knightni

I don't know for sure that Torres, Hudson, Wassermann or Nunez could have been better than Linebrink in August and September, but I'm pretty sure that they couldn't have been much worse. It doesn't take much to pitch better than a 9.16 era and a 2.03 whip.

N.D.'s D still showing why they are subpar.

QUOTE (MHizzle85 @ Nov 28, 2009 -> 08:48 PM) So explain Palmeiro. I'm guessing that they went all "don't ask don't tell" at each other.

Very sure that Dylan and Floyd aren't metal, Tex.

6. Pink Floyd 8 of 24 lists - 138 points - highest ranking #1 Flash Tizzle Pink Floyd were an English rock band who, in the late 1960s, earned recognition for their psychedelic and space rock music, and in the 1970s, as they evolved, for their progressive rock music. Pink Floyd's work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album cover art, and elaborate live shows. One of rock music's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful acts, the group has sold over 200 million albums worldwide, including 74.5 million certified units in the United States. Pink Floyd were formed in 1965, soon after Syd Barrett joined The Tea Set, a group that consisted of architecture students Nick Mason, Roger Waters, Richard Wright and, briefly, Bob Klose. The group were a popular fixture on London's underground music scene, and under Barrett's leadership released two charting singles, "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play", and a commercially and critically successful album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The erratic behaviour of Barrett prompted his colleagues to add guitarist and singer David Gilmour to the line-up. Following Barrett's departure, bass player and singer Roger Waters became the lyricist and dominant figure in the band, which thereafter achieved worldwide critical and commercial success with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and rock opera The Wall. Wright left the band in 1979, and Waters in 1985, but Gilmour and Mason (joined by Wright) continued recording and touring under the name Pink Floyd. Waters used legal means to try to keep them from using the name, declaring Pink Floyd a spent force, but the parties reached an out-of-court settlement allowing Gilmour, Mason and Wright to continue as Pink Floyd. The band again enjoyed worldwide success with A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and The Division Bell (1994), and Waters continued as a solo musician, releasing three studio albums. Although for some years relations between Waters and the remaining three members were sour, the band reformed for what would be a final one-off performance at Live 8. Founder member Syd Barrett died on 7 July 2006, aged 60, at his home in Cambridgeshire; then just over two years later, on 15 September 2008, Richard Wright died of cancer, aged 65. Nick Mason and Roger Waters met at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, where both were studying architecture. The pair first played together in a band formed by Keith Noble and Clive Metcalfe, along with Noble's sister Sheilagh, an occasional singer. They were joined later by fellow student Richard Wright. With the addition of Wright the band became a sextet, and took the name Sigma 6. Wright's girlfriend Juliette Gale was often a guest artist, and Waters initially played rhythm guitar, before moving to bass. Early gigs were for private functions, and the band rehearsed in a tearoom in the basement of Regent Street Polytechnic. Sigma 6 played songs by The Searchers as well as material written by fellow student Ken Chapman, who became their manager and songwriter. In September 1963 Mason and Waters moved into the lower flat of Stanhope Gardens, owned by Mike Leonard, a part-time tutor at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Leonard was a designer of light machines (perforated discs spun by electric motors to cast patterns of lights on the walls, and for a time played keyboard with the band. They used the front room of the flat for rehearsals. Mason later moved out of the flat, and accomplished guitar player Bob Klose moved in. The band's name was changed several times, from the Megadeaths, to the Architectural Abdabs, and the Tea Set. Metcalfe and Noble left the band shortly thereafter, to form their own band. Syd Barrett, then aged 17, arrived in London in the autumn of 1963, to study at Camberwell College of Art. Waters and Barrett were childhood friends; the bassist had often visited Barrett as he played music at his mother's house. Barrett joined the Tea Set in 1964 and moved into Stanhope Gardens alongside Klose and Waters. With the Tea Set lacking the vocals of Noble and Metcalfe, Klose introduced them to Chris Dennis, a technician with the Royal Air Force. During Dennis' tenure, the Tea Set acquired an alternative name—the Pink Floyd Sound.[nb 2] Derived from the given names of two blues musicians that Barrett had in his record collection—Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, Barrett created it on the spur of the moment, when he discovered that another band, also named Tea Set, were to perform at one of their gigs. Dennis was posted to Bahrain, thrusting Barrett into the spotlight as frontman. Minus Wright—who had taken a break from studying—they acquired studio time between 1964–1965, and recorded promotional material which included a cover version of "I'm a King Bee" as well as several songs written by Barrett. The Pink Floyd Sound later became the resident band at the Countdown Club near Kensington High Street in London, and played three sets of 90 minutes, from late at night until early the following morning. According to Mason, this period "… was the beginning of a realisation that songs could be extended with lengthy solos." The band auditioned for the ITV programme Ready Steady Go! (whose producers expressed enough interest to invite them back into the studio audience the following week), and also for another club, and two rock contests. Bob Klose left in 1965, at the behest of his father and college tutors, and Barrett took over on lead guitar. The Pink Floyd Sound began to receive paid bookings playing mostly rhythm and blues songs, including one performance at the Marquee Club in March 1966 where they were watched by Peter Jenner. Jenner, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, was impressed by the acoustic effects that Barrett and Wright created during their performances, and with his business partner and friend Andrew King became their manager. Although the pair had little experience of the music industry, they used inherited money to set up Blackhill Enterprises and purchased new instruments and equipment for the band, including a Selmer PA system. Under their guidance, the band began performing on London's underground music scene at venues including All Saints Hall and The Marquee. The band felt encouraged to work on the instrumental excursions they had experimented with at the Countdown Club, and rudimentary light shows projected by coloured slides and domestic lights were used to powerful effect. To celebrate the launch of the Free School's magazine International Times, they performed at the opening of The Roundhouse, attended by a 2,000-strong crowd which included such celebrities as Alexander Trocchi, Paul McCartney, and Marianne Faithfull. Jenner and King's diverse array of social connections were meritorious, gaining the band important coverage in The Financial Times and The Sunday Times. The band's relationship with Blackhill Enterprises was strengthened when they became full partners, each holding an unprecedented one-sixth share. By October 1966 their set included more of their own material, and they were performing at venues such as the Commonwealth Institute. Their music was not to everyone's taste, however; following a performance at a Catholic youth club, the owner refused to pay. At the magistrates' court the judge agreed with the owner, who claimed that the band's performance "wasn't music". Although this was not the only occasion on which they encountered such opinions, they were better received at the UFO Club in London, where they used the in-house lighting to good effect. Barrett's performances were reportedly exuberant, "… leaping around and the madness, and the kind of improvisation he was doing … he was inspired. He would constantly manage to get past his limitations and into areas that were very, very interesting. Which none of the others could do." The often drug-addled audience was receptive to the music they played, but the band remained conspicuously drug-free —"We were out of it, not on acid, but out of the loop, stuck in the dressing room at UFO." Although in 1967 Mason admitted that the psychedelic movement had "taken place around us—not within us", the Pink Floyd Sound were present at the head of a wave of interest in psychedelic music, so attracted attention from record companies. While negotiating with the record companies, Joe Boyd and their booking agent Bryan Morrison arranged and paid for the band to record several songs at Sound Techniques in West Hampstead, including "Arnold Layne", and a version of "Interstellar Overdrive"; and to record a short music film for "Arnold Layne" in Sussex. Despite early interest from Polydor, the band signed with EMI, with a £5,000 advance. Boyd was not included in the deal. "Arnold Layne" became Pink Floyd's (the definite article was dropped at some point in 1967) first single, released on 11 March 1967. It was banned by several radio stations for its vague references to sexual perversions, but due to some creative manipulation at the shops which supplied sales figures to the music industry, it peaked at number 20 in the UK charts. Each member of the band had by now either abandoned their studies, or left their job. The band upgraded their ageing Bedford van to a Ford Transit, and used it to travel to over 200 gigs in 1967 (a ten-fold increase on the previous year). They were joined by road manager Peter Wynne Willson, with whom Barrett had previously shared a flat. Willson updated the band's lighting rig with innovative ideas such as the use of polarisers, mirrors, and stretched condoms. "See Emily Play", recorded in London, was their second release, on 16 June 1967. It premièred at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in May 1967, where the band also used a device called an Azimuth co-ordinator. They performed on the BBC's Look of the Week, where an erudite and engaging Waters and Barrett faced rigorous questioning from Hans Keller. The single fared slightly better than "Arnold Layne", and after two weeks was at number 17 in the charts. The band mimed the single on the BBC's Top Of The Pops, and returned for another performance after the single climbed to number five, however a scheduled third appearance was cancelled when Barrett refused to perform. At about this time the other band members began to notice changes in Barrett's behaviour—by early 1967 he was regularly using lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), a psychedelic drug—and at an earlier show in Holland Mason observed him to be "completely distanced from everything going on, whether simply tripping or suffering from a more organic neural disturbance I still have no idea." The band's agent, Bryan Morrison, had been instrumental in negotiating their contract with EMI through producer Norman Smith, and the band were obliged to record their first album at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London. Although in his 2005 autobiography Mason recalled the sessions as relatively trouble-free, Smith disagreed, and claimed that Barrett was unresponsive to his suggestions and constructive criticism. They experimented with musique concrète, and were at one point invited to watch The Beatles record "Lovely Rita". The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was released in August 1967. Pink Floyd continued to perform at the UFO Club drawing huge crowds, but Barrett's deterioration caused them serious concern. The band initially hoped that his erratic behaviour was a phase that would pass, but others, including Jenner and June Child, were more realistic: … I found him in the dressing room and he was so … gone. Roger Waters and I got him on his feet, we got him out to the stage … and of course the audience went spare because they loved him. The band started to play and Syd just stood there. He had his guitar around his neck and his arms just hanging down. —June Child, To the band's consternation, they cancelled a performance at the Windsor Jazz Festival, and informed the music press that Barrett was suffering from 'nervous exhaustion'. Jenner and Waters arranged for Barrett to see a psychiatrist—a meeting he did not attend. He was sent to Formentera with Sam Hutt (a doctor well-established in the underground music scene) but later showed no signs of improvement. A few dates in September were followed by the band's first tour of the United States, and in his capacity as tour manager Andrew King travelled to New York to begin preparations. The tour suffered serious problems. Visas had not arrived, prompting the cancellation of the first six dates. Elektra Records had turned Pink Floyd down, and so the band were by default handled by EMI's sister company, Capitol, which assigned them to their subsidiary, Tower Records. Tower released a truncated version of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn on the same date as the band's American première at The Fillmore in California, on 26 October 1967. Communication between company and band was almost non-existent, and Pink Floyd's relationship with Tower and Capitol was therefore poor. Barrett's mental condition mirrored the problems that King encountered; when the band performed at the Winterland Ballroom, he detuned his guitar during "Interstellar Overdrive" until the strings fell off. His odd behaviour grew worse during further performances, and during a recording for The Pat Boone Show he confounded the director by miming the song perfectly during the rehearsal, and then standing motionless during the take. King quickly curtailed their visit to the US, sending them home on the next flight. Shortly after their return from the US, beginning 14 November the band supported Jimi Hendrix on a tour of England, but on one occasion when Barrett failed to turn up they were forced to replace him with David O'List. Barrett's depression worsened the longer the tour continued. Wynne Willson left his role as lighting manager at the end of the Hendrix tour, and allied himself with Barrett, whose position as frontman was now becoming insecure. He was replaced by John Marsh. Pink Floyd released "Apples and Oranges", but for the rest of the band Barrett's condition had reached a crisis point, and they responded by adding a new member to their line-up. David Gilmour was already acquainted with Barrett, having studied modern language in the early 1960s at Cambridge Tech while Barrett studied art. Gilmour had started playing guitar aged thirteen, and the two played together at lunchtimes, with guitars and harmonicas. They later hitch-hiked and busked their way around the south of France. Gilmour had also seen the Tea Set perform in 1965, while playing in Jokers Wild. At an event near the end of 1967 the band asked him to become the fifth member of Pink Floyd. By coincidence Barrett had already suggested adding four new members, in the words of Roger Waters, "… two freaks he'd met somewhere. One of them played the banjo, the other the saxophone … [and] a couple of chick singers". Steve O'Rourke, one of Bryan Morrison's assistants, gave Gilmour a room at his house, and he was promised a salary of £30 per week. One of Gilmour's first steps as a member of Pink Floyd was to purchase a custom-made yellow Fender Stratocaster from an oft-frequented music shop in Cambridge (the instrument became one of Gilmour's favourite guitars throughout his career with Pink Floyd), and in January 1968 he was announced him as the fifth member of Pink Floyd. To the general public he was now the second guitarist, but as the Barrett's performances continued to ebb, privately the rest of the band saw him as a replacement. One of Gilmour's first duties was to pretend to play a guitar on an "Apples and Oranges" promotional film. In a demonstration of his frustration at being effectively sidelined, Barrett tried to teach the band a new song "Have You Got It Yet?", but changed the structure on each performance—making it impossible for them to learn. Matters came to a head on the day they were due to perform in Southampton. When somebody in the van asked if they should collect Barrett, the response was "No, f*** it, let's not