Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 1 of 20
*****
[introduction]
Hello, my name is Pierre Schaeffer and I’m an audiovisual syncher. My several advertised synch discoveries can presently be found on baker b.’s personal synchronicities site, along with many capsule descriptions of the ones by baker that we’ll be discussing here.
I decided to go forward with this interview as a type of return favor for baker’s kind use of his web space over the last 2 years to promote my own a/v [audiovisual] synchronicities. I couldn’t help noticing other’s difficulty in understanding baker’s ideas of tiling recently discussed on the Synchronicity Arkive’s discussion board [Synchboard], and I, myself, admit some confusions as well. As my style of synching may be closer to baker’s than anyone else’s, I felt like I also may be the proper person to dig further into the mystery and ask the potentially pointed questions. Baker seems to have definite and fixed ideas about the subject, so it may be a tough nut to crack. So we’re going to do a little question and answer session that may help resolve some of these issues. Maybe not, but I don’t think it would hurt. So baker…
[begin interview]
baker: Yes.
Pierre: …can you explain, in a nutshell, what tiling is and why at least you feel the need to create the terminology at this particular point in time? Is it more a personal thing or can it be expanded to explain other people’s synchronicities as well?
baker: First of all, thanks a whole bunch for giving me the excuse to clarify this subject, both to others and, admittedly, to myself. But, as we agreed, I don’t want to devote our time here just to this subject. I want to bring up some of your new and exciting synchronicity related projects as well.
Pierre: Yes, we’ll get to those in a moment. So about tiling?
baker: Well, a single tile is basically the same as a straight take synch, as I define it in the introduction of my Ultimate Pink Floyd Synchronicities, which has been a kind of flagship site for my thoughts and theories on a/v synching, at least up until recently. A single tiling is simply the positioning of a certain segment of unmanipulated audio material on top, as it were, of a basal and hypothetically unrelated segment of video. The way the tile is set up is through a cue between audio and video components. The cue, which positions the entire segment, is the one degree of manipulation. As I said, it is the same as an audiovisual synchronicity in terms of a straight take, such as we have with both Dark Side of the Rainbow and the 2001-Echoes overlap, which are still our 2 best known synchronicities along with, perhaps, the Alice-Wall combo. Whatever is *inside* this one degree of manipulation is synchronicity, or unmanipulated material. There are several theories out there regarding what makes up the oddities that we see in any one tile, which include pure change, intent, gestalt theories and the related information matrix. I would throw in the pure synchronicity aspect as first raised on the Synchronicity Arkive in regards to Dark Side of the Rainbow, when it first made widespread popularity in 1997. I’m paraphrasing, but I think this, at the time, was considered the most interesting of all theories but the hardest to prove. Mentions of gestalt and related theories came later on, after the second, present wave of synching set in. This was around the beginning of 2000. In studying the matter, and with the huge influx of audiovisual synchronicities being logged into the still new-ish Synchronicity Arkive synch database, I think the importance of gestalt theories should be emphasized. As I described it to one syncher, if the theory about audiovisual synchronicities and what makes them work for the observer is a cake, then gestalt theory must be included as the main ingredient, like the flour for this hypothetical cake. However, at least for me, it doesn’t provide a comprehensive answer. The intent theory, much to my surprise, has stuck around much longer than anticipated, and I think there is a reason for this tied into a dissatisfaction for the gestalt theory as a blanket explanation. This is one of my newer theories on the subject anyway. Continuing the flour analogy, we can say that a certain quality that makes the cake what it is will obviously be missing if we use only the flour in the baking. We have to add sugar, flavoring, and the proverbial icing. This comes from other directions than gestalt theory, but right now I’m more interested in defining exactly what an audiovisual synchronicity has become. Obviously the situation is more complicated that was the case when Dark Side of the Rainbow was one of the few around.
Pierre: You’re talking about manipulation now, and the increased ease of using technology for the creation of synchs.
baker: Yes, partly. What fascinates me most is the moving boundary between the straight take synch and manipulation, as we have in film making. And this is where tiling comes into place.
Pierre: Yes, back to tiling.
baker: So a tile is simply the same as a straight take synchronicity, which has one degree of manipulation represented by the cuing point or simply a cue. As I said, Dark Side of the Rainbow is a single tile, even if we use repeat, and also 2001-Echoes. All the ones I highlight on my Ultimate site would be straight tiles, and these also include Shawn Hare’s Contact-Echoes, my own Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine…
Pierre: Maybe you should rename that one Dark Submarine? Just an idea.
baker: I’ll think about it. And then we have Michael Allen’s Show Truman The Wall, Carlo’s Soft Toy Story, and Dave Bytor’s Rush Wonka Project, of which I’ve isolated the Rush 2112 suite section of the synch as a particularly effective straight take using a single concept. However, I’ll most likely talk about the entire Rush Wonka Project in a minute as one of the earliest — and probably best known still — examples of a complete tiling of a movie in a more complicated way than Dark Side of the Rainbow or Alice-Wall. But the point here is that all of these, as I presented them on my site, are straight take synchs, as are the great majority listed in the Kitchen Synchs, my earlier attempt at a history of the a/v synching field.
Pierre: So where did a/v synching leave this base of single degree manipulation, as you call it, and enter more complicated manipulations?
baker: Well, here we already go back to Dave’s Rush Wonka Project. Here we have Dave overlapping the entire 2112 album with the last part of the Willy Wonka movie, and then filling in the first part of the movie with various other Rush songs. I can’t remember how many off the top of my head, but I’d say there were at least a half dozen from various albums [editor’s note: there are nine total songs before the 2112 album in this synch]. They were chosen by Dave because of their relationship to what is happening onscreen at the time. This is simply a new and different way to create an audiovisual synchronicity. And this led to Dave’s own Rushian Matrix synchronicity and then, quite quickly actually, to the ultra manipulated Being Geddy Lee, where we run into some really tough definitions as to what an audiovisual synchronicity is. When I first began to email Dave in the spring of 2000, he was already in the 1st stages of mapping this huge project out, even though the Rush Wonka Project and Rushian Matrix synchronicities were less than a year old.
Pierre: Moving more into film making.
baker: It turned out to be really an amazing project. Again, I need to study up on what it would compare to presently on the web, but it is a form of illegal art, if not necessarily synchronicity art. I feel my knowledge is insufficient in that area to make a more comprehensive analysis at this time.
Pierre: Well, let’s move on then. Perhaps we can return to Dave’s work later. Let’s go into the Rainbow Sphere, and I think this may be appropriate to begin here because I know at the same time that Dave was relating a lot of details about the beginnings of his Being Geddy Lee, you were talking to him at the same time about this Sphere. This is another thing that you’ve brought up quite a lot recently on the board, and people don’t seem to get it. I also know that this is directly tied into all your personal theories about tiling, and your personal take on Dark Side of the Rainbow. It seems that if you have a different idea about Dark Side of the Rainbow, then we should get that out in the open toward the beginning, because this is the primary synchronicity everyone is familiar with.
baker: It’s interesting, but I bet if you talked to 10 synchers — if there are that many left out there (laughs) — then you’ll get ten ideas of how to run Dark Side of the Rainbow. A lot of this flexibility is dealt with in the Dark Side of the Rainbow page of Mike Johnston’s Synchronicity Arkive. He emphasizes the mutability of this a/v synch, and I agree with this approach. Mike’s page should be the representative for Dark Side of the Rainbow. Even Shawn’s The Definitive List favors a particular brand of Dark Side of the Rainbow, albeit the best known. This is where you simply leave Dark Side of the Moon on repeat mode through the entire Wizard of Oz movie and let it run for about 2 1/3 times to completely tile the film, as it were. I’ve never personally been pleased with this most popular way to run Dark Side of the Rainbow — or the best known way at least. And yet this is the one most in the public eye.
Pierre: You prefer letting the synchronicity end when the album has played one time.
baker: Yeah, and there are some easy reasons for this and then some more complicated ones. The simplest explanation is that I don’t think the synchronicity is strong enough in the repeats to justify carrying on like this. Even during the first run, the synchronicity begins to wind down after the Munchkinland scenes, or after about the first 33 minutes or so. The final 10 can get pretty tedious at times, especially, um, if you don’t use a certain version of The Wizard of Oz movie. Would this be an appropriate time to bring that up?
Pierre: Whatever you wish.
baker: Well, all this is brought up in the Dark Side of the Rainbow page on my site, so I’ll just refer readers of this interview to that link. But basically I’ll just say I prefer to run the synchronicity with the pre-89 version of the film, the one with the black and white Kansas as opposed to the sepia toned one. There are several cuts in this earlier version that seem to make the synchronicity run better, and this becomes more apparent to me after the second of these cuts, right at the end of the Munchkinland scenes. To me, this makes the end of the synch come into focus better, and sharpens a potential interpretation.
Pierre: In our discussions before the interview, you told me that you now see this as what you call a silver tile or tiling. That is, Dark Side of the Rainbow, this one run of Dark Side of the Moon through The Wizard of Oz, represents a one take silver tile, using some of your terminology. Can you explain why you call this a silver tile? And, also, if I may add here, you call the covering of the entire Wizard of Oz movie with the most common version of Dark Side of the Rainbow a gold tile. Can you explain this use of the terms silver and gold tiles here?
baker: Sure. First of all, I want to emphasize that a synch may not be the same as a tile. In the case of Dark Side of the Rainbow it is, but in more manipulated synchs such as Rush Wonka and Rushian Matrix it isn’t. A silver tiling would simply be the covering of a movie with an entire album, in this case Dark Side of the Moon. A gold tiling would similarly be the covering of an entire movie with either a repeating tile, as we have with the most commonly known version of Dark Side of the Rainbow, such as The Definitive List advertises, or using a series of tiles to cover a movie, as we have with Rush Wonka. For the latter, there would be about 7 [sic: 10] individual tiles to cover the movie, with the last tile being the same as an album. In the same way, many people have completed Dark Side of the Rainbow with their own variations of tiling. A syncher I got to know fairly well on the old Film/Album Synchronicity Board, for example, follows up Dark Side of the Moon immediately with Wish You Were Here and then a segment of Animals to completely tile the movie. Others have used The Wall or other Pink Floyd albums after the end of Dark Side of the Moon, and other groups besides Pink Floyd have been employed in this role as well. I think specifically of someone who used Jethro Tull’s Aqualung as a follow up album. In my emails down through the years, suggestions of how to run so-called alternate Dark Side of the Rainbows have been the most common. (pause) So all of these would be examples of completely tiling The Wizard of Oz, to make it a gold tiling. There is a *great* desire to do so by all synchers that are interested in Dark Side of the Rainbow, I’ve found.
Pierre: Except for you.
baker: No, including me I would say. Definitely. But, you see, I do it through The Rainbow Sphere.
Pierre: Ahhh.
baker: The Rainbow Sphere combines the first and last parts of the film to make a complete whole. It is a strange sort of gold tiling, in that it is a film/film overlap, but it is such a nice synchronicity that it resolved all of my needs for continuing Dark Side of the Rainbow itself with other music to complete the movie. And there are also quite logical reasons for leaving DSOTR as a silver tiling, so to speak. The whole heart-brain thing that may be too long to go into here.
Pierre: Well, from what you’ve told me it is a fascinating concept, but I think you’ve dealt with that in your Rainbow Sphere posts found on your web site, and maybe it would be best to pass it over here? Your option, of course.
baker: It is a very key thing, though, this heart filling for Dark Side of the Rainbow and complementary brain filling for The Rainbow Sphere. Let’s stick with the heart. As everyone knows Dark Side of the Moon, the audio component for basically all beginnings of Dark Side of the Rainbow at least, starts and ends with human heartbeats. They fade in at the beginning and fade out at the end. One of the most profound internal synchs, shall we say, of Dark Side of the Rainbow, at least the way I run it, is that the Tinman’s missing heart at the end of the synchronicity is instead filled from Dark Side of the Rainbow and the dubbed soundtrack. The heartbeats that end the album start right when the Tinman declares to the Scarecrow and Dorothy that he has no heart. This is quite profound, as I saw when I first viewed the synch back in ’97.
Pierre: We’ve talked a lot about Dark Side of the Rainbow and perhaps rightly so. Let me speed things up here and say that the silver tile, as you’ve told me earlier, represents the single Dark Side of the Moon as passed through The Wizard of Oz beginning at the end of the third lion roar or thereabouts…
baker: Exact as far as I can tell in the pre-89 version.
Pierre: …and then is lined up through the simultaneous appearance of the bike riding Gulch with the bells beginning the third song of Time on the album. This is about 8 minutes into the film. But this line up also causes the end of side one of the album, the lp version when it was released, to switch from Kansas to Oz right where you should flip the record over. And this is also the first place where you find differences in the pre-89 film and more recent versions with the sepia toned Kansas restored, as we had in the original version of the film.
baker: Yeah, the overlap seems odd. And this is mirrored in the refraction of the white light when it goes through the prism on the cover of the album. The passage from Kansas to Oz represents a refraction of white light to colored light, just as we have the color part of the film beginning with Dorothy’s entrance into Oz proper. And also the two versions of the film begin to refract away from each other here, and this refraction is furthered at the very end of the Munchkinland scenes — the first Oz scenes being the same as the first Munchkinland scenes here, of course.
Pierre: I admit all of these overlapping refractions, shall we say, seem a little odd.
baker: The synchronicity is divided cleanly into two parts, which correspond to the two sides of the Dark Side of the Moon lp album. There is the Kansas side and the Oz side. Non-colored and colored. Or white and colored light, as we have on the album’s cover.
Pierre: Doesn’t this substantiate an intent theory for the synchronicity in a large way, then?
baker: Yes, I think so, just by itself. But you have to look at all the factors involved.
Pierre: Can you give examples?
baker: Well, obviously the Rainbow Sphere plays a huge part in the overall interpretation for me. Remember that the Rainbow Sphere will run properly, in my opinion, only with the pre-89 videos. And this is at least doubly important for the Rainbow Sphere in comparison to Dark Side of the Rainbow because we’re using two parts of the edited film instead of just one.
Pierre: But, as you said, the Rainbow Sphere is a difficult concept to wrap your brain around. Oh, I made a sort of pun there!
baker: Perhaps we should just leave it as my own gold tiling of The Wizard of Oz movie, which doesn’t involve Pink Floyd at all.
Pierre: So let’s get back to the gold and silver tiles, which is quite a fascinating idea to me. So, let me understand. You’re saying there is a great need to completely tile the Oz movie, but that, for you, this need is substituted by The Rainbow Sphere.
baker : The Rainbow Sphere is a gold tile without the silver. It is too much brain, in a nutshell. The Rainbow Sphere needs Dark Side of the Rainbow as a balance. I don’t think it works very well without this balance. Dark Side of the Rainbow, on the other hand, is silver which can’t complete itself successfully without knowledge of the complementary gold, or The Rainbow Sphere. It is too much heart, or heart without brain. And all this goes back to Baum’s original creation of Oz, which acted as a framing landscape for the argument between the Scarecrow and the Tinman over which was better to possess, a heart or a brain. Obviously the Scarecrow was arguing for the brain and the Tinman the heart here. But it all seems to go back to that primary argument, which is perhaps the primary dichotomy present in the world at large as it appears today. It is a universal theme, perhaps the most universal theme. Which is better, emotions or intellect? Both have advantages and disadvantages. In truth both need each other as a balance. And this is the entire meaning of Oz. As Oz frames the heart vs. brain argument of Scarecrow and Tinman, what I call the Rainbow Complex — or perhaps the Oz synchronicity complex — frames the similar elements found in Dark Side of the Rainbow and The Rainbow Sphere.
Pierre: So you’re saying there’s an overall complex that Dark Side of the Rainbow and the Rainbow Sphere are a part of. Just like the Scarecrow and the Tinman are characters in Oz, perhaps the main characters. Very interesting.
baker: It really is, when you study it. I’d say all my other synchronicities directly stem out of this original balance and paradox, I suppose you could call it. The beginning of the Oz/Floyd Paradox.
Pierre: Perhaps we should stop here for the night and continue this tomorrow. We have a long ways to go.
baker: Well, it’s a long journey through this paradox from Dark Side of the Rainbow to SID’s 1st Oz, that’s for sure. I’d add here that I think that SID is the only true gold synch I’ve found besides perhaps the Rainbow Sphere, but it appears to be more because it is made up of 3 internal silver synchs. But to really understand SID we have to travel through such intermediate synchs as MessiaenSphere and Pink Vertigo. There is no other way.
Pierre: So we’re on for tomorrow.
baker: Definitely.
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 2 of 20
*****
Pierre: So we’re back with baker b. on night two of this interview about tiling and his Oz/Floyd Paradox. I’ve read briefly over the transcript of the interview so far, as has baker, and afterwards we made up a little check sheet of what would be best to discuss tonight. Now I have the idea of a bronze tile to begin with. So baker? Bronze tile.
baker: With the coining of the terms silver and gold tiles, or silver and gold synchs or tilings, I immediately saw the need to create a bronze tile or tiling as well. For me, this represents the shortest form of an audiovisual synchronicity, and basically is the overlap of an unmanipulated *half* of an album with a segment of unmanipulated film. The classic example of a bronze tile would be the 2001-Echoes synch, which combines the entire second half of Floyd’s Meddle album, the one before Dark Side of the Moon, with the ending segment of Kubrick’s 2001 film. This overlap is well known in synching circles, but relatively unknown outside. Just in my own work I don’t consider anything much less than a side of music, or a similar lengthed piece of music, to constitute a full synchronicity. Individual songs with segments of film, for me again — this may not apply to others at all — always seem to be waiting for another section to come along to complete them. Or, conversely, as we may discuss with my first bronze tile find, the individual song is tacked on to an already forming synchronicity.
Pierre: So let me see if I understand this from our pre-interview discussions. As you wished we will try to be consistent and use the term “tiling” instead of “tile” from now on, since the former term is more inclusive. A bronze tile or tiling would be an overlap between basically a ½ an album with a piece of film, a silver tile or tiling would involve a whole album with same, and a gold tile or tiling would be covering an entire movie with music, usually involving either a repeat of the original album, as we have with the most common version of Dark Side of the Rainbow, or a series of tiles, as we have with Rush Wonka? And, if I remember you saying at the time, a gold tiling is twice the size of a silver tiling usually, or a little more, as a silver tiling is, in turn, about twice the size of a bronze tiling.
baker: Basically speaking, this is correct. I would add that Alice-Wall, probably the third best known synchronicity — or perhaps even second — would represent another form of gold tiling, and in this case, since The Wall album is a double album and is about the same length as the movie, it would be both a gold and silver tiling in effect. Two as one.
Pierre: Well, already it is getting complicated. Now I know in the classic version of Alice-Wall, if we can call it that, one song is dropped from The Wall to make the movie and album run about the same amount of time.
baker: This is Comfortably Numb, which, according to some sources, was not suppose to be a part of the Wall concept but was added at David Gilmour’s insistence, as I remember.
Pierre: But when this song is dropped, the album and the movie are about the same length.
baker: This is basically correct.
Pierre: Now, doesn’t this corroborate an intent theory for the two being crafted to go together?
baker: Not really, although it is an interesting idea. On the plus side, we have a pretty strong beginning to the synch, and also the overlapping trials at the end — Alice’s trial presided over by the Queen of Hearts, and then Pink’s parallel trial, also animated, with the Worm as the judge. This is interesting. Unfortunately, the synchronicity is not as strong after the first 10 -15 mins. or so, and generally loses people’s interest. For classically straight Wall synchs, which this is, minus one revision, I’d personally go with Michael’s Show Truman the Wall, and perhaps some of the others. Dave Bytor, again, has some interesting Wall creations. So, to answer your question, it is an interesting theory on the surface which I don’t think holds water, giving all the other evidence. You have to fit it into the whole framework; get a bigger picture.
Pierre: But we have all the intent proof for 2001-Echoes that’s not been mentioned yet. Combine that with Dark Side of the Rainbow and Alice-Wall, even though you say you don’t think the latter is as strong as the first two, then I can certainly see how people would be fooled, at least initially.
baker: Right you are. In looking at the evidence, it could appear that way on the surface. And you’re right: 2001-Echoes probably has the most obvious intent problems connected with it, and a lot of this stems from the quote in the famous Floyd bio, Saucerful of Secrets, about Roger Waters saying he’d wish he’d done the soundtrack to the 2001 movie. Just before this, Floyd also rejected an offer to allow Kubrick to use their Atom Heart Mother suite as the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. And it is also true that the final segment of the 2001 movie, separately titled Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite, the very abstract and psychedelic ending segment of the movie, is basically the same length as Echoes. Quite a bit of proof for intent there.
Pierre: So how are you countering this proof so far? We’ve talked about the Rainbow Sphere, and then your dissatisfaction for tiling The Wizard of Oz movie with Dark Side of the Moon set on repeat. It all seems hinged on the Rainbow Sphere so far, and your idea of Dark Side of the Rainbow as just a silver tile — covering one run of the album through the movie — and not a gold tiling.
baker: Basically that’s right. The Rainbow Sphere was enough for me to prove non-intent. And also there are some other factors connected with the silver tiling of Dark Side of the Rainbow that also prove non-intent, although I have not mentioned them in synch discussion boards for various reasons, one of which is that they could be used to further an intent theory.
Pierre: Further?
baker: Yes.
Pierre: Okay, let’s move on to our next item on the check list, and that is the idea of resonating cues. Perhaps a discussion of these will resolve this intent factor more, because I’m admitting a little confusion right now, although I believe your theories. I mean, just taking what we’ve said so far, it seems that we’re supporting intent to outside eyes more than disproving it.
baker: As I said, the Rainbow Sphere was basically enough for me, and this is set up through resonating cues, namely the perceived obvious three 3rd lion roars inside The Wizard of Oz movie. Now, as I’ve said, the 1st 3rd lion roar, of MGM’s Leo the Lion that starts the movie, acts as the beginning cue for Dark Side of the Rainbow. If we start Dark Side of the Moon at, similarly, the 2nd 3rd lion roar of the movie, and this is when Dorothy and her new Oz friends are waiting for an initial audience with the Wizard of Oz, just outside his chambers — during the song “If I Were King of the Forest” — then we have some other interesting matches occurring, such as the lion falling with the central explosion of the Dark Side of the Moon song On the Run, and then jumping with the bells of Time [the next song on Dark Side of the Moon]. Already, I’ve discussed the Gulch-bells overlap with the Dark Side of the Rainbow started at the 1st 3rd lion roar, and logically we can see that a triangle of associations can be made between, 1) appearance of Gulch in the film, on her bike, 2) the bells, chimes, etc. of the song Time of Dark Side of the Moon, and, 3) the lion jumping to the final command of the Wizard of Oz. The bells of Time glue the two events together, as it were, and although this is one of the most obvious triangles made between the two runs of Dark Side of the Moon through The Wizard of Oz, one beginning with the first 3rd lion roar, and the other at the 2nd third lion roar, there are many others. What I found out at a certain point is that if you remove Dark Side of the Moon from the equation altogether and simply run the two parts of the Oz movie with each other, starting one part at the 1st 3rd lion roar and the other at the 2nd 3rd lion roar, then the matches are more numerous and consistent. This is basically all there is to the Rainbow Sphere: this consistent matching between two parts of the Oz movie starting at two directly resonating cue points, or two of the three third lion roars of the movie.
Pierre: Where is the third third lion roar, just out of curiosity? Does this play a part in the Sphere?
baker: The third occurs about 9 minutes after the second, and is again emitted by the Cowardly Lion. It comes when the lion is trying to demonstrate his courage in the Haunted Forest, but not succeeding very well.
Pierre: Does it play a part in the Sphere, though?
baker: Indirectly, but it may be too difficult to go into here. Basically the way I see Dark Side of the Moon started at this third lion roar is as a blank template, a test to show that this part of the movie doesn’t synch nearly as well with either of the Dark Side of the Rainbows started at the first two lion roars. The structure would be similar to a double-blind test in psychology.
Pierre: Very interesting. An interesting theory I mean. Dark Side of the Rainbow contains its own test for validity.
baker: But there is also something else to this higher harmonic of Dark Side of the Rainbow, and I saw this upon first viewing it. There are two places that stick out from the non-synchronous background, one where the witch dies after being splashed with water by Dorothy, and the other where Dorothy returns to Kansas at the end of the movie. This is something I should also explain: in my complete version of Dark Side of the Rainbow, these two segments would be blended into the main run of Dark Side of the Rainbow to fill in certain gaps in the first, as it were. These gaps would correspond to the non-synchronous transitions between Time proper and Breath Reprise, and also Money and Us & Them. And, oddly, these gaps are centered by a triangle of associations, beginning with the third lion roar common to both of them. This is when the word “death” is sung just as the witch is splashed by Dorothy, with the witch closing her eyes here — this comes at 12:56 after the third third lion roar — and then Dorothy opening her eyes upon the return back to Kansas. The latter occurs at 25:52 or so in the movie. In other words, it comes 12:55 after the witch splash, as the witch splash comes 12:55 after the third third lion roar. So this triangle is fitted into the first run of Dark Side of the Rainbow as another type of completion of the synch, in lieu of not using the repeat to cover the entire movie.
Pierre: We’re getting more complicated all the time. And this is only the first synch baker! Admittedly I don’t remember you telling me about this “filling in” aspect of the original Dark Side of the Rainbow.
baker: Let’s put it this way. This is how I see it. There is a hidden triangle of associations in the plain Dark Side of the Rainbow — or the playing of Dark Side of the Moon inside The Wizard of Oz beginning at the third Leo the Lion roar — that is *moved* to another position in the movie. And this triangle is recovered when you play Dark Side of the Moon at the two other 3rd lion roars, the most obvious resonating points in the movie. The second third lion roar provides the base to the Rainbow Sphere, the other side of the movie started at the first third lion roar. The third third lion roar start provides both a double-blind test for the second — it is saying, “Yes, you have found the right way to run the Rainbow Sphere” — and also provides the hidden triangle for the first. Let’s say you draw a person’s face, but then you decide to hide part of this face in two other pictures. Let’s say you remove any shading from this first picture and put it on a second piece of paper, re-creatable, perhaps, in a kind of cellophane or see thru effect. Then you similarly remove, say, the nose and chin on this first picture and put it on a third piece of paper, another see thru re-creation. The template, then, is in the second piece of paper, which contains the whole face, if only in shadow.
Pierre: I almost want to say I need a break now. Don’t you see we have moved quite a ways beyond your gold, silver and bronze tilings that we were suppose to talk about? Without actually seeing this version of Dark Side of the Rainbow, it is very hard to justify what you are saying.
baker: True, but resonating cues will appear again and again in our discussions, culminating in SID’s 1st Oz. This is only the beginning, albeit a complicated beginning. But the structure of Dark Side of the Rainbow, really, needs to be understood at least on a simple level to even discuss the two Olivier Messiaen synchs, or Messiaen Trek and MessiaenSphere. These two synchs seem directly related to both Dark Side of the Rainbow and 2001-Echoes.
Pierre: Maybe we should just skip into your other Oz/Floyd Paradox synchronicities then. You don’t even plan now to put the Rainbow Sphere on these tapes anyway. Instead, you plan to follow up the original play of Dark Side of the Rainbow, your silver tile version, with a similar silver tile called Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine also using this Dark Side of the Moon sound source. Can you describe the reasoning behind this?
baker: Well, Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine is fairly easy to explain, because it is so similar to Dark Side of the Rainbow in structure and also feel. It makes a very good comparison, and in some places I call it a poor man’s Dark Side of the Rainbow, which is mainly true I believe. If Dark Side of the Rainbow is amazingly consistent through the first 33 minutes or so, or until the end of the Munchkinland scenes — especially if you use my doctored version with the two inserts from the Dark Side of the Rainbow started at the third third lion roar — then the Yellow Sub synch acts more like a wave, phasing in and out of synchronization. The “in” parts, however, are just as strong as the best parts of Dark Side of the Rainbow, and, in some cases, perhaps even a little better. And the “out” parts are not extremely long. There’s one in Time which spills over into a lot of Breathe Reprise and Great Gig in the Sky, and then there’s another long one during the Sea of Monsters scenes, or during the playing of the end of Us & Them and also Any Color You Like. However, to do justice to Dark Side of the Yellow Sub, I also think it ends stronger than Dark Side of the Rainbow, and also has a stronger repeat, at least for the first 10 minutes or so of this repeat. This was one of the most interesting things to me: the strength of the repeat in Dark Sub, and also the obviousness of the recue involved in this repeat.
