“HuHuh! I was in the right!”
“Yes, absolutely in the right!”
“I certainly was in the right!”
“You was definitely in the right. That geezer was cruising for a
bruising!”
“Yeah!”
“Why does anyone do anything?”
“I don’t know, I was really drunk at the time!”
“I was just telling him, he couldn’t get into number 2. He was asking
why he wasn’t coming up on freely, after I was yelling and
screaming and telling him why he wasn’t coming up on freely.
It came as a heavy blow, but we sorted the matter out”

-Last lines of Pink Floyd’s “Money”

Richard Wright, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Roger Waters, circa 1974. Photo courtesy of AP.

There are some people who measure their lives through small achievements. There are those whose lives are marked by big goalposts. And then there’s the group who divide their existences into epochs defined by which songs they were listening to at which time.

I, like Cameron Crowe, Quentin Tarantino, and Nick Hornby, belong to that last camp. Certain songs can play for only an instant and I’m immediately shuttled to another moment. It’s the easiest form of time travel, really…just press play, and you’re gone. What would H.G. Wells have to say about that?

Pink Floyd, more than any other band, invariably parses my life into discrete segments.So I was affected by the death of band keyboardist Richard Wright, who passed away from cancer Monday. (more…)