Pink Floyd's disastrous 1967 American tour

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.”

On November 5 they were on Pat Boone’s television show to promote their new single, ‘Apples And Oranges’ and though Syd mimed perfectly during rehearsals he refused to move when the cameras went live.

Roger: “We did the Pat Boone show, and we were taping the show, and he would do the run-through and Syd would stand with his Telecaster with silver bits all over it and mime happily. ‘Cut, cut, we are going to do it now’... He knew perfectly well what was going on, he was just being crazy and they did four or five takes like that. Eventually I mimed it.”

Despite this, Pat Boone chose Syd to talk to and asked him an inane question about what kind of things he liked. Syd fixed him with a Night Of The Living Dead-style stare and pondered the question. The rest of the band waited for what seemed like an eternity, buttocks clenched in horror as they saw their American career going down the tubes. Eventually Syd said ‘America’, which made the all-American audience holler and shout their approval. 

On Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Syd half-heartedly mimed, as if catatonic, through ‘Apples And Oranges’ and ‘See Emily Play’. For Perry Como’s show, it was Rick who had to mime ‘Matilda Mother’. After this, Andrew King finally accepted reality and cancelled a Beach Party TV appearance and a New York engagement at the Cheetah Club and put the group on a plane home. Before leaving Syd managed to fall into the Tropicana pool fully clothed and just abandoned his wet clothes in his room when leaving for LAX. 

Syd Barrett's First Trip

Syd Barrett's First Trip

According to the filmmaker, Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, the film “just happened…. It is an unselfconscious film. It was not planned.” Of the ’66 footage, shot by his wife Jenny, he writes on the film’s IMDB page:

''I shot this film of Syd on a visit from film school in London to my hometown, Cambridge. We were on the Gog Magog hills with a bunch of friends. David Gale is there along with Andrew Rawlinson, Russell Page, Lucy Pryor and my wife, Jenny. She's the one in the yellow mac talking to the tree. The mushroom images are iconic and will last forever. It is an unselfconscious film. It was not planned. It just happened. The guy on the balcony is me at 101 Cormwell Road, London SW7. This footage was shot by Jenny. When David Gale wrote about 101 in The Independent he recalled: As the 60s began to generate heat, I found myself running with a fast crowd. I had moved into a flat near the Royal College of Art. I shared the flat with some close friends from Cambridge, including Syd Barrett, who was busy becoming a rock star with Pink Floyd. A few hundred yards down the street at 101 Cromwell Road, our preternaturally cool friend Nigel was running the hipster equivalent of an arty salon. Between our place and his, there passed the cream of London alternative society - poets, painters, film-makers, charlatans, activists, bores and self-styled visionaries. It was a good time for name-dropping: how could I forget the time at Nigels when I came across Allen Ginsberg asleep on a divan with a tiny white kitten on his bare chest? And wasn't that Mick Jagger visible through the fumes? Look, there's Nigel's postcard from William Burroughs, who looks forward to meeting him when next he visits London! The other material is of the band outside EMI after their contract signing. It's raw, unedited footage and stunning even so. It is silent but many people have subsequently put music to it on their youtube an google postings. Good luck to them.''

It was the late summer of 1966 when Syd first tripped on magic mushrooms while film student friend Nigel Gordon captured the moment on standard 8mm film. Even before his days in Pink Floyd, Syd had that star quality. It's fair to say that life would never be the same after that day out at the Gog Magog Hills outside Cambridge. 

These are the characters in Syd’s entourage in this “raw, unedited footage,” which was originally silent, though many people have added music such as the new age-y ambient soundscape in the version above. I happen to think it’s a nice complement, but if you find it intrusive, turn the volume off. The images, as the filmmaker admits, are still “stunning.”

The films style has also influenced modern psychedelic filmmakers such as British underground filmmaker Fabrizio Federico and his cult movie Black Biscuit.