bother". Waters later admitted "He was our friend, but most of the time we now wanted to strangle him". For a while Barrett still turned up to the occasional gig, apparently confused as to what was happening. As a result of his de facto removal Pink Floyd's partnership with Peter Jenner and Andrew King was dissolved in March 1968. Barrett's departure was officially announced on 6 April 1968. Jenner and King, who believed that the creative spirit of Pink Floyd derived almost entirely from Barrett, decided to represent him and ended their relationship with Pink Floyd. Bryan Morrison then agreed that Steve O'Rourke should become Pink Floyd's manager. Although the changeover between Barrett and Gilmour was something of a relief, it was also a difficult time for Gilmour, who was forced to mime to Barrett's voice on the group's European television appearances. Barrett had been their main songwriter, however Waters and Wright created new material such as "It Would Be So Nice", and "Careful With That Axe, Eugene". They developed their new material while playing on the University circuit, and were joined by road manager Peter Watts, before touring across Europe in 1968. In 1968 the band returned to Abbey Road Studios with Smith, to record their second studio album. They already had several songs recorded with Barrett, including "Jugband Blues" (his final contribution to their discography). Waters wrote three songs, "Let There Be More Light", "Corporal Clegg", and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun". Wright contributed "See-Saw" and "Remember a Day". The band continued the experimentation seen on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, recording some material at their homes—a process that Smith encouraged. He was unconvinced by their music, but played drums on "Remember a Day" when Mason struggled with the song. Neither Waters nor Mason could read music, and both created the album's title track "A Saucerful of Secrets" by inventing their own system of notation—something which Gilmour later would comment looked "… like an architectural diagram". A Saucerful of Secrets was released in June 1968 to mixed reviews; Record Mirror wrote positively, urging listeners to "forget it as background music to a party", and John Peel claimed that the album was "… like a religious experience …". However, NME viewed the title track as "… long and boring, and has little to warrant its monotonous direction". The album cover was designed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis. On the same day the album was released the band performed at the first free Hyde Park concert (organised by Blackhill Enterprises), with Roy Harper and Jethro Tull. Bryan Morrison later sold his business to NEMS Enterprises, and Steve O'Rourke became Pink Floyd's personal manager. O'Rourke was considered by the band as a "great deal-maker", whose business acumen overshadowed his lack of interest in aesthetic matters. Thus the band were able to take complete control of their artistic outlook. The band returned to the US for their first major tour, accompanied by Soft Machine and The Who. In 1968 the group worked on the score for The Committee, and just before Christmas that year released "Point Me At The Sky". It was no more successful than the two singles they had released since "See Emily Play", and it was to become the band's only single for several more years ("Apples and Oranges" was not released in the US). In 1969 the band composed the soundtrack for More, directed by Barbet Schroeder. The work proved important; not only did it pay well, but along with A Saucerful of Secrets the material they created would become part of their live shows for some time thereafter. A tour of the UK followed through the spring 1969, ending at the Royal Festival Hall in July 1969. It was memorable for the band, but more so for Gilmour who was thrown across the stage by an electric shock caused by poor earthing. The performances, built around two long pieces called The Man and The Journey, were enhanced with performance art created by artist Peter Dockley, and some of the sound effects were later used on 1970's "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast". While composing the soundtrack for Zabriskie Point (directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni) the band spent almost a month in a luxury hotel in Rome. Waters has since claimed that the work could have been completed in less than a week, but for Antonioni's continuous changes to the music. Eventually he used recordings by the Grateful Dead, The Youngbloods, Patti Page, and the Rolling Stones, but three of Pink Floyd's contributions remained. One of the pieces turned down by Antonioni would eventually become "Us and Them" on Pink Floyd's 1973 The Dark Side of the Moon. The band also did some work on the soundtrack for a proposed cartoon series called Rollo, but a lack of funds meant that the series was never produced, and away from Pink Floyd, Waters scored the soundtrack to the 1970 film The Body (directed by Ron Geesin). Pink Floyd's next album was something of a departure from their previous work. Ummagumma, a double-LP released on EMI's Harvest label, contained barely any new compositions. The first two sides of the album were live acts, recorded at Manchester College of Commerce and at Mother's Club in Birmingham. For the second LP, each member was given one half of each side on which to experiment. The album was released to positive reviews in October 1969. Ummagumma was quickly followed by 1970's Atom Heart Mother. The album apes the work produced at the time by groups such as Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The band's previous LPs had been recorded using a four-track system, but Atom Heart Mother was their first to use eight tracks of audio. An early version was premièred in France in January 1970, but disagreements over its direction prompted the arrival of Ron Geesin, who worked for about a month to improve the score. Production was troublesome, with little creative input from the band, but with the aid of John Aldiss the album was eventually completed. Gilmour has since dismissed Atom Heart Mother as "a load of rubbish", and Waters is similarly dismissive, claiming that he wouldn't mind if it were "thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again." Norman Smith was given only an executive producer credit, his final contribution to the band's discography. Atom Heart Mother was massively successful in the UK, and was premièred at the Bath Festival on 27 June 1970. In 1971 they took second place in a poll of readers by Melody Maker (behind Emerson, Lake and Palmer), and for the first time in their history were making a profit. However, the theft in New Orleans of equipment worth about $40,000 almost crippled the band's finances. The local police were unhelpful, but within hours of notifying the FBI the equipment was returned. Mason and Wright were now fathers and bought homes in London. Gilmour, not married, moved to a 19th-century farm in Essex. Waters installed a home recording studio at his house in Islington, in a converted tool-shed at the bottom of his garden. Meddle is sometimes considered to be a transitional album between the Barrett-influenced band and the modern Pink Floyd. The group's other releases during this period, More and Zabriski Point, were soundtracks, and Atom Heart Mother was influenced as much by Ron Geesin and the session artists as it was by the band. Returning from touring Atom Heart Mother, at the start of 1971 the band began work on new material. While they lacked a central theme, in a divergent attempt to spur the creative process they tried several largely unproductive experiments. Engineer John Leckie described Pink Floyd's sessions as often beginning in the afternoon, and ending early the next morning, "during which time nothing would get done. There was no record company contact whatsoever, except when their label manager would show up now and again with a couple of bottles of wine and a couple of joints." The band would apparently spend long periods of time working on simple sounds, or a particular guitar riff. They also spent several days at Air Studios, attempting to create music using a variety of household objects, a project which would be revisited between The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. The production of Meddle was spread over a considerable period of time; the band recorded in the first half of April, but in the latter half played at Doncaster and Norwich before returning to record at the end of the month. In May they split their time between sessions at Abbey Road, and rehearsals and concerts in London, Lancaster, Stirling, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Nottingham. June and July were spent mainly performing at venues across Europe. August was spent in the far east and Australia, September in Europe, and October to November in the US. In the same period the band also produced the compilation album Relics. The band again worked with Barbet Schroeder on the film La Vallée, for which a soundtrack album was released, called Obscured by Clouds. The material was composed in about a week, at the Château d'Hérouville near Paris, and upon its release was their first to break into the top 50 on the US Billboard chart. Following the release of Meddle, Waters proposed that their next album should deal with things that "make people mad", and that it could also form part of an upcoming international tour. Their new material was given the provisional title of The Dark Side of the Moon (an allusion to lunacy, rather than astronomy), but on discovering that that title had already been used by the blues rock group Medicine Head, it was temporarily changed to Eclipse. Medicine Head's album was a commercial failure, and so the title changed back to the band's original preference. The album was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, between May 1972 and January 1973, with staff engineer Alan Parsons. They spent much of 1972 touring the new material, and returned in January 1973 to complete recording. The band also filmed studio footage for Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, and once the recording sessions were complete, began a tour of Europe. Late in the album's production, producer Chris Thomas was hired to provide "a fresh pair of ears". Thomas was responsible for significant changes to the album, including the perfect timing of the echo used on "Us and Them". He was also present for the recording of "The Great Gig in the Sky". Packaging was designed by Hipgnosis, and bore George Hardie's iconic refracting prism on the cover. Since Barrett's departure the burden of lyrical composition had fallen mostly on Waters' shoulders. He is therefore credited as the author of the album's lyrics. Generally, the press were enthusiastic; Melody Maker's Roy Hollingworth described side one as: "… so utterly confused with itself it was difficult to follow", but went on to praise side two, writing "The songs, the sounds, the rhythms were solid and sound, Saxophone hit the air, the band rocked and rolled, and then gushed and tripped away into the night." In his 1973 album review for Rolling Stone magazine, Lloyd Grossman wrote: "a fine album with a textural and conceptual richness that not only invites, but demands involvement". The Dark Side of the Moon was released in March 1973, and became an instant chart success in Britain and throughout Western Europe. Throughout March 1973 it featured as part of their US tour, including a midnight performance at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on 17 March. The success of the album brought previously unknown wealth to all four members of the band; Richard Wright and Roger Waters bought large country houses, and Nick Mason became a collector of upmarket cars. Much of the album's early stateside success has been attributed to the efforts of Pink Floyd's US record company, Capitol Records. Newly appointed chairman Bhaskar Menon reversed the relatively poor performance of the band's previous US releases, but, disenchanted with Capitol, the band and manager O'Rourke negotiated a new contract with Columbia Records. The Dark Side of the Moon was the last album that Pink Floyd were obliged to release before formally signing a new contract. Menon's efforts to secure a contract renewal with Pink Floyd were in vain, and the band signed for Columbia with a reported advance fee of $1M ($4,794,891 today), while in Britain and Europe they continued to be represented by Harvest Records. Pink Floyd returned to the studio in the first week of 1975. Alan Parsons had declined the band's offer to continue working with them (instead becoming successful in his own right with The Alan Parsons Project), and so the band turned to Brian Humphries, with whom they had already worked on More. The group initially found it difficult to devise any new material, especially as the success of Dark Side of the Moon had left all four physically and emotionally drained. Richard Wright later described these early sessions as "falling within a difficult period", and Waters found them "torturous". Gilmour was more interested in improving the band's existing material, and Mason's marriage was failing, bringing on in him a general malaise and sense of apathy, which interfered with his drumming. "It was a very difficult period I have to say. All your childhood dreams had been sort of realized and we had the biggest selling records in the world and all the things you got into it for. The girls and the money and the fame and all that stuff it was all ... everything had sort of come our way and you had to reassess what you were in it for thereafter, and it was a pretty confusing and sort of empty time for a while ..." —David Gilmour After several weeks, however, Waters began to visualise another concept. During 1974, they had sketched out three new compositions, "Raving and Drooling", "Gotta Be Crazy", and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", and had performed them at a series of concerts in France and England. These new compositions became the starting point for a new album, with "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" forming a centrepiece for the new work. The opening four note guitar phrase, composed entirely by accident by Gilmour, reminded Waters of the lingering ghost of former band-member Syd Barrett. "Welcome to the Machine" and "Have a Cigar" were barely-veiled attacks on the music business, their lyrics working neatly with "Shine On" to provide an apt summary of the rise and fall of the former bandmate; "Because I wanted to get as close as possible to what I felt ... that sort of indefinable, inevitable melancholy about the disappearance of Syd." "Raving and Drooling" and "Gotta Be Crazy" had no place in the new concept, and were set aside. An overweight white male with shaved head and eyebrows, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and black trousers, looks at the camera with a neutral expression. The room behind him appears dark, and several unidentifiable pieces of equipment are visible. On 5 June 1975 Gilmour married his first wife, Ginger, and it was also the eve of Pink Floyd's second tour of the US that year. The band were in the process of mixing one of the album's tracks when an overweight man entered the room. Initially, nobody recognised him, but it soon became apparent that the stranger was Barrett. Mason thought that Barrett was "desultory and not entirely sensible". Storm Thorgerson later said: "Two or three people cried. He sat round and talked for a bit but he wasn't really there." Waters was reportedly deeply upset by the experience. Barrett also mentioned that he was ready to avail the band of his services, but on listening to the mix of "Shine On", showed no sign of understanding its relevance to his plight. He joined the guests at Gilmour's wedding reception in the EMI canteen, but later left without saying goodbye. None of the band members ever saw him again. Storm Thorgerson concealed the album artwork with a dark-coloured shrink-wrap. Inside, the cover image was inspired by the idea that people tend to conceal their true feelings, for fear of "getting burned", and thus two businessmen were pictured shaking hands, one man on fire. Much of Wish You Were Here was premièred on 5 July 1975 at an open-air music festival at Knebworth, before being released in September that year. It reached number one in Britain and the US, along with positive reviews; Robert Christgau wrote: "... the music is not only simple and attractive, with the synthesizer used mostly for texture and the guitar breaks for comment, but it actually achieves some of