Pierre: So you don’t recommend just letting the album repeat here?
baker: The recue comes at basically the same exact point that a repeat of the album would occur anyway, but, yeah, you’ve run on one of my little pet peeves. I don’t like using the repeat of a CD player alone, but prefer recueing, or identifying a place to recue as well. It’s just that the repeat fucntion works at different speeds for different players, and I like my own synchs to run precisely, because, well, they just seem to run very precisely for the most part, down to the split second. But this is what the Yellow Sub find reinforced for me: that the repeat mode of Dark Side of the Rainbow is not the way to go — it would be better just to follow Dark Side of the Rainbow the way I run it, as a silver tiling that is, with Dark Side of the Yellow Sub, and this is why I combine the two on the first tape of the Oz/Floyd Paradox. But there’s not a whole lot more to say about the Yellow Sub creation except that it is another silver tiling, albeit with a small bit of repeat, and also it closely follows the themes and structure of Dark Side of the Rainbow. Also, it is important to note that this was cued internally. I simply overlapped the bells beginning Time — also strongly highlighted in Dark Side of the Rainbow with the appearance of the bike riding Gulch, as we’ve talked about already — with the eruption of the smokestacks signaling the abrupt movement from Pepperland and the undersea fairy world to the real world of Liverpool and all the inherent problems with this. Much like the bells of Time signal the wake up call from a fairyland existence of the womb, like birth I suppose you could say.
Pierre: So this is all we need to know about Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine, your second selection for the Oz/Floyd Paradox synchs?
baker: I think so. For now anyway. Maybe that better be it for tonight. I need to get to sleep so I’ll be fresh for work tomorrow.
Pierre: Sounds good to me. We’ll review the transcript again and make up a new check list. We didn’t get to the third part of tonight’s check list, I see, but that can wait.
baker: Right. Good enough. Thanks and see you tomorrow night.
Pierre: Okay. Good night baker. Sleep tight.
baker: Hehe.
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 3 of 20
*****
Pierre: Okay baker, we’re going to try to fit in a whole session tonight. Are you up for it?
baker: Certainly. Fire away.
Pierre: So it looks like upon reading the transcript of the last part that we’ve finished talking about the two synchronicities that will be appearing on tape one, or Dark Side of the Rainbow and Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine. We especially talked about Dark Side of the Rainbow because of its relative complexity. We’re not dealing with a lot of deeper symbolism, as you wished, but more here the surface structure, especially as applied to tiling and the different ways to create a tiled synchronicity, at least in terms of your own finds. This is basically what you’re more interested in here, and also how this fits into the whole Oz/Floyd Paradox running from Dark Side of the Rainbow to SID’s 1st Oz. All this is a bit of a mystery to you and, obviously, others right now. This interview is helping you get a better grasp on the mystery.
So we’re up to the newer finds, which began in the summer of 2000. Can you tell us about these baker, and especially focusing on the three that are present on tape 2 of the Oz/Floyd Paradox?
baker: In other places recently (Hystery) I’ve talked about my sites in terms of how one tends to evolve from the other. The first two internet sites I created, The Ultimate Pink Floyd Synchronicities and The Booker T. Archive, which were directly attached to one another, dealt a lot with the Rainbow complex, or Dark Side of the Rainbow + The Rainbow Sphere, but in a hidden way. I’ve mentioned my description of how to run Dark Side of the Rainbow on the Ultimate site was a direct result of its apparent interface with The Rainbow Sphere, and how The Rainbow Sphere was a secret center for this site.
Pierre: Why would you want to keep this a secret?
baker: I don’t know. I guess I thought it just a little too odd to reveal. And also I wanted to write about it and you’re not suppose to reveal you utmost secrets if you’re going to save them for a book. So almost from the beginning of finding The Rainbow Sphere I saw it as fitting somehow into a book, as an interpretation of both The Rainbow Sphere and Dark Side of the Rainbow.
Pierre: Interesting.
baker: But I should also add here that I’ve been planning a book on this and a book on that for decades now. And I’ve published nary a thing.
Pierre: Well, I wouldn’t worry about that. The important thing is that you’ve done a lot of research. You can always write the thing at a later date, when the picture becomes even clearer
baker: Thanks for that. But the book has shifted. Hey, perhaps this *interview* is the way I talk about Dark Side of the Rainbow. Only thing is, we’re just talking more about the surface aspect rather than an in-depth interpretation.
Pierre: Maybe we should do another series of interviews after these tiling ones are over?
baker: That might not be a bad idea. Hmmm….
Pierre: So I think what you’re saying is that since you have this Hystery written out about the various synchronicity related web sites you’ve created over the years, that you don’t want to duplicate a lot of the same information.
baker: Exactly. So let me just say here that with the Ultimate Pink Floyd Synchronicities site I was trying to grasp the overall mystery of this Rainbow Complex I felt very strongly about, while keeping the center a secret. This was behind my peculiar looking, in ways, interpretation of Dark Side of the Rainbow and how to run it — the pre-89 video version and all.
Pierre: And stopping it at the heart filling episode with the Tinman.
baker: Right, and the third lion roar start, which ties into these other two third lion roars. This was the first important resonating cue, because the three third lion roars seem to act in harmony to provide some kind of overall puzzle and then a solution to the same.
Pierre: The creation of the Rainbow Sphere from the first two, and then the more complete version of Dark Side of the Rainbow from the third, which also acts as a type of double blind test for the whole thing, you said.
baker: Yes.
Pierre: But then when you created The Film/Album Synchronicity Board — and I think this was already about 3 years after finding Dark Side of the Rainbow and The Rainbow Sphere — 2000…
baker: …Summer of 2000.
Pierre: ….You began to find other synchronicities as well. Can you tell us a little about the first of these? I know that particular one isn’t a Floydian one, but it seems interesting to note how all this started up again and continued at least until the past winter.
baker: Here’s how I thought about explaining it. Traditionally The Wizard of Oz and Yellow Submarine were #1 and #2 on my list of favorite movies. Have been since I was a kid. Now all of a sudden I find there are rather profound looking synchs for each one. I was happy. The elevation of Yellow Submarine to Wizard of Oz status through very similar synchs was rather mind-blowing at the time. You have to remember there weren’t a lot of synchs around back then, and finding another good one seemed unusual. I wasn’t very pleased with the handful of synchs advertised on the Synchronicity Arkive at that time, for example. But then in the spring of 2000 I bought a video of a full length collage animation called Sophie’s Place by a surrealist film maker/artist named Larry Jordan, as well as another tape containing some of his earlier animated shorts. Suddenly I had two new tapes perched at the top of my favorite films list, because I simply adored the animation style of this man. If I were an animator — and I wanted to actually be one when in college but just didn’t have the grades to go where I wanted — I would work somewhat in the style of Jordan. He is influenced heavily by the earlier surrealist Max Ernst, as well as American Joseph Cornell. Now Ernst was already my favorite “traditional” artist, and Jordan is kind of like Ernst in motion. I know I’m probably not remarking about my love for this type of art in a proper manner, but I think it just represents more of what I’d be trying to do as an animator. I’ve also created a lot of collages down through the years.
Pierre: Art collages. Yes, I liked those baker. And I remember you talked about seeing these synchronicities of yours as very precise collages, like, perhaps, some of Ernst’s work in his collage novels.
baker: La Femme 100 Tetes. Yeah, I actually presented several professional style papers on Ernst’s work after graduating college, partly covering his collages, especially the very simple early ones done during his Dada phase, or the transition between Dada and Surrealism.
Pierre: So, let me guess — and, of course, I actually know — but you created a new synchronicity from this new favorite movie.
baker: Sophie’s Place, the 2 hour long animation, impacted me more than the shorts, although I loved the latter as well. There was a sense of being absorbed into some other totally abstract world that appealed to me, I guess. Somewhat like Yellow Submarine, but even more so. But, yeah, a synchronicity appeared using the movie, and this was an absolute and total accident. This is one I call Sophie’s No. 9, and involved overlapping the last 3 songs on the Beatles White Album, centered by the infamous collage called Revolution No. 9 — my favorite Beatles “song,” by the way — with a totally randomly selected section of Sophie’s Place. Simply put, I began playing part of the White Album at random against the video of Sophie’s Place to see what would happen. To my amazement, I realized that what was playing, first take, was actually a synchronicity, and it took me some time to recreate what I had collaged together in an automatic state. Afterwards, I learned to tape all my experiments because of this.
Pierre: We’re trying to stick to the surface on all this. How does Sophie’s No. 9 fit into the idea of tiling?
baker: First of all, I would classify this as a bronze tiling, a rather incomplete bronze tile but one nonetheless. Symbolically, it captures the essence of the final side of the White Album, even though the first several songs are cut off. This is because the obvious center of this side is Revolution no. 9, And then Good Night that closes the side is such a contrast. So although this is a short bronze, it is a bronze nonetheless.
Pierre: Well if you don’t mind let’s move on to the next found synch, which is Psychogumma, a Floydian one. And you call this a classically straight synch in our pre-interview discussions. Can you fit this into a tiling theory?
baker: This would be a silver tiling, just like Dark Side of the Rainbow and also Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine. Structurally it’s a classic example of a straight synch, such as Michael Allen has a lot of on his Synching Ship site. The music begins exactly with the start of the film. Exactly. And then you have a delayed repeat of the beginning section of the album at the beginning of the shower murder scenes in Psycho. So this is more like Dark Side of the Yellow Sub because you have the original run-through of the album with the movie, which, in this case, starts with the very beginning of the film, and then you have a repeat that runs for another 10 or so minutes and is cued very closely to where a “natural” repeat would occur anyway.
Pierre: This synch was found right after Sophie’s No. 9, in the summer of 2000, just after the start of your co-op synch board. But this is the one Floyd find that you don’t include on your Oz/Floyd Paradox tapes. Why not?
baker: Psychogumma is probably the weakest of my Floyd finds, although I don’t consider it a bad synch at all. I wouldn’t call it a synch if it were too bad… I don’t do such things. But I thought it dragged a bit in places, for sure, and the energy of Hitchcock and early Floyd is captured better in Pink Vertigo, which Psychogumma acted as a direct foundation for.
Pierre: I see. And we’ll get to Pink Vertigo later on then. Moving on to the next pair of synchs you found. By my notes, I see these were both from December, 2000, or about 5 or 6 months after Sophie’s No. 9 and Psychogumma. Can you describe Messiaen Trek and, especially, Piper’s Nightmare Christmas?
baker: Messiaen Trek is a really interesting synch, but it may be too long a story to go into in much detail here. Suffice to say it is really my first artistic synch, because it involves a series of cues instead of just one cue or a cue set on repeat mode. This was directly inspired, in hindsight, by Dave Bytor’s manipulations I’ve mentioned before, but also extended the new idea, as far as I could tell, of resonating cues, and these cues are very, very similar to what we have in the Rainbow Complex.
Pierre: Can you tell us a little more? Especially since you’ve compared it with Dark Side of the Rainbow and others now.
baker: The resonating cues here are the commands of Captain Kirk, specifically the two that involve moving, first, into the gargantuan alien cloud called V-jer, the nexus of the whole movie, and then another command just afterwards by Kirk to move in much closer to the center of this cloud. Both commands were met with resistance by the crew, or at least by Commander Decker, who was an advisor of sorts to Kirk. To me, these cues were directly inspired by the lion roar cues of the Rainbow complex, and, once again, the cues come immediately after a command is finished. Kirk’s commands are like the final roaring of a king lion. We have placed our confidence in him, from past experience, and are allowing him this judgement to move into the cloud in the first place, and then even deeper into the cloud, although it is obviously very dangerous — it has demonstrated its ability to kill anything and everything in its path.
Pierre: Perhaps we should back up here to those not as familiar with the movie as you are. And also we don’t want to spend an incredible amount of time on Messiaen Trek, since it is not Floydian in nature. The music used is several orchestral pieces composed by Olivier Messiaen, which is one of your favorite classical composers as I understand. They were created right at the end of his life, and only date from the late 80s/early 90s, so actually after the Star Trek movie was created? [baker nods in agreement here] So, another favorite artist used, much like Jordan in Sophie’s Place, but this time a musician. And, as you told me, this was one of the few classical music synchs around, and, um, still is?
baker: There are a lot of synchs out there but I’d say this is still one of only a handful of classical compositions, although many other genres of music have been used in synchs besides just rock. Rock is still the king, though, and Pink Floyd synchs are still the most prevalent overall. By far, actually.
Pierre: Why don’t we just leave Messiaen Trek as your first example of a multiple cue synch, and also that it extends the resonating cues first found in Dark Side of the Rainbow and encloses them in a single synch. Am I reading this correctly?
baker: Sure, that sounds good. And as far as tiling goes, this is another bronze one for me, although it doesn’t cover an album side of any kind per se. However, it has much the feel of 2001-Echoes, the classic bronze synch, and also the V-jer cloud scenes used in the movie here are obviously inspired by the psychedelic ending of 2001 used in this earlier synch. This is a rather important comparison, actually — or potentially. We’ll see.
Pierre: Now we’re finally at Piper’s Nightmare Christmas.
baker: Discovered several weeks after Messiaen Trek, yes. December 2000.
Pierre: Describe then. Is this another multiple cued synch like the Trek one?
baker: No this is a straight synch like Dark Side of the Rainbow or Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine or Psychogumma. However, unlike these earlier ones the entire album is not used — Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd’s first album and the one with mostly Barrett compositions. Also, like with Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine, an internal cue sets the whole thing up, but in this case more near the center rather than at the beginning, as we have with the bells of Time lining up with the erupting smokestacks in the Yellow Sub creation. This was probably directly inspired by another similarly constructed synch called Soft Toy Story by a syncher named Carlo which I quite enjoyed at the time. This was one of the rare synchs that really caught my eye, and Carlo seemed pretty amazed by it as well. A very similar structure.
Pierre: Should we talk about this internal cue?
baker: I don’t think we need to in detail except to say that it seems like a very natural cue. In terms of the overall synch, much like Sophie’s No. 9 is centered by the long, experimental work called Revolution No. 9 by the Beatles, so Piper’s Nightmare Xmas is centered by Pink Floyd’s classic acid rock improvisation, but in very much a different vein than the similarly abstract material on, say, Echoes and Dark Side of the Moon. This is, of course, Interstellar Overdrive, very familiar to Pink Floyd enthusiasts but probably not to the general public who are basically only familiar with Floyd through [Dark Side of the] Moon, The Wall, Wish You Were Here, and maybe Animals. The big four albums, in other words, from the mid to late 70s. But Piper is another really excellent album, if lacking the overall concept and cohesion of these later works. And Piper is where the early leader of the band, Syd Barrett, really shines.
Pierre: Shine on you crazy diamond!
baker: Yeah, that line was a direct reference to Barrett from the Wish You Were Here album. You could almost call that one Wish You Were Here *Syd*, although I know the name refers to more general lacks as well. Barrett is someone who must be talked about in depth to make a detailed analysis of the Oz/Floyd Paradox. His works will come up again and again, and, I think, of the remaining works on the Oz/Floyd Paradox tapes, only The Point of The Wall contains absolutely no Barrett compositions. But, then again, The Wall is supposedly all about Barrett as well, like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. The central character of Pink is based a lot on Barrett.
Pierre: But, as I understand, it’s really only this one album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, that Barrett had any real influence on Floyd and their legacy. This contained almost all his compositions, whereas already on the second album we have none.
baker: No, there is one: Jugband Blues, which will be discussed more soon. It’s the ending track to A Saucerful of Secrets. And, supposedly, he plays in several of the other songs. And also we have a number of Floyd singles composed by Barrett, several of which are quite famous, at least in Floydian circles. But, yeah, you’re basically right in ways, for after the first album Barrett’s direct musical input was minimal. He simply began to loose it, a legendary rock & roll casualty story right up there with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in my opinion. In fact, if he had died or ODed or something at that point, there’s a good chance he’d be better known, at least approaching the legacy of these others if not exactly their equal, especially Hendrix perhaps. But he obviously was an amazing song writer and very strong on the experimental, improvisational side. Definitely a “what if” story. What if he hadn’t fell in with the wrong group at the time and let pop fame get the best of him? What if he remained with Floyd and remained the primary composer? What would have happened to Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall? In looking back on it, a split between Barrett and Waters was probably inevitable. But we’re getting very far into the story.
Pierre: No, that’s fine. Waters being Roger Waters, the leader of the band through the post-Barrett period which includes their best known albums, including Moon and The Wall. You’re saying that Waters and Barrett had such different personalities that a clash was inevitable in your opinion. I think this is important to talk about, because the tension between Barrett and Waters runs all through the synchs of the Oz/Floyd Paradox in my opinion, culminating in SID [‘s 1st Oz].
baker: Well, you have to understand — and you can tell this especially, perhaps, in listening to his solo album The Madcap Laughs, released just after Barrett left Floyd — that Syd was a really amazing songwriter. A great gift, and not only on the musical side but also the lyrics. I get the impression from my readings that Syd was most proud of his lyrics, in fact. Now Waters wasn’t as gifted musically. In fact, the story goes that Syd — or, I’m sorry, Rick Wright, the keyboardist — had to tune his bass guitar before and during concerts because he was tone deaf. Waters made up for this with technical ability or studio wizardry, such as we find amply demonstrated already in Dark Side of the Moon. This was one of the best produced albums of all time, and although Alan Parsons was the official producer, Waters and the other Floyds were already adept in their own special ways in studio production. No doubt they could have produced the album themselves, and, in fact, Gilmour and Waters had contrasting opinions about how the album should sound. Each knew how they wanted it to sound and how to get it done. But getting back to the Syd comparison, Waters was very, very structured while all Syd’s ideas were based on spontaneity and improvisation. It is said that Syd rarely played a song the same way twice. Waters, trained as an architect, was quite the opposite. In creating his pieces, he and the others — {Nick] Mason, the drummer, went to school to train to be an architect as well — would create giant graphs of album dynamics. In Dark Side of the Moon, the story goes that such a chart ran along an entire wall of the Abbey Road studio they were recording in. Such structure would be alien to Syd. Where they shared some similarities was in their strong lyrics writing, although, again, the emphasis was very different. Waters tended to be polemic, and this grew increasingly so in later works such as The Wall. His ideas also grew more grandiose, although the music eventually began to suffer, and we see this especially when he went solo. The Wall is Waters almost personified, and also The Final Cut shows this formula wearing thin. This is at the opposite spectrum of Piper.
Pierre: I’ve let you go on and on here because it is very important to set this tension up when talking about even your next two Floyd synchs, or Piper’s Nightmare Christmas and Full of Secrets, which are directly linked in your mind, as well as to Pink Vertigo. Now I remember you saying that the Piper synch was inspired by the similarity between Jack’s error in trying to understand the meaning of Christmas and Syd’s similar misuse of pop stardom. Jack Skellington trying to become Santa Claus in Nightmare Before Christmas — although this is not shown in the actual synch — is like Barrett becoming the “madcap laugher.” And both are shot out of the sky: Barrett losing his place in Floyd — replaced by his friend David Gilmour, guitarist extra ordinaire — another part of your story I assume. But, more specific to the Piper synch of yours, it seems that you overlap Jack’s initial fascination and awe of Christmastown and the concept of Christmas and Santa Claus with Barrett’s fascination with rock fame and also all the trappings of the same. He became ensnared in his own success.
baker: I think there is a very direct comparison here. Like Jack, Syd was considered king of Floyd, as Jack is the leader of Halloweentown. The song they play at the beginning of the movie, which is superbly replaced by Pow R. Toc H. to begin the synch, as others have commented about, represents the annual reinforcement of this leadership. No one creates a Halloween spectacle like Jack, and right after the celebration ends, the mayor of the town is showing up at Jack’s door the next morning with plans for next year’s event. The cycle is never ending; one big Halloween. In thinking about it, I would compare this celebration to such things as early Floyd success in revues such as the UFO Club. They were underground successes before moving on to bigger and better things above ground. Barrett simply had problems with this transition, as Jack did when trying to absorb the meaning of Christmastown into the very different template of Halloween. The two don’t mix easily at all. When exposing what is an underground movement to a wider audience, you debase the meaning. I would consider Jack’s visit to Christmastown to be the successes that went along with pop stardom, especially after the release of Piper at the Gates of Dawn and also their second single of See Emily Play, which was a top ten hit in Britain. Syd had already become a legend. But he couldn’t reconcile this success with a grass roots origin; his past. The contrast was too stark. One did not fit into the other. In knowing about the ambitions of the others, we can see that Syd, his disdain for playing hits at concerts — all this fit into the picture of a man who was enthusiastic about his art but knew that it would be misunderstood once it reached a wider audience. Thus his catatonic stare during the Pat Boone Show, when interviewed after the playing of See Emily Play. Drugs obviously played a part in this as well, a big part. Especially LSD. There was a rumor that one of Syd’s roommates — and I think this was after Piper at the Gates of Dawn had been released — laced his coffee with acid and kept Syd on a continual trip. You can imagine the consequences of such actions on a sensitive musician and songwriter. Success included money, chicks, and drugs. Remember this was the Summer of 1967, at the very height of the love movement and hippies and beads and all that. It could be said that Syd, like many others, was the victim of the Summer of Love. Everyone was reportedly taking a lot of drugs, and the consequences were not apparent then, at least in a general way. Also you could get away with it at the time; the drug busts of the Stones and others were still in the future, as well as the nightmare worlds of Altamont and the Manson slayings based on a lunatic’s misinterpretation of various Beatles lyrics.
Pierre: Very interesting. It sounds like you identify with Barrett to a large extent. Could this be because you are a songwriter as well?
baker: I think this may play a part, actually, but it’s probably too long a story to go into here. When I was a sophomore in college, I lived in a suite with 7 other roommates, and one night they all went in another room and dropped some LSD. I stayed in my room because I knew not to touch the stuff. I was weird enough as it was. And then later on, in the middle of the night, one of them burst into my room — he was usually very quiet — and insisted on telling me something. He said, and he was very serious about this, that they, the group, had found a new name for me: Syd. He said he couldn’t explain it but that my real name was Syd. Then he just left. I knew nothing of Syd Barrett at the time, and made no connection with him. But in looking back, I think it sort of summarizes my fascination with Syd, as played out in all these Oz/Floyd synchronicities. I am a musician much like Syd, except I didn’t have the fame that went along with it. Baker is actually a nickname that goes along with a pretend musician who did achieve fame and success, an alter ego of sorts. Not a lot of fame, mind you, but some. So there’s definitely an identification, and it extends into other areas that would be too complicated to go into for this interview most likely.
Pierre: Well Syd, er, baker, I see by the clock that our interview must end for tonight. Perhaps we can try for tomorrow night.
baker: Phew! This is tiring. We only covered one Floyd synch tonight from the tape, and not even that one fully.
Pierre: It’s admittedly taking longer than expected. That’s okay. I am enjoying it quite a lot.
baker.: Thanks. So let’s try for tomorrow night.
Pierre: See you then.
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 4 of 20
*****
Pierre: So we’re back. Are you up for this tonight bake?
baker: I’ve been awake for 3 hours now, and am showered and relaxed by an evening of looking at synchs and listening to music.
Pierre: I’ll take that for a yes, then!
baker: (laughs)
Pierre: So, where were we? Talking about Piper’s Nightmare Xmas still, I believe. Now have we determined if this is a gold tiling, silver tiling or bronze tiling or something else?
baker: I think it is a ‘tweener, between bronze and silver that is. This will become more clear as we talk about its perceive companion in Full of Secrets.
Pierre: So are we ready to talk about this next synch then?
baker: I think I want to discuss Piper a little more. The Oz references and all. But, actually, I can talk about these when I discuss the Oz material related to Full of Secrets. Okay let’s move on then.
Pierre: Let me then apply the same question to Full of Secrets. What kind of tiling?
baker: Full of Secrets is definitely a bronze. We have the direct equivalent of a side of an album’s worth of material. This is basically the original side two of A Saucerful of Secrets, Floyd’s second studio album and the one after Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But there is one difference: Corporal Klegg is used to begin the synch, and this is actually the last song on the original side 1. Then we have the centerpiece of the synch in the lengthy title song, which is about 12 minutes long I believe.
Pierre: This is the Saucerful of Secrets title track.
baker: Much like Piper at the Gates of Dawn contains the space rock jam Interstellar Overdrive, so the Saucerful of Secrets album contains another long abstract, experimental piece. This time, however, the driving force was not Barrett but instead the aforementioned architects of the band, primarily Roger Waters. But the result is about equally experimental. This is definitely the highlight of the album in my opinion, along with Jugband Blues in a very different way.
Pierre: So I know you end the synch with Jugband Blues, which is the last song on the album.
baker: Skipping over the song Seesaw, which is usually considered a pretty weak song and didn’t seem to fit into the synch in any way. So we have 3 of the last 4 songs from the album used, beginning with the last song on the original side 1 of the album and ending with the last song on side 2 and skipping over the next to last song.
Pierre: The title track being third from the end of this album, right?
baker: Yeah. But this skipping is hard to detect in the synch, since Jugband Blues starts right after the end of the title song. You can make this work pretty well, actually, just programming your CD player to play tracks 4, 5, and 7 of the album [track 4 being Corporal Klegg]. But I suggest recueing, as is my want in these things. This is an exacting synch, like about all of them in my opinion. But the results would be very close in any case.
Pierre: The video used in this synch is the final 20 minutes of the Twin Peaks series, which takes place mostly in what is called the Black Lodge. Do you want to attempt to explain what the Black Lodge is and how it fits into the theme of this landmark television series, produced by David Lynch?
baker: (laughs) Well, I guess I could try. Many people have been trying to figure out this episode since it was shown in 1992, and some interesting interpretations have resulted, none of which I’m totally satisfied with — at least the ones I’ve read. Here’s where Oz and the whole Oz/Floyd Paradox comes in handy, because the easiest way to describe the Black Lodge is as an anti-Oz, with Oz being the same as what is called the White Lodge in the Twin Peaks series.
Pierre: Interesting. And I know this is backed up by other Oz references in the series.
baker: Yes. An original promo for the series, aired by ABC, showed Agent Cooper in bed waking up amongst his Twin Peaks buddies, an obvious nod to the famous scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas surrounded by her aunt and uncle and the farmhands, as well as Professor Marvel who subsequently appears at the window. In David Lynch’s Wild at Heart movie, created at the same time as the Twin Peaks series, there are many Oz references — it’s a running motif in the movie. Sheryl Lee, who plays Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, actually appears at the end of the movie as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, and gives some similarly sage advice to the Nicholas Cage character regarding a second chance with his girlfriend played by Laura Dern. Dern’s mother in the film is similarly portrayed as the Wicked Witch of the West, and so on and so on.
Pierre: I know that Windom Earle, the really evil character in the series who plays Agent Cooper’s arch nemesis, describes the White Lodge as some kind of saccharin place of harmony and beauty. I’ll look up the direct quote and put it here [footnote 1 below]. I must admit it sounds a little bit like Dorothy’s sweet, lovable Oz and her friends to me.
baker: I think there is a direct reference here, although Lynch — or perhaps his partner Mark Frost came up with this idea — may have been basically unconscious of the connection. Creative ideas have a way of working that way for the most part. Sometimes other people have to point out influences that are not obvious to you, the creator.
Pierre: So the Black Lodge is an anti-Oz, and Agent Cooper becomes trapped in it, unable to wake up back in Twin Peaks, like Dorothy went back to Kansas. Instead there is a doppleganger that returns to the town.
baker: This is correct. Cooper is trapped in the Black Lodge, which is a reversed Oz. It is the Oz that would be if the Wicked Witch were allowed to conquer the Emerald City, for instance, and depose the humbug but still kind-at-heart Wizard. In the ’39 movie, Dorothy, by splashing the witch, makes sure this doesn’t happen.
