Pink Floyd's Richard Wright Left Millions to His Kids

It recently came out that Richard Wright who passed away last year was worth about $26 million, and he left the lion's share to his children, James, 42, Gala, 39, and Ben, 17. None of Wright's three former wives were mentioned in the will. But none of them have contested it, because presumably they were taken care of with divorce settlements.

Here is a cool bit: Wright also made arrangements for 'a really good party' to be held for his friends - putting aside $30,000 with a guest list to be drawn up by James and Gala.

Dang - I was not on that guest list! Didn't they know I am in a PF Tribute Band!!!???

More on this from the Daily Express here.

Sort of DVD Review - David Gilmour at Royal Albert Hall

This is a "sort of" review because a buddy loaned me just the bonus DVD and I have not seen the actual concert DVD. This bonus DVD is loaded with songs from other gigs on the tour and a very good film about the On An Island tour in general. I wanted to suggest watching this bonus DVD for a few reasons:

--There is a very interesting encounter with Roger Waters that is captured on film. This is after the Live 8 reunion but they sure still don't seem very comfortable around each other.

--The film reinforces what I already thought, which was that On An Island is a return to pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd, mood-wise. The tour is also a showcase for Rick Wright, who plays better than ever and is shown in the most light-hearted manner I have ever seen in a film. He always seemed cautious and guarded but not here. Given that he dies the next year, it's a bittersweet observation but still worth watching.

--The guest appearances are very interesting. David Bowie, Nash, Crosby etc. Makes me want to watch the actual concert to see how they performed. The backstage stuff in the bonus film is fun. Bowie is a kick.

--Gilmour comes off as a very cool dude. For example, at some point on the tour, people start futzing around with playing wine glasses at a restaurant. One thing leads to another and some of the band plays the keyboard parts to Shine On on wine glasses at a festival gig in front of thousands of fans, as a dare by Gilmour, and it takes a life of its own from there.

Gilmour also decided to bust into On The Turning Away at a show, but fails to tell the rest of the band, some of whom have never played the song before. Hearing a bootleg of it recently, it's classic. Gilmour forgets the end of the second verse and starts laughing on the mic. Come to think of it, like Iron Maiden with A Matter of Life and Death, Gilmour decides to do his whole new album live on this tour, despite the fact that everyone wants to hear old Floyd hits. He busts out oldies like Echoes, Fat Old Sun and Wots...Uh the Deal. Good for him. Very few bands have the balls to do that. Porcupine Tree is doing it now with their new album The Incident.

Anyway, this has been out for a while but if you haven't seen it and you dig Gilmour or old Floyd, check it out. It's a good bookend with the Live at Gdansk CD/DVD from the end of this same tour, which I reviewed here.

CD Review - David Gilmour Live In Gdańsk

I enjoyed David Gilmour’s solo album On An Island very much but didn’t really find myself coming back to it a lot. But while at Costco the other day, I noticed Gilmour’s spanking new double live CD Live In Gdańsk.

This was recorded during the 2006 tour, where the recently departed Richard Wright was in the band and Gilmour did On An Island end-to-end live. Which made quite a few Floyd fans upset. They thought it was excessive and too much new material. They wanted more Wish You Were Here and less Take A Breath.

But I gotta say, the live version of the new album is fantastic. If you are a fan of Meddle-era Floyd, most of this CD will be pleasing. The live version of On An Island (the song) is particularly good, with a couple of very epic effects-laden solos. In fact, the CD really picks up when it gets to the new material.

The CD opens with Breathe – Time – Breathe from Dark Side, and while it is great to hear Gilmour and Wright reprise their vocal and instrumental roles, we’ve just heard these songs so many times, they lose their luster a bit. But given that Wright just passed away, it’s pretty chilling to hear his vocal spots in Time (every year is getting shorter/never seem to find the time…).

But then we hit the new album, and off it goes. After a few listens, this live version of On An Island is kind of like a new Floyd album, with Wright very present in the mix. Lyrically it can’t touch Waters in his heyday of course, but musically it’s very ethereal, spacy and well, Floydy!

It sounds somewhere between Meddle, Wish You Were Here and The Division Bell. Could easily have been a Floyd album, had Gilmour chosen. I did not get that feeling from the studio version but this live version is of that caliber. The instrumentals are particularly good – Then I Close My Eyes could have come off of a Wright solo album. Very dreamy and mellow with great Gilmour/Wright solos. Smile is from the same songbook at Fat Old Sun. Just gorgeous.

And it does not get much stonier than the live versions of the instrumental Red Sky At Night or the very sleepy but mesmerizing The Blue.

Or does it? Just when I am preferring the solo Gilmour tunes over the re-hashed Floyd, we get to disc 2, where he busts out Astronomy Domine, Fat Old Sun and oh yes, a 25 minute epic version of Echoes – hearing Gilmour and Wright lay out those vocal harmonies one last time is worth the money right there. And the two trade solos in the extended jam section in the middle of song. The delicate end outro with Wright’s keys and Gilmour’s noodlings is a fitting end to that musical partnership. Sad, but beautiful.