the symphonic dignity (and cross-referencing) that The Dark Side of the Moon simulated so ponderously." Following the Knebworth concert, the band bought a three-storey block of church halls at 35 Britannia Row in Islington. Their deal with EMI for unlimited studio time in return for a reduced percentage of sales had expired, and they set about converting the building into a recording studio, and storage facility. The studio would be on the ground floor, with the storage facility above, necessitating the installation of a hoist to move the band's equipment in and out of the building. The top floor became an office, equipped with a pool table. The band also envisaged hiring their equipment out, but the hire business was unsuccessful and would later be taken over by Brian Grant and Robbie Williams. The studio, however, was more successful. Its construction took up most of 1975, and in 1976 the band recorded their eighth studio album, Animals at the new facility. Animals was born from another Waters concept, where the human race was reduced to dogs, pigs, and sheep. The idea was borrowed from George Orwell's Animal Farm, but in Waters' version the sheep eventually rise up to overpower their oppressors. Brian Humphries was again called upon to engineer the album. Two tracks previously considered for Wish You Were Here—"Raving and Drooling" and "Gotta Be Crazy"—reappeared as "Sheep" and "Dogs" respectively. The album was completed in December 1976, and work began on its cover. Hipgnosis took responsibility and offered three ideas, but unusually the final concept was designed by Waters. At the time he lived near Clapham Common, and regularly passed Battersea Power Station, by then approaching the end of its useful life. The building was chosen as the subject of the cover image, and the band commissioned a 30 feet (9.1 m) porcine balloon (known as Algie). Photography began on 2 December, with a trained marksman ready to fire if it escaped. Unfortunately inclement weather delayed shooting, and O'Rourke had neglected to book the marksman for a second day. The balloon broke free of its moorings and ascended into the sky, eventually landing in Kent where it was recovered by a local farmer, reportedly furious that it had "apparently scared his cows." Shooting continued for a third day, but the image of the pig was later superimposed onto the cover photograph as the early photographs of the power station were considered to be better. The division of royalties became a sore topic, during production of the album. Royalties were accorded on a per-song basis, and although Gilmour was largely responsible for "Dogs"—which took up almost the entire first side of the album—he received far less than Waters, who also contributed the two-part "Pigs on the Wing". The song contains references to Waters' private life—his new romantic interest was Carolyne Anne Christie. Gilmour was also distracted by the birth of his first child, and contributed little else toward the album. Similarly, neither Mason nor Wright contributed much toward Animals (the first Pink Floyd album not to contain a writing credit for Wright); Wright had marital problems, but his relationship with Waters was also suffering: "Animals was a slog. It wasn't a fun record to make, but this was when Roger really started to believe that he was the sole writer for the band. He believed that it was only because of him that the band was still going, and obviously, when he started to develop his ego trips, the person he would have his conflicts with would be me." —Richard Wright, Animals was released on 23 January 1977, and entered the UK charts at number two, and number three in the US. NME called the album "… one of the most extreme, relentless, harrowing and downright iconoclastic hunks of music to have been made available this side of the sun …", and Melody Maker's Karl Dallas wrote "… [an] uncomfortable taste of reality in a medium that has become in recent years, increasingly soporific …" The album became the subject material for the band's In the Flesh tour, during which early signs of discord became apparent. Waters began arriving at each venue alone, and departing immediately after the performance was complete, and Gilmour's wife Ginger did not get along with Waters' new girlfriend. On one occasion, Wright flew back to England threatening to leave the band. The size of the venues was also an issue, and the end of the tour was a low point for Gilmour, who felt that the band had by now achieved the success they sought, and that there was nothing else to look forward to. The In the Flesh tour was Pink Floyd's first playing in large stadiums, and at one venue a small group of noisy and excited fans in the front row of the audience irritated Waters so much that he spat at one of them. Waters was not the only person who felt depressed about playing in such large venues, as that same night Gilmour refused to perform the band's usual twelve-bar blues encore. About this time, Gilmour and Wright released their début solo albums, David Gilmour, and Wet Dream. Both albums sold poorly, a situation only exacerbated by the loss much of the band's accumulated wealth. In 1976 the band had become involved with financial advisers Norton Warburg Group (NWG). NWG became the band's collecting agents and handled all financial planning, for an annual fee of about £300,000. Between £1.6M and £3.3M of the band's money was invested in high-risk venture capital schemes, primarily to reduce the band's exposure to high UK taxes. It soon became obvious that the band were still losing money. Not only did NWG invest in failing businesses, they also left the band liable for tax bills as high as 83% of their income. They eventually terminated their relationship with NWG, demanding the return of any cash not yet invested, which at that time amounted to £860,000 (they received £740,000). In the midst of this, in July 1977 Waters presented the band with two new ideas. The first was a ninety-minute demo given the provisional title Bricks in the Wall, and the other what would later become his first solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. Although both Mason and Gilmour were initially cautious, the former (inspired by the recent spitting incident) was chosen to be their next album. Bob Ezrin was brought in as co-producer, and he wrote a forty-page script for the new album. The story was based on the central character of Pink—a character inspired by Waters' childhood experiences—the most notable of which was the death of his father in World War II. This first 'brick in the wall' led to more problems, each serving to isolate Pink further. Pink would later become so drug-addled and worn down by the music industry that he would transform into a megalomaniac, a development inspired partly by the decline of Syd Barrett. At the end of the album, the increasingly fascist audience would watch as Pink 'tore down the wall', once again becoming a normal caring person. At Britannia Row, Brian Humphries was emotionally drained by his five years with the band, and was replaced by James Guthrie. Early sessions were difficult, as Ezrin, Guthrie and Waters each had strong ideas about the direction the album would take; however, Ezrin's role expanded to that of an intermediary between Waters and the rest of the band. Work continued up to March 1979, at which point the band's critical financial situation demanded that they leave the UK for a year or more, to continue recording at the Super Bear Studios near Nice. Waters planned the recording sessions on a tight schedule. His relationship with Ezrin had soured, but his relationship with Wright had broken down completely. The band were rarely in the studio together, and Wright, worried about the effect that the introduction of Ezrin would have on the band's internal relationships, was keen to have a producer's credit on the album (their albums up to that point had always stated "Produced by Pink Floyd"). Waters had agreed to a trial period, after which Wright was to be given a producer's credit, but after a few weeks Waters and Ezrin expressed dissatisfaction with his methods. The keyboardist eventually stopped coming into the studio during the day, and worked only at nights. Gilmour also expressed his annoyance, complaining that Wright's lack of input was "driving us all mad". Wright had his own problems, with a failing marriage, and depression. Columbia offered the band a better deal in exchange for a Christmas release of the album, and Waters increased their workload accordingly; however, Wright refused to cut short his family holiday in Rhodes. What exactly happened next remains unclear. In Inside Out (2005) Mason says that Waters called O'Rourke, who was travelling to the US on the QE2, and told him to have Wright out of the band by the time Waters arrived in LA to mix the album. In Comfortably Numb (2008), however, the author states that Waters called O'Rourke and asked him to tell Wright about the new recording arrangements and that Wright's response was apparently "Tell Roger to f*** off …". Wright disagreed with this recollection, stating that the band had agreed to record only through the spring and early summer and that he had no idea they were so far behind schedule. Waters was stunned and felt that Wright was not doing enough to help complete the album. Gilmour was on holiday in Dublin when he learned what was happening, and tried to calm the situation. He later spoke with Wright and gave him his support, but he reminded him about his lack of input on the album. Waters was insisting that Wright leave, else he would refuse to release The Wall. Several days later, worried about their financial situation and the failing interpersonal relationships within the band, Wright quit. Rumours persisted that Wright had a cocaine addiction (something he always disputed), and although his name did not appear anywhere on the finished album, he was employed as a paid musician on the band's subsequent The Wall tour. Production of the album continued and by August 1979 the running order was largely complete. Wright completed his duties, aided by session musicians. Toward the end of The Wall sessions, Mason left the final mix to Waters, Gilmour, Ezrin and Guthrie, and travelled to New York to record his début solo album, Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports. The album was promoted by the a rare Pink Floyd single—"Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)", peaked at number one in the US and the UK. The Wall was released on 30 November 1979, and topped the Billboard charts for fifteen weeks. It remains one of the band's best-selling albums. The cover is one of their most minimal designs, with a simple white brick wall, and no logo or band name. It was also their first album cover since The Piper at the Gates of Dawn not designed by Hipgnosis. Gerald Scarfe was employed to produce a series of animations for the subsequent The Wall Tour, including a series of nightmarish visions of the future such as a dove of peace exploding to reveal an eagle. Large inflatable puppets were also created for the live shows. Meanwhile relationships within the band were now at an all-time low. On tour, their four Winnebagos were parked in a circle, with the doors facing away from the centre. Waters remained isolated, using his own vehicle to arrive at the venue, and staying in separate hotels from the rest of the band. Wright, who had returned as a paid musician, and was the only 'member' of the band to profit from the venture, which lost about $600,000. They were asked to play at Philadelphia's John F. Kennedy Stadium, but Waters refused. The band returned to the UK following their year as tax exiles. The album also spawned a film. The original plan was for the film to be a mixture of live concert footage and animated scenes. However, the concert footage proved impractical to film. Alan Parker agreed to direct, and took a different approach. The animated sequences would remain, but scenes would be acted by professional actors, with no dialogue. Waters was screen tested but quickly discarded, and Bob Geldof was asked to take the role of Pink. Geldof was initially disdainful, condemning The Wall's storyline as "bollocks". He was eventually won over by the prospect of being involved in a major film and receiving a large payment for his work. Waters took a six-week holiday during filming and returned to find that Parker had used his creative licence to change parts of the film to his liking. Waters was irate, the two fought, and Parker threatened to walk out. Gilmour pleaded with Waters to reconsider his stance, reminding the bassist that he and the other band members were shareholders and directors and could out-vote him on such decisions. A modified soundtrack was also created for some of the film's songs. The Wall was released in July 1982. Spare Bricks was to have been the soundtrack album for The Wall film, but with the onset of the Falklands Conflict Waters changed direction, and began writing new material. A socialist at heart, Waters saw Margaret Thatcher's response to the invasion of the islands as jingoistic and unnecessary, and he dedicated the new album—then provisionally titled Requiem for a Post-War Dream—to his dead father. Immediately, there were arguments between Waters and Gilmour, who felt that the album should contain new material, rather than songs not considered good enough for The Wall. Waters felt that, lately, Gilmour had contributed little to the band's lyrical repertoire. Michael Kamen (a contributor to the orchestral sections of The Wall) mediated between the two, and also performed the role traditionally occupied by the now absent Richard Wright. James Guthrie was the studio engineer, and surprisingly, Mason was aided by two session drummers. Recording took place in an unprecedented eight studios, including Gilmour's home studio at Hookend Manor and Waters' home studio at East Sheen. Still, the tension within the band grew worse. Waters and Gilmour worked separately (itself not unusual) but Gilmour began to feel the strain, sometimes barely maintaining his composure. Waters lost his temper, ranting at Kamen, who in boredom during one recording session, had started writing "I Must Not f*** Sheep" repeatedly on a notepad in the studio's control room. After a final confrontation, Gilmour's name as producer was removed from the credit list, reflecting what Waters felt was his lack of song writing contributions. Mason's contributions were minimal, as he busied himself recording sound effects for an experimental new Holophonic system to be used on the album. With marital problems of his own, he remained a distant figure. Hipgnosis had by this time disbanded, but again Thorgerson was passed over for the cover design, Waters choosing to design it himself. His brother-in-law, Willie Christie, was commissioned to take pictures for the album. The Final Cut was released in March 1983, going straight to #1 in the UK, and #6 in the US. "Not Now John" was released as a single, with its chorus of "f*** all that" bowdlerised to "Stuff all that". Despite its success, the album again received mixed reviews. Melody Maker declared it to be "… a milestone in the history of awfulness …", but Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder viewed it as "… essentially a Roger Waters solo album … a superlative achievement on several levels …" Gilmour recorded his second solo album About Face in 1984, and used it to express his feelings about a range of topics, from the murder of musician John Lennon, to his relationship with Waters. He has since admitted that he also used the album to distance himself from Pink Floyd. Soon after, Waters began touring his new solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. Richard Wright meanwhile formed Zee with Dave Harris, and recorded Identity, which went almost unnoticed upon its release. Wright was also in the midst of a difficult divorce, and has since admitted that it was "… made at a time in my life when I was lost." Mason released his second solo album Profiles in August 1985, which featured a contribution from Gilmour on "Lie for a Lie". Waters now believed that Pink Floyd was a spent force, and contacted O'Rourke with a view to settling future royalty payments. O'Rourke felt obliged to inform Mason and Gilmour, and as a result Waters tried to dismiss him. Waters then went to the High Court to prevent the Pink Floyd name from ever being used again. His lawyers discovered that the partnership had never been formally confirmed, and Waters returned to the High Court in an attempt to gain a veto over further use of the band's name. Gilmour's team responded by issuing a carefully-worded press