Pierre: Getting back to Pink Floyd, how does all this correlate to Barrett and Piper then? You said there were also Oz references in the Piper synch.
baker: Yes, most obvious in the fact that the basic plot of the Nightmare Before Christmas movie, where Santa Claus is kidnapped and replaced by a doppleganger, as it were, is based on a short story by L. Frank Baum called “A Kidnapped Santa Claus.”
Pierre: Baum being the creator of Oz and the writer of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz children’s book that the famous ’39 movie is based upon.
baker: Right. Baum also wrote a full length book about Santa Claus as well, which may be the best treatment of this figure’s history so far. It’s quite detailed, and was created in Baum’s strongest period of writing, near the same time as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Pierre: What’s the name of that book?
baker: Um, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. Quite fascinating read. Later Baum situated the Happy Valley where Santa Claus lived right across from Oz — across the Deadly Desert that surrounded Oz and separated it from several other fairylands that Baum created. Then all of this — the central Oz, the surrounding desert, and then the fairylands bordering this desert — were, in turn, encompassed by the Nonestica Ocean. The interface between these fairylands and our Earth remains ambiguous at best. It could even be that they lie on an alien planet, but I like to see them as simply existing in our unconscious, like the lands we travel when we dream.
Pierre: In pre-interview talks, you also indicated to me other Oz influences in Piper.
baker: There is speculation that the central characters of the Nightmare story, Jack Skellington and Sally — who are found to be soulmates, I guess you could say, at the end of the film — are based upon the Scarecrow of Oz and his apparent soulmate called the Patchwork Girl.
Pierre: I’ve never heard of her. Is she in the original Oz book?
baker: No, she doesn’t show up until after the first six Oz books were published, with the sixth meant by Baum to end the series. He shut down all communication between Oz and the real world because the girl ruler of Oz, Ozma, decided that the interface between Oz and Earth had become too dangerous. Thus there was a shutting off of Oz from reality; it became a complete fairyland unto itself, like the separation of our dreams from waking reality. Baum simply thought the Oz idea had run its course. But children demanded more, and were not satisfied with the books that Baum subsequently wrote after setting Oz aside. They did not sell as well, in other words. Baum, strapped for money and also probably beginning to realize the importance and impact of his primary fairyland, turned back to Oz for new stories. Thus begins the second wave of Oz books, which numbered an additional eight. Many reviewers have criticized this second part of the series, but, really, there is some excellent writing in these books in my opinion, and, actually, my favorite Oz book may be the Tinman of Oz from this run. When I had the pleasure — along with the co-workers at the library section I work at — of receiving a tour of a defunct Oz related resort recently, the tour guide, who also was the appointed caretaker of the place, relayed to us that this was her favorite Oz book as well, and gave a synopsis of the story. Then, queerly, she looked at me and said I would make a good Tinman, and that I had the eyes for the role. I’ve actually been meaning to get back up with this woman and perhaps help in maintaining the park, which is the site of an annual Oz festival now that has recently been increased from one day to a whole weekend. Swordfisht and I attend each year faithfully. I should also add that I worked at this park in the summer of ’79, just before it permanently closed. But I am getting off the subject. What were we talking about (laughs)?
Pierre: Well, Oz. The Oz references in Nightmare Before Xmas and also the related Piper synch. You’re not off the subject at all. Continue. This is very interesting. After all, we’re talking about the *Oz*/Floyd paradox, not just the Floyd paradox. Oz is half of the impossible equation.
baker: So right you are my friend. Oh… I remember how we got onto this. So Jack Skellington, the main character in Nightmare and the one who misunderstands Christmas and decides to become a Santa Claus doppleganger, is often compared to the Scarecrow, because he is very smart for one thing and also is made of vegetable matter. But he actually more closely resembles another Oz character we meet in the second Oz book.
Pierre: The one after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, then.
baker: Yes. A character called Jack Pumpkinhead, who closely resembles Jack Skellington but instead has an actual pumpkin for a head instead of a skeleton-like equivalent like Nightmare’s Jack. But obviously the name Jack refers to a carved pumpkin in each case, or a Jack-o-Lantern. The difference is that Jack Pumpkinhead in Oz is a dufus, or a dull person. “His head did no thinking,” to quote from Piper; he is what the Scarecrow thought himself as but actually wasn’t at all: brainless. For Jack, there is no such irony in the Oz series. He *is* a dullard. Jack Skellington, in contrast, is considered the brightest and most creative person in Halloweentown, along with his soulmate Sally in a different way. So in this way, Jack Skellington is more like the Scarecrow, who is considered the most clever person in Oz. But the most obvious Oz parallel in Nightmare, besides the story origin, is Sally’s parallel with the Patchwork Girl. Like Baum’s character, Sally is covered with patches of cloth, like a crazy quilt rag doll, I suppose.
Pierre: And also as the Scarecrow and Patchwork Girl are soulmates, as presented by Baum, so are Jack and Sally portrayed as the same in the Nightmare movie.
baker: Correct.
Pierre: So moving back to the Full of Secrets synch, it seems that, from what you’re saying, Jack Skellington somewhat reincarnates, as it were, into the figure of Agent Cooper, another very clever fellow who has already solved a very difficult crime — the murder of Laura Palmer that wrapped up the first season — and is now tackling an even bigger mystery: that of the Black Lodge. This is like Jack tackling the mystery of Christmastown, as we’ve talked about. Now to me, this seems like you’re saying that Christmastown is kind of a substitute of Oz, and that the Black Lodge is this Oz, or Christmas, turned sour or gone completely bad, like spoilt milk. Something sweet and saccharin that isn’t so anymore.
Pierre: You are spot on here Pierre! Couldn’t have said it better myself. Christmastown, to Jack when he first visits it, is like a delightful drink of refreshing milk just opened. Cooper’s visit to the Black Lodge is like drinking milk left on the counter for a week. Something that has changed into its opposite, like white to black. What I see the symbolism of Full of Secrets as being is actually the completion of the Nightmare Before Christmas movie, where Jack decides to become Santa Claus and mixes up the Halloween and Christmas traditions, two things that don’t go together at all. This is exactly what you have in the Black Lodge, when Cooper is captured at the end by his own doppleganger and replaced. The Cooper that returns to Twin Peaks at the end of the movie — wakes up in his bed like Dorothy did in Kansas — is not the Cooper that we’ve grown to love and respect. This is the doppleganger Cooper, the Cooper of the Black Lodge. In Nightmare Before Christmas, Halloween would be the same as the Black Lodge, but in a humorous way, of course. At the end of Twin Peaks we are afforded no such humor, and because the series ended after the second season, Cooper’s transformation from white to black remained, in effect, permanent, whereas in the Nightmare movie Jack Skellington was, at the end, allowed to return to his rightful dark half of the equation and leave the white, outer saccharin world to Santa Claus. And I’d also like to add that, in Baum’s 5th Oz book, Road to Oz, Santa is invited to Ozma’s party and is called the most respected figure in all of fairyland, which was centered by Oz. You can actually see Santa Claus in one of the final scenes of the Return to Oz movie, which is a direct sequel to The Wizard of Oz and based on the 2nd and 3rd Oz books.
Pierre: Return to Oz being the basis for SID’s 1st Oz, which we will go, I’m sure, into much detail later on. To perhaps wrap up Full of Secrets and Piper’s Nightmare Xmas, I know you mentioned something about the ratios of the length of the involved Floyd music.
baker: The internal cue of Piper’s Nightmare Christmas, as it turns out, divides the music of the synch into an exact 3:2 ratio according to the remastered Piper at the Gates of Dawn CD. That is, tracks 5-7 before this cue total 17:14, and tracks 8-11 completing both the album and the synch have a total time of 11:29. The ratio between 17:14 and 11:29 is 3:2. Now, taking a look at the tracks in Full of Secrets, again according to the remastered [Saucerful of Secrets] CD, the total time is [INSERT]. Taking the total of the music in Piper, or 17:14 + 11:29 = 28:43, we see that, once again, there is a ratio of 3:2 involved, this time between Full of Secrets (2) and Piper’s Nightmare Xmas (3). While this may seem rather complicated on the surface, it is easy to relate all of these times by reduction to the lowest common whole number ratio, which would be 15:10 for Piper’s Nightmare Christmas to Full of Secrets, and then 9:6 for the internal 3:2 parts of the Piper synch. What this means to me personally is that as the second part of Piper, emphasizing lyrical matches, is a perfect complement and completion to the mostly musical matches of the first part, so Full of Secrets acts as a similar completion of the Piper synch as a whole, as we’ve already explained. There is a sense that the replacement of Santa by Jack is equivalent to the replacement of Agent Cooper by his dark doppleganger. The main difference is that there is no implied happy ending in the Twin Peaks case.
Pierre: All this seems quite fascinating, if a little over complicated to me. Perhaps we should move on to Pink Vertigo then, which will complete the second tape. Should we wait for our next session to talk about this?
baker: I think before ending the talk about the two synchs under discussion presently, we should relate them back to Floyd and the Barrett story. This is very important. I’ve talked about Barrett’s parallel with Jack Skellington, and the initial visit to Christmastown being the same as the absorption into fame and fortune after the release of Piper and several successful singles, especially See Emily Play. He and the other Floyds have moved beyond their underground roots, and have gone on to larger things above ground. Well, Full of Secrets, and also the album A Saucerful of Secrets, shows this success turning completely sour, at least for Barrett. A lot of this has to do with the drugs, and there is a very interesting parallel in Full of Secrets and Agent Cooper in the coffee that the agent loves and is offered in the Black Lodge — and then which turns viscous or plasmic, as it were, when the Black Lodge action gets into full swing; this is a sign that the elements are changing — and Syd’s supposedly laced coffee creating parallel and probably even overlapping acid trips. There is a definite parallel. In the end, Syd couldn’t get out of this trap much like Cooper couldn’t. There was really no alternative but for Syd to leave Pink Floyd, or for Floyd to dump Syd actually. But the split was inevitable, because Syd had simply lost his mind by this point. As he sings in a later song we’ll discuss, “I’ve tattooed my brain all the way.” Drugs played a part, but this was wrapped up in the trappings of success and the debasement of a pure underground art. Syd never could reconcile commercial success with artistic development, and, in the end, they cancelled each other out, at least for Syd. Floyd carried on, and the title track of A Saucerful of Secrets showed the way to do this. From now on, Floyd would be dominated by the architects, and, especially, Waters. As I said, this split seemed inevitable. If the drugs hadn’t rotted Syd’s brain, then the split would have come anyway because Syd was song oriented and into improvisation/spontaneity, while Waters and Mason were construction oriented. The two parts simply didn’t mix very easily. What effect this overlying dichotomy played in Syd’s breakdown can only be speculated about, but my guess is that it loomed large. For Syd, Pink Floyd was always his band, even after he was booted out and replaced by David Gilmour. And the dichotomy between the title track of Saucerful and Jugband Blues demonstrates this song vs. construction approach beautifully. Jugband Blues is the last Barrett composition released while he was a Floyd. I remember reading somewhere that a Barrett/Floyd fan always whispers the words “goodbye Syd” after listening to this song. This was the end for Syd, just as surely as it was the end for the good Agent Cooper at the conclusion of Twin Peaks. All we have left after this is a laughing madcap, as you put it.
Pierre: Just to complete all these thoughts, I should mention that Full of Secrets is the actual title of a critically acclaimed book about the Twin Peaks television series, written by a number of authors. The title of this book actually suggested the match between Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets and the end of Twin Peaks for you.
…..Well, baker, unless you think otherwise I think this would be a good time to end. Do you think so? Is there anything to add? Then we can begin fresh tomorrow night and talk about Hitchcock and Pink Vertigo, which wraps up early Floyd and the struggle of Pink Floyd to carry on after Barrett.
baker: That sounds like a good idea. I can’t think of anything else to add to tonight’s discussion. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. This is really helping me clarify my own thoughts on the matter!
Pierre: Yes, I can tell. So we’ll try for tomorrow night, or, at the very least, the night after that. Then I understand you’re going on vacation, and probably I will too.
baker: Definitely tomorrow night, unless something comes up.
Pierre: See you then Little B!
baker: Thanks so much Pierre.
*****
1) “Once upon a time there was a place of great goodness called the White Lodge. Gentle fawns gamboled there amongst happy laughing spirits. The sounds of innocence and joy filled the air. And when it rained, it rained sweet nectar that infused one’s heart with a desire to live life in truth and beauty. Generally speaking a ghastly place. Reeking of virtues sour smell and gorged with the whispered prayers of newlying mothers, mulling newborns, and fools young and old compelled to do good with out reason. But I’m happy to point out that our story does not end in this wretched place of sacrilific sense. For there’s another place, it’s opposite, a place of unimaginable power chalk full of dark forces and vicious secrets. No prayers dare enter this frightful maw. The spirits there care not for good deeds or priestly implications. They’re as like to rip the flesh from your bone as greet you with a happy good day. And if harnessed these spirits in this hidden land of unmuffled screams and broken hearts would offer up a power so vast that its bearer might reorder the Earth itself to his liking. This place I speak of is known as the Black Lodge, and I intend to find it,” (episode 2026).
*****
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 5 of 20
*****
Pierre: Well, baker, our interview marathon continues! Where do we start tonight?
baker: I know we want to at least begin Pink Vertigo.
Pierre: In talking a little beforehand, it was brought up that several synchs have been passed over in leaping into Pink Vertigo at this point, and these include one called Jordan Road, which is another Beatles-Larry Jordan combination, and also a rather important one in your estimation. Do you want to start with these and then move into Pink Vertigo?
baker: Jordan Road is one we don’t need to dwell on in depth. The structure is much like what I see as its direct companion in Sophie’s No. 9, which we’ve already discussed. This is another bronze structured synch, for one thing, and is about as long as Sophie, or about 15 min. This time the successive string of album songs used is not from the end of an album but, instead, its middle. Again a long song centers the synch, as it does in many of my synchs. In this case, it’s I Want You/She’s So Heavy, the second longest song created by the Beatles, as Revolution No. 9, already used in Sophie’s No. 9, is the longest. There are actually three cues in this one, and it’s very similar to Full of Secrets in that we recue the final song. We also have one additional cue at the beginning of the synch involving another Beatles song from the Let It Be album. What may be the most interesting thing about this synch is that in the summer of 2000 I decided to combine it with Sophie’s No. 9 and a variety of single song Jordan-Beatles synchs to create an overall Jordan Beatles Project, the name being a type of homage to Dave’s similarly styled Rush Wonka Project. It also summarizes this type of outer influence on my synching, and at almost the same time Dave released his ultra-manipulated Being Geddy Lee that we’ve also discussed before and which may or may not be actually considered synchronicity art the way I’m describing it here through the tiling process. But this continued melding of Larry Jordan with music of The Beatles, in effect, took away the need to synch the most famous rock group in history to anyone else. I saw Jordan and The Beatles — and again this is just in my own work — as a 1:1 correspondence. Actually, I may work on the Jordan Beatles Project more sometime. This may be a way to progress beyond SID’s 1st Oz, and I have some ideas about how to apply more manipulation to the project. But this is what I got out of Jordan Road in combination with Sophie’s No. 9 and various Jordan-Beatles out takes, as I call them. In summary: The Jordan Beatles Project.
Pierre: By out takes here, you mean combinations between Larry Jordan’s animation or film making and music by The Beatles that you didn’t consider worthy of a full blown synchronicity?
baker: They’re synchronicities but just of a single song kind. In my own practice, single song synchronicities are usually waiting to latch on to a larger synchronicity of some sort involving mostly these long landmark songs such as Revolution No. 9, I Want You/She’s So Heavy, Interstellar Overdrive, or A Saucerful of Secrets or, in the case of Pink Vertigo, the Atom Heart Mother suite from the fourth Floyd studio album. In other words, a single [normal-length] song synch, which is perhaps what we could call a lead [metal] synch if pressed, I suppose, is usually waiting to be incorporated into a legitimate bronze, silver, or gold synch. This is just according to my own practice and methods, mind you. Other people might have different ideas.
Pierre: This is an interesting distinction, though. There are no exceptions to this rule?
baker: Well, I have some single song synchronicities lying around, obviously, but, as I said, I either see them as a continuation of an already present bronze, silver, or gold tiling, or what will potentially be a part of one. Or kind of like an out take scene for a movie. If I were to make a DVD that includes Piper’s Nightmare Xmas, Full of Secrets, and Pink Vertigo, as I plan to, if only for archival purposes and as a type of time capsule, then I might include, at the end, another single song synch I’ve created that also uses Jugband Blues — a song already used three times in these synchronicities, two in Pink Vertigo and one in Full of Secrets. Similarly, in the SID’s 1st Oz DVD, I might tack on a synch with Barrett’s Golden Hair to a stretch of the Fantasia movie I found earlier on. I should say here that Golden Hair is used in the SID’s 1st Oz synchronicity, but, there, is incorporated into a much more grandiose concept I suppose you could say.
Pierre: I see. Would you consider synchs below the song level, say a match between a 15 second piece of film and a particular sequence of a Pink Floyd song, to be a type of synchronicity, maybe another lead synchronicity?
baker: Again, I don’t work in that manner, but, sure, I don’t see why not. I’d use it in my present style in combination with something else, or log it in as something to be used later, like a sculptor may have different projects he has experimented with in various corners of his studio, or a painter with his sketches for projects. They wouldn’t interesting me — again at this point — as types of final products, though.
Pierre: So you’re saying in this Jordan Beatles Project, as you call it, there are several song-movie matches that are incorporated with these two complete bronze synchs already discovered to create an overall project. This is the way you’re using the word “project” here, as a catch all phrase of sorts?
baker: It’s an homage to Dave’s Rush Wonka Project, which similarly uses otherwise unrelated songs of Rush to complete his tiling of the Willy Wonka movie. It’s a sort of tiling in this manner as well, but not in as obvious a way, and not as complete. As I said, Dave’s Project is the first gold tiling that’s simply not a repeat of an album through a movie, as we have in the most popular form of Dark Side of the Rainbow still. There may have been others present, but they weren’t advertised on the web at the time, and thus they had no way to influence my work, for example.
Pierre: This explanation sounds good enough. So let’s move on, if you wish, to MessiaenSphere, which may be a little more complicated to explain, from what you’ve told me.
baker: Quite right. To begin, I would consider MessiaenSphere a silver synch, and of a very pure but also different kind. The basic structure is very similar to Dark Side of the Rainbow, in that we have a one cue synch, at least on a musical level, that runs for the entire length of the piece through the film. *However*, there are some important differences, and all of these differences actually have something in common with the various oddities I’ve already discussed in connection with the Rainbow complex, centered by both Dark Side of the Rainbow and also The Rainbow Sphere. The musical opus used, Messiaen’s Illuminations of the Beyond, the final work he complete before his death in 1992, consists of 11 separate movements and lasts something over an hour. But in MessiaenSphere, although we begin at the start of track 1 just like with Dark Side of the Moon for Dark Side of the Rainbow, several subsequent tracks are edited out, although the synch run is not interrupted overall.
Pierre: I’m not sure if I understand what you’re talking about. This sounds like the dropping of Seesaw from Full of Secrets, which makes that synch jump from track 5, the title track of A Saucerful of Secrets, to track 7, Jugband Blues.
baker: No, this is different. Remember how for my complete version of Dark Side of the Rainbow, I included those little inserts from the last part of the film to fill in perceive gaps in the standard straight run of the synch? Again, these inserts did not actually interrupt the cadence of the album through the movie, but were merely pasted on, one could say, atop these gaps to make the synch flow better. Well, in MessiaenSphere we have the same principle: I saw there were gaps in the synch that needed to be dealt with. But my decision here was not to paste over top of them but simply remove these more dead spots from the film. So there was an early decision to remove the final three tracks of Illuminations of the Beyond, or tracks 9-11, and also tracks 3 and 6. This left 3 groups of 2 movements apiece, or tracks 1 and 2, tracks 4 and 5, and tracks 7 and 8. So while this was still a one cue synch, several sections of this synch have been discarded, dividing it into three separate parts. But there was an odd way I came about this decision.
Pierre: I know this is tied into the actual times of these songs. Do you want to go into this in detail? I would suggest a more general review, rather than going into the actual times. From what I understand in our pre-interview talks, you consider Illuminations of the Beyond to be a very structured — I almost want to say purposefully structured, but I don’t think that’s the right terminology. How would you put it? Can you help me out here?
baker: This is it in a nutshell: Dark Side of the Moon, as I found in my research, gives the appearance of being a very structured piece as far as the actual times of the tracks and their overall relationship with each other. I have mentioned the 3:2 ratio between the groups of tracks on either side of the internal cue of the Piper’s Nightmare Christmas synch, but this goes beyond that to create ratios between not one or two songs, but *all* songs of the [Dark Side of the Moon] album. And I found this same property to apply to the times of the movements of Messiaen’s last work here. I should add that this could be considered the definitive version of this work, since the conductor, Myung-Whun Chung, worked very closely with Messiaen in interpreting the score, and, more importantly, Messiaen himself said he considered it the authentic version of the piece, according to CD liner notes I’ve read. And this could also apply to the two pieces used in Messiaen Trek, which were also conducted by Chung and recorded at almost the same time as Illuminations of the Beyond.
Pierre: I remember you mentioning this problem with classical pieces in your synchs. This idea of finding a definitive version of any symphony or other work from amongst the several and sometimes many versions available. This is a problem you don’t encounter nearly as much in rock music, simply because the composers usually play their own music and then record it as a definitive version themselves, although there could be live versions also recorded, I guess. Here with the Messiaen piece, it sounds like you’ve solved that problem to a large extent. Is this correct?
baker: Yes, because we have the composer’s stamp of approval on one particular version of his work, in comparison to all other versions. I also think here of other ways you could limit this scope, but we may be getting into too much detail here. After all, MessiaenSphere is not a Floyd synch, and not on the Oz/Floyd Paradox tapes.
Pierre: I should be saying that as controller of the interview! So how much deeper do you want to go with MessiaenSphere? I know you wanted to mention the dialog inserts.
baker: Well, as I said, this is a straight, one cue synchronicity much like Dark Side of the Rainbow, but I felt the need to edit out several tracks, effectively dividing it into three parts. This is much like the similar editing of my complete Dark Side of the Rainbow, as I have mentioned, and the parallels extend further than I probably have time here to explain. But even with this editing, the combination simply didn’t work well enough to consider it a full fledged synch, although there were some very interesting moments to it. So this is what I figured out: I had to add dialog from the film at certain places in the synch, which turned out to be 6 large stretches of dialog in all in order for the thing to actually work. But the music of the synch never stops during this dialog… again, the dialog is merely pasted on top of the music, but this time in a transparent way. And the dialog parts take up almost half the synch now. This allows you to also understand the movie much better.
Pierre: I really think we should move on here baker, even if all these individual notes are quite fascinating.
baker: Well, let me end it this way, then. MessiaenSphere — and this is the simplest way I can put it — seems to act as some kind of direct complement to Dark Side of the Rainbow, as Messiaen Trek does the same for 2001-Echoes. A whole web site could be devoted to the subject. But if we’re sticking to the structure of the synchs, as I think we should do here, MessiaenSphere is a silver synch, just like Dark Side of the Rainbow, even though the base musical work is edited somewhat. This is an example of an edited silver tile where, even though edited, the base music retains a rather high level of integrity in my opinion. This word or idea of “integrity” begins to play an increasingly large role in synchs we are to discuss, such as Pink Vertigo. And I also wanted to add that I saw MessiaenSphere, at the time I created it, was some kind of octave of Dark Side of the Rainbow, or Dark Side of the Rainbow on a kind of higher twist of a spiral in the same position on the cycle. However, in light of SID’s 1st Oz, I would consider this more a half octave, a mid point in our journey through the Oz/Floyd Paradox, if you will. In other words, SID’s 1st Oz is actually the true octave of Dark Side of the Rainbow, and, correspondingly, a much more complete example of integrating movie dialog with overlapping music. But without MessiaenSphere and the lessons I learned from that experience, I don’t think SID’s 1st Oz would have been possible. That’s why I say you have to pass through Messiaen Sphere and also Pink Vertigo, the next found synchronicity one month later — the mid points of the process, in other words — to get from beginning, Dark Side of the Rainbow, to end, SID. There is no other way, and I would also directly parallel this process to alchemy, where in order to create gold you have to pass through silver. If MessiaenSphere is silver, and the repeat of Dark Side of the Rainbow in a very personal sphere — pardon me –then Pink Vertigo is the beginning of the movement from silver to gold. This is my first attempt at covering an entire movie with dubbed music, an edited movie to be sure but one, once again, that seems to retain its basic *integrity*.
Pierre: Fascinating and perhaps controversial as some of those statements seem, I’ll simply let them stand and move on to Pink Vertigo. So describe this synch. I know this is what you would call your first unique gold tiling, and that it grows directly out of MessiaenSphere. This is also what you would consider your first artistic synch, along with, to a lesser degree, the contemporary MessiaenSphere. So with that introduction take it away baker.
baker: I have to pause here because I feel we haven’t covered something important.
Pierre: No, I think we should just leap into Pink Vertigo now. That’s my gut feeling.
baker: Tonight?
Pierre: Yeah. Fire away. How’s your neck holding up?
baker: I think I’ll be fine.
Pierre: If you really want to wait we can. What else do you want to talk about?
baker: I guess it just seems that we’re entering something new now, a second part of a process where before we were talking about a part 1. The quadrangle of Dark Side of the Rainbow, 2001-Echoes, and then the two Messiaen synchs is hard to get by.
Pierre: But this is a discussion of the Oz/Floyd Paradox tapes. But what I think you’re telling me is that we are moving from silver to gold, or moving from an emphasis on the albums to one on the movies and a more complete concept. As you say, we’re at a halfway point between Dark Side of the Rainbow and SID.
baker: How many interview sessions have we done by now? Five I think? Maybe we should end this one here and then make about five more that will take us through SID’s 1st Oz.* The wife and I do plan to drive a lot this weekend, and perhaps I should rest my neck instead of continuing to type.
Pierre: Okay, perhaps you’re correct. So the next time we start *immediately* with Pink Vertigo (laughs). Also it would give us some time to edit what we already have. Are we ready to turn off the tape then?
baker: Go ahead sir. See you on the flip side.
* [editor’s note: this turned out to be about the 1/4th point in the interview instead of being halfway through]
*****
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 6 of 20
*****
Pierre: Okay we’re back with baker. This time during daylight hours. Dare we actually get up in the middle of the night and do even *another* session?
baker: Probably not, since I have to drive early in the morning.
Pierre: Now, as I remember, you promised to leap into Pink Vertigo ASAP. No dilly dallying around this time. So take it away.
baker: Pink Vertigo, Pink Vertigo. So this is the first transition from a silver to gold tiling for me, but admittedly in an incomplete way. Yet structurally, it represents something beyond the silver tiled synchs before it, beginning with Dark Side of the Rainbow and ending with MessiaenSphere. I say this even though, on my personal synchs site, I don’t give it quite the high marks of Dark Side of the Rainbow. I do give it an A, though. There are weaknesses, with one obviously being the relative lack of lyrical matches in comparison with Dark Side of the Rainbow.
Pierre: Dark Side of the Rainbow was given an A+, right?
baker: Yeah, and I give MessiaenSphere an A-. But I grade down a little for the more manipulated or tiled synchs. You have to take that into consideration in my opinion. But Pink Vertigo is a very interesting synch, still.
Pierre: And this is on the second tape of your proposed 4 tape Oz/Floyd Paradox set, following Piper’s Nightmare Xmas and Full of Secrets.
baker: It summarizes and directly continues those two.
Pierre: So the movie used now is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which many consider to be his best flick even though others are better known — Psycho obviously. When you say this is an incomplete gold tiling of the movie, what do you mean? And — before you start — you said you wanted me to specifically prompt you about resonating cues on this one. Now you’ve talked about resonating cues in the Rainbow Complex, obviously, or Dark Side of the Rainbow, your more complete version as you call it, and then the complementary Rainbow Sphere. You also mention it in Messiaen Trek, and directly compare the resonating cues in that synch, the commands of Cpt. Kirk, to the three third lion roars in The Wizard of Oz movie. You didn’t mention these in connection with MessiaenSphere…
baker: They’re not as important in that one.
