Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Pink Floyd - Zabrinskie Point - Alternate Version (1970)

In 1968 and 1969, director Michelangelo Antonioni made a Hollywood movie about the counterculture called "Zabrinskie Point." Since it was about the counterculture, he wanted music to match for the soundtrack. He used some existing songs by various bands, and got Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and Kaleidoscope to compose new music for the film.

When the movie came out in early 1970, Pink Floyd only ended up with three songs on the soundtrack. But in fact they recorded a lot more, enough to have an entire album just from them. This is my attempt to create a "Zabrinskie Point" soundtrack featuring only Pink Floyd music.

I could have made this a very long album that gathers up absolutely everything Pink Floyd did that was considered for the soundtrack. But frankly, a lot of it isn't that good. Pink Floyd's "The Early Years" box set has no less than 16 outtakes from the soundtrack. I didn't include any of them, because they're all incidental film music, meant to help set a mood but not far removed from forgettable muzak. Many of them are alternate versions of songs I have included.

What I did instead was pick the strongest songs I could find, so this album would stack up with the other Pink Floyd albums from that era. I included the three songs that made it on the actual soundtrack album, plus two more songs that were bonus tracks released in the 1990s, and one of the songs from "The Early Years" box set. On top of that, I've included two more songs that were on "The Early Years," but slightly different unreleased alternate versions.

One more song, "The Violent Sequence," needs a little explanation. It almost made it to the official soundtrack, but the director decided it sounded too sad. If you listen to it, you'll immediately recognize it as an instrumental version of what would become "Us and Them" on the classic 1973 album "Dark Side of the Moon."

All the songs mentioned above make for a 39-minute long album, which is a decent length. But I've added three more songs that weren't connected to "Zabrinskie Point" at all, because I don't have a better place to put them. These come from another 1970 soundtrack, this one for a documentary about the human body called "The Body." The soundtrack is called "Music from the Body," and it's credited to Roger Waters, the main singer and songwriter for Pink Floyd at the time, and avant garde artist Ron Geesin. Most of the songs are experimental, strange sounding instrumentals that aren't to my taste. But it also includes three folky songs written and sung by Waters, and I've added them here. They sound exactly like lost Pink Floyd songs, and that's basically what they are. In fact, one of them, "Give Birth to a Smile," is performed by all four members of Pink Floyd, so I've credited it to the full band.

01 Heart Beat, Pig Meat [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
02 Country Song [The Red Queen] (Pink Floyd)
03 Aeroplane [Fingal's Cave] [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
04 Crumbling Land (Pink Floyd)
05 Alan's Blues [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
06 Oenone [Early Version] [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
07 Rain in the Country [Unknown Song] [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
08 Come in Number 51, Your Time is Up [Careful with that Axe, Eugene] [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
09 The Violent Sequence [Early Version of Us and Them] [Richard Wright Demo] (Pink Floyd)
10 Chain of Life (Roger Waters & Ron Geesin)
11 Sea, Shell and Stone - Breathe (Roger Waters & Ron Geesin)
12 Give Birth to a Smile (Pink Floyd)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701316/PNKFLYD1970a_ZabrskiPontAlternte_atse.zip.html

The official "Zabrinskie Point" soundtrack seems to have had several different album covers, that I think were for different editions of the album. I picked a version that had the least text, with just the words "Zabrinskie Point" in big letters. Then I added "Pink Floyd" above it.

1 comment:

  1. Looking forward to your take on this. I've listened to several different versions over the years, and none have ever really felt like a Floyd album. I've enjoyed almost everything I've gotten from you so far... so there's a good chance this will be the one that does it for me.

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