release affirming that Pink Floyd would continue to exist. However, Gilmour later told a Sunday Times reporter that "Roger is a dog in the manger and I'm going to fight him …". Waters wrote to EMI and Columbia and declared his intention to leave the group, and asked them to release him from his contractual obligations. Gilmour believed that Waters left to hasten the demise of Pink Floyd, however, Waters later stated that by not making new albums, Pink Floyd would be in breach of contract—which would mean that royalty payments would be suspended—and that he was effectively forced from the band as the other members threatened to sue him. With the case still pending, Waters dispensed with O'Rourke's services and employed Peter Rudge to manage his affairs. He went on to record for the soundtrack for When the Wind Blows, as well as a second solo album, Radio K.A.O.S. Radio K.A.O.S. was released in June 1987, just as Gilmour was recruiting musicians for what would become Pink Floyd's first album without Waters at the helm—A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Artists such as Jon Carin and Phil Manzanera worked on the album, but they were also joined by Bob Ezrin. Gilmour was also contacted by Wright's new wife. She had heard that he was working on new material and asked if Wright could contribute. Gilmour considered the request; there were several legal obstacles to Wright's re-admittance to the band, but after a meeting in Hampstead he was brought back in. Gilmour later admitted in an interview with Karl Dallas that Wright's presence "… would make us stronger legally and musically". The album was recorded along the River Thames, on Gilmour's houseboat Astoria. Andy Jackson (a colleague of Guthrie) was brought in as engineer. Gilmour experimented with various songwriters such as Eric Stewart and Roger McGough, but eventually settled on Anthony Moore as a lyricist. Gilmour would later admit that Waters' absence was a problem, and that the new project was difficult without his presence. Nick Mason was concerned that he was too out of practice to perform on the album, and was replaced on occasion by session musicians. He instead busied himself with the album's sound effects. In a marked change from previous Floyd albums, A Momentary Lapse was recorded onto a 32-channel Mitsubishi digital recorder, and used MIDI synchronisation with the aid of an Apple Macintosh computer. Waters on one occasion visited Astoria to see Ezrin, along with Christie, by then his wife. As he was still a shareholder and director of Pink Floyd music, he was able to block any decisions made by his former bandmates. Recording moved to Mayfair and Audio International Studios, and then to Los Angeles—"It was fantastic because … the lawyers couldn't call in the middle of recording unless they were calling in the middle of the night." Waters tried to block a proposed Pink Floyd tour, by contacting every promoter in the US, threatening to sue if they used the Pink Floyd name. Gilmour and Mason funded the startup costs (Mason, separated from his wife, used his Ferrari 250 GTO as collateral). Some promoters were offended by Waters' threat, and several months later, tickets went on sale in Toronto (and were sold out within hours). Storm Thorgerson, whose creative input was absent from The Wall and The Final Cut, was employed to design the cover. The album was released in September 1987, and in order to drive home the message that Waters had left the band, a group photograph was, for the first time since Meddle, included on the inside of the cover. The album went straight to number three in the UK and US—held from the top spot by Michael Jackson's Bad, and Whitesnake's 1987. Although Gilmour initially viewed the album as a return to the band's best form, Wright would later disagree, admitting "Roger's criticisms are fair. It's not a band album at all." Q Magazine's view was that the album was primarily a Gilmour solo effort. Early rehearsals for the upcoming tour were chaotic, with Mason and Wright completely out of practice, and realising he'd taken on too much work Gilmour asked Bob Ezrin to take charge. As the new band toured throughout North America, Waters' Radio K.A.O.S. tour was, on occasion, close by. The bassist had forbidden any members of Pink Floyd from attending his concerts, which were generally in smaller venues than those housing his former band's performances. Waters issued a writ for copyright fees for the band's use of the flying pig, and Pink Floyd responded by attaching a huge set of male genitalia to its underside to distinguish it from his design. However, by November 1987 Waters appeared to admit defeat, and on 23 December a legal settlement was finally reached. Mason and Gilmour were allowed use of the Pink Floyd name in perpetuity, and Waters would be granted, amongst other things, The Wall. The bickering continued, however, with Waters issuing the occasional slight against his former friends, and Gilmour and Mason responding by making light of Waters claims that they would fail without him. The Sun printed a story about Waters, who it claimed had paid an artist to create 150 toilet rolls with Gilmour's face on every sheet. Waters later rubbished this story, but it serves to illustrate how deeply divided the two parties had now become. For several years thereafter the three members of Pink Floyd busied themselves with personal pursuits, such as filming and competing in the Carrera Panamericana (where Gilmour and O'Rourke crashed), and later recording a soundtrack for the film. Gilmour divorced Ginger, and Mason married actress Annette Lynton. In January 1993 the band began working on a new album. They returned to a now remodelled Britannia Row Studios, where for several days Gilmour, Mason and Wright worked collaboratively, ad-libbing new material. After about two weeks the band had enough ideas to start creating new songs. Bob Ezrin returned to work on the album, and production moved to Astoria where from February to May 1993 the band worked on about twenty-five ideas. Contractually, Wright was still not a full member of the band: "It came very close to a point where I wasn't going to do the album", a situation which clearly upset the keyboardist. However, he was given his first songwriting credit on a Pink Floyd album since 1975's Wish You Were Here. Another songwriter credited on the album was Gilmour's new girlfriend, Polly Samson. She helped write "High Hopes" with Gilmour—along with several other tracks—a situation which although initially was tense, according to Ezrin "pulled the whole album together". She also helped Gilmour, who, following his divorce, had developed a cocaine habit. Michael Kamen was brought in work on the album's various string arrangements, and Dick Parry and Chris Thomas also returned. Keen to avoid competing against other album releases (as had happened with A Momentary Lapse) the band set a deadline of April 1994, at which point they would begin touring again. The album title was chosen by writer Douglas Adams, and Storm Thorgerson once again provided the cover artwork. Thorgerson also provided six new pieces of film for the upcoming tour. The band spent three weeks rehearsing at a US airforce base in North Carolina, before opening on 29 March 1994 in Miami with an almost identical crew to that used for their Momentary Lapse of Reason tour. They played a mixture of Pink Floyd favourites, but later changed their setlist to include The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. The band also renewed their acquaintance with Peter Wynne Willson. Waters was invited to join the band as the tour reached Europe, but declined, later expressing his annoyance that some Floyd songs were being performed again in large venues. On the first night of the European leg, a 1,200 capacity stand collapsed, but there were no serious injuries and the performance was rescheduled. The tour ended at Earls Court on 20 October 1994, and was the group's final concert performance until Live 8, apart from performing "Fat Old Sun" and "The Great Gig in the Sky" in Chichester Cathedral at the funeral of their manager Steve O'Rourke who died on 30 October 2003. A live album of the tour Pulse, and a concert video Pulse, were released in 1995. On Saturday 2 July 2005 at the Live 8 concert, at about eleven o'clock in the evening, the classic lineup of Pink Floyd performed together on stage—for the first time in almost 25 years. The reunion had been arranged by Live 8 organiser Bob Geldof who had called Mason earlier in the year to discuss the band reuniting for Live 8. Geldof had already asked Gilmour, who had turned down the offer, and asked Mason to intercede on his behalf. Mason declined, but contacted Waters, who was immediately enthusiastic. Waters then called Geldof to discuss the event, which was at that time only a month away. About two weeks later, Waters called Gilmour—their first conversation for about two years—and the next day the latter agreed. Wright was contacted, and immediately agreed. Statements were issued to the press which stressed the lack of import of the band's problems, compared to the context of the Live 8 event. The setlist was planned at the Connaught Hotel in London, followed by three days of rehearsals at Black Island Studios. The sessions were troublesome, with minor disagreements over the style and pace of the songs they were practising. Waters wanted to use the occasion to expand the concepts he had designed, whereas Gilmour wanted to perform the songs in exactly the way the audience would expect. The final setlist and running order was decided on the eve of the concert. The band performed a four-song set beginning with "Speak to Me/Breathe/Breathe (Reprise)", "Money", "Wish You Were Here", and ending with "Comfortably Numb". Gilmour and Waters shared lead vocals. Onstage, at the start of "Wish You Were Here" Waters told the audience that the event was "quite emotional, standing up here with these three guys after all these years". At the end of their performance Gilmour thanked the audience, and started to walk off the stage, but Waters called him back and the band shared a group hug that became one of the more notable images from Live 8. I don't think any of us came out of the years from 1985 with any credit … It was a bad, negative time. And I regret my part in that negativity. —Roger Waters (2007) In the week following their performance there was a revival of interest in Pink Floyd. According to HMV, in the week following sales of Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd rose by 1343%, while Amazon.com reported a significant increase in sales of The Wall. Gilmour subsequently declared that he would donate his share of profits from this sales boom to charity, and urged other artists and record companies profiting from Live 8 to do the same. After the show Gilmour confirmed that he and Waters were on "pretty amicable terms". A £136 million (then about $250 million) deal for a final tour was offered, but turned down. Waters did not rule out further performances, but only for a special occasion. In a 2006 interview with La Republica, Gilmour stated that he wished to focus on solo projects, and his family, and that his appearance at Live 8 was to help reconcile his differences with Waters. However, in a 2006 interview Mason stated that Pink Floyd would be willing to perform for a concert that would support peace between Israel and Palestine. Speaking in 2006, speaking of Pink Floyd's future, Gilmour stated "who knows". David Gilmour released his third solo record, On an Island, on 6 March 2006. He began a tour of small concert venues in Europe, Canada and the US, with contributions from Wright and other musicians from the post-Waters Pink Floyd tours. Mason joined Gilmour and Wright for the final night of the tour, but was otherwise engaged in playing for Waters 2006 Europe/U.S. tour. Gilmour, Wright, and Mason's encore performances of "Wish You Were Here" and "Comfortably Numb" marked the first performance by Pink Floyd since Live 8. Syd Barrett died on 7 July 2006, aged 60, at his home in Cambridgeshire. He was interred at Cambridge Crematorium on 18 July 2006. No Pink Floyd members attended. Although Barrett had faded into obscurity over the previous 35 years, he was lauded in the national press for his contributions to music. He left over £1.25M in his will, to be divided between his immediate family, and some of his possessions and artwork were auctioned. The band are very naturally upset and sad to hear of Syd Barrett's death. Syd was the guiding light of the early band line-up and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire. —Richard Wright In September 2006 Waters released his long-awaited Ça Ira, an opera in three acts to a French libretto, based on the historical subject of the French Revolution. Reviews were complimentary, Rolling Stone wrote "the opera does reflect some of the man's long-term obsessions with war and peace, love and loss". 2007 saw the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's signing to EMI, and the 40th anniversary of the release of their début album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This was marked by the release of a limited edition set containing mono and stereo mixes of the albums, plus tracks from the singles and other rare recordings. On 10 May 2007 Waters and Pink Floyd performed separately at the Syd Barrett tribute concert at the Barbican Centre in London. The event, organised by Joe Boyd and Nick Laird-Clowes, saw the band perform some of Barrett's hits, such as "Bike", and "Arnold Layne". In a January 2007 interview Waters suggested he had become more open to a Pink Floyd reunion: “I would have no problem if the rest of them wanted to get together. It wouldn’t even have to be to save the world. It could be just because it would be fun. And people would love it.” Later that year Gilmour stated: "I can’t see why I would want to be going back to that old thing. It’s very retrogressive. I want to look forward, and looking back isn’t my joy." In a May 2008 interview for BBC 6Music, David Gilmour hinted that he would be in favour of another one-off show, but ruled out a full tour. Speaking to Associated Press to promote the release of his new live album, David Gilmour stated that a reunion would not happen. Gilmour said: "The rehearsals were less enjoyable. The rehearsals convinced me it wasn't something I wanted to be doing a lot of … There have been all sorts of farewell moments in people's lives and careers which they have then rescinded, but I think I can fairly categorically say that there won't be a tour or an album again that I take part in. It isn't to do with animosity or anything like that. It's just that I've done that. I've been there, I've done it." Just over two years after the death of Barrett, on 15 September 2008 Richard Wright died of cancer, aged 65. He was lauded by his surviving bandmates, Gilmour in particular, for his influence on the overall sound of Pink Floyd. In April 2009 it was revealed that the band had initiated legal action against EMI for an alleged failure to pay royalties. The dispute is reportedly connected to an ongoing disagreement with Terra Firma Capital Partners, the private equity firm who took ownership of EMI in 2007. Pink Floyd are one of history's most successful and influential rock bands, with over 200 million album sales worldwide. They have been nominated for and won several awards, including a Grammy in 1995 for "Rock Instrumental Performance" on "Marooned"; inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (17 January 1996) and UK Music Hall of Fame (16 November 2005), and the Polar Music Prize for their contribution to contemporary music in 2008 when Waters and Mason received the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Technical awards include a "Best Engineered Non-Classical Album" Grammy in 1980 for The Wall; and a BAFTA for sound in 1982 for the film. The group has sold over 200 million albums worldwide, including 74.5 million certified units in the United States. Pink Floyd discography 1967 "See Emily Play" - #134 1973 "Money" - #13 1973 "Us and Them"/"Time" (double A-side) - #101 1979 "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II" - #1 1980 "Run Like Hell" - #53 1983 "Not Now John" - Main #7 1983 "Your Possible Pasts" - Main #8 1987 "Learning to Fly" - #70 - Main #1 1987 "On the Turning Away" - Main #1 1987 "One Slip" - Main #5 1994 "Keep Talking" - Main #1 1994 "Take It Back" - #73 - Main #4 1994 "High Hopes" - Main #7 Factoid: The Chicago Bulls use Pink Floyd's "On The Run" when they do the opponent's starting lineup. "Time" http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-jhihmczs