Pierre: …but now in Pink Vertigo they come up again.
baker: Right. Well, the resonating cues are what holds the whole synch together, or, actually, how it was put together in the first place. As with all my other true synch finds, this one was found quite quickly, in the matter of a night, if I remember correctly. Actually, the title sequence, overlapped with the first song of their soundtrack to La Valle, was found before, perhaps several weeks before. Remember how I talked about single song synchs seeming to be waiting for some larger concept to attach itself to? Well, this is a perfect example, because the title song laid the foundation for the entire structure of this gold tiling, which fell into place very quickly after I found the proper opening.
Pierre: You’ve described this synch as primarily being about the Pink Floyd studio album directly following Ummaguamma, or Atom Heart Mother, specifically the long title song which takes up the entire original side 1 of this album. And you use all of this song in the synch, while only using small parts of the other albums?
baker: There are 6 sections to the Atom Heart Mother suite, as I like to call it, which were created, actually, because of the structure of royalties made on any album at the time. Basically speaking, the more tracks on an album the more royalties you received. So to get more money, Floyd divided this long song on side 1 into 6 separate parts. 5 of these sections — all but the last, separately called Remergence — are used in Pink Vertigo. But the suite is divided into two separate parts in the synch. Sections 1 through 3, or Father’s Shout, Breast Milky, and Mother Fore, make up the first part of the two, which begins in the synch just after the title sequence mentioned before. And then the second part, which begins exactly at what could be similarly called the second part of the movie, uses the following two sections, or Funky Dung and Mind Your Throats Please. Then, as I said, the 6th and last part is not used. Taken alone, you could call these two sections, if linked together — and they continue one right into another — a bronze tiling, since almost an entire side of an album is employed. This would be much like the classic bronze synch 2001-Echoes, where we have a song similarly covering an entire side 1 of the Floyd studio album following Atom Heart Mother, or Meddle. In fact, the Atom Heart Mother suite is considered an alternate musical overlap to this ending section of 2001: A Space Odyssey [Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite], and some synchers I’ve talked to apparently consider this an even stronger match with the ending section of 2001.
Pierre: But Pink Vertigo doesn’t stop with Atom Heart Mother. There are a lot of other Pink Floyd albums involved. You’ve already mentioned the title sequence and the 1st song of the La Valle soundtrack, called Obscured by the Clouds.
baker: Well, I think it’s easier to start from this base of the Atom Heart Mother suite, this bronze base, if you will, and build up from there. Following each half of this suite in the synch would be the same exact three songs, which would lead up to the end of the 1st part of the movie and the 2nd half of the movie respectively. These would all be the first songs of early Pink Floyd albums except one, and that one is, once again, Jugband Blues, already discussed in connection with the Full of Secrets synchronicity. Instead of the first song on an album, this is the last. Alpha switched with Omega, if you will.
Pierre: And the other songs?
baker: Well, following each of the two halves of the Atom Heart Mother suite, we have the 1st song from Meddle, or One of These Days, but only the first part of the song in each case, or up to the only spoken words in the song: “One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces,” the source of the title.
Pierre: What do these words mean? Is there any significance to the Pink Vertigo synch?
baker: I think they refer to a DJ whose voice Pink Floyd were poking fun at for one reason or another. “Cutting up” here refers to cutting up tapes of his voice and rearranging them to make nonsensical phrases. I think I’m remembering that correctly. But in Pink Vertigo, it could actually refer to the cut up method used to collage the movie together to synch with Pink Floyd.
Pierre: So you’re saying that these sections, one overlapping Atom Heart Mother, and the next overlapping One of these Days from Meddle, aren’t continuous according to the movie sequence. But they are in Pink Vertigo through a cut and paste method.
baker: Only two of the nine sections used in Pink Vertigo are continuous in relationship to the movie, although all are in the proper time sequence. That is, there are no reversals of the film order or anything like that. The two continuous sections are the 4th and 5th of nine, lying right in the middle of both the movie and the synch. It may be best to think of this as a chain of islands, with the islands themselves the synched part of the movie in Pink Vertigo, and the water gaps between the islands as the parts of the movie in-between that are left untouched. All we see in Pink Vertigo are the islands, while the actual movie Vertigo would be the islands and the water gaps, the static dialog parts. Does that make sense?
Pierre: Somewhat. Go on with your explanations, though, and maybe it will become more clear. So we have two parts of the movie, two natural halves…
baker: Yes, a symmetry that Hitchcock purposefully built into the movie. It is like a looped mobius stip.
Pierre: Well, I’m going to leave that statement alone for now. I’m confused enough! But each of these two halves of the movie are synched to the exact same material, using this island chain method of cutting up the film. So you’ve mentioned each section begins with the Atom Heart Mother suite, which, itself, is cut in two, the first section beginning the first half, and the second section beginning the second half of the movie. So I’m okay so far?
baker: Let me just go ahead and plug in the final song used in the synch. This is Astonomie Dominie, the first song off the first Pink Floyd album Piper at the Gates of Dawn, an album we’ve already discussed extensively in terms of the Piper’s Nightmare Xmas synch. But, in this case, this is one of the four songs off the album not used in this former synch. If you remember, tracks 1 through 4 of this album were not used in Piper’s Nightmare Xmas.
Pierre: So, let me start again. In each half of the movie, which also corresponds to a half of the film, as Hitchcock designed it — the film that is, of course — we have, first off, the Atom Heart Mother suite…
baker: Which is the first song of the album of the same title.
Pierre… then One of these Days
baker: …first song off Meddle, the studio album after Atom Heart Mother.
Pierre: Then…
baker: …Astronomie Dominie, an excellent Barrett composition that’s the first song…
Pierre & baker jointly: …off Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
(both are laughing here)
Pierre: Uh (laughs)… oh, Jugband Blues, which is the *last* song…
baker: …off A Saucerful of Secrets, the Floyd studio album following Piper. Do you see a pattern in this, by chance?
Pierre: Well, you’ve mentioned several albums that follow each other.
baker: The trick is to understand that Pink Vertigo is built around the earlier Psychogumma. Floyd fans reading this, if any, may have noticed that I’ve mentioned all early Floyd studio albums except Ummaguamma, which is used in Psychogumma instead and overlaps Hitchcock’s more famous movie, Psycho. So what we’re doing in this round robin effect of songs in Pink Vertigo is effectively skipping over Ummaguamma each time it comes round in the game, and also we can include Dark Side of the Moon in this skipping as well, which is the album after Meddle. To make things even more complicated — and simpler at the same time, actually — all this structure can be seen as a further downstepping, I guess you could call it, from that of MessiaenSphere composed just the month before. Remember that MessiaenSphere uses the skipping method itself in setting up the proper way to run the synch, as I see it. Remember which tracks were skipped over? Tracks 3 and 6 [baker answers himself quickly]. Well, here this is equivalent to the Pink Floyd studio albums nos. 3 and 6, or Ummagumma, no. 3, and Dark Side of the Moon, no. 6.
Pierre: You’re purposefully playing with my mind here, right?
baker: No, because in Pink Vertigo, you see, we’re skipping over no. 3 and no. 6 in a sequence again, except this time they are tracks representing an entire album and not just a track in an album. We can skip over these because we can say they’ve been accounted for already in the Oz/Floyd Paradox overall scheme of things, because Ummagumma is already used in Psychogumma — a silver tiling which involves the whole studio album part of the double album — and Dark Side of the Moon, of course, is already taken care of in Dark Side of the Rainbow and also Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine, both also silver tiles and thus also involving the whole studio album.
Pierre: Okay, I’m going to play along. Let me count this off then. First, Atom Heart Mother, which is the 5th studio album.
baker: The album order, in terms of studio albums, and subtracting any compilation or soundtrack or live albums, is: one, Piper at the Gates of Dawn; two, A Saucerful of Secrets; three, Ummagumma; four, Atom Heart Mother; five, Meddle; and, six, Dark Side of the Moon. Later Floyd, or all that comes after Dark Side of the Moon, doesn’t play a role yet in the Oz/Floyd Paradox. This will wait for tape 3 of the set, beginning with Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 and also including The Point of The Wall. So what I’m saying here is that you have two halves of the movie…
Pierre: Yeah, I got that part.
baker: …and we start with Atom Heart Mother suite in each, off album no. 4, then move to the first song, again, off Meddle, or no. 5, then we jump over Dark Side of the Moon and go back to album no. 1 for the next first song, which is Astronomie Dominie, then we move to album no. 2 for the next song, which is not the first but the last…
Pierre: Jugband Blues.
baker: Yeah, and then the cycle skips over album no. 3, Ummagumma, to resume again at Atom Heart Mother and the title song, another first song. It can be seen as an endless loop, just like the movie is to a large extent. That mobius strip idea I mentioned before. You’ve got to keep in mind that I’d been watching MessiaenSphere a lot the month prior to uncovering Pink Vertigo, and the structure of the former lent itself to the latter in a natural carryover of sorts. This is the way I see it anyhow.
Pierre: Pretty mind-boggling. Am not sure I’m taking this all in correct. Bleh! [hands playfully indicating brain blowing up].
baker: Look at it this way. There are three ways to view Pink Vertigo. On level 1, as I described it at the beginning, this is a bronze-type synch using only the Atom Heart Mother suite, and thus akin in structure to 2001-Echoes using the following album {Meddle], and also Full of Secrets, another bronze synch. On the second level, in addition to this, it is a synch that uses, in round robin style, all the first songs off all early Pink Floyd studio albums prior to Dark Side of the Moon, with Ummagumma skipped over since it is accounted for in the earlier Hitchcock synch, Psychogumma. The third level involves the one exception to this first song rule, which is Jugband Blues, and this exception indicates, at least to me, that we’re dealing with, here on this third level, a direct successor in ways to Full of Secrets, which also uses this song. And *then*, before this whole cycle begins, we have an introduction by way of the title sequence of Vertigo perfectly synchronized with the first song of one of the three soundtrack albums of early Floyd, or Obscured by the Clouds, often called the best of these three by the way.
Pierre: Okay, maybe that’s enough about the structure of Pink Vertigo. It’s certainly a little more complicated than the others mentioned before. Now, can you continue some of that energy you used in interpreting Piper’s Nightmare Xmas and Full of Secrets into this one? After all, the same two albums are used, and even one of the same songs in the second case. You mentioned a direct connection especially with Full of Secrets.
baker: What pops into my mind to discuss before this is the resonating cues we talked about before. Let’s take the island chain image again. The start of these islands as seen from our hypothetical side view, one after another, would be equivalent to a cuing point, which, in each case, is a starting cue, although it is verified by an internal cue in some cases. Let’s only deal with the 8 cues of the cycle, and leave out the title sequence, which is an abnormality in this case. The cue is obvious when you watch the sequence, though. So to the cycle: 4 of these 8 cues are directly resonating in that they occur *right* at the end of a dissolve from one scene to another. In each case, this is a dissolve from a scene which involves dialog to one with little or no dialog. According to number, these would be cues 1, 3, 6, and 7. Two other cues are very similar to these. One involves starting a song right at the scene change preceding a very similar dissolve, again between a dialog section of the movie and a non-expository section. I should mention here that the movie Vertigo is naturally cycled between these periods of dialog with little to no motion, and non-dialog with a lot of motion and action. It was obvious to me from the beginning that the static dialog sections would be no good for synching. This left the non-dialog parts, which drew me to use the movie in the first place. As I remember, I thought that the oft-called boring scenes where Scottie, the Jimmy Stewart character, is merely following the female character played by Kim Novak, around various locations in San Francisco… in fact, the first of these non-dialog scenes is rather famous, because there’s no talking in the movie for a solid 12 minutes or so. So, my thinking went along these lines: okay, these driving and otherwise parts of Vertigo are considered boring to some, and the rather plodding Atom Heart Mother suite is considered boring to many, so perhaps these two boring, plodding motions belong together in some odd way. And having this thought in my mind, I was surprised to find, with only a minimum of experimentation — thanks to the resonating cue points which allowed the synch to unfold before me with only a minimum of prodding — that, yes, they do indeed seem to go together very well. Perhaps too well, in fact. And then, perhaps because of the title sequence already being in place and dubbed by another first track song off a Floyd album, the idea occurred to me to continue this first song tiling of the movie, as you could put it, with the natural next song being One of these Days off the album following Atom Heart Mother. And, again, a very successful match was found. Then, skipping over Dark Side of the Moon and Ummagumma for reasons already stated, I quickly fit in the two repeats of Astronomie Dominie and Jugband Blues to complete the tiling of Vertigo. And as I remember, each cue derived from the one before, both in terms of which album to use and also the cuing point. And, as I said, this went along with the movie’s natural division into dialog and non-dialog sections, with the non-dialog sections actually eliminated from the synch very early on. This method of elimination will come up again when we speak of The Point of The Wall.
Pierre: Well, let’s definitely not jump ahead until this is cleared up. I think I’m beginning to get a little better picture now, though. I’m not sure how these 8 resonating cues of this main cycle fit in together, or how one section naturally suggested the following section, as you put it. You mentioned some of these resonating cues but not all of them. There were 4 mentioned out of 8 I think.
baker: Right. Well, two of the remaining four apply to Jugband Blues, and are resonant unto themselves. Both involve Scottie — the Stewart character — grabbing Madeline — the Kim Novak character — at a certain church in the movie which is shown at the end of the first half of the movie and, again, at its very end. So these two suggested each other, but, in truth, both are really synched to the end of each half of the movie, as you can see when you watch the synch. And then of the remaining two, one is suggested by a dissolve just after it, and then realigned a couple of seconds ahead through an internal cue — again, this internal cue is obvious when watching the synch. And then the final cue is, strangely, inspired by the one cue in Psychogumma. It comes right at the beginning of the second half of the movie, and, as in this earlier Hitchcock synch, the beginning chord of Funky Dung should “light up” the scene beginning this 2nd half. Have you had a chance to watch the synch yet Pierre? I forgot to ask you that.
Pierre: I watched it only one time, admittedly, when you sent a tape to me several years ago. Actually, I must confess I only watched the first part, because I thought the synch was over. Forgive me!
baker (laughs): That’s okay. So that’s one reason why you’re having a hard time grasping some of this. But I think we’ve covered the basic structure; the idea of resonating cues and the chain of islands as the synched parts of the movie, each island in the chain being positioned by these cues, and also their actual composition — I don’t know what this would compare to — being basically inspired by the first song, round robin album rule.
Pierre: Okay, now let’s move to the interpretation then. Let me guide you if I can by mentioning Full of Secrets. Now I know that Scottie, the lead male character of Vertigo played brilliantly by Jimmy Stewart — as usual — is a detective, but he is retired from the force because of some trauma involving a roof top fall he was involved in. This traumatic moment is shown at the first of the movie, and also a bit at the first of the synch as you presented it, if I remember correctly [baker nods]. Then along comes an old friend name Gavin Elster during the following dialog oriented sequence — not shown in the synch — who wants him to come out of retirement, at least briefly, as a favor to him, and follow his apparently disturbed wife around to see what she is up to during her daytime travels. So this is where the synch begins again, when this following starts. Is this correct so far? You’re going to have to help me here because my memory gets a little vague from this point on.
baker: That’s right so far. And this begins that famous 12 minute stretch of cinema where there’s no dialog, only Scottie following Madeline around to her various daytime haunts. Then he reports back to Gavin Elster after doing some research, and, at this time, Elster basically convinces him that Madeline is haunted by a specter from the past named Carlotta Valdes, who lived during the mid-1800s in San Francisco and whose portrait and haunts [places] Madeline is apparently obsessed with. Then begins the 3rd part of the synch with the first run of One of These Days, when Scottie’s ultimate fears are realized as Madeline tries to commit suicide by jumping in the San Francisco Bay, just as Carlotta committed suicide at the same age in her life. Luckily Scottie is following her and is able to save her. Then cut to the first run of Astronomie Dominie, where Scottie and Madeline are now traveling together, and heading down the coast to visit a sequoia forest, where Madeline describes her imagined life as Carlotta Valdes using the rings of a cut sequoia as a timeline. “I was born here,” she says as she points between two of these rings, “and died here,” as the finger moves an inch or so over, indicating the 28 years Carlotta lived. So Scottie is infatuated, and shortly after this — during another non-synching section — kisses Madeline and declares his love and that he’ll solve the mystery for her. So then Madeline shows up the next day, I believe, at Scottie’s door and says she remembers even more. She remembers a church in a town about 50 miles below San Francisco. Am I going into too much detail here?
Pierre: That’s fine. Go ahead.
baker: So they head down the coast in Scottie’s car, where, and I should put a basic [capital letters] SPOILER ALERT here for all those who haven’t seen the movie — if I shouldn’t have done so before — Madeline seems to successfully follow through on a second suicide attempt in the movie by jumping out of the bell tower at the mission’s church. The trick is that Scottie can’t follow her up to this tower because of his vertigo, the condition caused by the traumatic experience that made him retire. So he remains helpless on the stairs as Madeline scampers up the tower and jumps off. So ends part one — and this last part is synched to Jugband Blues again.
Pierre: Well, baker, it looks by the clock that we may have to continue this another day, perhaps tonight but most likely after we return from our vacation. So I’ll let you describe part 2 of the movie/synch next time, and then we’ll go into an interpretation. Frankly I’m pretty tired and not totally absorbing all this, especially after we’ve switched from that deep abstract mode into a more descriptive one now.
baker: Totally understandable.
Pierre: Anything you want to add at this point before we close?
baker: No, I’m ready to *plunge* into the next part as soon as a slot opens (laughs).
Pierre: So I’ll give you a call tomorrow night. Oh wait, you won’t be home. You’ll be back Sunday at the earliest, right?
baker: I’d give me a call sometime Monday evening. I’ll try your place first.
Pierre: Okay, it’s a date then. Monday or Tuesday or, on the outside, tonight.
baker: See ya then bud.
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 7of 20
*****
[very first part of tape cut off]
Pierre: Already back on a Sunday night. What a whirlwind tour you had of these states!
baker: Yes sir. Covered some new ground; re-explored the old. I think Swordfisht and I have licked the art of taking a trip. The key is: listen to your instincts and recognize these nudges from others!
Pierre: Okay, I guess we should go ahead and start talking about audiovisual synchs now. As I remember, we’re in the middle of a discussion on Pink Vertigo, but you briefly indicated to me in our warm up talks that you want to simplify this process?
baker: Upon rereading the transcript of our last interview before leaving town, I realized that I was going into too much detail about the Vertigo movie, or I would have if I had continued in the same manner that ended the second. The easiest — and most appropriate here, perhaps — way of describing the second part of the movie is that it is exactly the same as the first part, and this symmetry is emphasized through the Pink Vertigo synch. Another thing I want to emphasize while I’m thinking about it is that although I consider Pink Vertigo an advance in structure over Dark Side of the Rainbow — being my first attempt at a gold tiling while Dark Side of the Rainbow is “merely” a silver tiling — I don’t necessary consider it to be a better synch overall. In fact, I think it is little hard to understand or have been reminded of this quality by others, although they also seem to appreciate it. I can’t say it is a fully successful gold tiling at all, because, 1) you probably have to be familiar with the movie to really “get” it, as we say in synch world, and, 2) it is really a gold synch edited down to the length of a silver synch. And here we get back to the symmetry, because just as the albums of old were divided into two sides, or the front and back of a long playing record — like all of the old and classic Pink Floyd albums we’ve been and will be talking about — Pink Vertigo is similarly divided into two parts, each of which would be about an album side in length. The trick is that if you were to create one of these types of albums from the Pink Vertigo soundtrack, shall we say, both sides of the album would be basically identical, except that the Atom Heart Mother suite would be divided between the sides. Does all this make sense?
Pierre: I suppose so. You’re simply trying to emphasize that just because the structure is quite a bit more complex here, this doesn’t make the synch better.
baker: Yes. Personally I give it about an A, just rating it among my own finds, while I still give Dark Side of the Rainbow an A+. But even this may be overrating Pink Vertigo.
Pierre: I haven’t told you but I did watch Pink Vertigo while you were gone. Overall I think it is strong, although I must admit I liked the Atom Heart Mother parts of the synch better than the others. I wasn’t sure how the following songs from Meddle, Piper, and Saucerful fit in afterwards, although I could sense a certain pattern. And in my defense, and yours as well I guess, I found the editing of the film into segments — your chain of islands — a little disconcerting, if that’s the proper word.
baker: Thanks for your honest comments, but it just reinforces to me that this a difficult one to get because it is an imperfect gold tiling. Even the next one we’ll be discussing, Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000, or what I guess we should call, even at this early date, simply WSF2K, as I usually do, is quite a bit more fully realized gold tiling or synching because it involves a much more complete chunk of the movie. But, then again, with the synch we’ll talk after even this, The Point of The Wall, we’re back to the structure of Pink Vertigo, but I think it’s easier to swallow at this point because we’re using basically chronological material from the same album to cover the skips, plus also the two stories are obviously more intertwined in that case.
Pierre: So I guess you’re not mad at me then for not understanding it fully?
baker: Oh no. I understand completely. But I still think Pink Vertigo is a very important synch for reasons I’ve already given, and that it is really the first full blown, or at least half blown, artistic synch, as well as the first attempt at a gold tiling in a more complex, personal style than just the one cue Rainbow Sphere.
Pierre: So if you’re leaving the second part of the movie as a repeat of the first here, do you want to go ahead and attempt some type of interpretation? Are there any connections with Oz here, for example?
baker: Not Oz directly, but more indirectly through the Full of Secrets synch that Pink Vertigo is probably most attached to symbolically, along with, of course, Psychogumma, since this involves another Hitchcock movie and lays the ground structure for Pink Vertigo. But in Full of Secrets, the obvious link is Jugband Blues, and the end of Barrett within the flow of the Floyds. Although he released two solo albums — and, you know, the second of these is not very good in my opinion — this really represents the parting of the ways as far as Syd and the architects who would dominate the band during the Waters-led years.
Pierre: This is from a Saucerful of Secrets all the way to the Final Cut, then. Spanning how many years?
baker: Let’s see. I like to look at The Final Cut as the 10th studio album of Floyd, so that would make 8 studio albums total, not counting, again, compilations or live or soundtrack albums. Because even Saucerful, as I’ve said, is mostly Waters at work already. Barrett’s only composition on the album is Jugband Blues.
Pierre: So let me guess. From looking at Pink Vertigo, and realizing you want to keep this as a total symmetrical creation, what we have here is the death of Barrett within Floyd, not once but twice, and then these two deaths are looped into each other in some way.
baker: If we look at Full of Secrets again, we have the Barrett figure there, or Agent Dale Cooper, being taken over by a dark doppleganger, just like Jack Skellington took over the role of Santa Claus near the end of Nightmare Before Christmas. Jack being another Barrett figure. Here, in Vertigo and also Pink Vertigo, of course, we have Kim Novak’s character of Madeline also being taken over by a doppleganger, but, in this case, she’d always been a doppleganger all along, at least on one level. On another, deeper level, following Hitchcock’s lead, we can see that she’s not a doppleganger at all once again. So it’s a sandwich interpretation, going along with the actual film’s interpretation of this character.
Pierre: I’m not following you baker.
baker: Well, let’s put it this way. Even from the film’s beginning, if we’re familiar with the film, we know — and I guess I should put a big “ALERT: SPOILER” here again for those who haven’t seen the film but perhaps want to — Madeline, the Novak character, is a doppleganger on this level, one below the surface level. In the second part of the film, we see her as she really is. Now on this deeper level, we can say that *both* these versions of Madeline are the same, and that they are bound through the love of Scottie, the Stewart character. In the first part of the film, she is playing a role for Scottie, but makes the mistake, as she says I think at some point, of falling in love with him. This is the flaw for her, and reveals the whole movie structure. He also falls for her, of course. Otherwise this would only be a standard murder mystery. In the second part of the film, she is still in love with him, as her real self of Judy Barton I mean, a plain Kansas girl, much like Dorothy Gale all grown up perhaps — hmmm — and…
Pierre: Judy Barton sounds a lot like Judy Garland…
baker: That’s just what I was thinking. Maybe we can explore that in a moment. But going on here, there are these two symmetrical parts of the film, and also two symmetrical parts of the Novak character, or Madeline in the first part and Judy in the second. But Judy is the real self, while Madeline is played by Judy, as an actor would play a role. But the only audience here is Scottie himself, who is the patsy in this whole deal. All this an elaborate set to get away with the murder of the real Madeline, who is killed by her husband.
Pierre: Now I haven’t seen Vertigo in a long time, and I’ve only watched your Pink Vertigo synch all the way through one time now, but I don’t remember another man at all.
baker: Yes, in the synch he’s barely seen. He’s edited out. But the husband’s not the important one anyway. He’s the one who talks to Scottie at the window just after the trial, at the point in the synch where I let the dialog bleed through.
Pierre: Yeah, I meant to complement you on that part. I thought that and the subsequent psychedelic scene involving him falling into a grave was a good rebound from the end of the first part.
baker: That’s the only part of the synch I play that trick. And, really, the idea came because the section of the Atom Heart Mother playing at the time, Funky Dung, is so, so static and rather bland and boring. That’s probably my least favorite part of the [Atom Heart Mother] suite, actually.
Pierre: Yeah, I can see that. So getting back to this symmetry. Um, let me gather my thoughts here. Why don’t you just go on with your explanations.
baker: There is a true and false Judy Barton. Both die at the end of their respective halves of the film, and in exactly the same way. And this symmetry between the two women — one a character and the other a real person behind the character — is drawn out by the love between both and Scottie. Scottie is the bridge, but we also get to see a lot of character development from him through the movie. I must also add here that of all the movies we’ve reviewed so far in terms of my Oz/Floyd Paradox synchs, this is probably the best and greatest in my opinion, even over The Wizard of Oz. I think the themes of Oz are more universal — this heart vs. brain conflict — but Vertigo is a better picture, cinematically speaking. So when we attempt to analyze Pink Vertigo we have to go into the levels of the movie, which are multiple. But getting back to Barrett and the comparison with Full of Secrets, I think a direct line can now be drawn from Jack Skellington to Agent Dale Cooper to, not the Madeline/Judy Barton duality as much as Scottie Ferguson, the character who observes and interacts and *loves* both. There is no love between Madeline and Judy however. It is clear in the movie that Judy hates the role she played, thus her reluctance to turn into Madeline again, at least in terms of a surface look at the end of the film. She hates it because she deceived Scottie and made him suffer tremendously. After all, it drove him crazy — the psychedelic part as you put it.
Pierre: So you’re saying there’s a direct chain of associations between the main characters of the three synchs on your “tape two”: or Jack Skellington, Agent Cooper, and now Scottie… what was it?
baker: Ferguson. Yeah, and I still haven’t explained the Vertigo-Twin Peaks influence. The character of Laura Palmer and her own doppleganger of Maddy in the series — and we see both in the Black Lodge — are direct inspirations of this character from Vertigo, as is well known among Twin Peak circles. In Twin Peaks, Maddy — short for Madeline, a direct reference to the Vertigo character — is Laura’s twin cousin, shall we say, much like Patty Duke played twin cousins in her TV series from the sixties. The only difference is that Maddy had dark hair and Laura light, just as Madeline had light hair, and Judy Barton had dark hair. Other parallels can be made. For example, we do not meet Madeline until after Laura’s death, much like Judy Barton doesn’t show up in Vertigo until after Madeline’s death. Oh, and the last name of Maddy in Twin Peaks is Ferguson, which directly refers, in a conscious way I mean, to Scottie Ferguson.
Pierre: Now you see I didn’t pick up on any of this. So what is the parallel between Agent Cooper and Scottie suppose to be? Did Cooper have a love interest in Laura, or perhaps Maddy?
baker: No, but there was a tie because Cooper was in charge of finding out who was responsible for Laura’s death, and also Maddy, who later died at the hands of the same murderer. And Laura is the one who gave Cooper the key to solving both murders when she whispered the name of the murderer to him while he was inside the Black Lodge. This was earlier in the series, though.
