Syd, R.I.P.

In the last six days I have seen the following bands: sonic youth, pearl jam, sleepytime gorilla museum, the stolen babies, & ozric tentacles, among a few others. It all continued to gel (as it has been doing all along) last night when I rolled downtown just after ten at night on my bike through the stormy evening summer ambience. The pupils of my eyes resembled plus signs (one usually tilted into an X) that lent me a certain mollusk related look (thanks to the knockout contacts) and when I tried bargaining w/the cute ticket girl at the box office (because I had shown up late after the 2 opening bands) she finally reached over and handed me this one ticket (saying I could have it). I thanked her profusely and ventured into the venue feeling higher than a kite from her delta nine dreamy sweetness breathed in from the rippling summer airwaves.

Partially motivated by the recent news of Syd Barrett's demise, it was all I could do to keep the refrain from Shine On You Crazy Diamond out of my head. I arrived too late to catch Particle's homage cover of Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun. But when Ozric finally took the stage, their prototypical hippie jam healed all disparaties and disjointed thoughts with a soothing amalgamation of precisely processed keyboard tweakings from Zia, their lovely long brown haired star child of flowers. It turned out to be a starry struck evening of gyrating spot lights and pulsating rhythms that balanced out the feeling of loss left from the void previously occupied in this sector of the universe by one George "Syd" Barrett, the real Pink. As the Ozric Tentacles served up their psychedelic jam of homage to his particles now beaming from this universe to meet the speed of light itself on a journey freed from the grave chains of our second law of thermodynamics, folks caught up in this sonic exuberance danced and sweated away their cares in a communal frenzy of shared abandon. The Ozric Tentacles certainly set the controls for the heart of sun and carried us there by the time they were done. There was even a feeling we may have passed Syd's spirit by while we were all on the fly. It was a fitting celebration for his passing.