7. Bob Dylan 9 of 24 lists - 135 points - highest ranked #1 Soxy Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman; May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet and painter who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was, at first, an informal chronicler and then an apparently reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'," became anthems for both the civil rights and the anti-war movements. Dylan's early lyrics incorporated political, social and philosophical as well as literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. While expanding and personalizing genres, he has explored many traditions of American song, from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll and rockabilly to English, Scottish and Irish folk music, and even jazz and swing. Dylan performs with guitar, piano and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. His accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been central to his career, but his greatest contribution is generally considered to be his songwriting. He has received numerous awards over the years including Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy Awards; he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2008 a Bob Dylan Pathway was opened in the singer's honor in his birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2008 awarded him a special citation for what they called his profound impact on popular music and American culture, "marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." Dylan released his most recent studio album, Christmas in the Heart, on October 13, 2009. The album comprised traditional Christmas songs, including "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing". All Dylan's royalties from the sale of this album will benefit the charity Feeding America in the USA, and similar charities in overseas markets. Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham) was born in St. Mary's Hospital on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised there and in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range west of Lake Superior. His paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to the United States following the antisemitic pogroms of 1905. His mother's grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in the United States in 1902. In his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan writes that his paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kyrgyz and her family originated from Istanbul. Dylan’s parents, Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone, were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community. Robert Zimmerman lived in Duluth until age six, when his father was stricken with polio and the family returned to his mother's home town, Hibbing, where Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood. Robert Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio—first to blues and country stations broadcasting from Shreveport, Louisiana and, later, to early rock and roll. He formed several bands in high school: The Shadow Blasters was short-lived, but his next, The Golden Chords, lasted longer and played covers of popular songs. Their performance of Danny and the Juniors' "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show was so loud that the principal cut the microphone off. In 1959 he saw Buddy Holly in the Winter Dance Party tour and later recalled how he made eye contact with him. In his 1959 school yearbook, Robert Zimmerman listed as his ambition "To join Little Richard." The same year, using the name Elston Gunnn (sic), he performed two dates with Bobby Vee, playing piano and providing handclaps. Zimmerman moved to Minneapolis in September 1959 and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. His early focus on rock and roll gave way to an interest in American folk music. In 1985 Dylan explained the attraction that folk music had exerted on him: "The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings." He soon began to perform at the 10 O'clock Scholar, a coffee house a few blocks from campus, and became actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit. During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan." In a 2004 interview, Dylan explained: "You're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free." In his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan acknowledged that he was familiar with the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Dylan dropped out of college at the end of his freshman year. In January 1961, he moved to New York City, hoping to perform there and visit his musical idol Woody Guthrie, who was seriously ill with Huntington's Disease in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. Guthrie had been a revelation to Dylan and was the biggest influence on his early performances. Describing Guthrie's impact on him, Dylan later wrote: "The songs themselves had the infinite sweep of humanity in them ... [He] was the true voice of the American spirit. I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie's greatest disciple." As well as visiting Guthrie in the hospital, Dylan befriended Guthrie's acolyte Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Much of Guthrie's repertoire was actually channeled through Elliott, and Dylan paid tribute to Elliott in Chronicles (2004). From February 1961, Dylan played at various clubs around Greenwich Village. In September, he eventually gained public recognition when Robert Shelton wrote a positive review in The New York Times of a show at Gerde's Folk City. The same month Dylan played harmonica on folk singer Carolyn Hester's eponymous third album, which brought his talents to the attention of the album's producer John Hammond. Hammond signed Dylan to Columbia Records in October. The performances on his first Columbia album, Bob Dylan (1962), consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material combined with two original compositions. The album made little impact, selling only 5,000 copies in its first year, just enough to break even. Within Columbia Records, some referred to the singer as "Hammond's Folly" and suggested dropping his contract. Hammond defended Dylan vigorously, and Johnny Cash was also a powerful ally of Dylan. While working for Columbia, Dylan also recorded several songs under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt, for Broadside Magazine, a folk music magazine and record label. Dylan made two important career moves in August 1962. He legally changed his name to Robert Dylan, and signed a management contract with Albert Grossman. Grossman remained Dylan's manager until 1970, and was notable both for his sometimes confrontational personality, and for the fiercely protective loyalty he displayed towards his principal client.[33] Dylan would subsequently describe Grossman thus: "He was kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure ... you could smell him coming."[23] Tensions between Grossman and John Hammond led to Hammond being replaced as the producer of Dylan's second album by the young African American jazz producer Tom Wilson. From December 1962 to January 1963, Dylan made his first trip to the UK. He had been invited by TV director Philip Saville to appear in a drama, The Madhouse on Castle Street, which Saville was directing for BBC Television. At the end of the play, Dylan performed Blowin' in the Wind, one of the first major public performances of the song. While in London, Dylan performed at several London folk clubs, including Les Cousins, The Pinder Of Wakefield, and Bunjies. He also learned new songs from several UK performers, including Martin Carthy. By the time Dylan's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was released in May 1963, he had begun to make his name as both a singer and a songwriter. Many of the songs on this album were labeled protest songs, inspired partly by Guthrie and influenced by Pete Seeger's passion for topical songs. "Oxford Town", for example, was a sardonic account of James Meredith's ordeal as the first black student to risk enrollment at the University of Mississippi. His most famous song at this time, "Blowin' in the Wind", partially derived its melody from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", while its lyrics questioned the social and political status quo. The song was widely recorded and became an international hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting a precedent for many other artists who would have hits with Dylan's songs. "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" was based on the tune of the folk ballad "Lord Randall". With its veiled references to nuclear apocalypse, it gained even more resonance when the Cuban missile crisis developed only a few weeks after Dylan began performing it. Like "Blowin' in the Wind", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" marked an important new direction in modern songwriting, blending a stream-of-consciousness, imagist lyrical attack with a traditional folk form. Blowin' in the Wind was, according to critic Andy Gill, "the song with which Dylan's name is most inextricably linked, and safeguarded his reputation as a civil libertarian through any number of changes in style and attitude." While Dylan's topical songs solidified his early reputation, Freewheelin' also included a mixture of love songs and jokey, surreal talking blues. Humor was a large part of Dylan's persona, and the range of material on the album impressed many listeners, including The Beatles. George Harrison said, "We just played it, just wore it out. The content of the song lyrics and just the attitude—it was incredibly original and wonderful." The rough edge of Dylan's singing was unsettling to some early listeners but an attraction to others. Describing the impact that Dylan had on her and her husband, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: "When we first heard this raw, very young, and seemingly untrained voice, frankly nasal, as if sandpaper could sing, the effect was dramatic and electrifying." Many of his most famous early songs first reached the public through more immediately palatable versions by other performers, such as Joan Baez, who became Dylan's advocate, as well as his lover. Baez was influential in bringing Dylan to national and international prominence by recording several of his early songs and inviting him onstage during her own concerts. Others who recorded and had hits with Dylan's songs in the early and mid-1960s included The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, The Hollies, Peter, Paul and Mary, Manfred Mann, and The Turtles. Most attempted to impart a pop feel and rhythm to the songs, while Dylan and Baez performed them mostly as sparse folk pieces. The cover versions became so ubiquitous that CBS started to promote him with the tag "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan." "Mixed Up Confusion", recorded during the Freewheelin' sessions with a backing band, was released as a single and then quickly withdrawn. In contrast to the mostly solo acoustic performances on the album, the single showed a willingness to experiment with a rockabilly sound. Cameron Crowe described it as "a fascinating look at a folk artist with his mind wandering towards Elvis Presley and Sun Records." In May 1963, Dylan's political profile was raised when he walked out of The Ed Sullivan Show. During rehearsals, Dylan had been informed by CBS Television's "head of program practices" that the song he was planning to perform, "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", was potentially libelous to the John Birch Society. Rather than comply with the censorship, Dylan refused to appear on the program. Dylan said of "The Times They Are a-Changin'": "This was definitely a song with a purpose. I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close and allied together at that time." By this time, Dylan and Baez were both prominent in the civil rights movement, singing together at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Dylan's third album, The Times They Are a-Changin', reflected a more politicized and cynical Dylan. The songs often took as their subject matter contemporary, real life stories, with "Only A Pawn In Their Game" addressing the murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers; and the Brechtian "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" the death of black hotel barmaid Hattie Carroll, at the hands of young white socialite William Zantzinger. On a more general theme, "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "North Country Blues" address the despair engendered by the breakdown of farming and mining communities. This political material was accompanied by two personal love songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "One Too Many Mornings". By the end of 1963, Dylan felt both manipulated and constrained by the folk and protest movements. These tensions were publicly displayed when, accepting the "Tom Paine Award" from the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an intoxicated Dylan brashly questioned the role of the committee, characterized the members as old and balding, and claimed to see something of himself (and of every man) in Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded on a single June evening in 1964, had a lighter mood than its predecessor. The surreal, humorous Dylan reemerged on "I Shall Be Free #10" and "Motorpsycho Nightmare". "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" are romantic and passionate love songs, while "Black Crow Blues" and "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" suggest the rock and roll soon to dominate Dylan's music. "It Ain't Me Babe", on the surface a song about spurned love, has been described as a rejection of the role his reputation had thrust at him. His newest direction was signaled by two lengthy songs: the impressionistic "Chimes of Freedom", which sets elements of social commentary against a denser metaphorical landscape in a style later characterized by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images," and "My Back Pages", which attacks the simplistic and arch seriousness of his own earlier topical songs and seems to predict the backlash he was about to encounter from his former champions as he took a new direction. In the latter half of 1964 and 1965, Dylan’s appearance and musical style changed rapidly, as he made his move from leading contemporary songwriter of the folk scene to folk-rock pop-music star. His scruffy jeans and work shirts were replaced by a Carnaby Street wardrobe, sunglasses day or night, and pointy "Beatle boots". A London reporter wrote: "Hair that would set the teeth of a comb on edge. A loud shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo." Dylan also began to spar in increasingly surreal ways with his interviewers. Appearing on the Les Crane TV show and asked about a movie he was planning to make, he told Crane it would be a cowboy horror movie. Asked if he played the cowboy, Dylan replied, "No, I play my mother." Dylan's March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was yet another stylistic leap, featuring his first recordings made with electric instruments. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" and was provided with an early music video courtesy of D. A. Pennebaker's cinéma vérité presentation of Dylan's 1965 tour of England, Dont Look Back. Its free association lyrics both harked back to the manic energy of Beat poetry and were a forerunner of rap and hip-hop. By contrast, the B side of the album consisted of four long songs on which Dylan accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. "Mr. Tambourine Man" quickly became one of Dylan's best known songs when The Byrds recorded an electric guitar version which reached number one in both the U.S. and the U.K. charts. "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" would be acclaimed as two of Dylan's most important compositions. In the summer of 1965, as the headliner at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed his first electric set since his high school days with a pickup group drawn mostly from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, featuring Mike Bloomfield (guitar), Sam Lay (drums) and Jerome Arnold (bass), plus Al Kooper (organ) and Barry Goldberg (piano). Dylan had appeared at Newport in 1963 and 1964, but in 1965 Dylan, met with a mix of cheering and booing, left the stage after only three songs. As one version of the legend has it, the boos were from the outraged folk fans whom Dylan had alienated by appearing, unexpectedly, with an electric guitar. An alternative account claims audience members were merely upset by poor sound quality and a surprisingly short set. Dylan's 1965 Newport performance provoked an outraged response from the folk music establishment. Ewan MacColl wrote in Sing Out!, "Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside traditions formulated over time ... But what of Bobby Dylan? ... a youth of mediocre talent. Only a non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel." On July 29, just four days after his controversial performance at Newport, Dylan was back in the studio in New York, recording "Positively 4th Street". The lyrics teemed with images of vengeance and paranoia, and it was widely interpreted as Dylan's put-down of former friends from the folk community—friends he had known in the clubs along West 4th Street. In July 1965, Dylan released the single "Like a Rolling Stone", which peaked at #2 in the U.S. and at #4 in the UK charts. At over six minutes in length, the song has been widely credited with altering attitudes about what a pop single could convey. Bruce Springsteen, in his speech during Dylan's inauguration into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said that on first hearing the single, "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind". In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine listed it at #1 on its list of "The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The song also opened Dylan's next album, Highway 61 Revisited, titled after the road that led from Dylan's Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans. The songs were in the same vein as the hit single, flavored by Mike Bloomfield's blues guitar and Al Kooper's organ riffs. "Desolation Row" offers the sole acoustic exception, with Dylan making surreal allusions to a variety of figures in Western culture during this long song. Andy Gill wrote, "'Desolation Row' is an 11-minute epic of entropy which takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities featuring a huge cast of iconic characters, some historical (Einstein, Nero), some biblical (Noah, Cain and Abel), some fictional (Ophelia, Romeo, Cinderella), some literary (T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), and some who fit into none of the above categories, notably Dr. Filth and his dubious nurse" In support of the record, Dylan was booked for two U.S. concerts and set about assembling a band. Mike Bloomfield was unwilling to leave the Butterfield Band, so Dylan mixed Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks from his studio crew with bar-band stalwarts Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, best known at the time for being part of Ronnie Hawkins's backing band The Hawks. On August 28 at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, the group was heckled by an audience still annoyed by Dylan's electric sound. The band's reception on September 3 at the Hollywood Bowl was more favorable. While Dylan and the Hawks met increasingly receptive audiences on tour, their studio efforts floundered. Producer Bob Johnston persuaded Dylan to record in Nashville in February 1966, and surrounded him with a cadre of top-notch session men. At Dylan's insistence, Robertson and Kooper came down from New York City to play on the sessions. The Nashville sessions produced the double-album Blonde on Blonde (1966), featuring what Dylan later called "that thin wild mercury sound". Al Kooper described the album as "taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion": the musical world of Nashville and the world of the "quintessential New York hipster" Bob Dylan. On November 22, 1965, Dylan secretly married 25-year-old former model Sara Lownds. Some of Dylan’s friends (including Ramblin' Jack Elliott) claim that, in conversation immediately after the event, Dylan denied that he was married. Journalist Nora Ephron first made the news public in the New York Post in February 1966 with the headline “Hush! Bob Dylan is wed.” Dylan undertook a world tour of Australia and Europe in the spring of 1966. Each show was split into two parts. Dylan performed solo during the first half, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica. In the second half, backed by the Hawks, he played high voltage electric music. This contrast provoked many fans, who jeered and slow handclapped. The tour culminated in a famously raucous confrontation between Dylan and his audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in England. (A recording of this concert, Bob Dylan Live 1966, was finally released in 1998.) At the climax of the evening, one fan, angry with Dylan's electric sound, shouted: "Judas!" to which