Pierre: So the end of the series wasn’t the first time. Did they visit the Black Lodge a lot?
baker: Not a lot. Twice in the series, once in a dream and then once in reality, I guess we could call it. But Lynch is doing the same thing as Hitchcock in Vertigo in this series: purposefully mixing up what is real and what is a dream. Much like the ending lines of Barrett’s Jugband Blues: “And what exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke?”
Pierre: Interesting. I’m still confused about Scottie’s role in all this.
baker: Well, let’s approach it from a different angle. Scottie is a detective, or was, of the San Francisco police department, in somewhat the same way that Agent Cooper is an agent of the FBI, another investigative organization. Obviously, both had solved a lot of crimes, including probably some murders in both cases. Scottie, although he thinks he is merely following a disturbed woman around town to find out her haunts and perhaps the source of her mental aberrations, is actually, at the end, moving through the process of solving a murder, much like Agent Cooper was solving the murder of Laura Palmer, and some others by the same hand. But in the case of Scottie, he doesn’t realize this until the end of the film. He’s apprehended his murderer, or at least the murderer’s accomplice, and has to make the incredibly difficult decision to forgive her for this through his love for her. This would, however, go against every grain of his being, because he is trained to solve crimes and then apprehend the suspect for trial, much like he himself went on trial in the case of Madeline’s murder where I bleed the movie dialog into the Funky Dung music.
Pierre: Is Scottie tried for murder here? Do they suspect him then?
baker: No. He is tried, if I remember correctly, for negligence, or this was simply a hearing to determine what caused the death of Madeline. It was ruled that she committed suicide, and that Scottie had no part in it.
Pierre: Oh. So go on.
baker: Well, I think the best way to see the parallels is to examine the end of the film. Madeline jumps again off the bell tower, just as she did in part 1. Except here the perspectives have changed: Scottie knows about the faked murder from the end of part 1, and that Madeline is actually Judy Barton, who played the role of Madeline for money as an accomplice to the real murderer of Madeline, who was her husband. But Scottie’s perspective in all this is the real interest here, because at the end of the movie we see him looking down on Madeline/Judy’s body again, just as he’d done in part 1, but this time from the top of the bell tower instead of from a side window. We get the impression that he is ready to jump after her, to finish up a kind of Romeo and Juliet dual death. But the viewer cannot be sure. We are literally left hanging.
Pierre: Uh huh. I remember that from the end of the synch. Powerful scene, but confusing. Without the movie dialog I mean. But from what you’re telling me, and I’m trying to speed things up here again — if you’ll forgive me — is that Madeline’s death is tied into the death of Barrett inside Floyd.
baker: Well, approached from yet another angle, we can see that Pink Vertigo is divided between Barrett compositions and post-Barrett compositions in terms of Pink Floyd. Notice that when we have Barrett compositions playing, or Astronomie Dominie and Jugband Blues, Madeline/Judy and Scottie are together, while in the post-Barrett compositions from the Atom Heart Mother and Meddle albums they are apart, although Scottie may be observing Madeline/Judy from a distance. It is obvious to me that the union between the two somehow represents the union of Barrett with the other Floyds. As I said before in connection with Full of Secrets I believe, I think the split between Barrett and the Architects-of-Floyd, especially Waters, was inevitable. One way to look at Pink Vertigo is to see this inevitable split read into the accompanying music, which changes dramatically in each case between Barrett and non-Barrett regions, or between Jugband Blues and Atom Heart Mother if we make the whole synch a mobius strip. In each case we have a death, which are exactly the same symbolically in this mobius strip model. This can be overlapped with the death of Barrett within Floyd, and the mystery of the movie becomes one with the mystery of early Floyd. Hence [the name] “Pink Vertigo.” Now with Dark Side of the Moon, we have Floyd becoming completely independent of the Barrett specter, in ways, by fully integrating this specter, as it were, inside the structure and motifs of the album — the idea of an everyday, ordinary man driven insane by the pressures of time constraints, money, and drugs. All the things that drove Barrett mad, in other words. But in earlier Floyd, pre-Dark Side you see, there wasn’t this independence. Pink Vertigo is a snapshot of early Floyd, just before Dark Side of the Moon. It surfaces all the guilt about the “death” of Barrett, which is then resolved in Dark Side of the Moon and all subsequent albums up to The Wall. I would dare say that without Barrett and this lingering guilt, there would be no Dark Side, no Wall. What made the Waters-led Pink Floyd what it was — and, make no doubt of it, the period between Dark Side and The Wall was one of the greatest runs of rock and roll albums in our history, as impressive as any stretch of The Beatles, even, in its own special way — came from this guilt and an attempt at a resolution. Waters knew that, in a way, he was the cause of Barrett’s insanity, just because of the extreme differences in personality. Barrett would have been driven away at any rate, in my opinion, as the architects took over, more and more, the compositional roles. This was fate.
Pierre: Perhaps we should then wrap up Pink Vertigo with this summary. Is there anything else you want to add tonight before we perhaps move on to tape 3 and Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000?
baker: Only that Pink Vertigo represents, in its own way, almost a completely sideways synch, and that Dark Side of the Rainbow and Pink Vertigo link up like the two lines forming a “T”, one exactly perpendicular to the other. You can see this in the structure but also the underlying symbolism. Pink Vertigo, cutting across the tops of all early Floyd albums, is a line pointing directly to Dark Side of the Moon and Dark Side of the Rainbow, which is perpendicular to it.
Pierre: Okay there you have it. We’ve formed a perfect “T” between the first synch we’ve discussed and the last so far. Well baker, I think that’s it for tonight. I know you must be tired from your trip.
baker: Actually I’m not, surprisingly. As I said, I think Swordfisht and I have got this timing down exactly on our trips, and we know when to leave, where to go, and then when to come home. It is definitely an art that has been refined over the years.
Pierre: So perhaps tomorrow night. I’m looking forward to the next one, admittedly, because I like it a bit better than Pink Vertigo.
baker: It is stronger on the surface for sure, I think. Tomorrow sounds good for me right now.
Pierre: Okay baker, see you then and take it easy tomorrow.
baker: T’will do!
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 8 of 20
*****
Pierre: Alright, back with baker.
baker: Yes sir.
Pierre: I’m glad you decided to do the interview tonight. I know you wanted to cancel because you hadn’t had a chance to rewatch Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 but decided you were quite familiar with it enough already to carry on. So let me set you up further, since I know about this one better. Just to give some background, baker and I first met each other through my several posts on his Film/Album Synchronicity Board back in, what was it, November 2001 I guess, almost two years ago at this point.
baker: Phew!
Pierre: Seems a lot shorter time period, I agree. But I had created my own film/album synchronicity just after this called Kansas City Life, which I won’t go into here except to say that it appears to be, in baker’s terms, a classic bronze synch. The posts, however, were before, and at the time I was living in Denver City, Texas and having some difficulties with my career and life in general. I had a good friend named Tommie Dekker there, a writer — now known as Tommie, with an “ie”, to both of us — who helped me though the bad times, but it wasn’t until I moved away and drifted through Missouri and Colorado before deciding to settle in Lancaster, California that I found some stability, and also a seemingly perfect mate in Butchie Donglegapper, as baker now has Tommie, ironically enough. So when I interacted with baker on his next project, which involved Walt Disney’s Fantasia movie, I was rather in a state of flux. Baker also helped me through this period by providing a kind of working comrade for my new hobby. It was in this spirit that we worked together on the Fantasia movie, which was a private collaboration based on a new and very public collaboration called Shared Fantasia that part of baker’s work became a selection of. My own contribution to our private collaboration was called Night on Beefheart Mountain, unused in Shared Fantasia since I decided early on not to participate. Just to complete my own thoughts, Night on Beefheart Mountain represents another type of bronze synch, and represents my only other contribution to audiovisual synchronicity before my own personal muse decided to move me into other arts apparently, although recently I’ve taken up the hobby again.
Now, I’m telling the reader all this since baker decided that he was talking too much for some reason here, which I didn’t think at all [Pierre and baker laugh together]. No… really, he wanted me to set up his Fantasia synchronicities, because I knew more of the story in this case since I was directly involved in a way.
baker: Thanks for giving me a break Pierre (laughs again). Well, you’ve beautifully set me up, and also I see now the value of writing my so-called Hystery before this interview, because I can merely point to that to give details about the Shared Fantasia project, which, in my eyes, represents a kind of culmination for the co-op board I administered.
Pierre: This is The Film/Album Synchronicity Board, which went on for about 2 years.
baker: Right. Over two years. But as I say in my Hystery, the selection process for the participants turned out some queer and interesting results. It happened that the randomized selection of syncher-to-animation order spit back out the order of the sponsor site owners as they appeared in the header of The Film/Album Synchronicity Board. I thought at the time that this is what you could call a synchronicity, and I’m talking more in a standard way of speaking things, the term as it was originated by C. G. Jung, and has a lot of attached meaning.
Pierre: Just to review some — not much, since, as you say, this is in your Hystery. Why do you spell this with a “y” [and an “e”] actually?
baker: “Hystery” is the name of an album by Ron Geesin, who worked with Pink Floyd on several projects, including the orchestration for the Atom Heart Mother suite. It’s just a name for something.
Pierre: Hystery. Interesting. Okay, back to the order of the board. Where were we?
baker: Talking about how the order of the board sponsors mirrored the randomly selected order of the Shared Fantasia participants. May I take over here?
Pierre: Sure. Maybe I’ve had too much coffee tonight.
baker: I want to hear more about your two projects in a moment. Promise me you’ll save some breath for that. (laughs)
Pierre: Okay.
baker: But to make a long story short, the project, to me, represented a summary of the board — this is the capsule meaning I distilled from the ordering synchronicity. To give an example, I had the oldest sponsor site of the board at the time, and, parallel with this, I was selected to go first in the project. Dave Bytor had the second oldest site, and was the second selection, and so on.
Pierre: With one exception, though…
baker: Yeah, but even the exception had an attached story to it. Shared Fantasia is a large topic unto itself… may be too much to go into here in any detail.
Pierre: Understandable.
baker: But, basically speaking, the seven sections of Fantasia, the individual animated sections, that is, were divvied up between the seven selected participants. I received the first. Then I asked you to help me to work on the whole movie in a private way, just to get an overall feel. In retrospect, I knew that I was beginning to work in a gold tiling manner myself, and wanted to experiment with someone who was perhaps more akin to me in synching styles. I had viewed and appreciated your Kansas City Life by this point, as well as some earlier projects. I also knew about your D is 4 Denver project, which is, even now, still in its early stages. A huge project though, if I’m allowed to say that.
Pierre: But I’ve turned over most of that to you with the Mile High Studio sir!
baker: Maybe it’s time to give it back, at least partially. We can talk about this later, though.
Pierre: So your contribution to Shared Fantasia turned out to be one half of what you call Fantasia Brick Road, the whole of which was actually part of our little side project. Now I should also mention here that we were unsuccessful in tiling the entire Fantasia movie, even with our joint contributions. But the Shared Fantasia project represents a successful tiling of the movie as a whole. Would you call this a gold tiling then baker?
baker: Um, yes I guess it is. Yes, this is definitely a collaborative gold tiling.
Pierre: And, interestingly, this is your last *non*-gold tiling. Fantasia Brick Road I mean. Now, can you explain how your contribution to Shared Fantasia only represents half an overall synchronicity?
baker: Yes. I’ve had the opportunity to create a rather lengthy post about this subject on my new board, where I describe Fantasia Brick Road as basically a straight synch with some interesting kinks. One of these is the new idea of moveable tiles [break for phone call]. Let’s see… perhaps the best way to describe this in summary form is through an analogy. Let’s take the case of four tiles, laid side by side on some kind of board, as we would have in a game of scrabble perhaps, and with a certain small, basically equal space separating each tile. These 4 tiles would represent the first 4 songs or tracks off Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album, the musical source for the synch. The primary idea behind Fantasia Brick Road is minute [small] adjustments to each of the natural [CD] spacings between each of these four neighboring tiles, moving each slightly closer together or slightly more apart. In CD terms, this is only a matter of several seconds at the most. Once these adjustments are made, it’s like you glue them down into their new positions, and then use a knife to cut the whole arrangement, board and all, in two, and then reverse the places of the two resulting board pieces. Now, the cutting occurs through the end of the second tile and not one of the spaces in-between, but it still comes at what we can call a naturally occurring flaw in the tile, I suppose. This is basically the process I used to create Fantasia Brick Road from a straight synch involving the first four songs off the CD. The tracks are all adjusted in respect to each other, moved closer or further apart, and then the whole new effect is cut in two and reversed, with the new part 1 [formerly part 2] going along with the whole *second* animation of Fantasia, and the new part 2 [formerly part 1] overlapping the entire *first* animation of the movie. The latter represents my personal contribution to the overall Shared Fantasia Project. Confusing enough?
Pierre: Well, I know what you’re talking about, but to someone new to this material it probably is. What you’re talking about is taking a straight synch, and making adjustments relating to this whole tiling process and then donating “half” of the resulting “whole” synchronicity created to the Shared Fantasia Project.
baker: The reversing process between the two halves is also very important, because it will play a role in both the following Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 and also SID’s 1st Oz, as well as, also, Fantastic Aspic and Tronesis actually.
Pierre: Maybe all of this will become more clear if we just move into your Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 from here.
baker: I thought we were going to discuss your synchs?
Pierre: Let’s save them for later. I don’t think we should loose momentum. So WSF2K, as you abbreviate it, stems directly from the Shared Fantasia project, much as Fantasia 2000 acts as a follow up to the Fantasia movie created some 60 year before.
baker: Just to give a little background, the Fantasia movie was a very important project for Walt Disney personally, and represented what he saw as a first attempt at melding traditional classical music and animation in a large way. That is, the music used was not created for the movie, but existed as a masterpiece by itself. Most film scores are not considered this way, although there are some exceptions — the score of Vertigo may be one, actually… by Bernard Herrmann.
Pierre: Go on.
baker: So Disney came up with the idea of using animation to introduce a larger audience to these classical masterpieces, and also allow those familiar with the pieces a new understanding of them, perhaps. In a certain way, actually, you could call Fantasia the first audiovisual synchronicity, where you have large “unaltered” pieces of music synched, as it were, to a film. This would be something like our MTV videos, using a more modern example. But the main difference is that the animation was purposefully synched to the music, whereas in audiovisual synchronicity, as most commonly defined, the music and animation are created totally separate from each other and then cued together… the tiling process we’ve been discussing.
Pierre: However, isn’t it true that the more you tile and facet a synchronicity, the closer it comes to a film score? Where would the dividing point be between the two manipulations, where one transforms into the other?
baker: I think this is a very good question. I don’t know personally. Maybe we can talk about this more with SID’s1st Oz, which is a more manipulated affair and thus even closer to scoring. In Shared Fantasia, and, especially, my Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2K, there is not as much.
Pierre: So I know that your WSF2K project is very similar to Shared Fantasia, in that you successfully tiled the entire follow-up to Fantasia. We weren’t communicated as much at this time… I think this was about the point I moved from Denver City and began my short wandering period. I know you saw Shared Fantasia as a success, especially given its experimental basis, as you say. Would you consider your own Fantasia 2000 experiment equally successful?
baker: It is difficult to compare the two projects, actually, because one is a group effort, of course, and the other is my own personal interpretation. But, yes, I was very, very pleased with the Fantasia 2000 tiling. I think it represented my strongest synch to that date, and, in ways, it is still the strongest, although SID’s 1st Oz is better in other ways, and represents a more complicated and manipulated synch. I like to compare the two as a painting and a sculpture. On the surface, as in a glossy colored painting, the Fantasia 2000 creation is more profound, but SID is more dimensionalized, like the added 3rd dimension involved in sculpting. It is just different, and also I think has more overall meaning. That’s why I like SID better than Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000, even though the latter is, on the surface, perhaps my most consistent find.
Pierre: As you’ve stated before, you’ve described Shared Fantasia in quite some detail in your Hystery. Let’s just leave it at that. How is your Fantasia 2000 tiling different?
baker: First of all, it is less manipulated. Whatever positives the Shared Fantasia project had, I thought one of the weaknesses was a tendency, perhaps, to try to use as variegated music as possible to tile any certain section. I shouldn’t say weakness — that is showing a personal bias, because, simply, it is not the way I approached the project. It is difficult to explain, and one of the reasons is that Fantasia is a different movie than Fantasia 2000 to me. Remember that, even together, we [Pierre and baker] couldn’t tile the movie in our personal project that ran parallel to Shared Fantasia. I don’t think the structure of the earlier Fantasia lends itself to the more simplistic tiling of the later sequel. I would point, for example, to Mike Casey’s detailed mosaic of musical tiles that replaced Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in the fifth animation of the movie. Mike approached the project from a very different angle, and I think it was the correct thing to do. As we found out, a totally straight synch doesn’t seem to work with this section, or even several synchs. Mike’s choice was to use nine very different pieces of music to tile the animation here. I like his choices very much.
Pierre: So you’re saying that the structure of Fantasia 2000 is quite different from Fantasia, even though, on the surface, they appear very similar, especially since they are based on the exact same idea of fitting a whole classical piece to a specific animation?
baker: That’s what I picked up on during our experiments with Fantasia and then my own with its successor. As it turns out, in this one particular way my own overlaps with the second Fantasia are closer in spirit to Disney’s idea of merging a whole musical piece with a whole animation. And, really, WSF2K outdoes even Disney in one way, because the two ending animations are actually one big tile, created from the two ending songs of the first CD of Pink Floyd’s Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd.
Pierre: Ahhhh… Pink Floyd. I’d almost forgotten about them.
baker: (smiles) Yes, that and Oz are what we’re here to talk about mostly. Remember?
Pierre: How could I have forgotten so easily (laughs). So… seriously, baker. Now I’m looking at this whole picture and it seems important. One of the things that struck me when you described Shared Fantasia in your Hystery is that you summarized the project in one word: “potential”. Do you think you’ve built on the momentum of Fantasia 2000? Have the other participants? I know these may be hard questions to answer, so let me begin myself. I see our Fantasia collaboration — our personal parallel to Shared Fantasia — as a kind of dead end for me. At the time, I saw my contribution to the project, Night on Beefheart Mtn. as I like to call it, as inferior to the slightly earlier Kansas City Life. At the time you saw their value as reversed: you thought Night on Beefheart Mtn. was the stronger. In retrospect, here’s what I think. I think both are equally strong, for very different reasons, but they also cancel each other out in the same fashion. They point the way for my move to Lancaster, California, where both Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet [a.k.a. Captain Beefheart] lived while growing up together. There’s something to this overlap, and I only moved there because Butchie lived there and we grew up nearby. It was like returning home to me. So baker — I’m asking the pointed question to you, and I only do this because I’m a friend and I know you wouldn’t purposefully hurt me or do me wrong, but you also want me to grow. Did I miss the potential of my own contribution to the Fantasia collaboration? Am I right in thinking these two synch cancel each other out and lead me back to Butchie and Lancaster? Mind you, I’m very happy in California, and I think it was fate that I went back, but now, through my new experiments with Zappa and others, I’m seeing that perhaps I should have been more consistently experimenting with synchronicities in the lag between Shared Fantasia and the present. Perhaps I’m totally out of place by asking you this, but you did want me to share my input with you, and I think this is the most logical question that could come out of it. Do you want to try tackling it baker? Maybe this will also give an indication to others what you mean by “potential” here.
baker: This *is* a pointed question! You are a friend, and what I think happened is that you channeled the energy that you could have put into further experimentation with synchronicity into other areas. Obviously you were involved with developing the Mile High Studio for a while before moving to California. But I think you are primarily asking about The Garrs. Do I think you wasted your time in a way with them, and trying to get their band started back up? I think every life experience is valuable, and I have no right to judge what you’ve done, although from the outside I think that it was also destiny that you and Butchie end up together. I’m not sure, though, that you should have given up The Mile High Studio just because of the failure to restart The Garrs. There was more to it in my estimation. But I’m glad you are renewing your experiments, and I look forward to seeing some of the results soon. Does that answer, in any way, your question Pierre?
Pierre: This was a parting of the ways for me, but we’ve renewed our friendship basically over what happened to Tommie — her whole decisions to totally change her… essence. And now she is with you, just like I have my Butchie.
baker: Perhaps we should look at it this way. I built upon Shared Fantasia to create, essentially, the two Walt SIDney projects, or WSF2K and SID. What I got out of it was the uncovering of the Walt SIDney archetype through the strange melding of Syd Barrett and Walt Disney, beginning in the center of the two Fantasias. This is something you saw but decided not to, um, accept at the time, and then went on to other things. This despite some intense study of Shared Fantasia at the time, as I remember.
Pierre: Well, we’re going on and on about personal things here. Is this appropriate? Perhaps not.
baker: Walt SIDney is important to me, though. Frankly speaking.
Pierre: Walt SIDney.
baker: Yes.
Pierre: Perhaps this is a good spot to end our discussion tonight, and it really was a discussion and not an interview this time, just as you wished. And we’ve zoned in on our differences, where we parted at the time and perhaps where the two streams are coming back together now. At least Butchie is pushing me in this direction, and perhaps Tommie for you as well.
baker: Yes. Because once we begin functioning as a trio again, or, sorry, a quartet now, then the better we can reach our fullest potential for any future projects, whether created jointly or separately. This is what I’m picking up on now.
Pierre: So we have another day to mull all of this over and review the transcript. Very interesting discussion tonight baker. One for the books.
baker: I agree. Now *you* have a good rest tonight. (laughs)
Pierre: Thanks.
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 9 of 20
*****
Pierre: So, after a week and a half… has it been longer than that baker?
baker: Um, I think about a week and a half, yes.
Pierre: …We’re back to interviewing baker b. here in his basement studio apartment, or what he calls the Mile High Studio even though it is actually only a kilometer high.
baker (laughs): Well, I have you to thank for the “Mile” part. Mile, after all, sounds more impressive here than “Kilometer”.
Pierre: Maybe the 3333 Studio, or Studio 3333.33 (both laugh; inside joke).
baker: Maybe you should review what happened, Pierre, before I start again about Walt SIDney’s Fantasia. Let me ask you a question first, now. Has your opinion changed any about what I call the Walt SIDney archetype in the intervening time?
Pierre: Before answering this question — and I can tell you, short answer, I think it has — let me just catch up any reader of this material to tell them that baker and I stopped the interview process to work on a brand, spanking new collaboration we now call Quadrospirited… an overlap of the work from 7 separate musicians/musical groups with the newly released movie by supreme animator Hayao Miyazaki called Spirited Away, which both baker and I consider an animation masterpiece and seemingly destined to be an all time classic in the genre. I must also say up front that baker did most of the work on this one, although it still took a very short time.
baker: Same time as Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000: 3 nights.
Pierre: And this gives me the chance to say that the structure and feel of the synch is very similar to this earlier one, the one we’re talking about now. That seems a little odd to me.
baker: Yes, a synchronicity!
Pierre: We’ve also decided that even though this involves a section from a former member of Pink Floyd — Roger Waters — that it shouldn’t be included on your 4 DVD Oz/Floyd Paradox set, even though it is better than most of the synchs on it.
baker: This is correct.
Pierre: So, well, what else can I add? I think we should definitely talk about this synch sometime, but perhaps not here. Perhaps during or directly after SID’s 1st Oz.
baker: I think you should talk about your Zappa section, and our fun collaboration with Space Ghost anyway, since it leads directly from the topic ending our last discussion together here. This is, in a way, a fulfillment of our collaboration, whereas the attempt to tile the Fantasia movie, although very interesting, was a failure. And, very interestingly and seemingly very meaningful, both are precisely centered by Who material [material from the band, The Who]. The selection of the artists also has something to do with our earlier collaboration. We tried to work in Captain Beefheart here, remember? Specifically Trout Mask Replica, considered by many his finest hour. But since we had your excellent overlap of Beefheart already in the earlier Fantasia collaboration/synch, I think it tended to cancel the need to use it in the present synch. Instead the center really congealed, and thus ended the synch.
Pierre: Who Central.
baker: I remember, I remember. That’s what we called it before, except here it is realized to the fullest.
Pierre: So what do you recommend we say about this new collaboration in the interview?
baker: I think we should basically save all of it for later. But let’s make the bridge the Walt SIDney archetype. I want to hear your admission that you understand this archetype better, and that Quadrospirited is, besides a fulfilment of our earlier attempt to tile Fantasia, also another excellent example of this archetype manifesting among us, I guess you could say.
Pierre: Admission, huh?
baker: Yeah.
Pierre: I will admit that everything we talked about in the interview session before this one has been resolved to a very large degree. I am extremely impressed with the Zappa match inside Quadrospirited, as well as the match for the two Who tiles in the center that follow it. This is a new beginning for us, a new synthesis. This could not be by accident — I do see that. Whether I will ascribe this to your archetype I’m not sure still. Surely something is at work behind the scenes, though.
baker: I’ve been taking some notes on Walt SIDney, behind your back recently.
Pierre: Have you?
baker: I’ve come to the conclusion that this is where audiovisual synchronicity, such as we’ve been explaining here via the Oz/Floyd paradox synchs, ties into map synchs, the other synchronicity art I’ve been actively participating in over the years.
Pierre: Would this be a good spot to bring this map synching into the picture?
baker: (pause) My inclination is to leave it out. Makes things too complicated.
Pierre: So do you still want to talk about the archetype, then? Let me lead you here, through our pre-interview chat. Let’s talk about how this WSF2K synch represents the whole of Pink Floyd, beyond just the representation of earlier, pre-Dark Side of the Moon Floyd we have in Pink Vertigo, the synch discussed before this one and which appears on the end of the 2nd DVD. Let’s see, we are at the beginning of the 3rd DVD?
baker: Right.
Pierre: Why don’t you review what’s on each DVD for me, briefly. Then maybe we’ll edit it out of the interview.
baker: The 1st DVD of the Oz/Floyd Paradox contains, first, Dark Side of the Rainbow, with my little pastes/edits in it, and then Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine, its double in many ways. The second DVD contains, first, Piper’s Nightmare Xmas, then Full of Secrets, and, lastly, Pink Vertigo. The third DVD starts out with Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000, and then The Point of the Wall. Then the 4th DVD will be exclusively SID’s 1st Oz, which is a two hour work, or twice as long as anything that has preceded it in the set and in my works up to this point.
Pierre: Except Quadrospirited now.
baker: Yes, good addition. Quadrospirited is an hour and 20 minutes long, which makes it my second longest synch — and *our* longest synch (laughs).
Pierre: Thanks for including me in on that one.
baker: It really was a joint effort. You even pointed me in the direction of the Lou Reed ending. It just had to end that way, you know. Matches the Waters beginning.
Pierre: I agree, upon looking at it quite a number of times now, as have you. But back to WSF2K and Walt SIDney in general.
baker: By the way, perhaps we should add here as partial explanation that Spirited Away is another Disney production, albeit of foreign origin.
Pierre: Right. So WSF2K; Floyd. How do they link?
baker: First off, WSF2K is the first work that I include a number of artists in, extending the energy of Shared Fantasia. 5 artists are used in all, and we can even break this down into 7 separate artists — just like we have for Quadrospirited — if we take each version of the Pink Floyd band separately.
Pierre: Let’s see, we have the Barrett-led Floyd originally, then the Waters-led Floyd and then we end the synch with a track from the Gilmour-led Floyd. Perhaps this would be a good time to clue the reader in on the history of Floyd, if they don’t know it yet.
baker: I think the last time we discussed the Oz/Floyd Paradox synchs, we mentioned that Waters took over the band after the breakdown, shall we say, of original leader and main songwriter Syd Barrett. This was a very traumatic and public break down. The other band members, led by Waters, decided at a certain point that the band could not carry on with Syd as leader. They did try for a time, bringing in a new guitarist named David Gilmour — a childhood friend of both Barrett and Waters from Cambridge, England, actually — to cover for Barrett’s lapses in musicianship. I think at this point they envisioned Barrett as kind of a behind-the-scenes songwriter, much in the style of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys.
Pierre: Brian Wilson being another casualty of rock and roll fame and all the trappings that go along with it.
baker: I don’t know much of the story behind Wilson but I think you’re right here. You may know more about it, though, than I.