Every musical era has its cautionary tales, and its visionaries. The sixties produced its share of them all, but also a handful of brilliant misfits who were inseparably both, all of them psychedelic pioneers. Skip Spence, for example—the brilliant founding member of Jefferson Airplane, then Moby Grape, who effectively ended his career attacking his bandmates with a fire axe. Then of course, there’s the founding singer/songwriter of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, whose decline found him onstage, almost catatonic, with a can of Brylcreem and a crushed bottle of pills called Mandrax dripping down his face. When Barrett passed away in 2006, most of the reaction—after the shock of learning he’d still been alive—centered on the sequence of psychotic breakdowns during 1967 that would leave Barrett changed forever. Spence and several other, more obscure figures, had similarly dramatic, and permanent, shifts in consciousness, and of all of them the same question gets asked: was it the drugs?

Of course we’re asking if the drugs created the mental illnesses or just exacerbated the inevitable, but we’re also asking if the drugs created the music. It’s a worthwhile, if somewhat uncomfortable, inquiry that’s probably impossible to answer. But I must admit, it’s difficult to imagine the first incarnation of Pink Floyd without Barrett’s heavy experimentation. The short film above implies a direct connection and takes us to Syd’s psychedelic inception. Simply titled Syd Barrett’s First Trip, the first part of the film, “Gog Magog Hills,” follows a clean-cut Barrett and several companions as they frolic in a field on LSD. As you probably gathered, it’s his first time. Then the film cuts abruptly to “Abbey Road Studios,” to footage documenting Pink Floyd in London after having just signed their first contract with EMI in 1967. It’s the beginning of the end for Barrett’s career and mental health, but the inauguration of the band as mass-market phenomenon.

Pink Floyd 1967

VEGETABLE MAN: A Lost Psychedelic Classic by Syd Barrett

Considering Syd Barrett's relatively slight musical output, the absence of "Vegetable Man"  leaves a sizeable hole in his canon, thankfully both songs have finally been released. The former was penned in 1967 as a spontaneous response to manager Peter Jenner's request for a follow up to Pink Floyd's then-recent single, "See Emily Play." Though often interpreted as a self-portrait of his own mental disintegration, it actually vents his contempt for the vapid nature of fame and his own role as a pop star. Delivered with a sarcastic sneer, it's disturbingly direct in its anger.

The name of the song, Vegetable Man, is based on a 1572 painting called Summer by an Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo who created imaginative portraits made entirely of vegetables, fruits, flowers, fish, tree roots and books. Summer featured a composite man made from intricate painted vegetables; a vegetable man, if you will. Syd even appeared in a promotional photo with spring onions tied to his head. The song has also proved inspirational to British underground filmmaker Fabrizio Federico. ''LOON's main character is based on Vegetable Man, he's pilled to the gills on med's and his world isn't real. He doesn't want to think or feel, it's a life choice that many people make.''

According to Peter Jenner, the song was written in his apartment moments before leaving for the recording session. "On 'Vegetable Man,' the description of the person in there is him," he told author Rob Chapman. "What he was wearing, what he was becoming. I was with him in the room when he was writing it. He was in one corner and I was in the other. Then he read it out and it was a description of him and what was going on in his head."

The track was recorded in the second week of October 1967 and earmarked as the band's third single, backed by another Barrett composition, "Scream Thy Last Scream." Promotional videos were recorded for both songs, but their release was cancelled at the last minute for fear that they were too dark. 

Uncomfortable with the pointed lyrics and troubling imagery, the band also decided to leave both songs off their second album, 1968's A Saurcerful of Secrets.

Though Jenner admits that the songs expose Barrett's fragile psyche "It's like psychological flashing," he's quick to argue in favour of their artistic merit. "I always thought they should be put out, so I let my copies be heard," he said in 2005. "I knew that Roger [Waters] would never let them out, or Dave [Gilmour]. They somehow felt they were a bit indecent, like putting out nude pictures of a famous actress. ... But I thought they were good songs and great pieces of art. They're disturbing, and not a lot of fun, but they're some of Syd's finest work – though God knows, I wouldn't wish anyone to go through what he's gone through to get to those songs."