Dylan responded, "I don't believe you ... You're a liar!". Dylan turned to his band and said "Play it f***ing loud!", and they launched into the final song of the night with gusto—"Like a Rolling Stone". After his European tour, Dylan returned to New York, but the pressures on him continued to increase. ABC Television had paid an advance for a TV show they could screen. His publisher, Macmillan, was demanding a finished manuscript of the poem/novel Tarantula. Manager Albert Grossman had already scheduled an extensive concert tour for that summer and fall. On July 29, 1966, Dylan crashed his 500cc Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle on a road near his home in Woodstock, New York, throwing him to the ground. Though the extent of his injuries were never fully disclosed, Dylan said that he broke several vertebrae in his neck. Mystery still surrounds the circumstances of the accident since no ambulance was called to the scene and Dylan was not hospitalized. Dylan later expressed concern about where his career and private life were headed up until the point of the crash: "When I had that motorcycle accident ... I woke up and caught my senses, I realized that I was just workin' for all these leeches. And I didn't want to do that. Plus, I had a family and I just wanted to see my kids." Many biographers believe that the crash offered Dylan the much-needed chance to escape from the pressures that had built up around him. In the wake of his accident, Dylan withdrew from the public and, apart from a few select appearances, did not tour again for eight years. Once Dylan was well enough to resume creative work, he began editing film footage of his 1966 tour for Eat the Document, a rarely exhibited follow-up to Dont Look Back. A rough-cut was shown to ABC Television and was promptly rejected as incomprehensible to a mainstream audience. In 1967 he began recording music with the Hawks at his home and in the basement of the Hawks' nearby house, called "Big Pink". These songs, initially compiled as demos for other artists to record, provided hit singles for Julie Driscoll ("This Wheel's on Fire"), The Byrds ("You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "Nothing Was Delivered"), and Manfred Mann (Quinn the Eskimo ("The Mighty Quinn"). Columbia belatedly released selections from them in 1975 as The Basement Tapes. Over the years, more and more of the songs recorded by Dylan and his band in 1967 appeared on various bootleg recordings, culminating in a five-CD bootleg set titled The Genuine Basement Tapes, containing 107 songs and alternate takes. In the coming months, the Hawks recorded the album Music from Big Pink using songs they first worked on in their basement in Woodstock, and renamed themselves The Band, thus beginning a long and successful recording and performing career of their own. In October and November 1967, Dylan returned to Nashville. Back in the recording studio after a 19-month break, he was accompanied only by Charlie McCoy on bass, Kenny Buttrey on drums, and Pete Drake on steel guitar. The result was John Wesley Harding, a quiet, contemplative record of shorter songs, set in a landscape that drew on both the American West and the Bible. The sparse structure and instrumentation, coupled with lyrics that took the Judeo-Christian tradition seriously, marked a departure not only from Dylan's own work but from the escalating psychedelic fervor of the 1960s musical culture. It included "All Along the Watchtower", with lyrics derived from the Book of Isaiah (21:5–9). The song was later recorded by Jimi Hendrix, whose version Dylan himself would later acknowledge as definitive. Woody Guthrie died on October 3, 1967, and Dylan made his first live appearance in twenty months at a Guthrie memorial concert held at Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968, where he was backed by The Band. Dylan's next release, Nashville Skyline (1969), was virtually a mainstream country record featuring instrumental backing by Nashville musicians, a mellow-voiced Dylan, a duet with Johnny Cash, and the hit single "Lay Lady Lay", which had been originally written for the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack, but was not submitted in time to make the final cut. In May 1969, Dylan appeared on the first episode of Johnny Cash's new television show, duetting with Cash on "Girl from the North Country", "I Threw It All Away" and "Living the Blues". Dylan next travelled to England to top the bill at the Isle of Wight rock festival on August 31, 1969, after rejecting overtures to appear at the Woodstock Festival far closer to his home. In the early 1970s critics charged Dylan's output was of varied and unpredictable quality. Rolling Stone magazine writer and Dylan loyalist Greil Marcus notoriously asked "What is this s***?" upon first listening to 1970's Self Portrait. In general, Self Portrait, a double LP including few original songs, was poorly received. Later that year, Dylan released New Morning, which some considered a return to form. In November 1968, Dylan had co-written "I'd Have You Anytime" with George Harrison; Harrison recorded both "I'd Have You Anytime" and Dylan's "If Not For You" for his 1970 solo triple album All Things Must Pass. Dylan's surprise appearance at Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh attracted much media coverage, reflecting that Dylan's live appearances had become rare. Between March 16 and 19, 1971, Dylan reserved three days at Blue Rock Studios, a small studio in New York's Greenwich Village. These sessions resulted in one single, "Watching The River Flow", and a new recording of "When I Paint My Masterpiece". On November 4, 1971 Dylan recorded "George Jackson" which he released a week later. For many, the single was a surprising return to protest material, mourning the killing of Black Panther George Jackson in San Quentin Prison that summer. In 1972 Dylan signed onto Sam Peckinpah's film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, providing songs and backing music for the movie, and playing the role of "Alias", a member of Billy's gang who had some basis in history. Despite the film's failure at the box office, the song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" has proven its durability as one of Dylan's most extensively covered songs. Dylan began 1973 by signing with a new record label, David Geffen's Asylum Records, when his contract with Columbia Records expired. On his next album, Planet Waves, he used The Band as backing group, while rehearsing for a major tour. The album included two versions of "Forever Young", which became one of his most popular songs. Christopher Ricks has connected the chorus of this song with John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", which contains the line "For ever panting, and for ever young." As one critic described it, the song projected "something hymnal and heartfelt that spoke of the father in Dylan", and Dylan himself commented: "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental." Biographer Howard Sounes noted that Jakob Dylan believed the song was about him. Columbia Records simultaneously released Dylan, a haphazard collection of studio outtakes (almost exclusively cover songs), which was widely interpreted as a churlish response to Dylan's signing with a rival record label. In January 1974 Dylan and The Band embarked on their high-profile, coast-to-coast North American tour. A live double album of the tour, Before the Flood, was released on Asylum Records. Dylan said of the opening song from Blood on the Tracks: "I was trying to deal with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you're never sure if the first person is talking or the third person. But as you look at the whole thing it really doesn't matter." After the tour, Dylan and his wife became publicly estranged. He filled a small red notebook with songs about relationships and ruptures, and quickly recorded a new album entitled Blood on the Tracks in September 1974. Dylan delayed the album's release, however, and re-recorded half of the songs at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis with production assistance from his brother David Zimmerman. During this time, Dylan returned to Columbia Records which eventually reissued his Asylum albums. Released in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks received mixed reviews. In the NME, Nick Kent described "the accompaniments [as] often so trashy they sound like mere practise takes." In Rolling Stone, reviewer Jon Landau wrote that "the record has been made with typical shoddiness." However, over the years critics have come to see it as one of Dylan's greatest achievements, perhaps the only serious rival to his mid-60s trilogy of albums. In Salon.com, Bill Wyman wrote: "Blood on the Tracks is his only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion. It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-'60s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years." Novelist Rick Moody called it "the truest, most honest account of a love affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape." That summer Dylan wrote his first successful "protest" song in 12 years, championing the cause of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who had been imprisoned for a triple murder in Paterson, New Jersey. After visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote "Hurricane", presenting the case for Carter's innocence. Despite its 8:32 minute length, the song was released as a single, peaking at #33 on the U.S. Billboard Chart, and performed at every 1975 date of Dylan's next tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. The tour was a varied evening of entertainment featuring about one hundred performers and supporters drawn from the resurgent Greenwich Village folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Joni Mitchell. David Mansfield, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, Joan Baez, and violinist Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan discovered while she was walking down the street, her violin case hanging on her back. Allen Ginsberg accompanied the troupe, staging scenes for the film Dylan was simultaneously shooting. Sam Shepard was initially hired to write the film's screenplay, but ended up accompanying the tour as informal chronicler. Running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, the tour encompassed the release of the album Desire, with many of Dylan's new songs featuring an almost travelogue-like narrative style, showing the influence of his new collaborator, playwright Jacques Levy. The spring 1976 half of the tour was documented by a TV concert special, Hard Rain, and the LP Hard Rain; no concert album from the better-received and better-known opening half of the tour was released until 2002's Live 1975. The fall 1975 tour with the Revue also provided the backdrop to Dylan's nearly four-hour film Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling and improvised narrative, mixed with concert footage and reminiscences. Released in 1978, the movie received generally poor, sometimes scathing, reviews and had a very brief theatrical run. Later in that year, Dylan allowed a two-hour edit, dominated by the concert performances, to be more widely released. In November 1976 Dylan appeared at The Band's "farewell" concert, along with other guests including Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison and Neil Young. Martin Scorsese's acclaimed cinematic chronicle of this show, The Last Waltz, was released in 1978 and included about half of Dylan's set. In 1976, Dylan also wrote and duetted on the song "Sign Language" for Eric Clapton's No Reason To Cry. Dylan's 1978 album Street-Legal, recorded with a large, pop-rock band, complete with female backing vocalists, was lyrically one of his more complex and cohesive. It suffered, however, from a poor sound mix (attributed to his studio recording practices), submerging much of its instrumentation until its remastered CD release nearly a quarter century later. In the late 1970s, Dylan became a born-again Christian and released two albums of Christian gospel music. Slow Train Coming (1979) featured the guitar accompaniment of Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits) and was produced by veteran R&B producer, Jerry Wexler. Wexler recalled that when Dylan had tried to evangelize him during the recording, he replied: "Bob, you're dealing with a sixty-two-year old Jewish atheist. Let's just make an album." The album won Dylan a Grammy Award as "Best Male Vocalist" for the song "Gotta Serve Somebody". The second evangelical album, Saved (1980), received mixed reviews, although Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone declared the album was far superior, musically, to its predecessor. When touring from the fall of 1979 through the spring of 1980, Dylan would not play any of his older, secular works, and he delivered declarations of his faith from the stage, such as: Years ago they ... said I was a prophet. I used to say, "No I'm not a prophet" they say "Yes you are, you're a prophet." I said, "No it's not me." They used to say "You sure are a prophet." They used to convince me I was a prophet. Now I come out and say Jesus Christ is the answer. They say, "Bob Dylan's no prophet." They just can't handle it. Dylan's embrace of Christianity was unpopular with some of his fans and fellow musicians. Shortly before his murder, John Lennon recorded "Serve Yourself" in response to Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody". By 1981, while Dylan's Christian faith was obvious, Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times that "neither age (he's now 40) nor his much-publicized conversion to born-again Christianity has altered his essentially iconoclastic temperament." In the fall of 1980 Dylan briefly resumed touring for a series of concerts billed as "A Musical Retrospective", where he restored several of his popular 1960s songs to the repertoire. Shot of Love, recorded the next spring, featured Dylan's first secular compositions in more than two years, mixed with explicitly Christian songs. The haunting "Every Grain of Sand" reminded some critics of William Blake’s verses. In the 1980s the quality of Dylan's recorded work varied, from the well-regarded Infidels in 1983 to the panned Down in the Groove in 1988. Critics such as Michael Gray condemned Dylan's 1980s albums both for showing an extraordinary carelessness in the studio and for failing to release his best songs. The Infidels recording sessions, for example, produced several notable songs that Dylan left off the album. Most well regarded of these were "Blind Willie McTell" (a tribute to the dead blues singer and an evocation of African American history), "Foot of Pride" and "Lord Protect My Child". These songs were later released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991. Between July 1984 and March 1985, Dylan recorded his next studio album, Empire Burlesque. Arthur Baker, who had remixed hits for Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper, was asked to engineer and mix the album. Baker has said he felt he was hired to make Dylan's album sound "a little bit more contemporary". Dylan sang on USA for Africa's famine relief fundraising single "We Are the World". On July 13, 1985, he appeared at the climax at the Live Aid concert at JFK Stadium, Philadelphia. Backed by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, Dylan performed a ragged version of "Hollis Brown", his ballad of rural poverty, and then said to the worldwide audience exceeding one billion people: "I hope that some of the money ... maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe ... one or two million, maybe ... and use it to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the banks." His remarks were widely criticized as inappropriate, but they did inspire Willie Nelson to organize a series of events, Farm Aid, to benefit debt-ridden American farmers. In April 1986, Dylan made a foray into the world of rap music when he added vocals to a verse of Kurtis Blow's "Street Rock", which appeared on Blow's album Kingdom Blow. Credited with making arrangements for Dylan's performance are veteran singer-songwriter-producer, Wayne K. Garfield, who conceived the collaboration and former Dylan back-up singer, Debra Byrd, who is now head vocal coach for American Idol. In July 1986 Dylan released Knocked Out Loaded, an album containing three cover songs (by Little Junior Parker, Kris Kristofferson and the traditional gospel hymn "Precious Memories"), three collaborations with other writers (Tom Petty, Sam Shepard and Carole Bayer Sager), and two solo compositions by Dylan. The album received mainly negative reviews; Rolling Stone called it "a depressing affair", and it was the first Dylan album since Freewheelin' (1963) to fail to make the Top 50. Since then, some critics have called the 11-minute epic that Dylan co-wrote with Sam Shepard, 'Brownsville Girl', a work of genius. In 1986 and 1987, Dylan toured extensively with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, sharing vocals with Petty on several songs each night. Dylan also toured with The Grateful Dead in 1987, resulting in a live album Dylan & The Dead. This album received some very negative reviews: Allmusic said, "Quite possibly the worst album by either Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead." After performing with these musical permutations, Dylan initiated what came to be called The Never Ending Tour on June 7, 1988, performing with a tight back-up band featuring guitarist G. E. Smith. Dylan would continue to tour with this small but constantly evolving band for the next 20 years. In 1987, Dylan starred in Richard Marquand's movie Hearts of Fire, in which he played Billy Parker, a washed-up-rock-star-turned-chicken farmer whose teenage lover (Fiona) leaves him for a jaded English synth-pop sensation (played by Rupert Everett). Dylan also contributed two original songs to the soundtrack—"Night After Night", and "I Had a Dream About You, Baby", as well as a cover of John Hiatt's "The Usual". The film was a critical and commercial flop. Dylan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 1988. Bruce Springsteen's induction speech declared: "Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. He showed us that just because music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual." Dylan then released the album Down in the Groove, which was even more unsuccessful in its sales than his previous studio album. The song "Silvio", however, had some success as a single. Later that spring, Dylan was a co-founder and member of the Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty returning to the album charts with the multi-platinum selling Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1. Despite Orbison's death in December 1988, the remaining four recorded a second album in May 1990, which they released with the unexpected title Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3. Dylan finished the decade on a critical high note with Oh Mercy produced by Daniel Lanois. Rolling Stone magazine called the album "both challenging and satisfying". The track "Most of the Time", a lost love composition, was later prominently featured in the film High Fidelity, while "What Was It You Wanted?" has been interpreted both as a catechism and a wry comment on the expectations of critics and fans. The religious imagery of "Ring Them Bells" struck some critics as a re-affirmation of faith. Dylan's 1990s began with Under the Red Sky (1990), an about-face from the serious Oh Mercy. The album contained several apparently simple songs, including "Under the Red Sky" and "Wiggle Wiggle". The album was dedicated to "Gabby Goo Goo"; this was later explained as a nickname for the daughter of Dylan and Carolyn Dennis, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, who was four at that time. Sidemen on the album included George Harrison, Slash from Guns N' Roses, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Elton John. Despite the stellar line-up, the record received bad reviews and sold poorly. Dylan did not make another studio album of new songs for seven years. In 1991, Dylan was honored by the recording industry with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The event coincided with the start of the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, and Dylan performed his song "Masters of War". Dylan then made a short speech which startled some of the audience. The next few years saw Dylan returning to his roots with two albums covering old folk and blues numbers: Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), featuring interpretations and acoustic guitar work. Many critics and fans commented on the quiet beauty of the song "Lone Pilgrim", penned by a 19th century teacher and sung by Dylan with a haunting reverence. An exception to this rootsy mood came in Dylan's 1991 songwriting collaboration with Michael Bolton; the resulting song "Steel Bars", was released on Bolton's album Time, Love & Tenderness. In November 1994 Dylan recorded two live shows for MTV Unplugged. He claimed his wish to perform a set of traditional songs for the show was overruled by Sony executives who insisted on a greatest hits package. The album produced from