Pierre: Go on.
baker: Well, as we discussed before I think, even removing Barrett’s obvious mental problems from the picture we have a basic rift in philosophy between Barrett and, especially, Roger Waters. The architectural way of composing songs vs. the improvisational way for Barrett. The success of the architectural way shows up first in the title track for the Saucerful of Secrets album, the second Floyd effort following up the excellent Piper at the Gates of Dawn where Barrett dominated. A Saucerful of Secrets, the title song I mean, acts as an excellent contrast to Interstellar Overdrive from the first Floyd album, which is based purely on an acid rock style improvisation that made Floyd famous in the underground scene. Try as they might, though, they could not really recapture the total spaced out feel of this early song, and we have some of these later, less successful attempts showcased, actually, in the Piper synch here, or the first two songs of the synch in Pow R., Toc H. and Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk.
Pierre: Where is Interstellar Overdrive in relation to them on the album?
baker: It comes right after these two. It’s Track 7 on the Piper CD, as Pow R., Toc H. and Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk are tracks 5 and 6 respectively. Interstellar Overdrive summarizes part 1 of 2 of the synch, and directly overlaps the Christmastown scenes, the initial Christmastown scenes, of the movie, at least during the song’s 2nd part. So this synch can be said to be centered on Interstellar Overdrive, the main manifestation or bridge between the Floyd’s underground roots and their subsequent above ground success. This is why it is so important.
Pierre: But with the title song from the subsequent album, you’re saying the tone has changed in the band.
baker: Now above ground successes, they wanted to build on the foundation. Recapturing the energy of the earlier space jams didn’t seem a viable option, especially given the obvious breaking down of the man most responsible for its sound and energy. So there was a shift to architectural compositions, the one really serious and advancing composition of the album, as the band members saw it [the title track of the Saucerful of Secrets album]. So we shift to the Full of Secrets synch to help us understand this change, and how Barrett, manifesting as Agent Cooper, as it were, wasn’t able to comprehend the rigidly angled structure, as opposed to his own much more loose and variable creations. I may not be putting that the right way, but it is exactly how the Black Lodge trapped Cooper, the good Cooper, and instead replaced him with a dark doppleganger. To me, this perfectly summarizes what happened, musically, to Barrett in the band, and one of the principle reasons for his breakdown. Perhaps if he could’ve remained drug free, he would have been able to integrate his talents with Waters, perhaps making a kind of fire-and-ice Lennon/McCartney partnership. As it was, he became completely overwhelmed by this new style and found it totally alien to his own. He didn’t make it though the Black Lodge, in other words.
Pierre: We seem to be mixing analogy and reality in a rather queer way here, but I think I get the gist of what you’re saying to me. But we must now, with WSF2K, take a broader look at the band. Now I know that, later on, Roger Waters began to eerily parallel Barrett in that he also left the band, and then the ones who carried on, led by Gilmour — the original replacement for Barrett — made music that was also considered alien to Waters. Am I right in saying this?
baker: There is a song off The Division Bell called Poles Apart that nicely summarizes the similarity between Barrett leaving the band, and, much later, Waters leaving the band under similar circumstances: what we could call, if accounts are true, an example of another breakdown, but of a much more controlled and measured type.
Pierre: I know the answer to this, but I thought I’d ask it all the same. Was Water’s kicked out of the band, then, like Barrett, because of this different but similar breakdown?
baker: Well, quite the opposite my fine friend. Waters basically kicked out everyone else from the band! The last Floyd album, The Final Cut — the one made right after The Wall — was, by all accounts, essentially a Waters solo album with the name Pink Floyd stamped on the cover for legal and monetary reasons.
Pierre: And I know these legal reasons were also attached to Waters’ need for control at this point.
baker: It was a money issue. Gilmour, I believe, wanted Waters to release the album without the Pink Floyd name. He thought the material inferior to recent albums, and told Waters this up front at the time. However, there were also some severe money shortages then, as I remember, and they all knew the name Pink Floyd would add immensely to the sales of the album. This is quite a lot, actually, like L. Frank Baum stamping Oz on any book and having it sell twice as much as his non-Oz books. He did this in later life, even though some of the books from that time had very little to do with Oz.
Pierre: I remember you talking about this parallel between the Floyd and Oz logos. Obviously, just because of the juxtaposition, this seems to have something to do with the whole Oz/Floyd Paradox. Would this be a good time to bring this parallel up?
baker: Only this right now. Baum thought his original Oz book to be self contained. This is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, of course, the basis for the famous 1939 movie starring Judy Garland. However, he returned to writing about Oz in book form after this original Oz novel was made into a very successful play. In fact, this is, I believe, one of the most successful fantasy plays of all times, and made the stars of two fellows named Stone and Montgomery, a vaudeville team who played the Scarecrow and Tinman respectively. In fact, Baum dedicated the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, to these actors in a public display of gratitude. The second book, unlike the first, was designed to be transformed into a play from the beginning; at least this is the thought of most critics. Because of this — and I would agree with this point — the Marvelous Land of Oz is usually considered inferior to the original Oz book, and, personally, it is one of my lesser favorites overall, despite the fact that this is the one where we have Ozma first showing up, a very, very important moment in the canon because Ozma is then found to be the one true and rightful ruler of Oz. The Scarecrow from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book, became, in effect, only a stop gap between The Wizard of Oz — original ruler at the very beginning of Oz series — and Ozma.
Pierre: The Scarecrow being named the ruler of Oz by The Wizard at the end of the movie… er book. Is this event the same in both the book and movie?
baker: Yes, that’s correct. The movie was based largely on the book. In fact, the more the script was revised for the ’39 film, the more the book was truly represented in it.
Pierre: Well, does this seem like a good point to end tonight? Tomorrow, if you agree with this, then we can take up Pink Floyd and talk about Dark Side of the Moon to The Wall — the great run of four albums that Floyd is most famous for — and compare this Waters-led era to Barrett and his Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and then also to the Gilmour-led, modern era, I guess we could call it. And also fit into this picture Waters’ and Barrett’s solo efforts. Does this sound good to you?
baker: I guess we shouldn’t do too much in the first night back. But I would like to finish my thoughts here about Baum’s books before we move away from them and say that if the original Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz published in 1900, is comparable to the first Floyd album, the Barrett dominated Piper at the Gates of Dawn…
Pierre: Named, actually, after another very important children’s book, or a chapter, I believe, in this book: Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, and from around the same time period as the original Oz book.
baker: I think Grahame’s book was published in the decade after Baum’s but I’d have to check [ed. note: it was published in 1908]. But — getting back to my point — Baum’s second Oz book could be compared a bit to A Saucerful of Secrets, where Pink Floyd had to continue on in a different vein, as Baum wanted to carry on the successful play format of the Oz series, which he, at this juncture, saw as more important that the book format. So with the 3rd Oz book, after the dismal failure of a 2nd Oz play, he begins, once again, to focus on book versions of Oz, and this continued for 4 more books. It is these books that can perhaps best be compared to the Waters-led Floyd and their successful albums of the mid 1970s. So when Baum decides to give up Oz again, this time after a successful run of books, and shift to other subjects, this is like members of Pink Floyd, like Richard Wright and especially David Gilmour, deciding to try to crank up a solo career after the end of Pink Floyd at The Final Cut. Waters had broken up the band just after The Final Cut, realizing that it would be a joke to continue since obviously no other member of Floyd was helping out by this point. He had driven them all away… had to control all aspects of an album, including the music.
Pierre: Even though he wasn’t the most talented of musicians, as you said.
baker: This is where he needed Gilmour definitely, who is one of the great rock and roll guitarists in history by about any standard. Called “best fingers in the business” by many.
Pierre: So let me summarize a bit here. You’re saying that Baum’s several non-Oz books, when he attempted to end the series after, what was it?…
baker: The Emerald City of Oz, the 6th book in the series, and one of my favorites, actually.
Pierre: So after this book, he turned to non-Oz books, just like Gilmour and the others shifted to non-Floyd venues after The Final Cut. And just like Floyd, Baum, in seeing his sales plummet, began to understand the power of a marketing name, Oz in his case.
baker: That is correct. And a very important comparison to make in our discussion of the Oz/Floyd Paradox. And after this gap, for the rest of his life, which totaled about 7 years, Baum focused exclusively on the Oz books. And very underrated Oz books in my opinion, although, just like with the later Gilmour-led Floyd works, most critics consider them inferior to the earlier Oz books, as material like The Division Bell is considered inferior to Dark Side of the Moon and even Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In fact, many consider Piper to be Floyd’s finest moment, the ones who champion the spontaneous style of Barrett. I number myself among these, not surprisingly, although I see both the strengths of Barrett’s, the “together Barrett’s” style, and also Waters’ style. But, as I said, I don’t see how the two would have blended.
Pierre: So is there anything else you would like to add tonight before we wrap this up?
baker: I think it’s good to end with this parallel between Oz and Floyd. Tomorrow we can tackle Walt SIDney (laughs).
Pierre: We are, slowly, uncovering the treasure chest at the heart of the mystery. Wouldn’t you say that baker?
baker: Hmmm, an interesting way to put it. But in light of Quadrospirited, I think… I think you may be right. Quadrospirited is close but not really a full member of the Oz/Floyd Paradox synchs. It represents another limit, and also points to where the center is, once again.
Pierre: So we’re on for tomorrow night.
baker: Let’s try anyway. Unless another synch shows up.
Pierre: Ya never know. Goodnight baker.
baker: Thanks Pierre.
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 10 of 20
*****
baker: Morning Pierre!
Pierre: My, you’re enthusiastic sounding tonight! You must have turned in early.
baker: Actually, Pierre, I’m trying to sound enthusiastic to make up for a lack of sleep. You know, Swordfisht wasn’t home last night, and although I didn’t drink too much this time, like I sometimes do when she’s away for the night (laughs), I did stay up late watching synchs on tv. But the good news is that I did get a chance to look at Pink Vertigo again, and also the Pink Floyd part of WSF2K.
Pierre: What, no Quadrospirited last night?
baker: Oh, that was earlier on. That’s what I started with (laughs again).
Pierre: So we were talking about this Walt SIDney thing before starting tonight, and, just to lead in from the last discussions we were having, noticed that you mentioned Walt Disney, at a certain point, bought the rights to all of Baum’s Oz books after the first one, which was still owned by MGM at the time. So this would be all the ones you were talking about the last time, including those created after this break that we compared with the break in Pink Floyd’s lineage in the early eighties.
baker: Yes. The reason I remember this is that it’s mentioned on web sites pertaining to the movie Return to Oz, which we’ll talk about more when reaching SID’s 1st Oz.
Pierre: But this is where you said Walt Disney began to take over Oz from MGM, and that, actually, Disney wanted to buy the rights to the first book but MGM beat them to the punch.
baker: I think I remember that. Certainly they must be kicking themselves in the hind end over that loss! But, who knows, without MGM’s specific touch in translating the book to film, perhaps we wouldn’t have the same ultra-classic — as I often call both it and its rock counterpart, if you will: Dark Side of the Moon — that we do now.
Pierre: But there’s only been one movie made from the rest of the books, this Return to Oz from, what was it, 1986?
baker: 1985. 1985? Yes, 1985. There was a television special based on the 2nd Oz book from the early 60s, that, interesting, starred Shirley Temple as [the voice of] Dorothy, and also a full length animation adaptation from the 70s loosely based on Baum’s second Oz book. The latter, actually, was a rather ambitious effort but obviously dated now.
Pierre: Shirley Temple wanted to be Dorothy in the ’39 movie, right?
baker: I’m not sure if she wanted to be Dorothy as much as MGM wanted to borrow her from their arch-rival studio 20 Century Fox, but certainly MGM wanted her to star in it. These were the days when she was the hottest child actor around. Instead, they ended up having to take a chance on the lesser known Garland, who was mainly known at the time through several popular but lightweight Andy Hardy movies starring Mickey Rooney. They realized she had tremendous singing skills even then, though.
Pierre: How about other Oz films?
baker: Return to Oz was the second big budget Oz film and the what could be called the true successor to the original classic. All the rest have either been animations or adaptations of The Wizard of Oz to other means, such as The Wiz from the 70s, the Black Oz as it is sometimes called. But that was rather an inept movie and something of a box office failure. As was Return to Oz, actually, although I understand it was a big hit in Japan and overseas. But just to complete the picture here, Baum actually owned his own film company in the early 1900s and translated several of his Oz books to celluloid at the time. In retrospect, though, they aren’t all that good, and neither was a 1920s adaptation of the original Oz book starring Oliver Hardy among others, another silent film. It is considered quite atrocious, actually. The Baum movies are a little more tolerable, but they also deviate quite a bit from the book narratives. Baum apparently saw the film version of the book as different from the book version. Luckily the 1939 movie was a closer adaptation, surprisingly. I personally think this is why it works so well, and, even though there are still some obvious differences, in ways the movie has its own strengths that the book didn’t have. Baum was not known to construct the tightest narrative plots, after all. He was a man of ideas: characters and settings.
Pierre: Speaking of Oz, another thing you brought up to me in our pre-interview chat was the fact that you select many of the albums for your synchs based on either a proximity to the magic year 1973, as you call it, when Dark Side of the Moon was released, or through direct references to either Oz or Dark Side of the Moon in the albums themselves. And, strangely, most of the time these two sets of references coincide. Now I know that Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road — from 1973, just like Dark Side of the Moon — is perhaps the most obvious and best known reference of this kind — and you, of course, used that album in our Fantasia collage.
baker: Fantasia Brick Road, correct.
Pierre: But there are also others. Can you talk about this a bit, especially in reference to, well, both our Fantasia collaboration and your separate, unique Fantasia 2000 tiling?
baker: Yes, this is definitely another important part of our story. You’ve mentioned Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but there are others, as you said. Just keeping with the Oz references, there’s also another album from 1973, Electric Light Orchestra’s Eldorado — considered by many to be their best effort — which contains, on the cover of the album, a scene taken directly from the ’39 Oz movie where the Witch is electrocuted as she attempts to remove Dorothy’s ruby slippers in her castle. So this is one of the things that prompted me to use this album in Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000. Other prompts are found in resonance with the Dark Side of the Moon album, and, again, they mostly come from the magic year of 1973. For WSF2K, we have, in this vein, Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run album, whose name refers to “On the Run”. I don’t think this was a conscious reference to Dark Side of the Moon, actually, but, on the other hand, McCartney did tape some of the filler voices for Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, although they were not used in the final version of the album. And McCartney is also good friends of Gilmour, although I don’t know if this friendship was in place at the time.
Pierre: So we end WSF2K with the 3 Pink Floyd selections, and then the two before this are the Paul McCartney selection, filling in animation section no. 4, I believe, and then Electric Light Orchestra’s two songs beginning the 5th section, which is the famous Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
baker: Correct. Then there is also the Stevie Wonder selection, again from a 1973 album but this time without any overt Oz or Dark Side references. This is from his Innervisions album, which, just like McCartney’s Band and ELO’s Eldorado, is often mentioned as being his best album. So all of these artists, along with Elton John, can be said to have peaked during this year — along with Pink Floyd, actually — and along with this peaking you have all these common references to Oz and also Dark Side. And this, actually, continues into more recent synchs such as SID’s 1st Oz and Fantastic Aspic, where we, again, have albums with obvious references to Dark Side of the Moon and also from, once again, 1973. These are Jethro Tull’s Passion Play and King Crimson’s Larks Tongues in Aspic.
Pierre: Maybe we should save discussion about those two albums until later, but I know what references you are talking about. And, also, this linkage spills over into the spanking new Quadrospirited… in a major way actually, because we’re talking about two more 1973 concept albums taking up about half the time of the synch.
baker: Yes. The Who’s marvelous rock opera Quadrophenia from 1973, perhaps their best work, and also another peak effort from Lou Reed, formerly of the Velvet Underground.
Pierre: Which is just as shitty a band as Zappa’s Mothers of Invention! (both laugh; inside joke).
baker: But the Oz/Dark Side references are not as obvious in these latter two, in comparison to the ones I’d already mentioned from earlier synchs.
Pierre: And then we have some artists filling out the picture that seem to have very little to do with this pattern. Nirvana and Radiohead, for example, two more modern bands, especially Radiohead obviously.
baker: I was very pleased to fit these bands into the picture, and, actually, used probably my favorite song from each of these bands in the synch. This is Nirvana’s Milk It from their In Utero album, which corresponds exactly with the first section of the movie, and then two selections from Radiohead’s OK Computer, perhaps another peak album, as In Utero may be as well.
Pierre: This was Nirvana’s last album, the one they put out just before Kurt Corbain snuffed himself.
baker: Yeah. Many call it their best, although the preceding album, Nevermind, is the classic that will probably always be associated more with the band.
Pierre: And then after this short starting section we have Stevie Wonder’s selection, which are two songs that blend together… as do the ending two songs by Pink Floyd off their Echoes compilation released just the year before, in 2001.
baker: Yes, this is Visions and Living for the City from the Innervisions album, with the last part of Living for the City spilling over, as it were, into the third animation in an interesting transition reminiscent of the one used in Fantasia Brick Road. That is, the song is cut in two, and then the second part is attached to the following animation in a kind of direct continuation. Except here we have the dialog-ish middle of the song being used in both sections.
Pierre: Yes, I remember that. But it was obvious to continue Wonder’s song about NYC into the 3rd animation section, since this was actually set in this city — this is dubbed over Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue number — and the street sounds jibe very precisely to the original drawings of the city beginning the section.
baker: A natural continuation, definitely. The hard part was rediscovering the cue point. This was actually the hardest transition to set up in the synch as a whole. After this tough spot, the rest of the synch fell into place quite quickly. And this was made easier, obviously, by the last two sections being set up by one cue… one tile as it were.
Pierre: So let’s move on to them. So we have Nirvana, Wonder, and then Radiohead and their two selections from OK Computer.
baker: Including Paranoid Android, probably my favorite of their songs and one of their longest and most complicated. And then another selection from the album that just seemed to be the perfect one to follow up this with to complete the tiling of WSF2K’s 3rd animation section.
Pierre: Then the next animation section, the 4th, is entirely Paul McCartney.
baker: Yes, and here we come upon another interesting trick that was a carry over, in essence, from Fantasia Brick Road. This is the idea of reversing two pieces of music — or film — in order to make things seemingly run the way they’re suppose to. Here I reversed the two songs that begin the original second side of the Band on the Run album to exactly tile the section. This looks so natural in the synch, however — no gap, really, between the songs — that without paying close attention here you would think that this was the natural running order of the songs on the album. But they are reversed. Actually, I use to use this section to introduce people to the fine art of audiovisual synching. This is perhaps my favorite part of the synchronicity, along with the ending “two song” tile. This is almost a perfect tiling in its limited way — the music beginning right with the start of the animation and ending with same.
Pierre: Yes, I remember the ending, and found it quite startling when the final chord hit right when the lights turned off in the animation. Quite scary, especially given the reversing story behind the proximate songs.
baker: And we’ll also run into this reversal trick several times in SID’s 1st Oz as a type of natural development from these experiments in Fantasia Brick Road and WSF2K. All former tricks were used in SID, which is a definite culmination of these things.
Pierre: So moving on in WSF2K, we now come to the Eldorado section, which uses the first two songs of the album to overlap the beginning of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And, once again, as we have with the former section, the music is cued right to the start of the animation.
baker: Really, all the sections so far are cued this way except the 3rd, where we instead have the continuation of the Wonder song. This is most obvious in the cuing of the beginning of the Wonder section, the first of his two songs used, right with the supernova explosion starting the 2nd animation.
Pierre: Yes, I liked that part as well. But now moving on to the Pink Floyd chunk of the synchronicity — after all, we’re trying to focus on Pink Floyd and also Oz here — and we have 3 selections, each one representing a different phase of the band. Can you describe these 3 songs here?
baker: Well, we start out with Arnold Layne, which is the first professional recording by Pink Floyd way back in February, 1967. A Syd Barrett composition which only existed as a ’45 single until it was included on a compilation album, Relics, released just before Dark Side of the Moon. But, nonetheless, it is a rather famous Floyd song, and was also a rather daring track for its time, being about a transvestite — someone who steals women’s clothing off the neighbor’s washing lines for his own private amusement and pleasure.
Pierre: But this is one part of the Fantasia 2000 synch you already had in “the can” because it was originally created during our earlier Fantasia tiling experiments. This is because the Sorcerer’s Apprentice animation is used in both synchs. You simply carried this over from the earlier attempt at tiling a Fantasia movie, as it were.
baker: Well, it was also set up perfectly by the Electric Light Orchestra tile, if I may, that started the Sorcerer’s Apprentice section this time. That is, Arnold Layne, the way I set it up in Fantasia, started right after the second ELO song ended…
Pierre: Can’t Get It Out of My Head… right?
baker: This was just before the brooms, which Mickey thought he had axed to bits and was done with, actually reconstituted themselves — the bits became whole brooms themselves — and forced open the door to the room Mickey had thrown them in. This opening of the door corresponds to the opening chord of Arnold Layne. And, of course, the themes of Arnold Layne are seen in the ending Sorcerer’s Apprentice section as well, most obviously in the line “now he’s caught” as Mickey is similarly caught red handed by his Sorcerer master in meddling with his magic spells and wrecking havoc in the process. So the Sorcerer has to come in and clean the whole situation up — the brooms and the water mess — and then reproves Mickey. Similarly, Arnold Layne is locked up for wearing women’s clothing at the end of Arnold Layne. It’s a strange overlap, for sure, but one that makes for an odd type of sense in the synch. We have the magical brooms in the film that keep dumping the water all over the place, and then in Arnold Layne we are hearing about the protagonist stealing clothes off a washing line. At an earlier point, the see-though baby blue reference to one of the particularly risque articles of clothing procured by Arnold is overlapped with the brooms beginning to walk through the blue water, which you can see through at this point.
Pierre: And, once again as I remember, the song ends beautifully with the end of the animation. At the end, Mickey seems to even be *Mickey Mousing* the radio announcer beginning the next song on the Echoes compilation… this is Wish You Were Here, right?
baker: Exactly, but I only use the very beginning of [this announcing] in the synch. We should also mention here that all three Pink Floyd selections used to end the synch are taken from the Echoes compilation, and not from the albums they were originally recorded for. Arnold Layne, for example, is taken from this much later album and not from the pre-Dark Side Relics compilation. That’s why you get the nifty dialog at the end, because, as you said, this is actually the segue — created just for the compilation — to the next song Wish You Were Here.
Pierre: I think we should talk about map synchronicities here, in light of the importance of the Arnold Layne-Mickey Mouse fusion in setting up SID’1st Oz and providing a more direct link between it and Dark Side of the Rainbow. Don’t you think?
baker: Well, I still think that map synching would be too complex to go into here.
Pierre: Why don’t you start with all those Beatles references you found in maps, and perhaps connect it to the Larry Jordan based synchronicities such as Sophie’s No. 9. This is, after all, how you got back into the synching business after that long layoff of, what was it, 3 years?
baker: 2 ½. Well, again, I don’t know if that would be a wise thing to do. What I can do is say that, for me, Walt SIDney, which can be said to have started exactly with this overlap between Arnold Layne and Mickey Mouse, is a secret melding or blending of the energies of The Beatles and Pink Floyd, one at the very peak, once again, of their game, and the other, Floyd, just beginning. The peak of the Beatles is often seen to correspond with the release of the Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields single in-between the Revolver and Sgt. Pepper albums. Correspondingly, both Revolver and Sgt. Pepper are usually considered the band’s two best albums, although which one is better depends on who you ask. I like to look at it this way, and, really, you have the same situation with Pink Floyd: taken as a whole the Sgt. Pepper album is their best album, but Revolver contains the better songs overall. And this is exactly the case with Meddle — which contains perhaps Floyd’s best song, if you can call it that, or “Echoes” — while the following Dark Side of the Moon is the best overall album.
Pierre: How about The Wall?
baker: Conceptually, it is pretty strong, but I don’t think it has nearly the cohesion and continuity of Dark Side. There is a sense that the ideas are running out, and here we have a kind of last hurrah of all that went on before. The Final Cut shows the well finally running dry, though.
Pierre: So getting back to Walt SIDney and The Beatles…
baker: Well, the main trick here is to see that Penny Lane, side A of the Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields single that was so revolutionary at the time, the two sides of McCartney and Lennon illustrated so beautifully in their contrast…
Pierre: Strawberry Fields being the B side of this single.
baker: But, really, there was no side B and no side A, much like all of Lennon’s songs and all of McCartney’s songs while with the Beatles were credited to both as a joint “Lennon/McCartney” composition. This single summarized all that energy in one completed tight and sealed package. It *is* Lennon/McCartney in a nutshell.
Pierre: I sense that we’re running out of time for tonight, but I want to complete this Walt SIDney deal here. Let me just jump ahead and tell what I know. Now I know that Penny Lane was composed at almost the exact same time as Arnold Layne, and this seems odd because both are two word compositions with the same phonetic ending of [Layne/Lane].
baker: Penny Lane is a place though — as is Strawberry Fields — while Arnold Layne is a person. But, exactly, both were composed in February, 1967.
Pierre: So the 64 dollar question follows: Was Barrett conscious of writing an “answer” or “reply” to McCartney’s Penny Lane? The books say that they were in the studio together during the following Sgt. Pepper recordings. And then, to add to this, we also have the similarity, as you’ve mentioned to me recently, of the names Sgt. *Pepper* and *Piper* at the Gates of Dawn. Drawing this back time-wise into the Arnold Layne/Penny Lane overlap, is this where the references start?
baker: I do know that Syd Barrett took a lot of time and effort in writing the lyrics to Arnold Layne, which contains the line “…takes two to know.” Now on the surface it is used in the song to apparently emphasize that Arnold Layne, instead of dressing up as a woman and parading around in front of a mirror looking at himself, should instead go out and find a real, live woman. One can’t do it alone, in other words — takes two to know real and true love, or even sex for that matter. But, and this is my own personal spin on the words, perhaps Barrett was referring to The Beatles themselves as this mate, and Penny Lane, the peak of The Beatles — although no one probably could pick up on that at the time — was the true mate to Arnold Layne. Penny Lane personified as a woman, as the name could also imply since Penny is the name of a woman. In other words, Barrett saw Arnold Layne as Pink Floyd themselves, and particularly himself as primary composer, while Penny Lane represented McCartney and also Lennon, since he’s personified on the single as well through Strawberry Fields. The Beatles as a whole, in other words, as Syd represents Pink Floyd as a whole.
Pierre: “Two to know,” the line from the song, is chanted over and over again to emphasize your point, if I remember correctly.
baker: Yeah, this is interesting as well. The phrase is highlighted in the song as Barrett chose it. But getting back to Walt SIDney, I don’t think, even if this was a conscious reference to The Beatles, that Barrett understood the full meaning of this Layne/Lane overlap. I think it is a direct transference from the center of The Beatles, as it were, into the very beginning of Floyd — Arnold Layne, again, being their first professional recording. This is summarized, in ways, in the ancient symbol of the vesica piscis.
Pierre: The what?
baker: Actually, maybe we better save that concept for later. But let’s see the careers of both The Beatles and The Pink Floyd Sound, as they were known at the time, as completed circles. This circle aspect is more obvious in the case of the Beatles career, but obviously the center of both is in-between what is considered their two best albums, or Revolver and Sgt. Pepper for the Beatles, and then Meddle and Dark Side for Pink Floyd, as we discussed before.
Pierre: Two circles?
baker: Yes, the ancient symbol of the vesica piscis — which I think means fish bladder translated from the original Greek — is merely the symbol of two interpenetrating circles, with the center of one lying on the circumference of the other. Merged together in this manner, a third shared region known as the vesica itself is made, an almond shaped form between the two centers. This is actually the source of the Jesus fish symbols often found attached in various manners onto the rear end of cars as a stylish metallic plate. And also, of course, parodied in the similar Darwin plates with the added feet. The whole evolution vs. creationism idea, or science vs. religion, and, specifically, Christianity.
Pierre: Well, with this very deep subject perhaps we should draw our discussions to a close tonight. Are we on for tomorrow again? I’ll assume we are.
baker: Let’s assume that. I’m not quite finished with Walt SIDney, though.
