Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

…we came in”)

Of all these stories, this – and the next – sum up my relationship with music and life. It centered my core and truly began the healing from my parents’ deaths. They both explain the exploration of my pain and how I embrace this version of what my life has become. It would take another forty years of living life to realize that evening for what it was. Just a night out with friends and that we matter to each other, however great or small that consequence is. We are all a result of our decisions, the ones made and not made.

First, let me explain who Pink Floyd is. If you were to ask me now who my favorite band is, I would say I don’t have one. I do have a ‘Buy List’ which includes bands I am currently buying when they release a new album. As I now question the accumulation of media, this was not the case when I was in high school.

We were just beginning to get into media, which was going to continue to go through great changes in the coming years. Vinyl had been the only choice for anyone serious about music. 8-tracks pulled in some people for convenience, and the first media format battles began forming. I had yet to commit to vinyl. I was still exploring the great amount of music out there. As a new driver, bringing my music in the car was a huge influence.

As I bought more and more music, my favorite bands shifted from The Beach Boys (junior high) to Blue Öyster Cult (freshman and sophomore years). Everyone knew about Dark Side of the Moon, even though it was released in 1973, in 1980, it was still on Billboard’s top 200 Album chart. It had never fallen off. I knew I had to buy that album. I remember Todd Combs, a friend of mine from junior high, who was in Dave and Jim’s class, who first told me about Pink Floyd and how ‘Dark Side’ had never left Billboard’s Top 200 Album chart.

“If you get ‘Dark Side, ‘ you’ve got to get ‘Wish You Were Here,” he said. “There’s one part where the song ends, and someone is changing the radio station, and that’s how they bring in the next song that just starts with a guitar.”

It sounded incredible! So the next Midnight Sale Laurie’s had I picked both of these Pink Floyd albums as cassettes. I recognized most of the songs on ‘Dark Side’ since “Time”, “Money” and “Brain Damage” were regular tracks on the Loop radio station. But hearing all the songs laid out back to back was important for many reasons.

First, I realized I did not like the cassette format. ‘Mr. Radio,’ as I called my boombox, did not sound as good as Dave’s and my stereo (not that it would score more than 2 or 3 points from an audiophile). Second, there were no liner notes in the cassettes. From flipping through the albums, I know both of these albums were gatefold (single albums that opened up).

As compelling as it was to be able to play my music in the car and on my boombox, listening to ‘albums’ on cassettes just wasn’t really great. In another year or so, I would shift back to buying vinyl. But for now, I could play my music wherever I wanted.

‘Dark Side’ was everything I was looking for in music. It was a soundscape with lyrics that pushed more thoughts than story. Todd was right, all the songs blended into each other. Sometimes you couldn’t tell when one song ended and the other began. Some were just sound effects (“On The Run”), some were just vocals without words (“The Great Gig in the Sky”).  If the first side of the cassette was a soundscape, the second side was philosophical.  As much as I was trying to figure out what the songs were trying to say, there were so many ways it could be interpreted (“Us and Them,” “Brain Damage,” and “Eclipse.” Todd and I had many discussions on what Roger Waters was trying to tell us.

And “Wish You Were Here” was the same thing. While it was obvious it was about the music business (“Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar”), clearly, Roger Waters was missing someone. Until I learned the backstory of the band, I had pigeonhole the lyrics to fit the loss of my parents. It was easy with the first verse:

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell? Blue skies from pain?
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell?

While “Cold comfort for change?” fit my situation, I conveniently dismissed the war references:

Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change? Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

But I fully embraced the pain found in the final verse:

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year
Running over the same old ground, what have we found?
The same old fears, wish you were here

That pain would come back to haunt me. This song is a key song in the “Songs of My Life” playlist. In the weeks and months later, I would learn the backstory of the band. I would eventually learn that Roger Waters was writing about his former bandmate Syd Barrett. By the time I found that out, it was too late; “Wish You Were Here” was part of my lexicon of my parents’ deaths. And Pink Floyd became my favorite band.

I would soon purchase Pink Floyd’s “Animals.” I remember seeing this album at the  Deerfield Record Shop. I remembered the cover of a ‘dirty’ factory with a small pig floating amongst the smokestacks. While over forty minutes long, there were only five songs and the first and last were less than two minutes long. It fit right in with ‘Dark Side’ and “Wish You Were Here.”

These three cassettes were always in my cassette case, which was typically in the car but would also travel with ‘Mr. Radio’. As convenient as cassettes were, and as much as I had invested in upgrading my car stereo with new speakers and an equalizer, I couldn’t just sit in my car and listen to albums. So I began buying vinyl again.

