A Pocketful of Pink

Against my possible better judgment, I ordered a copy of Pink Floyd's 2-disc "best of" set, Echoes, for under $10. This package been taunting me for some time due to the inclusion of the movie version of The Wall's "When the Tigers Broke Free" (plus a few other tracks that are a bit hard to come by, like "Arnold Layne").

From what I've read, disc masterer (er) extraordinaire James Guthrie spent a hell of a lot of time bickering with the various members of Floyd regarding the tunes to include. He also did a fair amount of work remixing from the original tapes, deciding song order, and working on editing new to make a new flow for the record. Considering how good a job he did on the 5.1 SACD mix for The Dark Side of the Moon, and that this release has the band's blessing, I am more than a bit curious to hear how it turned out.

I briefly considered getting the 2004 remaster of The Final Cut because it also features "Tigers" on it. I gather the original 1983 release was supposed to have the song, but it was removed at the last minute. Color me kooky, but there's a part of me that keeps saying there was a reason it was eliminated, so I've never caved and bought this version (even though everything I've read says a good job was done sticking it in there). I guess when push comes to shove, I prefer my Final Cut as it was originally released. As my faithful blog readers know, I'm 0ld sch00l when it comes to stuff like this.

In other Floyd buying news, I got their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, this weekend. This album is weird. Out of the three pre-Meddle albums I own (this, Atom Heart Mother, and Piper at the Gates of Dawn), the only one I really can get into is Piper. The other two are just too much - good bits here and there, but really far out most of the time. Floyd got better at focusing, and thus making weird listenable, once they did Meddle.