Pierre: It’s a deep one, like a big fish in a large ocean… Sorry!
baker: That’s okay.
Pierre: So tomorrow night.
baker: For sure.
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 11 of 20
*****
Pierre: So this is the third tape we’re on now. The material is becoming quite voluminous baker!
baker: I think tonight that we should wrap up Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 and move on to The Point of the Wall, which will lead directly into our last synch, or SID’s 1st Oz.
Pierre: To the point tonight, eh? (laughs). Well, I think the material is quite great, and we’re going along at just the right clip. How’s that for positivism!
baker: I think tonight we should wrap up…
Pierre: Oh, get out of town.
baker: Speaking of which, when are you *ever* going back to Lancaster Pierre? Butchie must be missing you horribly at this point.
Pierre: Didn’t I tell you? Butchie is here now. She flew in, uh, night before last. Make that week before last. I don’t want to miss her too much. That’s the only reason I’ve been able to endure this torture of creating new synchs and this interview. I acutally told her to fly here when Quadrospirited was finished. I knew we were on to something really nifty.
baker: So when are you and Butchie going back to Lancaster?
Pierre: Are you all right tonight? Your eyes look a little bloodshot. Are you sure you want to go on with this tonight?
baker: I tell you what. Let me instead delay this until the morning, or further along in the morning, I should say. Yes, let’s try for late morning. You can come back to work, right?
Pierre: Oh sure, sure. Whatever you want to try. I think we’re far enough along in Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 that we can finish it off in a setting. You know this is going to be a book, don’t you?
baker: You don’t mind the work bit?
Pierre: Go back to sleep baker!
baker: Already there.
*****
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 12 of 20
*****
Pierre: Okay baker, are you ready to give it another go.
baker: Let’s do it.
Pierre: So I think from our little pre-interview talk that we can rush through the rest of Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 pretty quickly. Don’t you think so baker?
baker: Okay then. Well, I think all we have to talk about is the last two Pink Floyd sections. We’ve talked about how Arnold Layne overlaps the last of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice section, and how this seems, at the bottom of things, to indicate an abstract vesica piscis figure between The Beatles and Pink Floyd through the overlap of Arnold Layne and Penny Lane. This extends into map synchs as well, as we’ve hinted at before, although I don’t wish to go into that type of synchronicity art for this interview, or at least at this point. But the main thing to get at here is that the phrase “two to know” refers to the coupling of Arnold and Penny Lane symbolically, latching the beginning of Pink Floyd with the very center of the Beatles — center lying on circumference in terms of the two circles we’re talking about, as I mentioned before in our last discussion.
Pierre: This is still a little unclear to me but go on…
baker: Well, let’s just move into the next animation, which is the Donald Duck one about helping Noah load all the animals onto the ark during the flood. And during this process, he loses track of his mate Daffy Duck…
Pierre (laughs): I think that’s, um, *Daisy* baker!
baker: Right, I was about to correct myself when you jumped in! (laughs as well). So the two get separated, and both think the other was done in when the rain started and the huge wave which signaled the beginning of the flood rolled in.
Pierre: Yeah, that was a pretty big wave
baker: Tsunami in the extreme for sure. Maybe 200 feet high? Anyway, so the main point I want to bring up here is that Daisy and Donald lose track of each other, but after the ark lands and the animals exit when all the water dries up, they find each other, as each grasps the heart locket that symbolizes their marriage and love for each other. This is powerfully highlighted, by the way, with Gilmour’s power chords ending Sheep at this point.
Pierre: I remember finding out that Donald Duck was given a section in Fantasia 2000 because he was always so jealous of Mickey Mouse’s success, and a lot of that success was tied into the Sorcerer’s Apprentice section of the original Fantasia. So Disney decided to give Donald a section as type of appeasement. Now, interestingly, here we have the concept of “two to know,” if I may jump ahead of you…
baker: Sure.
Pierre: …because obviously Donald and Daisy feel they need each other to be whole, just like a heart shaped locket is traditionally broken in two with each half given to the partner. So this seems to be a resolution of the Mickey Mouse section preceding it. And then the whole animation is a separation from Earth and God as well, a type of purgatory until the flood recedes. It was really a purging of the Earth, although that, of course, is downplayed in this Disney flick.
baker: I should let you talk more often Pierre! Exactly put. Anything else? Want to try to guess what the last section means? Because, frankly…
Pierre: You’re still working on it, I know. Well, I did voice some excited opinions to you after one of the last interview sessions, but maybe it was just the coffee talking again. But it just seems to me that here we have Gilmour’s song Sorrow synching absolutely perfectly with the section involving the Firebird — another death and rebirth motif going on here.
baker: Well, actually let me back up here because I haven’t really fully explain the Walt SIDney archetype yet. I promise not to take to long with this, but what I forgot to mention is that we have the overlap of Arnold Layne with Mickey Mouse here, as indicated by map synchs I won’t go into, but also the creators of these two characters are also highlighted, and this is Syd Barrett for Arnold Layne and Walt Disney for Mickey Mouse. However, Arnold Layne puts on women’s clothes as a substitute for proper love — he doesn’t understand at that point it takes “two to know” There is no mate, in other words, and we’ve described how this is like the separation of Arnold Layne from Penny Lane, his actual, true mate. They must form the vesica piscis uniting the Beatles and Pink Floyd in order for, really, everything else to unfold correctly… Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, and the whole bit, you see. But this is my theory, and keep in mind I only claim this is logical in an artistic sense: without the union of Mickey Mouse with Arnold Layne here, this whole vesica would not have formed and we would have no audiovisual synchronicities with any of the other Floyd albums discussed here. This is because the union of Syd Barrett with Walt Disney, to create the Walt SIDney archetype, allows Arnold Layne to be substituted, or, better, reinforced, by the stronger Mickey Mouse, who *does* have a proper mate in Minnie Mouse, just as Donald Duck has his Daisy Duck. This is not seen in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but instead the union is substituted by Donald and Daisy in the next section, which is dubbed by Floyd’s Sheep from the Animals album in WSF2K.
Pierre: Very appropriate that you use the Animals album for a section about Noah’s ark. I liked that touch.
baker: The whole section syncs up very nicely, as does the Firebird section with Sorrow, as I’ve said. And keep in mind this is a one cued synch between them. That is, the last 15 minutes of WSF2K, including the Donald Duck-Noah’s Ark and also the Firebird section, are cued to a chord near the beginning of Sheep. I must also explain here, or repeat — can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before — but I don’t use the Sheep song from the 1977 album Animals but instead take it from Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd, released two years after Fantasia 2000, or only a year before I created WSF2K. This synch couldn’t have been created the way I did it even half a year before.
Pierre: Fantasia 2000 wasn’t released in 2000 then?
baker: No, 1999. But anyway, this is why Sorrow, which was originally found on the Momentary Lapse of Reason album, follows Sheep in the synch but is not recued. Because these two songs end the first cd of this new 2 cd Floyd compilation. And I also take the song Arnold Layne from this new compilation, and that’s why in my version you hear the beginning of the song Wish You Were Here after Arnold Layne ends. I think this also works well, so I wouldn’t suggest using another version of Arnold Layne, say, on the Relics compilation from 1971.
Pierre: Another thing you haven’t emphasized here is the fact that the three Floyd songs you use in succession, besides being from the three different incarnations of the band so far (Barrett-led, Waters-led, and Gilmour-led), are also spaced 10 years apart. That is, Arnold Layne was originally released in early 1967…
baker: …Sheep in 1977, and then Sorrow in 1987 on the Momentary album. That’s an important point to bring up Pierre.
Pierre: So now… about the Firebird…
baker: Right (laughs). Well, this is a beautiful synch, as I said, and tied directly into Sheep. Um, let’s just leave it as another death-and-rebirth shaped piece. As the Earth is flooded during the Sheep section, so here you have destruction by fire, albeit to a smaller part of the Earth, or just the area around the volcano that erupts. But for the characters in the animation, the sprite and the deer or elk or whatever it is, this *is* their whole world. Their forest world has been destroyed, and, actually, the sprite is itself destroyed and must be reconstituted by the deer/elk. This because the sprite has unwittingly awoken the Firebird, the spirit that slumbers inside the pit of the volcano, and its red, fiery eyes open to the searing chord of Gilmour’s guitar. But eventually the Firebird has finished its damage, and the sprite is reconstituted, as I said, and then the living green of nature returns, slowly at first but, as in a time warp, the trees begin to erupt from the ground. Although the music remains in a minor key during these times, the guitar still very closely follows what is happening on screen, eerily close at times. This may be the most consistent synch of an animation section I’ve ever seen, to be honest with you.
Pierre: And this from Gilmour’s first album after he reformed Pink Floyd? After Waters left, that is.
baker: Exactly. The Barrett piece and the Gilmour piece — or Arnold Layne and Sorrow — frame, as it were, the whole Waters-led band which extends from their second album of A Saucerful of Secrets all the way to The Final Cut, their tenth studio album minus compilations and the like. So to me there is a definite sense that Pink Floyd as a whole is symbolized in the synch, just as Pink Vertigo represents early Floyd. We are pulling even further back now, and bringing in other groups to reinforce the 1973 center in a particular way, almost like Floyd is giving off seeds from its central synchof Dark Side of the Rainbow. An odd thing to say, I realize, but that’s my take on it. And all of this is connected with Oz in a direct way as well, as witnessed by all the Oz motifs showing up on the 1973 albums used in this and other synchs at the time, especially Fantasia Brick Road and the John album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. But also here, we must keep in mind that I think a Wall synch, a personal Wall synch, is implied in this framing, even though I hadn’t found it yet. This is The Point of The Wall, and it may be a good thing to move on to it now to complete our Floyd picture before heading into SID’s 1st Oz.
Pierre: Yes, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time with WSF2K, and this with only about 20 minutes worth of Floyd music in it, or less than half of the entire synch’s time. But, as you said, it seems to be a very important synch, and may be your most consistent, if not most impressive structurally. I also know that we were talking about Oz — speaking of Oz — in the pre-interview discussions, and you mentioned that you thought it important that Walt Disney also owned the rights to film all the remaining Oz books.
baker: One thing you must keep in mind here, among others, I guess (laughs), is that I don’t think the Walt SIDney archetype forms unless there is a follow up to Dark Side of the Rainbow known as SID’s 1st Oz. All the tricks I use up to that point are employed full force in SID.
Pierre: Okay. Another thing you talked about is, um, the fact that Dark Side of the Moon, and, by association, Dark Side of the Rainbow — the individual songs — may represent the entirety of Pink Floyd. There are 10 tracks on Dark Side of the Moon/Dark Side of the Rainbow. There are 10 Floyd albums if we subtract the newer Gilmour material beginning with Momentary Lapse of Reason, which some say are not true Floyd albums because they lack Waters’ influence.
baker: There are some who would disagree, but I would admit it is a different band with a different sound. But Waters’ solo albums are not entirely successful creations either, and I’d include The Final Cut in with these, since it is really a solo album with Pink Floyd stamped on the cover to insure greater sales. But it is a cap or completion of the true Floyd, as 9 must change into 10 in order to complete a cycle according to ancient Greek superstition.
Pierre: So this brings us back to the vesica piscis: you talked about The Beatles and Pink Floyd as circles. You consider these 10 Floyd albums to be a circle, as Dark Side of the Moon is a circle. But you’re also saying that Dark Side of the Moon is a microcosm; would that be a correct word?
baker: Microform, yes.
Pierre: Of this entire Floyd cycle?
baker: I think that the two are tied in together. Now, Dark Side of the Moon is the 6th Floyd album, and, as I said, I think the peak of Floyd can be seen as both this album, as well as the song Echoes making up side 2 of the previous album of Meddle. So the peak lies between 5 and 6, just as the numbers 1 through 10 find their center between the numbers 5 and 6. Also playing into this symmetry is the fact that Piper at the Gates of Dawn is the most “Barrett” album in the Floyd canon, while, in the same way, The Final Cut is the most “Waters” album. Another thing to see, and this is very important, at least in an artistic, symmetrical sense, is that the albums numbered 3, 6, and 9 are all associated with silver tilings here… that is, the equivalent of the entire album is synched in my Oz/Floyd Paradox with a particular movie. For Ummagumma — the studio album that is — this is Psycho. For Dark Side of the Moon this is, of course, The Wizard of Oz.
Pierre: And also Yellow Submarine, if you’re talking about the Oz/Floyd Paradox tapes.
baker: Yes, but in a lesser way, or as a kind of reflection. So, moving on, the 9th album, or The Wall, is synched to a movie called The Point, but in a different kind of tiling more akin to that used in Pink Vertigo. So this seems like a good point to move to…
Pierre: The Point! Well, I think so too. I must admit this microcosm/macrocosm thing is confusing me a little bit, and I’m sure it is to the reader as well.
baker: All of this, actually, is encoded — again in an artistic sense — in both Dark Side of the Rainbow and also MessiaenSphere, which I consider to be its parallel in many ways, as I’ve discussed before. For one thing, MessiaenSphere is where I draw even with Dark Side of the Rainbow in my own personal synch evolution, in that I have created a fully successful silver tiling that isn’t dependant on earlier forms. Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine, for example, is obviously modeled on the structure of Dark Side of the Rainbow, and Psychogumma is based on a classically structured synch, as we can call it, such as we find a lot of on Michael Allen’s Synching Ship site and, well, most of the synchronicity sites outside of those working in more of a digital domain. But MessiaenSphere is a different silver tiling in that it omits part of the album while, in my opinion, not sacrificing its integrity. The parts of the album Illuminations of the Beyond…
Pierre: …Reminiscent of Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite!
baker: …Yeah, just as I called Daisy Daffy, I sometimes find myself writing the title of this Messiaen piece down as “Illuminations from Beyond the Infinite”! Interesting, since the Sphere movie is also obviously influenced by the structure of the 2001 movie.
Pierre: But what you’re saying here is that you don’t have to use an entire album to call it a complete silver tiling, more or less?
baker: Exactly, because, really, the two involved media begin to interact with each other or interface with each other, and they begin to edit themselves, really, although that seems to be a strange thing to say.
Pierre: I remember you talking about this 3-6-9 arrangement as a triangle.
baker: Right. You find this same pattern, actually, in Dark Side of the Rainbow. But these are also correspondingly traced in Dark Side of the Moon. The songs with the simpest titles — Time, Money, and Brain Damage — form a type of hidden triangle within the album, much as primary light colors of red, green, and blue lie hidden behind the full spectrum of the rainbow.
Pierre: Interesting, since the Dark Side of the Moon cover has a spectrum running all the way through it.
baker: Right. So in Pink Floyd as a whole — again in an artistic sense — you also have this hidden triangle forming in the 3-6-9 albums, or Ummagumma, Dark Side of the Moon, and The Wall. And, correspondingly, these are the albums with the most complete silver (whole album) tilings in the Oz/Floyd Paradox tapes. I know this sounds kind of strange, but it makes a type of sense viewed from a distance.
Pierre: Strange stuff indeed. Well baker, it sounds like we’re definitely ready for The Point of the Wall. Personally, I’m going to look at the synch this afternoon to refresh my memory.
baker: I looked at the synch yesterday after viewing The Point as a whole. It still seems to work quite well for me.
Pierre: Great. So we’re on for tonight.
baker: We can try! See ya, and thanks.
Pierre: Thank you.
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 13 of 20
*****
Pierre: Well sir, we’re back at it again. Middle of the morning to you baker!
baker: Same back to you sir!
Pierre: So we’re at The Point of The Wall. Now before we continue into this, you call Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 a gold tile, is that correct? A full gold tiling, I mean.
baker: It’s more complete than Pink Vertigo for sure, but it’s not a completely full gold tiling of the movie with audio tiles, although it comes close. For one thing, we have the introductions to each piece mostly removed from the synch. And also I didn’t choose to deal with the smallest animation segment of the movie.
Pierre: So Shared Fantasia is a complete tiling of Fantasia, then?
baker: In a way it is a more complete tiling, because we have dubs for the dialog as well as the animation sections. But, at the same time, it is a more fragmented and disjointed tiling. I point to Mike Casey’s section especially as representing a complicated tiling of one of the sections, using 8 different artists for source material.
Pierre: You’re saying that your own tiling of the Fantasia 2000 movie is, um, more homogenous, shall we say?
baker: Yes, because it represents more of what Disney itself was after: the cuing of one animation with one and only one section of music. In some sections it doesn’t succeed in this, or certain tricks are needed for the individual tiling. But for the ending, as I said, I even outdid Disney in ways by using one tile for 2 sections. And, as I said, this may even be the strongest part of the synch, even though, logically, it should be the weakest match since it is the less manipulated than any other stretch.
Pierre: So we have Pink Vertigo as an approximate gold tiling, and the first of its kind, at least in your work. All others before it being silver and bronze tilings as you define them. So now we’ve covered Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000, which, as you say is a more complete tiling than Pink Vertigo for sure, but still not a total tiling of a movie. Shared Fantasia is a more complete gold tiling but, as you said, it is more loosely constructed, with more options possible for the tiling if I’m reading you correctly.
baker: Yes.
Pierre: And now The Point of The Wall?
baker: This is an odd one, in that it is both an incomplete gold tiling as well as an incomplete silver tiling. And then, to top it off, it is not much longer than a regular bronze tiling such as we have in Jovian Echoes (2001-Echoes) or your Kansas City Life. But I do think it represents both the base media fairly well — retains the integrity of each in a large way. However, this is more of a blend between the two base media than, say, even Pink Vertigo or Walt SIDney’s Fantasia, because the two stories of both the album and the film are so tied in together and modified — but not too extremely — through their combination.
Pierre: There are a number of well known Wall synchs out there now, at least among the synchronicity group that you’re a part of and is centered by the Synchboard watering hole, as you like to call it. Tell us how this is different? I know that you mentioned, earlier on — right at the beginning of these interview, in fact, if I remember correctly — that you consider the Alice-Wall combination an example of a tiling where the audio and video are almost the same length. In that case, a single song, “Comfortably Numb” is dropped from the audio tiling to make the two almost exactly the same length, as we have with the Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite section of 2001 and the song Echoes. But in The Point of The Wall, we’re talking about a lot more manipulation, aren’t we?
baker: Let me start off by saying that I don’t think Alice-Wall, despite this editing, makes for an extremely successful synch, although I think it starts out somewhat promising. There’s nothing really I’m picking up on that sets it apart from the various other Wall synchs I’ve been able to view over the years, and, in fact, I consider at least Michael Allen’s The Truman Show-Wall combination stronger, and perhaps some of the others as well. And I also think The Point of The Wall is stronger, although there is much more editing to this one… hard to compare. But this was a sticking point for me down through the years and up to finding this particular one… the “Wall problem” as I thought of it occasionally. I simply didn’t think The Wall album was strong enough, or consistent enough I guess I should say, to synch in its entirety. I was glad to substitute any desire to find a Wall synch myself with others already found, such as Michael’s. But as I began to manipulate more and more in my own synch discovery evolution, and especially after the success of Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000, I began to turn around in the back of my head the idea of an edited Wall synch. I even thought about editing the Alice-Wall combination to see if I could make it work better. In the end, the choice was natural: The Wall, for me, had to be matched with The Point. As I think I said before, I saw this match in my mind’s eye, shall we say, even though I hadn’t watched The Point in probably over 2 decades. I just remember liking it a whole lot.
Pierre: The Point is a rather inexpensive made-for-tv animation — a full length feature, though — from the early 70s. There’s one fairly well known song from the movie…
baker: Me and My Arrow, by Harry Niilson. It’s about a boy and his love for a special dog in the movie name Arrow. They are kind of like Dorothy and Toto in their adventures in that the dog is always with the boy.
Pierre: But this is not a well known movie by any means.
baker: Not at all. I think I remember it quite well because it was much like Yellow Submarine, which, as I said, is one of my all time favorite movies. But as I had used most of my other favorite films in synchs already by this point, including, originally, Yellow Submarine, I began to turn to more obscure sources by this point. And the same goes for basically all the more recent synchs. This is why I kept being surprised at finding synchs after Pink Vertigo, because I thought I’d run out of videos to use, as well as audio sources. But I kept digging deeper and deeper and coming up with some excellent source material in both media. To me, The Point and The Wall simply go together like peanut butter and jam. They’re meant for each other. This doesn’t mean that The Wall can’t synch with other video sources as well, or, for that matter, The Point for other audio. But the two stories blend together so nicely that I find it hard not to think of one without the other.
Pierre: Uh huh: once you pair something with something else, it’s hard not to consider them a group. This is why, I suppose, it can be rather disconcerting when couples that you know split up, and you find that they’ve been having difficulties, perhaps, all along.
baker: Yeah I suppose so. But also the pairing between The Wall and The Point produces the interesting refracting pattern we see in the synch in my opinion. This is about the only way the two could combine to successfully work. The Point, for example, contains a lot of static space where there’s a lot of talking going on and not much motion. This is the same as Vertigo, actually, and the same reason I had to edit these parts out of the Pink Vertigo synch as well. I saw it as an imperative; the only way to make a gold tiling out of the movie… either movie.
Pierre: And you saw the same for The Wall? You said it lacks an overall consistency.
baker: The Wall can be edited and you can still get the overall picture of what Waters and the others were on about, especially with a supporting video source.
Pierre: So the structure of the synch is basically the same as Pink Vertigo? This, uh, chain of islands still applies here where we have parts that are synched surrounded by at least equal regions of unsynched material?
baker: Yes, the structure is very similar to Pink Vertigo, with some important exceptions. The most obvious is that we use only one audio source for The Point of The Wall, whereas in Pink Vertigo we used a number of albums. Pink Vertigo cannot be considered a silver tiling for this reason.
Pierre: I’m not sure what you mean by this.
baker: Pink Vertigo is a gold tiling, or an approximate or equivalent gold tiling anyway. But it is not a silver tiling. In fact, it is almost the opposite of a silver tiling, in that we use songs from as many early Pink Floyd albums as possible, and in all cases but one these are the first songs off their respective albums. These number 5 in all. As I described before this is an almost perpendicular synch in relationship to Dark Side of the Rainbow, which is the best known and perhaps most perfect silver tiling — together, as stated before, they form a symbolic “T” in a very clear cut way. Pink Vertigo, in contrast to Dark Side of the Rainbow and about all of my other finds, actually, cuts across the tops of a lot of chained albums.
Pierre: I think I understand here what you’re saying. So how do you justify calling The Point of The Wall both a silver and gold tiling?
baker: Well, let’s turn back to Alice-Wall. Here we have two media that are somwhat equal in length, and, if we subtract “Comfortably Numb” from the picture, they *are* basically equal. This would be both a gold and silver tiling, although in a very unmanipulated state. That is, the only manipulation we are doing here is removing one song from the audio source. Does this make sense?
Pierre: Yeah, I suppose so. This is both a silver and gold tiling because the two media are equal in length. As you said before, removing a song from a synch, or removing certain parts of it, doesn’t necessarily mess up the integrity as you call it. But this [Alice-Wall] would still be an incomplete silver tiling of a gold base, wouldn’t it?
baker: Yes, but in a very unmanipulated fashion. Now we’re doing the same thing with The Point and The Wall. My guess, even though I haven’t checked it closely, is that the two media, unmanipulated, are about the same length. The Point is probably about 1 ½ hours long, as is The Wall. What we’re doing in The Point of The Wall is editing about 2/3rds of both the album and the movie from the overall picture. Like Vertigo the movie kind of edits itself, because, as I said, there are a lot of static places within — the heavy dialog parts. Likewise there are parts of The Wall I enjoy more than other parts, ones that I think are stronger.
Pierre: In this particular synch you use only individual songs, Is that correct?
baker: In many cases only parts of songs.
Pierre: How many recuings of The Wall are there in this synch?
baker: If you count the recue at the end, there are 9.
Pierre: You also said this synch was completed very quickly.
baker: Except for the very beginning and end, where you have the Ringo Starr voiced character reading the story of Oblio to his son, the whole thing was completed in one six hour stretch.
Pierre: How did you complete this so quickly, because it looks fairly complex?
baker: Resonating cues. Each section has what has come to be known as an anchor point. This is most visually apparent in, let’s see, the fourth section from the beginning, where we have the animated words “Is There Anybody Down Here” when Pink Floyd sings the words “Is There Anybody Out There”.
Pierre: Yes, I got goose bumbs on me when that happened. Quite scary!
baker: Now, although I didn’t remember those written words in the movie prior to starting the synch after finding the video of The Point, perhaps unconsciously that’s what led me to combine the movie and the album — this resonance between the two phrases. But then there are other resonances that I don’t think I could have remembered nearly as easily. For example, the sixth section, which I also like a lot, is cued to Pink Floyd singing the number “two” with the simultaneous appearance of this same number onscreen.
Pierre: Yeah, I remember that one as well. Did I tell you I watched this last night?
baker: You said you were going to yesterday and I assumed you did.
Pierre. Yes, I enjoyed it very much. The way it was all chopped up still detracted from the synch, as it did moreso with Pink Vertigo. But I took this one in better. Still, knowledge of what’s going on in the movie would help.
baker: Of course. But also you can make your own determinations, if you study the matter more closely. The Point becomes The Wall at the end.
Pierre: Yeah, I did get that part, although I didn’t grasp the full significance of the situation. Another powerful overlap though for sure. (pause) Now, let me back up here and see if I understand the movie and the album just solely through their overlap, just as an exercise in observation. Now I got the part that the man Pink in The Wall overlaps the boy in the movie, the one without a point. I know his name is Oblio but I wouldn’t know this, of course, unless you told me. Perhaps you should use subtitles in this synch once you get the DVD of The Point, if it includes that option.
baker: Maybe. I think it works on its own, though, without the subtitles.
Pierre: Okay, continuing. So this non-pointy headed baby is born, this Oblio, and this overlaps the baby crying in the album. Got that. Then the boy grows up and they put a pointed hat on his head to hide his non-pointiness. I’m not sure if I would get that, uh, *point* even, if you hadn’t told me about it.
baker: I don’t think it’s that hard to deduce if you watch the whole thing once and then study it.
Pierre: So the baby who is now a boy heads away from the pointed village he grew up in for some kind of adventure with his dog. You said he was banished… again I don’t know if I would pick up on that.
baker: Okay.
Pierre: Then he starts his banishment proper — and this is where he hikes into the Pointless Forest. See, what I’m picking up on is that I have to know the movie, really, in order to get the synch.
baker: You may be right. I’ll leave it at that, although I disagree a bit. But the main parallel is that the life of the boy Oblio in the movie is intertwined with that of Pink in The Wall. The two are actually one and the same in my opinion, at least through the synch.
Pierre: But it’s hard to pick up on that in the synch. There seems to be just some disjointed adventures which all contain the boy and his dog, but no real tie ins between them. I’m saying this, but I’m also saying I enjoyed the synch in a visual kind of way, even though I didn’t really understand it.
baker: What you’re saying is that you picked up on parts of the parallel and not other parts… not enough to fill in the whole story.
Pierre: That’s what I’m saying.
baker: Well, I guess I can see that. In my defense, although I deleted a lot of scenes from the Pointed City, before Oblio’s banishment, I used almost all the possible footage from the subsequent journey through the Pointless Forest that I could… that is, all of the bits in-between the boring, talking parts. Here’s an idea, just as another experiment: start from the end and work backwards. You said you understood the part about The Wall becoming the same as The Point in the end.
Pierre: I *think* I understood that part. What I saw was that when this evil looking dude knocked off little Oblio’s pointed cap, what we see was not a round head, as when he was a baby at the beginning of the synch and the film, but one with a point, like everyone else. But then, at the same time, all the points of the city suddenly collapsed from the top and are then rounded off. This included everyone else’s head in the village, and also all the buildings… everything. But through all this Oblio’s remained pointed. I did understand this part in that Oblio’s head, when it was revealed as pointed, turned everyone else’s head pointless. Thus taking this a step further, it follows that since everyone seemed pretty happy with losing their point, except this evil dude…
baker: The Count, who caused Oblio to be banished in the first place.
Pierre: Hey, you’re not suppose to be giving me any more hints, remember?
baker: Okay, okay. Sorry!