it, MTV Unplugged, included "John Brown", an unreleased 1963 song detailing the ravages of both war and jingoism. With a collection of songs reportedly written while snowed-in on his Minnesota ranch, Dylan booked recording time with Daniel Lanois at Miami's Criteria Studios in January 1997. The subsequent recording sessions were, by some accounts, fraught with musical tension. Late that spring, before the album's release, Dylan was hospitalized with a life-threatening heart infection, pericarditis, brought on by histoplasmosis. His scheduled European tour was cancelled, but Dylan made a speedy recovery and left the hospital saying, "I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon." He was back on the road by midsummer, and in early fall performed before Pope John Paul II at the World Eucharistic Conference in Bologna, Italy. The Pope treated the audience of 200,000 people to a sermon based on Dylan's lyric "Blowin' in the Wind". September saw the release of the new Lanois-produced album, Time Out of Mind. With its bitter assessment of love and morbid ruminations, Dylan's first collection of original songs in seven years was highly acclaimed. Rolling Stone said "Mortality bears down hard, while shots of gallows humor ring out." This collection of complex songs won him his first solo "Album of the Year" Grammy Award (he was one of numerous performers on The Concert for Bangladesh, the 1972 winner). The love song "Make You Feel My Love" became a number one country hit for Garth Brooks. In December 1997 U.S. President Bill Clinton presented Dylan with a Kennedy Center Honor in the East Room of the White House, paying this tribute: "He probably had more impact on people of my generation than any other creative artist. His voice and lyrics haven't always been easy on the ear, but throughout his career Bob Dylan has never aimed to please. He's disturbed the peace and discomforted the powerful." Dylan commenced the new millennium by winning his first Oscar; his song "Things Have Changed", penned for the film Wonder Boys, won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award in March 2001. The Oscar (by some reports a facsimile) tours with him, presiding over shows perched atop an amplifier. "Love and Theft" was released on September 11, 2001. Recorded with his touring band, Dylan produced the album himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost. The album was critically well-received and earned nominations for several Grammy awards. Critics noted that Dylan was widening his musical palette to include rockabilly, Western swing, jazz, and even lounge ballads. In 2003 Dylan revisited the evangelical songs from his "born again" period and participated in the CD project Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan. That year also saw the release of the film Masked & Anonymous, a collaboration with TV producer Larry Charles that had Dylan appearing in a cast of well-knowns, including Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz and John Goodman. The film polarised critics: many dismissed it as an “incoherent mess”; a few treated it as a serious work of art. In October 2004, Dylan published the first part of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. The book confounded expectations. Dylan devoted three chapters to his first year in New York City in 1961–1962, virtually ignoring the mid-'60s when his fame was at its height. He also devoted chapters to the albums New Morning (1970) and Oh Mercy (1989). The book reached number two on The New York Times' Hardcover Non-Fiction best seller list in December 2004 and was nominated for a National Book Award. Martin Scorsese's acclaimed film biography No Direction Home was broadcast in September 2005. The documentary focuses on the period from Dylan's arrival in New York in 1961 to his motorcycle crash in 1966, featuring interviews with Suze Rotolo, Liam Clancy, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples, and Dylan himself. The film received a Peabody Award in April 2006 and a Columbia-duPont Award in January 2007. The accompanying soundtrack featured unreleased songs from Dylan's early career. May 3, 2006, was the premiere of Dylan's DJ career, hosting a weekly radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour, for XM Satellite Radio, with song selections revolving around a chosen theme. Dylan played classic and obscure records from the 1930s to the present day, including contemporary artists as diverse as Blur, Prince, L.L. Cool J and The Streets. The show was praised by fans and critics as "great radio," as Dylan told stories and made eclectic references with his sardonic humor, while achieving a thematic beauty with his musical choices. Music author Peter Guralnick commented: "With this show, Dylan is tapping into his deep love—and I would say his belief in—a musical world without borders. I feel like the commentary often reflects the same surrealistic appreciation for the human comedy that suffuses his music." In April 2009, Dylan broadcast the 100th show in his radio series; the theme was "Goodbye" and the final record played was Woody Guthrie's "So Long, It's Been Good To Know Yuh". This has led to speculation that Dylan's radio series may have ended. On August 29, 2006, Dylan released his Modern Times album. In a Rolling Stone interview, Dylan criticized the quality of modern sound recordings and claimed that his new songs "probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em." Despite some coarsening of Dylan’s voice (a critic for The Guardian characterised his singing on the album as "a catarrhal death rattle") most reviewers praised the album, and many described it as the final installment of a successful trilogy, embracing Time Out of Mind and "Love and Theft". Modern Times entered the U.S. charts at number one, making it Dylan's first album to reach that position since 1976's Desire. Nominated for three Grammy Awards, Modern Times won Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album and Bob Dylan also won Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for "Someday Baby". Modern Times was named Album of the Year, 2006, by Rolling Stone magazine, and by Uncut in the UK. On the same day that Modern Times was released the iTunes Music Store released Bob Dylan: The Collection, a digital box set containing all of his albums (773 tracks in total), along with 42 rare and unreleased tracks. August 2007 saw the unveiling of the award-winning film I'm Not There, written and directed by Todd Haynes, bearing the tagline "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan". The movie uses six distinct characters to represent different aspects of Dylan's life, played by Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw. Dylan's previously unreleased 1967 recording from which the film takes its name was released for the first time on the film's original soundtrack; all other tracks are covers of Dylan songs, specially recorded for the movie by a diverse range of artists, including Eddie Vedder, Stephen Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy, Willie Nelson, Cat Power, Richie Havens, and Tom Verlaine. On October 1, 2007, Columbia Records released the triple CD retrospective album Dylan, anthologising his entire career under the Dylan 07 logo. As part of this campaign, Mark Ronson produced a re-mix of Dylan's 1966 tune "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)", which was released as a maxi-single. This was the first time Dylan had sanctioned a re-mix of one of his classic recordings. The sophistication of the Dylan 07 marketing campaign was a reminder that Dylan’s commercial profile had risen considerably since the 1990s. This first became evidenced in 2004, when Dylan appeared in a TV advertisement for Victoria’s Secret lingerie. Three years later, in October 2007, he participated in a multi-media campaign for the 2008 Cadillac Escalade. Then, in 2009, he gave the highest profile endorsement of his career, appearing with rapper Will.i.am in a Pepsi ad that debuted during the telecast of Super Bowl XLIII. The ad, broadcast to a record audience of 98 million viewers, opened with Dylan singing the first verse of "Forever Young" followed by Will.i.am doing a hip hop version of the song's third and final verse. Over a decade after Random House had published Drawn Blank (1994), a book of Dylan's drawings, an exhibit of his art, The Drawn Blank Series, opened in October 2007 at the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz, Germany. This first public exhibition of Dylan's paintings showcased more than 200 watercolors and gouaches made earlier in 2007 from the original drawings. The exhibition's opening also premiered the release of the book Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series, which includes 170 reproductions from the series. In October 2008, Columbia released Volume 8 of Dylan's Bootleg Series, Tell Tale Signs: Rare And Unreleased 1989-2006 as both a two-CD set and a three-CD version with a 150-page hardcover book. The set contains live performances and outtakes from selected studio albums from Oh Mercy to Modern Times, as well as soundtrack contributions and collaborations with David Bromberg and Ralph Stanley. The pricing of the album—the two-CD set went on sale for $18.99 and the three-CD version for $129.99—led to complaints about "rip-off packaging" from some fans and commentators. The release was widely acclaimed by critics. The plethora of alternative takes and unreleased material suggested to Uncut's reviewer: "Tell Tale Signs is awash with evidence of (Dylan's) staggering mercuriality, his evident determination even in the studio to repeat himself as little as possible." Bob Dylan released his album Together Through Life on April 28, 2009. In a conversation with music journalist Bill Flanagan, published on Dylan's website, Dylan explained that the genesis of the record was when French film director Olivier Dahan asked him to supply a song for his new road movie, My Own Love Song; initially only intending to record a single track, "Life Is Hard," "the record sort of took its own direction". Nine of the ten songs on the album are credited as co-written by Bob Dylan and Robert Hunter. The album received largely favourable reviews, although several critics described it as a minor addition to Dylan's canon of work. In Rolling Stone magazine, David Fricke wrote: "The album may lack the instant-classic aura of Love and Theft or Modern Times, but it is rich in striking moments, set in a willful rawness." Dylan critic Andy Gill wrote in The Independent that the record "features Dylan in fairly relaxed, spontaneous mood, content to grab such grooves and sentiments as flit momentarily across his radar. So while it may not contain too many landmark tracks, it's one of the most naturally enjoyable albums you'll hear all year." In its first week of release, the album reached number one in the Billboard 200 chart in the U.S., making Bob Dylan (68 years of age) the oldest artist to ever debut at number one in the Billboard 200 chart. It also reached number one on the UK album charts, 39 years after Dylan's previous UK album chart topper New Morning. This meant that Dylan currently holds the record for the longest gap between solo number one albums in the UK chart. On October 13, 2009, Dylan released a Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart, comprising such Christmas standards as "Little Drummer Boy", "Winter Wonderland" and "Here Comes Santa Claus". The U.S. royalties from the collection will benefit Feeding America, which has been described as the nation's leading hunger-relief charity. The album received generally favourable reviews.The New Yorker commented that Dylan had welded a pre-rock musical sound to "some of his croakiest vocals in a while", and speculated that Dylan's intentions might be ironic: "Dylan has a long and highly publicized history with Christianity; to claim there’s not a wink in the childish optimism of “Here Comes Santa Claus” or “Winter Wonderland” is to ignore a half-century of biting satire." In USA Today, Edna Gundersen pointed out that Dylan was "revisiting yuletide styles popularized by Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, and the Ray Conniff Singers." Gundersen concluded that Dylan "couldn't sound more sentimental or sincere". In an interview published by Street News Service, journalist Bill Flanagan asked Dylan why he had performed the songs in a straightforward style, and Dylan responded: "There wasn’t any other way to play it. These songs are part of my life, just like folk songs. You have to play them straight too." The Never Ending Tour commenced on June 7, 1988, and Dylan has played roughly 100 dates a year for the entirety of the 1990s and the 2000s—a heavier schedule than most performers who started out in the 1960s. By the end of 2008, Dylan and his band had played more than 2100 shows, anchored by long-time bassist Tony Garnier and filled out with talented sidemen. To the dismay of some of his audience, Dylan's performances remain unpredictable as he alters his arrangements and changes his vocal approach night after night. Critical opinion about Dylan’s shows remains divided. Critics such as Richard Williams and Andy Gill have argued that Dylan has found a successful way to present his rich legacy of material. Others have criticised his vocal style as a “one-dimensional growl with which he chews up, mangles and spits out the greatest lyrics ever written so that they are effectively unrecognisable”, and his lack of interest in bonding with his audience. Bob Dylan's European tour of spring 2009 opened in Stockholm on March 22 and ended in Dublin on May 6. Dylan is currently touring the United States, concluding in New York in November. Dylan married Sara Lownds on November 22, 1965. Their first child, Jesse Byron Dylan, was born on January 6, 1966, and they had three more children: Anna Lea, Samuel Isaac Abraham, and Jakob Luke (born December 9, 1969). Dylan also adopted Sara's daughter from a prior marriage, Maria Lownds (later Dylan), (born October 21, 1961 now married to musician Peter Himmelman). In the 1990s his son Jakob Dylan became well known as the lead singer of the band The Wallflowers. Jesse Dylan is a film director and a successful businessman. Bob and Sara Dylan were divorced on June 29, 1977. In June 1986, Dylan married his longtime backup singer Carolyn Dennis (often professionally known as Carol Dennis). Their daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, was born on January 31, 1986. The couple divorced in October 1992. Their marriage and child remained a closely guarded secret until the publication of Howard Sounes' Dylan biography, Down the Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan in 2001. Bob Dylan has been described as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, musically and culturally. Dylan was included in the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century where he was called "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation". In 2004, he was ranked number two in Rolling Stone magazine's list of "Greatest Artists of All Time". Dylan biographer Howard Sounes placed him in even more exalted company when he said, "There are giant figures in art who are sublimely good—Mozart, Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Shakespeare, Dickens. Dylan ranks alongside these artists." Initially modelling his style on the songs of Woody Guthrie, and lessons learnt from the blues of Robert Johnson, Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 60s, infusing it "with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry". Paul Simon suggested that Dylan's early compositions virtually took over the folk genre: "[Dylan's] early songs were very rich ... with strong melodies. 'Blowin' in the Wind' has a really strong melody. He so enlarged himself through the folk background that he incorporated it for a while. He defined the genre for a while." When Dylan made his move from acoustic music to a rock backing, the mix became more complex. For many critics, Dylan's greatest achievement was the cultural synthesis exemplified by his mid-'60s trilogy of albums—Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. In Mike Marqusee's words: "Between late 1964 and the summer of 1966, Dylan created a body of work that remains unique. Drawing on folk, blues, country, R&B, rock'n'roll, gospel, British beat, symbolist, modernist and Beat poetry, surrealism and Dada, advertising jargon and social commentary, Fellini and Mad magazine, he forged a coherent and original artistic voice and vision. The beauty of these albums retains the power to shock and console." One legacy of Dylan’s verbal sophistication was the increasing attention paid by literary critics to his lyrics. Professor Christopher Ricks published a 500 page analysis of Dylan’s work, placing him in the context of Eliot, Keats and Tennyson, and claiming that Dylan was a poet worthy of the same close and painstaking analysis. Former British poet laureate, Andrew Motion, argued that Bob Dylan’s lyrics should be studied in schools. Since 1996, academics have lobbied the Swedish Academy to award Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s voice was, in some ways, as startling as his lyrics. New York Times critic Robert Shelton described Dylan's early vocal style as "a rusty voice suggesting Guthrie's old performances, etched in gravel like Dave Van Ronk's." When the young Bobby Womack told Sam Cooke he didn’t understand Dylan’s vocal style, Cooke explained that: “from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.” Rolling Stone magazine ranked Dylan at number seven in their 2008 listing of “The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time”. Bono commented that “Dylan has tried out so many personas in his singing because it is the way he inhabits his subject matter.” Dylan's influence has been felt in several musical genres. As Edna Gundersen stated in USA Today: "Dylan's musical DNA has informed nearly every simple twist of pop since 1962." Many musicians have testified to Dylan's influence, such as Joe Strummer, who praised Dylan as having "laid down the template for lyric, tune, seriousness, spirituality, depth of rock music." Other major musicians to have acknowledged Dylan's importance include John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Syd Barrett, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, and Tom Waits. There have been dissenters. Because Dylan was widely credited with imbuing pop culture with a new seriousness, the critic Nik Cohn objected: "I can't take the vision of Dylan as seer, as teenage messiah, as everything else he's been worshipped as. The way I see him, he's a minor talent with a major gift for self-hype."[309] Similarly, Australian critic Jack Marx credited Dylan with changing the persona of the rock star: "What cannot be disputed is that Dylan invented the arrogant, faux-cerebral posturing that has been the dominant style in rock since, with everyone from Mick Jagger to Eminem educating themselves from the Dylan handbook." If Dylan’s legacy in the 1960s was seen as bringing intellectual ambition to popular music, as Dylan advances into his sixties, he is today described as a figure who has greatly expanded the folk culture from which he initially emerged. As J. Hoberman wrote in The Village Voice, "Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then—having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning—vanish into a folk tradition of his own making." Bob Dylan discography 1965 "Subterranean Homesick Blues" - #39 1965 "Like a Rolling Stone" - #2 1965 "Positively 4th Street" - #7 1965 "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" - #58 1966 "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" - #119 1966 "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" - #2 1966 "I Want You" - #20 1966 "Just Like a Woman" - #33 1967 "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" - #81 1969 "I Threw It All Away" - #85 1969 "Lay Lady Lay" - #7 1969 "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You" - #50 1970 "Wigwam" - #41 1971 "Watching the River Flow" - #41 1971 "George Jackson" - #33 1973 "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" - #12 1973 "A Fool Such as I" - #55 1974 "On a Night Like This" - #44 1974 "Something There Is About You" - #107 1974 "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)" (w/ The Band) - #66 1975 "Tangled Up in Blue" - #31 1975 "Hurricane" - #33 1976 "Mozambique" - #54 1977 "Rita May" - #110 1979 "Gotta Serve Somebody/"Trouble in Mind"" - #24 1981 "Shot of Love" - Main #38 1984 "Sweetheart Like You" - #55 1985 "Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)" - #103 - Main #19 1986 "Band of the Hand" - Main #28 1986 "Got My Mind Made Up" - Main #23 1988 "Silvio" - Main #5 1989 "Everything Is Broken" - Main #8 1989 "Slow Train" (w/The Grateful Dead) - Main #8 1990 "Unbelievable" - Main #21 1993 "My Back Pages" - Main #26 2006 "Someday Baby" - Main #98 Factoid: The 2009 film Watchmen used "The Times They Are a-Changin'" as a part of the opening credits. The original version was 3:15; but, Dylan extended it to 5:40 so the song would go all the way through to the end of the opening. "The Times They Are a-Changin'" http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-urvuradw