So when Laurie’s Record Store in Deerfield received Pink Floyd’s First XI box set, which they displayed behind the counter, I was destined to buy it. When I asked to look at it (it was not sealed), the clerk slid the albums out of their slipcase. One by one, he pulled out their albums.

I had never seen the first five albums: Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Saucerful of Secrets, Soundtrack from the movie More, Ummagumma and Relics. I had seen Atom Heart Mother (the ‘cow’ album), Meddle (the ‘ripple’ album) and Obscured by Clouds, but no one really talked about them. As he showed me Dark Side of the Moon, he slid out the vinyl and slipped it out of the liner note sleeve. “This,” he said, “is a unique picture disc only available in this box set.” In my mind, I rationalized that this was not just a purchase of a bunch of albums – this was an investment.

Then he laid out Wish You Were Here. It was sealed in all black plastic, with an iconic sticker affixed to the center. “This,” he pointed out, “is in the original black plastic. It is also a picture disc, only available with this box set.” He pointed out the words “Picture Disc” on the sticker. This investment was looking better and better. He finally pulled out Animals like it was just a condiment.

“It doesn’t include The Wall?” I asked.

“Nope, just the first eleven albums.”

This was fine, I had already purchased The Wall on vinyl – the day it had come out. So now I needed to find out how much this was going to set me back. “How much?” I asked.

“It’s supposed to be $150, but since The Wall has been released, they are discounting it. It is only $125.”

What a deal this was. My only problem was how to justify my investment to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack. I could already hear Uncle Jack’s criticisms on how I am wasting my money on all these records. One advantage cassettes did have was that they were easier to sneak into the house, if I even brought them in at all.

“Can you hold it for me?” I asked.

“With a deposit,” he said.

I didn’t have any money; I had come in just to look. The clerk told me it would be waiting for me – unless someone else bought it, he threatened. The real issue was how to get it into the house. This was a slipcase of eleven albums – Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack are going to see it. I don’t remember how I got it, but somehow they accepted my investment.

I remember listening to the first albums and thinking what a mistake I had made. Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Saucerful of Secrets were SO old. It was like listening to a random psychedelic album, but this was Pink Floyd! But what I was listening to was – strange. I told myself they had to start somewhere. But even after More and Ummagumma, while the production improved, it was still really weird. Nothing like Dark Side, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall. When I got to Atom Heart Mother, I began to see the transitions to Dark Side of the Moon. And Meddle sealed that conviction. Pink Floyd became my favorite band.

I would show my box set to anyone that let me pull it out. I remember showing it to one of Dave’s friends, Ted. By this time, I had gotten my demo down to a performance. Pulling the first 5 albums fairly quickly, opening each gatefold album to expose the inside pictures. When I got to the Dark Side of the Moon picture disc reveal, as Ted grabbed the disc, a sneeze ambushed the disc. Ted and I stared at each other in shock.

Ted apologized. I grabbed the disc from Ted like a mother plucking a baby out of a polluted river. I rushed to my bedroom and threw the disc on the turntable. I quickly applied a triple dose of Discwasher fluid to the Discwasher brush and firmly and forcefully cleaned the offending mucus from the vinyl. I would look at the disc’s reflection to see if the Discwasher applications had done their job, and then repeat the process again. My poor baby! Needless to say, the boxset demo was over. Future demos no longer allowed the audience to actually hold the discs.

It was easy to get into Pink Floyd in 1980. The Wall was riding high. There was a limited run on concert revenues due to the complexity of the tour’s stage. The band was literally building a wall between themselves and their audience. And they were not stopping in Chicago.

In a couple of years, I would purchase a bootleg of that tour. It was a double album, and at the end of the second album, during the guitar solo for Comfortably Numb, the album ended. The quality was suspect from the beginning, hearing distinct crowd voices. I went back to Rock’n’Records to explain I was missing an album. And the guy behind the counter said it was a bootleg; that’s what you get with bootlegs.  It was buyer beware with bootlegs. Many more years later, I did procure a full concert bootleg of The Wall tour – three disc and the quality was much improved over the last one.

My family was one of the first to have a VCR (Sony’s Beta format), and I would record Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. While Pink Floyd was never on, I did catch the original Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” videos (nowadays the video shown is the one from The Wall movie).

