Releasing any song is going to be a double-edged sword for any artist. Sure, it’s nice to finally have those musical babies out in the world for the audience to appreciate them, but once they’re out of the studio, you have no choice as to whether a song becomes the next classic or gets forgotten like the thousands of other deep cuts lost along the way.
Pink Floyd never thought about music like that when worrying about singles, but that didn’t mean it didn’t sting when David Gilmour saw some of his songs plummet.
Then again, Gilmour didn’t come into the band completely comfortable with being a songwriter. His plan was to fill in for Syd Barrett for the time being, but once it became clear that was never going to happen, all the pressure fell onto Roger Waters to write everything. And while Gilmour did have the good fortune of singing most of the classics, there were always some songs that were bound to be a bit more forgettable than others.
While most of Ummagumma deserves to be forgotten for its avant-garde structure, Atom Heart Mother at least showed them on the right track. Not everything was perfect, and bringing in a horn section that didn’t know what they were doing was probably a mistake, but hearing ‘Fat Old Sun’ was the first sign that Gilmour could write some tunes. But who are we kidding here? We all know that Gilmour does his best work when he’s making like Frank Zappa by shutting up and playing his guitar.
There are countless songs in the Floyd oeuvre that Gilmour didn’t technically write but are unthinkable without him. ‘Comfortably Numb’ has his fingerprints firmly stamped on it, and ‘Time’ features some of the best lyrics that Waters ever wrote, but Gilmour’s solo is among the best emotional releases on Dark Side of the Moon. But right in the middle of the classics lies Animals, and it’s not like that album is the most user-friendly when it comes to prog rock.
Although it’s home to some of the finest moments in the band’s history, Gilmour felt the song ‘Dogs’ never got the appreciation that it deserved, saying, “There’s a solo on ‘Dogs’ that I thought was pretty good and unusual. It hasn’t entered the pantheon of the ones people seem to like because it’s a slightly different style for me, I suppose. I tracked it with an old Tele, and I was really thrilled with it.”
And for what it’s worth, Gilmour does have a point about the solo being fantastic. Those guitars played in harmony sound absolutely beautiful, and coupled with lyrics that dissect the more feral side of the human psyche, hearing those glorious bends practically sounds like dogs crying out in pain as they yearn for any kind of respite from their predators.
But part of the reason why the solo works so well has nothing to do with Gilmour; it’s about Richard Wright. A lot of Wright’s keyboards might seem a bit more muted than previous albums, but on this one track, he makes it all worth it by bringing in those haunting chords after the solo, almost like a dark cloud hanging over the dogs as they see an approaching storm and run for cover.
Then again, the fact that this song works so well on a musical front is a little bit tragic given where they would be going next. Since Wright was positioned out of the room most of the time when making The Wall, imagine what a song like ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ would have sounded like if he had been allowed to flex his muscles a little bit more.
