-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.

I can’t listen to Pink Floyd’s “Time” without being overwhelmed by a series of images from my past. The first takes place in 1996, when I was introduced to the band for the very first time. I was in 7th grade, and my parents had just picked me up from some Bat-Mitzvah. I can’t, for the life of me, remember whose it was or whether I even had that much fun, but what stands out so vividly in my memory is the Tower Records bag sitting next to me in the back seat. “Open it,” My dad said, barely containing his glee. He had just come back from the store, having gone there with the express purpose of introducing his kids to what he felt was some of the most sublime music of all time. In the bag were three CDs I was very soon to understand were priceless: a two-disc set of Jethro Tull’s Greatest Hits, Blood, Sweat & Tears’ Greatest Hits, and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. I wish I could hear those CDs for the first time again; my life was never to be the same afterwards.

“Time” takes me back to another set of nonlinear scenes, one in 7th grade, one in Spring 2003 and another back in July 2001. In the first, my friends and I sat around the Middle School’s garden arguing over whether or not it was the best song on the album. In the second instance, I had turned in a paper at Berkeley on the section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse titled, “Time Passes.” I had stapled a lengthy missive to my Professor explaining that I wrote the essay while listening to “Time” on repeat. Turns out she was also a fan. And the third memory transported me into summer music camp at CalArts. The program ended with a showing of The Wizard of Oz set to The Dark Side of the Moon. As Dorothy ran across the yellow brick road, all I could think was that Wright and his cronies were geniuses, not only for somehow managing such magical synergy with one of the better films in history, but also for creating a piece of music that could, true to its name, lift three very distant fragments of time and superimpose them onto one another.

I can easily assign Floyd albums to ages I’ve been or grades I’ve been in…9th grade belongs to “Wish You Were Here”; 10th grade is carried by “The Wall” 11th grade conjures memory of “The Wall II” and “The Division Bell”; 12th grade evokes “Meddle”—and so on. When my 11th grade crush stood up before English and announced he hated Floyd, that was it, the deal-breaker, the other side of the romantic Rubicon; I was over him. “Echoes” became the anthem to my daily ride to school, not purely because its 23:29 minutes conformed perfectly to the duration of trip which took me down Mulholland Drive, but also because its exultant crescendos, poetic verses, varied sections and instrumental solos were simply mind-blowing. And Wright had a hand in writing and playing those songs.

1971 Meddle album cover.

One of the founding members of the band, Pink Floyd could not have been the same without Wright’s keyboard-playing, his singing and song-writing. Fellow-band member David Gilmour said “in my view, all the greatest Pink Floyd moments are the ones where he is in full flow. No-one can replace Richard Wright—he was my musical partner and my friend.”

I’d like to thank Richard Wright, a talented man who has given me so much. I sure hope he enjoys “The Great Big Gig in the Sky.”