Outside of Echoes, Gilmour changes some of the classics up a bit, preferring to take the verses of Shine On right down to just guitar and vocals, and to rock the hell out of the end of Fat Old Sun, for example. On his solo material and the Floyd he chooses to do, it sounds like Gilmour is far more comfy singing mellow songs like Fat Old Sun over angry stuff like Run Like Hell. The end result is a set that has much more to do with Obscured By Clouds and Meddle than The Wall or Animals.

And that works for me. I have felt in the past that Gilmour has made albums with a conscious effort of trying to sound like Floyd (Momentary Lapse) or just maybe being weighed down by the baggage of the Floyd brand (Division Bell). By stripping this project of the name “Pink Floyd,” he liberated himself, played how he felt, and hey what do you know – it sounds like Floyd! And for Wright’s last recorded appearance, it is a fitting swan song.

This show was recorded at the Gdansk, Poland shipyards, and the band is accompanied by the Baltic Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. I only really hear them in the outstanding A Great Day for Freedom and the obligatory Comfortably Numb, though.

The version I got has an accompanying DVD of most of the live set, which I am eager to watch. There is also a very cool feature where you access Gilmour’s Web site via the DVD and obtain free extra downloads – one every month until September 2009. So far you can get another live version of Shine On and a live version of Wot’s…Uh The Deal from Obscured by Clouds! Hopefully one of the upcoming ones will be Wright’s Wearing the Inside Out, which was played on the tour.

One last comment on Wright. Just this week, Gilmour picked up an award for Outstanding Contribution to Music in London. He dedicated the award to Wright and said, "I'm going to dedicate this, if you don't mind, to my old friend and colleague Richard Wright who died a couple of weeks ago, (and) with whom I had worked for 40-odd years now. That's now come to an end. There's all sorts of music that I will not be able to play again without him. That's a source of sadness for me. He deserves this as much as I do. You could say that he was in the position of second fiddle, slightly behind some of the pushier chaps in the front. But his work was mighty important to our entire careers."

Amen.

Pink Floyd's Richard Wright Passes at 65

Pink Floyd keyboardist and co-founder Richard Wright died today at age 65 from cancer.

From the band’s start, to The Wall album, Wright was a crucial, important member of Pink Floyd.

He brought an easy jazzy piano style to the band’s music, but also added fantastic wicked Hammond organ playing and spacey synths and effects. He was also as much a part of the minimalistic style of the band’s arrangements as anyone. He knew that the space between the notes was as important as the notes themselves.

To me, Wright’s greatest Floyd moments are The Great Gig In The Sky, Us and Them and most of Shine On You Crazy Diamond (all of the parts, especially the last few minutes of the album).

But let’s not forget his voice. Wright provided backing vocals on much of Floyd’s music, up to Wish You Were Here. Then it was more of the Gilmour/Waters show. But his harmony work on Echoes from 1971's Meddle is classic Floyd and is a great example of how fragile and dreamy his voice was. You got the sense that he wasn’t very comfortable singing, yet he was probably the best singer in the group until Gilmour and Waters got more dominant post 1975

My take is that Wright provided as much of Floyd’s sound as Gilmour’s guitar and Waters' lyrics – at least up to the Animals album, where he seemed to lose interest, not contributing any new music until the 90s.

Of course this can be as equally attributed to Waters, who slowly squeezed Wright and then Gilmour out of the band by doing all the writing and then all of the singing. When Floyd came back without Waters in 1987, Gilmour involved Wright late in the project and he is barely on A Momentary Lapse of Reason – though I saw him on the tour and he was very involved live.

But by The Division Bell, Wright was back in the fold, contributing some really nice instrumentals and a song called Wearing the Inside Out. He also put out a final solo album (Broken China) that included the song Breakthrough, which he sang on Gilmour’s solo live DVD David Gilmour in Concert (below).

While he wasn’t as vibrant and prolific after 1975, he made a huge impact in the use of keyboards in prog rock. While Keith Emerson, Jon Lord and Rick Wakeman played circles around each other in the 70s, Wright was content to play for the song, and that is tougher than it sounds.

I was really glad when Waters buried the hatchet long enough for the band to reunite at Live8 a couple of years ago. They didn't show him much, but when Wright was on camera at the end solo of Comfortably Numb, he was standing up, rocking the shit out of his organ part. Once again adding crucial textures to Floyd's music.

Now I am really glad that reunion happened because along with the Beatles and The Who, death has robbed us of another reunion of one of the biggest bands in history. As recently as last week, Gilmour was saying he was done with Floyd for good, but now that door is shut for sure.

Weird thing is, when I put my iPod on random shuffle just now, Floyd’s Let There Be More Light came on. One song out of almost 15,000. Spooky.

The photo is from the LA Times. Below are two nice videos. Enjoy:

Breakthrough (from David Gilmour in Concert)


Echoes Part One (from Live at Pompeii)