One night, my friends and I went to 53 Drive at the end of Lake Cook Road before they built the overpass over the swamp. It was a triple feature showing The Who’s ‘The Kids Are Alright’, Pink Floyd’s ‘Live At Pompeii’ and Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Same Remains The Same.’ Our group had 3 or 4 cars there and ‘my connection’ at Frank’s Nursery had gotten us our regular supply of liquor. While we hung out for most of The Who’s movie, we cruised around (meaning we walked) through the drive-in looking to see if we knew anyone. So I missed most of Pink Floyd’s movie. By the time Led Zeppelin came on, we were all feeling pretty good.

I certainly should not have been driving, and I stayed on friend Frank’s bumper all the way back to Deerfield. My car was empty except for Todd, who – supposedly – had bought some mescaline from someone at the drive-in. I assumed he wanted to try it since the drug was featured in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book we both read. All I know is that while I was driving back to Deerfield, fearful of losing sight of Frank’s bumper, Todd was in my back seat talking about the colors he was seeing. It didn’t help when I got home to find that Aunt Joyce was still up, getting things ready for Aunt Betty and Uncle Richard’s garage sale the next day. Did I really get away with being drunk that night? Did she not notice as I added a few boxes to the station wagon before shuffling off to bed?

I didn’t always make the right choices back then. Was God protecting me? I was in my angry phase with God in high school about my parents. I thought God was something they told children, and I had outgrown God. But I was still too much of a child. As much as I had learned about life, I still made bad decisions.

Another night I was out with my friends. I think we had been to a party earlier, and the suggestion of Shakey’s grabbed our party minds. By chance, I had ‘Wish You Were Here’ in the cassette player. I would rarely play the radio. I made my captive audience suffer through my music.

I don’t know where the party was, but on the way to Shakey’s, the title track of ‘Wish You Were Here’ played. I don’t recall what caused my parents to come to mind, but that song triggered something. Something from the pit where I kept my deepest despair about my parents reached out and grabbed hold of me.

It focused me to look at the absurdity of this moment – here I was out partying with my friends. Friends, I only knew because I had to live with my Aunt and Uncle because my parents are dead. I shouldn’t know these people. I shouldn’t be in Deerfield. None of this should have been happening.

What kind of son am I? Was I trying to forget them? forget what happened? How could someone ever forget something like that? How could I disrespect them like this? I was pretending there was no pain, that I was cool, that these kids were my friends, that they even cared about me. These kids were naive; they didn’t understand about life – Real Life. This was all a waste of time; we were all going to die. Why was I even pretending to live? My life ended 9 years ago with them. I didn’t deserve to go on living. I shouldn’t be here.

This is what was going through my head when the song ended. Unfortunately, the cassette player in my car had an audio search feature that allowed me to rewind to the beginning of the song. So I rewound it to the beginning. The song started over, and then I began to cry. During the second play-through, I had made it to Shakey’s. I found a space in the back of the parking lot facing a wooden fence. The car emptied. This wasn’t a good situation for anyone. The driver of four kids was crying about his dead parents. They didn’t know what to do. This was super awkward.

I stayed in the car, continuously rewinding Wish You Were Here. Remembering the night they died, flashing memories of that night through my head, projecting on the backdrop of the wooden fence on the other side of the windshield. I don’t know who, but a couple of friends came out to check on me. They tried to get me to change the tape, but I wouldn’t let them. My mind was on a very dark road. One I shouldn’t have turned on to. A road where I didn’t matter. I didn’t deserve anything. I was a burden to everyone. Something that needed to be taken care of, something that needed attention.

Looking back, now 45 years later, it is hard to remember the weight I was feeling. Clearly, I had a social life, but I always viewed it as a mask to my reality. That night, Pink Floyd broke through my facade. Well, not Pink Floyd, but the song “Wish You Were Here.” I already knew it was about Syd Barrett, but the lyrics “two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl” put my miserable life on display to my friends. I wanted to end that pain. But that in turn raised another impossibility: I could not justify the pain that would surely be added back to my siblings. A few years ago, I shared my thoughts of suicide with Lee, and he confessed he had the same thoughts and the same conclusions. As we continued to talk about our dark thoughts, we were sure that if one of us had relieved their pain through suicide, that would have allowed the other to go.

Most people don’t understand suicide – thank God. But like many blessings, they are taken for granted. And not ‘taken for granted’ like – “no, I get it, I know I’m lucky”, I mean, a real understanding of how untouched by pain they really are. An understanding of the short road of being ‘normal’ to a feeling of pain and despair that death itself is actually viewed as a relief.