Really think that he learned his A-B-Zs.

QUOTE (Rowand44 @ Nov 28, 2009 -> 07:00 PM) If he didn't roid there would be absolutely no reason for him to plead the 5th, none. Unless the players all agreed beforehand on what they'd talk about and what they wouldn't. /Don Fehr

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Nov 28, 2009 -> 06:22 PM) The paradox. Rickey would be confused, because Rickey is the best of all time. But if Rickey is the best of all time, then how is Rickey the best of all time? /destruction of the universe, Rickey-style.

How would you classify Theo Epstein and Josh Byrnes then Ranger? Epstein went to college, worked for the school paper, got a PR job on an MLB club and worked his way up. Byrnes went to school, got an MLB internship and worked his way up. Neither of these guys are "baseball men", nor are they former players. Would you classify them as fans who got a break?

"He's a man, he's 42!"

Oh, my lumbago.

Umpire spitting incident won't delay Robbie's entrance?

article link: http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=Aqq5...o&type=lgns

Wow.

The big question, why couldn't a scientist just clone Rickey Henderson?

The problem with Pods was not speed or contact, maybe not even as much defense as in the past. The problem was the fact that he'd do Lonnie Smith impersonations when he got on base. He just showed no awareness when he got on base. The man was picked off or thrown out due to poor jumps, more than anyone that I can remember in the last 5 years.

My folks had 8 track - Glen Campbell.

Kicking me while I've fallen and can't get up?

I'm the same age as Ss2k5.

Goin' Back To Philly...?

Forgot that I own Chicago IX - cassette and CD.

QUOTE (flavum @ Nov 28, 2009 -> 01:17 PM) How's your vision? Mark McGwire took steroids, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the feds didn't follow up on with McGwire. Steroids don't always bulk you up. A lot of guys who have been busted are not that large. Alex Sanchez, and Pablo Ozuna as two examples. Giambi is still pretty large, as are Clemens and ARod - yet they have not officially "juiced" in years.

He's on the ballot by the Hall of Fame's choice. Pete Rose is not. This means that the Baseball Hall of Fame has no reason to deny McGwire the opportunity to be voted for.

QUOTE (MHizzle85 @ Nov 28, 2009 -> 01:08 PM) Doesn't matter to me. If he was so innocent then he could of said so when asked. But he chose "not to talk about the past." Perhaps he was told to say that by his lawyer. These guys were probably thinking that Congress was "railroading" them. Making them look bad in the court of public opinion, so they played it straight and refused to "narc" on each other. Until a positive test shows up, like in Bonds' or Palmeiro's case, I see no direct reason to deny McGwire.