out. But Syd was definitely from Mars or something.”