Some view suicide as a coward’s way out. I think those people miss two points: one, killing oneself is not natural. It is a human’s nature to survive. Animals don’t intentionally kill themselves. Two, it takes an unnatural drive to overcome this survival instinct. Pain is a natural driver. Combined with memories of life without pain is the true enticement. The unsympathetic dismiss this attraction because they cannot comprehend a pain so deep, so heart-retching. Like the cancer patient, when the morphine no longer quells the physical pain. When the twisted grimace and the contortions stop. And the muscles stop twisting on themselves.

Or like looking out the window of a skyscraper and imagining the fear of falling while you’re looking down at the street. And there are two viewpoints here: one, to allow yourself to feel that fear of falling out the window, can you imagine that true terror? Or two, keep the reality that you are in a stable building, looking out of a window. Can you let yourself feel that fear of falling? Can you shift your perspective? Then you can empathize with others who have the irrational fear of falling. If you cannot, then you do not understand the view of suicide as giving a release from the pain. If you still can’t understand, then you can’t imagine the depth of pain and hopelessness Lee and I, and many. many others in this world have felt. And again, God bless your life, but that was not ours.

The emotional swings in high school are already wide. I knew I was getting past the pain of losing my parents, and that brought on this perspective on how meaninglessness of all our lives are. That, despite any bond, parent-child, brother-sister, friend-to-friend, they were all temporary. They can be broken, and life will go on. In high school, there was so much discussion of the future, and I was really having trouble seeing past the next day. I would say I was angry with God, but I couldn’t be angry with something I didn’t believe in. I had to remind myself I was looking out the window of a skyscraper, that is reality. And in my reality, that window could break anytime – so what was the point?

So what was death? Death is nothing. And with nothing meant no pain, and if you could understand just a part of our pain, you could understand that ‘nothing’ meant a relief to that pain. That is why people kill themselves. And I will also say suicide is a selfish act. But aren’t we supposed to put ourselves first? Another cliché from ‘the blessed.’

I believe people who have gone through tragedies are empathetic, or rather, can be empathetic. They can also be cold – “Buck up,” “I’ve seen worse,” “Things happen.” Coming from the ‘the blessed’, it comes off ignorant, self-righteous, sanctimonious. For those who have been through tragedies, it is egotistical. I was already becoming very ‘matter-of-fact’ about my parents. On the social side, I could anticipate their shock when I told people my parent had died.

But that did nothing to the fact that I still missed them terribly in high school. And while everyone else’s parents sucked, I would still, occasionally, cry for mine. “Two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl.” And that night, I really, really wanted to jump out of that bowl and envelope that abyss, and to feel nothing would be a relief.

It was my road, it was where I had to go. I had experienced the worst a child could go through and still live. I didn’t deserve to go on – for what? And that is ego. So self-centered to think I had experienced the worst. But I was not abused; I was healthy; I was physically without pain. It would be 10 more years before I could see beyond my own prison.

Back then, I believe there was no future or nothing meaningful. I just felt so sorry for myself. I didn’t deserve happiness. It was against what I had become – this shell, this emptiness. I did not deserve to move forward. I was not worth it. Somehow, I found myself not worthy of life itself. Disillusioned by the charade everyone else was following, I was seeing it through. But it was time to end this charade.

My friends had come back to the car. We could no longer stay at Shakey’s. They decided maybe we needed to go somewhere else. McDonald’s in Deerfield? It was less than a 5-minute drive down Lake Cook Road. At this point, I was well past 30 replays of Wish You Were Here.

In Truth, I was looking for a way out, to stop repeating Wish You Were Here. I was numb. Now I was trying to stop the sympathy. I didn’t really matter. My friends didn’t matter. My brothers and sisters had moved on. We all just needed to move on. I was a burden to everyone. Even to my friends now. They didn’t know how to deal with me. Poor pathetic me, crying about my parents. And I get it, nobody liked our parents back then. But I was a living example of the story of the man who had no shoes, until he met a man who had no feet. Nobody liked what they saw tonight.

As I drove my friends to McDonald’s, I was looking for oncoming cars. A last-ditch effort to end this emptiness. The first few cars appeared as I turned onto Lake Cook Road, but there was a parkway between us. By the time the parkway on Lake-Cook Road ended, traffic had cleared eastbound, so I turned right toward McDonald’s without issue. Rewinding Wish You Were Here yet again, I turned into the McDonald’s parking lot. I found a spot facing the restaurant and let my captives escape again. I saw the endless replay like my life, pointless. We all end up dead. This pain just goes on, and on and on. It needed to stop.