Pierre: But there’s this inversion at the end of the movie, where in the album we have the obvious collapse of The Wall with the collapse of the points in the movie… except Oblio’s. So… Oblio, The Point, becomes one with The Wall at this endpoint. Simple enough. But how to connect that to the beginning and everything in-between would be very difficult.
baker: Why don’t you try?
Pierre: Well, I just did and that’s as far as I got!
baker: So can I give more hints here now?
Pierre: I suppose, but we’re talking about going into this cold turkey, and I don’t think anyone could get much further than I did using that perspective.
baker: Perhaps you’re right. Let’s just leave it as Oblio, The Point, becoming one with The Wall at the end. There’s no need here to analyze further. [baker takes small restroom break]
Pierre: Okay, okay, upon some reflection I can see how you could trace a story within a story here, and how this Oblio fellow meets the painted fat ladies when Floyd is singing about Pink needing a dirty woman, and then the druggiest bit in the movie when Comfortably Numb, the drug song of the [Wall] album is playing. And then I must admit the hole and Oblio’s interaction with it matches that particular song very well. Overall I certainly give it a thumbs up. Make no mistake about it. I don’t think it is as good as your WSF2K, but, then again, as you told me earlier, the Fantasia movie doesn’t make for one, single story. Each section is separate from the other, in other words, and this would also apply for the original Fantasia movie used in Shared Fantasia. Do you also want to talk about your Horton Hears The Who here?
baker: Just for completeness sake, I think it should be mentioned, because it is so similar to The Point of The Wall in many ways.
Pierre: This is the synch you found just before The Point synch, and, let me check my notes, the one just after Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000. Actually, looking at my watch, it’s almost lunch time for you at least. Perhaps we should continue this tomorrow, or maybe tonight if you wish.
baker: Are you going to be around?
Pierre: Listen, I’m always around, now that Butchie is by my side here. And we love [omit town name]. We’re happy just walking around and taking in the sights, grooving to the nature scene. It’s a gas.
baker: Hippie!
Pierre: Ditto!
baker: Well, I’ll see you soon then. I’ll just rap on the pipes if I need you.
Pierre: Just call us Toni Orlando and Dawn then!
baker: (blows out air). Hehe. Okay. Bye then!
Pierre: Yep yep yep yep yep.
*****
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 14 of 20
*****
Pierre: Good morning baker!
baker: Hi Pierre!
Pierre: Ready for another round?
baker: Let’s do it.
Pierre: So we’re talking about The Point of The Wall, and I think we left it at a segue into Horton Hears The Who. As I understand, you consider these two works quite similar to each other, not only in their length but also the content and makeup of each. Can you tell us a little about that sir?
baker: They are quite similar indeed, and the most surface similarity is between the album sources, which is, on the one hand, The Wall for The Point of The Wall, and then Tommy for Horton Hears The Who. Both with one album source, then, and both albums often compared with each other as the best known concept albums of all time, or at least the best rock operas.
Pierre: And also both have rather famous movies attached to them.
baker: Yes. Also in each case we have a 30 minute synch approximately, with some severe edits to the involved music albums, which, as well as being very famous concept albums, are both double albums. So in each case, I only use about 1/3 of the albums. The main difference is that for Horton Hears The Who, the animation I use is unbroken or unedited.
Pierre: You use the entire Horton Hears A Who animation, in other words.
baker: Yes. The music begins with the exact beginning of the film and fades with its ending. In toto, there are six cues. And while I’m not sure I want to go into it here, there are two cues in obvious resonation here, like we had the 3rd lions roars of the Rainbow complex and also the end of the two commands of Captain Kirk in Messiaen Trek, to name some other obvious cues of this type.
Pierre: This involves the 2 appearances of the monkeys in the film, doesn’t it?
baker: Right. The Wickersham Brothers, who are the archenemies of Horton, and wish to, in the end, destroy his clover that he claims contains the tiny world of The Whos on it.
Pierre: I haven’t had a chance to watch this synch. I meant to last night but things came up, you know.
baker: That’s okay. It’s not important to go into detail on this except to say that when I was able to successfully map the music of Tommy to a specific video source, my thoughts naturally turned to The Wall, which it is commonly compared to. Through the Horton match, I realized I could edit a single musical source in a more manipulated way that I had thought before to match the video, and also map two stories together. Much as The Point of The Wall weaves the parallel stories of Oblio and Pink together, so Horton Hears The Who does the same with Horton the Elephant and Tommy. Each also has a powerful climactic ending which acts as a resolution to both stories at once. In the case of Horton Hears The Who, this comes when Roger Daltry sings “see me, hear me,” etc., as the Wickersham Brothers and their leader of sorts, the snobby Kangaroo and her equally snobby kid, actually hear the Whos on the clover for the first time and suddenly realize that Horton isn’t insane after all and that the tiny world of Whoville on the clover actually exists.
…..Another important concept I developed in the Horton synch is the idea of a premature fade so that the individual tiles of the synch don’t overlap. For Horton, I create a premature fade or break for, let’s see, for, well all of the cues, with the 2 appearances of the Wickersham Brothers being slightly premature ends for the tracks that are playing instead of fades. All the other 4 cues end in premature fades, though.
Pierre: Interesting. I’ll have to watch it soon.
baker: Yes, you should, especially since you enjoyed The Point of The Wall. I think you’ll find it makes for an interesting comparison, one to the other.
Pierre: So what else do you want to add about The Point of The Wall? Does this relate to Oz in any way, or the Barrett story?
baker: The story of Oblio and his dog traveling far from his home in the Pointed City — or whatever it is called in the film — and then returning with great stories of adventure obviously has similarities with Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, and the return to Kansas. Both have faithful dogs at their side all along as well: Arrow for Oblio and, of course, Toto for Dorothy. Both return to parents in their homeland, or substitute parents in Dorothy’s case. Both welcome the journeyers back into their fold, of course. The main difference, as I see it and upon a review here, is that the Gulch problem, shall we say, is left hanging in The Wizard of Oz, while the similarly evil Count who exiled Oblio is transformed in The Point. The Wizard of Oz is more complicated in this way. When Dorothy and Toto return to school, how will Dorothy keep Toto out of Gulch’s garden? And so forth. These questions really haven’t been answered on the surface in the film, but are symbolically answered.
Pierre: How so?
baker: Well, I think Dorothy, by journeying with her friends — who are fantasy versions of her Aunt Em’s farmhands, after all — absorbs the lessons of brain, heart and action, and better understands what, for example, the Scarecrow-based farmhand was telling her at the beginning of the film, and that she should take a different route home and not go by Gulch’s place. That way, as he says, Toto won’t get in her garden and Dorothy wont’ get into any trouble. At the time, though, Dorothy didn’t seem to absorb this lesson. We must assume at the end of the movie that she does, if there is to be a successful resolution.
Pierre: Okay, how bout Barrett then?
baker: Well, as I said before, The Wall is largely about Barrett, and many scenes from the movie are taken directly from Waters’ experiences with Barrett — the eyebrow shaving scene improvised by Bob Geldof, who plays Pink, comes immediately to mind. The Wall was Waters’ attempt, in my opinion, to absorb Barrett’s influence once more, which was already done partially in Dark Side of the Moon and also Wish You Were Here. But this is another, larger absorption because Waters now can more fully understand what Barrett went through, since he had gone through a somewhat similar breakdown of sorts at the end of the Animals related tour. This may have been triggered by Waters spitting on a fan in a concert in Montreal, as I understand. Afterwards, he got the idea of creating a Wall between him and the audience, since they didn’t seem to understand or grok the music that [The Floyd] were playing. So he would simply create music about this Wall, and actually put together, brick by brick, a physical wall between the band and the audience as the album was being acted out onstage. Waters needed to heal himself, as Syd needed to heal himself before by building walls. So there is a direct overlap between Waters and Barrett through the character of Pink, an identification that wouldn’t have happened if Pink Floyd hadn’t become so massive and played in such large and impersonal arenas such as the Montreal stadium, which held almost 100,000 fans at the time of the spitting incident. Pink was based on both Waters and Barrett’s experiences. One they shared, actually, was the loss of a father early in their lives. In fact, I don’t think that Waters ever knew his father if I remember correctly — he was killed in Italy during World War II when a plane dived on him.
Pierre: This sounds a little like Oblio being born without a Point, even though he had a father in the film. But perhaps another parallel can be drawn here, bringing the synchronicity into the picture. Also, I thought of Tommy being unable to hear because of a childhood trauma, much like Pink had to build a wall. The inability to hear is also a wall, in a way.
baker: Quite right I think. The Point is The Wall. Hmmmm.
Pierre: But aren’t there also some Oz references in The Wall’s lyrics as well?
baker: Let’s see. Well, yes, there’s one about “over the rainbow”, used to describe Pink; [at the end of the movie] it is pointed out that he is “Crazy, over the rainbow he is crazy”, the lyrics which are then immediately echoed in a children’s chorus. I know this through my research into Dark Side of the Rainbow, and an intent theory.
Pierre: By intent theory here, you’re talking about the commonly held conception among synchers that Pink Floyd actually engineered the Dark Side of the Moon-Oz overlap. But you don’t believe this, as you say?
baker: No. I believe instead in the Oz/Floyd paradox (laughs).
Pierre: Alright. Are we ready to move into SID”s 1st Oz. Is this possible?
baker: I’m thinking about what to add to The Point of The Wall but nothing came to mind.
*****
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 15 of 20
*****
Pierre: I feel like balloons should be dropping from the ceiling and everyone should be blowing kazoos, because we made it all the way to the last synch, the big circle, the pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow. Don’t you feel like this baker?
baker: Absolutely. Let’s talk SID.
Pierre: So… I know you consider SID’s 1st Oz to be a gold tiling, like all the others since Pink Vertigo with the exception of Fantasia Brick Road.
baker: Yes.
Pierre: SID’s 1st Oz is different, though, in that it covers the entire movie, front to back, with audio tiles. So would I be correct in assuming that this is your one and only solid 100 % gold tiling?
baker: That would be correct. And it was hard earned. This is a culmination of the lessons learned from all earlier synchs.
Pierre: But, at the same time, you also consider this to be an amalgamation of *silver* tilings. This is a strange but rather fascinating concept: that you have multiple silver tilings inside one gold tiling. You describe this as an interweaving, is that correct?
baker: Yes sir.
Pierre: Now correct me if I leave one out or get one wrong, but the albums used in this synch to completely cover or tile the Return to Oz movie are Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play, Queen’s A Night at the Opera, Roger Water’s Radio KAOS…
baker: Er, no, I think you’re thinking about the Spirited Away synch, actually.
Pierre: Oh, yeah. Then, um… I can’t remember.
baker: It’s a Roger Water’s solo album, but his very first one. Radio KAOS comes much later; 15 or so years later, actually. His first solo album was composed jointly with Ron Geesin, who later did the orchestration for the Atom Heart Mother suite already discussed in connection with Pink Vertigo. This album is called Music From The Body, and it starts out the SID synchronicity. It was originally created as a soundtrack for a experimental documentary movie concerning the many bizarre and interesting facts about the human body. Geesin’s compositions actually dominate the album, though.
Pierre: So what are the other albums used?
baker: Two other Pink Floyd related ones. To parallel Roger’s first solo album, we also have here selections from Syd Barrett’s first solo album, after Floyd dropped him. This is called The Madcap Laughs, and is also from 1970, the same year Music From The Body was released. Then the last album used in SID is a Floyd bootleg album called Magnesium Proverbs, which deals with mostly early Barrett material not found on any of the regular studio albums. This would take the form of singles, both released and unreleased. There’s one unreleased single, for example, that I use in SID taken from this album. This is Vegetable Man.
Pierre: Jack Pumpkinhead! I remember.
baker: Yes.
Pierre: So tell us a little about Return to Oz, the film that forms the base of this synch. I know that much dialog is used from this film. We can start with that.
baker: SID’s 1st Oz lets a lot of dialog from the Return to Oz movie bleed through, and this is rather unique in my own work. The only other synch that I’ve used this technique extensively is MessiaenSphere. But here the use is much more intricate, in that we have bits and pieces of dialog strewn throughout the 2 hour long synch. In MessiaenSphere, it was just six large clumps of dialog, with the music from Messiaen’s Illuminations from the Infinite playing in the background at all times. Here we sometimes have music playing simultaneously, or not. Another place I used this technique is in Pink Vertigo, but only in one section and as a block. So we’re talking about much more manipulation here in terms of dialog taken directly from the movie.
Pierre: Okay. Let’s just keep in line with the talk about structure before going into the subject matter of either the movie or the albums. Unlike, say, in Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000, I know that the albums used in SID are interspersed with each other. In WSF2K, the bands and their albums are kept separate from each other in their own particular places in the synch. Does this also have an antecedent in your former synch works?
baker: Well, I’m trying to think… It bears a slight resemblance to Pink Vertigo, once again, in that we have music from the same album repeating in a synch. However in Pink Vertigo usually the same piece of music is repeated, and also only repeated once. Here in SID… let’s take Music From the Body. The music from this album occurs, in separate places, 8 times throughout the synch I believe.
Pierre: Another feature of SID that’s different from other synchs, and correct me if I’m wrong here, is your choice to divide the synch into separate regions…. 4 in all I believe. This helped to control the sprawl of the synch, as I remember you saying.
baker: Yes. The regions, which are all between about 23 and 33 minutes long, are called Kansas, Oz, Nome King, and then Return. Each is about the length of a bronze synch, therefore, or something like Full of Secrets or even Piper’s Nightmare Xmas, although the latter could be considered a silver synch as well.
Pierre: But there is no rearrangement of any part of the movie in these regions?
baker: Absolutely none. The running sequence of the movie is not affected at all in the synch.
Pierre: I can tell this is going to take a long time to even explain the structure, much less any meaning!
baker: Tell you what. Let me run and get some coffee and we’ll start again. [break for coffee]
Pierre: So we’re back. And you didn’t even ask me I wanted any coffee!
baker: Oh, sorry. But really, it’s a habit of mine because I have to carry the coffee back from [delete store] so far that I’ve had some disastrous results, especially with hot coffee. But, I mean, feel free to go get your own. I can certainly wait.
Pierre: No, no that’s alright. I’m not an addict like you. I was basically just kidding. So back to the synch discussion. No, I was really only kidding.
baker: Are you sure?
Pierre: Yes, yes. SID’s 1st OZ. Let’s chat.
baker: Okay, but only if you’re okay.
Pierre: I promise I’m hunky dory. I’ll simply get some water if I need something to drink during the interview. That’s plenty fine for me. I had coffee earlier this morning anyway.
baker: When do you have to get back to work, anyway?
Pierre: I’m not even thinking about that now. Nor is Butchie. We’re just living from moment to moment, and right now, for me, this involves continuing to move through our interview here. This is work in a way. Walking around and enjoying mountain scenery is work.
baker: Hmmm. Are you sure you don’t need money for coffee, then?
Pierre: I have more than enough money, thank you very much. Okay, 10 bucks then. I promise to pay you back within the month.
baker: See me after the interview. So let’s get back at it then, now that’s all resolved.
Pierre: (Glug, glug, glug.) Thanks for splitting that mocha latte with me. (more glugging)
baker: I was thinking about it on my walk to and from the coffee shop, and I think the best way to describe the structure of SID is to see each of the four regions as side-to-side sticks, all basically equal in length and exactly parallel with each other. Then overlaid on top of these sticks are 4 more sticks of the same length, but laid crossways on top of the others… in the same pattern, thus.
Pierre: Crossties.
baker: Yeah. So these four crossties are the four musical sources of the synch, these being Queen, Jethro Tull, Roger Waters/Ron Geesin, and, lastly, Syd Barrett. Now, notice I mentioned that five albums are used in the synch, but two of these involve almost exclusively Barrett compositions. So I just lumped his two albums together, Magnesium Proverbs and then The Madcap Laughs, and the total music from each artist equals out to about the same length, more or less. And these are, in turn, about the same length as the 4 regions of the synch. Thus all the equal lengthed sticks in our analogy.
Pierre: But there’s also the fact that each of these artists are used in each region.
baker: The crosstie effect, right. Jethro Tull, for example, appears in each region. Same for Queen, Waters/Geesin, and Barrett. Let’s put it like this. Say each of the regions is a certain color, say red, yellow, green, and blue. Now I use these colors for a specific reason here connected with TILE…
Pierre: This *is* TILE. Right?
baker: According to my theories, this is the only one and true TILE [capital letters intended] of mine. Each region has a certain color attached to it, but… that part may be too hard to go into right now. Let’s just leave it as 4 colors. And then we have each artist as 4 different designs, or, better here, shapes. Let’s say Jethro Tull is a triangle, Queen is a square, and Waters/Geesin is a circle and Barrett is a, um…
Pierre: Lunatic? No, just kidding. How about a heptagon?
baker: Let’s try something simple. How ’bout a crescent moon shaped thingie. Yeah, that would work.
Pierre: Excellent choice. I did contribute after all.
baker: Yeah. So the point in assigning these shapes is that if each artist takes part in each of these regions, then his particular shape becomes a certain color according to the region. So if these regions are red, green, yellow and blue, then each of the four shapes takes on one of these four colors through the synchronicity, giving us a total of sixteen different options in all. Four times four, in other words.
Pierre: Yeah, I see that.
baker: And on top of this, each shape has a different use in the synchronicity, or it manifests in a different way than the other shapes. This is something like the different ways chess pieces can move on a chess board, say, a knight vs. a bishop. But the difference is that all pieces are equal in this case. There is no pawn below and there’s no queen far above the others. They are all knights, bishops and perhaps rooks.
Pierre: Perhaps you should just talk about how each artist is used in the synch and maybe this will become more clear. What about these silver tilings? I don’t think you’ve explain that yet.
baker: Another important point — a very important point, actually — is that throughout the synch, the music from albums of three of these four artists are used in basically the same order that they are found on the album. The exception is Barrett, who has two assigned albums whose selections are used in a more or less haphazard way throughout the synch. Barrett is something of a wild card in these proceedings, thus.
Pierre: I’m not sure I understand you here.
baker: Well, we talked about the three silver tilings that combine to make a gold tiling. Actually this is somewhat misleading because there are actually three silver tilings and a wildcard tiling that make up the synch. The three silver tilings — or I should say silver equivalent tilings, because none of the three albums are used in full — would be these albums I mentioned before from Queen, Jethro Tull, and Roger Waters… or A Night at the Opera, A Passion Play, and Music From The Body respectively. And each of the selections from these albums are used in the same order that they occur in the album. So, for example, in region one, or the Kansas Region of SID’s 1st Oz, we use track 1 of Queen’s A Night at the Opera; in region two, Oz, we use tracks 3 and 4 from the album; in region 3, or the Nome King region, we use track 8, and in the last region, Return, tracks 11 and 12 are used. Track 12, God Save the Queen, is also the last track of A Night At the Opera, and we have come full circle in ways since region one uses the first track of the album, or Death on Two Legs. And this same “chronological order rule” can be applied to both Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play and also Music From the Body.
Pierre: But not Barrett’s music.
baker: No, that’s the wild card part.
Pierre: So let me see if I understand this. You’re taking Queen’s A Night at the Opera, the entire album, and using parts of it in each region of the SID’s 1st Oz synchronicity, but not enough to where you’re messing with the album order of the songs. That part is retained. But you’re still dropping songs out… about half of the tracks, if I’m counting correctly?
baker: That is right. But most of these songs were almost automatically eliminated in the beginning. I have a syncher’s ear, by now, and I can simply listen to an album and basically tell what is and isn’t going to work in a synch. Same for movies… I can see the parts that will work and parts that won’t. I don’t know how to describe this except that I appear to be looking at resonant material when I run upon these parts.
Pierre: You pick up a vibe, in other words.
baker: Hippie talk again! Yeah, a vibration. Me and the film or album.
Pierre: So let’s stick with the Queen album for a little longer. You’re saying that… well, why did you *vibrate* with some parts and not others? Or perhaps you’re telling me you don’t know the answer to this.
baker: I think part of it, and this is especially seen in albums, is that the stronger or more archetypally clear material sticks out for me. But reversing that, actually I decided to use only a small portion of what is the most logical choice to insert in the synch from this album, or the famous mini-opera in itself: Bohemian Rhapsody. My feeling was that, well, no. 1, the entire song wouldn’t fit in the synchronicity, and I think this goes along with the fact that the song is so well known that it would be overkill to present it in its entirety here. And also this would rub against the use of entire Queen songs in SID. In all cases except two of the eight selections from Queen, I decided to abridge the songs in one form or another.
Pierre: Wow, this is getting deep and complicated. Perhaps we should just take each Queen song, one by one, and discuss how you used it in SID’s 1st Oz. Or do you want to choose another album first?
baker: I think this is a good idea, but let’s start with Jethro Tull’s Passion Play first, because this was originally how I got into the synchronicity. I didn’t tile this synchronicity front to back in an orderly fashion, but, instead, haphazardly. Although, generally it had a front to back motion. However, in saying that I must admit that I had completely finished the fourth region, “Return,” before I had completed even one-half or so of the 3rd region preceding it. But I think Tull’s Passion Play would be a good place to start. In my opinion, I think we can make a good argument that this is an equivalent silver tiling, edited down to the length of a bronze tiling… just as we have in, say, Horton Hears The Who or The Point of The Wall. The difference is that this silver tiling is interspersed or interlaced with three other silver tilings, plus a fourth, similarly lengthed, random tiling, shall we say.
Pierre: Random tiling?
baker: Yes, the wildcard Barrett material that we discussed before.
Pierre: Oh yeah. Right.
baker: So for A Passion Play, I only use about 20 minutes of the album, or about half the album. This includes the very first part of the album, the very middle of the album, and the very end of the album. There are basically two symmetrical parts around the middle part that are dropped for the purposes of the synchronicity, in other words. And there is one more major trick here: the last part of the album is divided cleanly in two, with no real gap between the two parts of the music, and divided between regions three and four respectively. But we still have a straight run between album and movie in terms of chronological running order. The reason I thought Passion Play would be a good place to start is that I divide the album only in 4 parts in SID’s 1st Oz, whereas the Queen album is divided into 8 parts, and The Music From the Body, the Waters/Geesin album, is divided into 7. And, also, this Tull album very clearly defines or equates the center of the album with the center of the synchronicity — and the movie — as a whole. In the album, this is the strange story of the Hare who Lost His Spectacles, a spoken saga originally divided equally between sides 1 and 2 of the lp album. I believe it lasts about 7 minutes. So we can use this center, this solid center, as an entrance point to explain the entire synchronicity.
Pierre: Perhaps this would then be a good place to stop for the day. So we’re going to work from the center outwards.
baker: No, I think Passion Play will give us the center and also the frame for the synchronicity. Inside and out in other words.
Pierre: Well, perhaps tomorrow we can clarify all of this more. This is a complicated synch, as I knew when I started the interview, and it will most likely take the longest to explain and examine. We’ll just see how it goes. Perhaps together we can get through it.
baker: Let’s hope so. But it is the big climax of our interview. And why the interview is really taking place at all. I want to see the connection between SID’s 1st Oz, the end point, and Dark Side of the Rainbow, the beginning, because it is obvious to me that SID represents a very real and direct continuation of Dark Side of the Rainbow. I guess you could say that if Dark Side of the Rainbow is the best tile, then SID’s 1st Oz is the best “T-I-L-E.” And you should probably note here that I didn’t say the word “Tile” but spelt out the name, emphasizing each letter. And this may be a very personal term, not applicable to other tilings, whether done by myself or others. It is simply hard for me to imagine a better follow up to Dark Side of the Rainbow. I won’t be able to think of one without the other now. And I haven’t even mentioned The Rainbow Sphere yet!
Pierre: Well, perhaps it’s best to save The Rainbow Sphere for tomorrow. My brain is full enough!
baker: Good idea. So I’ll see you either sometime late tonight or probably tomorrow morning.
Pierre: Right. Have a good afternoon.
baker: You too. Are you going over to [omit name] Lake with Butchie?
Pierre: Though I might. Want to tag along? Think Swordfisht could play hookie from work as well?
baker: I better stay here and man the phones. You never know when someone high up will demand something to be delivered ASAP.
Pierre: God, you mean? Wait… I meant the President, of course.
baker: Only of a reversed USA, though (laughs).
Pierre: I knew there was an ending joke somewhere. See ya later.
baker: Be sure to wear suntan lotion out there.
Pierre: Right.
*****
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 16 of 20
*****
baker: So where were we Pierre?
Pierre: Ahem. That’s right, we’re back. Uh, I think we were talking about Jethro Tull and SID’s 1st Oz.
baker: Oh yeah.
Pierre: Actually we didn’t get a lot of time to review for this one. Let me check my notes… It looks like you were going to explain Tull’s A Passion Play as both a center and a frame for the synchronicity.
baker: I did watch SID’1st Oz again last night, or at least through the middle part you mentioned. The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles, the exact center of the Tull album, is a much maligned stretch of the album. Many wonder why it was inserted, but Ian Anderson…
Pierre: Head of Jethro Tull.
baker: The main composer and lead singer and also flautist, of course.
Pierre: The one legged man.
baker: Right. So he explained this inclusion as a way to give the band a break when they were performing the album live. But if you study the thing, it really goes along with the whole, loosely constructed Passion Play motif of the album, which tells of, first, the death of a man called Ronnie Pilgrim, and then his trips to both heaven and hell before returning to Earth. Whether this return involves reincarnation into a new body, or a return to the same body after a temporary death state, perhaps like a coma, is not made clear. But this is a loose treatment of the standard passion play telling the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But only a loose treatment. It represents the guts of the synchronicity, though, and parallels the idea that Dorothy died, at least temporarily, went to Oz and had some adventures and met both very good and very wicked people there, and then returned to Earth beside the stream she supposedly drowned in earlier in the flick. This is a very important parallel, actually.
Pierre: I remember you telling me that you thought the Land of Oz overlapped the Land of the Dead here.
baker: Well, perhaps we should back up, then, and talk about the first use of A Passion Play in the synch. This is during the original death part, where Dorothy supposedly drowned, at least to the outer world of her aunt, uncle and others. But in the movie, we understand that she instead went to Oz. She climbed in a corn crib and was able to ride out the storm while in the torrential stream, and then the stream just kind of vanished into a desert and then she woke up right outside the Land of Oz, a little way out in the desert.
Pierre: This was the Deadly Desert, right?
baker: Correct. It wasn’t shown in the original Oz movie, the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland I mean, but it was in the original Oz book that the movie was based upon. Originally, Dorothy’s house flew over the desert when landing in Munchkinland, and also the ruby slippers fell off of her feet when she returned to Kansas — into the Deadly Desert to supposedly be lost.
Pierre: It sounds like the two movies are a lot alike. I mean, we have, in the Garland classic, Dorothy getting hit on the head and then waking up inside a tornado which then takes her to Oz. In Return to Oz, we similarly have Dorothy once again in peril, and this leads her to Oz.
baker: In both cases it was supposed by Aunt Em and Uncle Henry that the girl may have died, or was close to death (in the case of the original movie). This supports my idea that Oz is the land of death. And, of course, in each case there is a return from this temporary death state that is Oz, and both returns are affected through the use of the ruby slippers.
Pierre: Alright, good. Now I think we were going to talk about The Rainbow Sphere somewhere in all this. Would this be a good place to bring this into the picture, since we’re talking about the original Oz movie now?
baker: It’s been so long since we originally talked about The Rainbow Sphere that I can’t remember what I’ve said here, but basically the way I see it is as a pure gold tiling…
Pierre: I thought that SID’s 1st Oz was your only 100% gold tiling. At least that’s what you said yesterday.
baker: Well, if I remember, what I said was that Dark Side of the Rainbow is a basically perfect silver tiling, or an entire album fitted into the first part of a movie to create one excellent synch for sure. But in this case, the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie itself is a synch — synchs with itself — without any aid from the Dark Side of the Moon album. And this creates The Rainbow Sphere, which is definitely a gold tiling, or a gold equivalent tiling. But it is very unique, you see, because it is a film/film synchronicity and not a film/album synchronicity. It is also unique because it is a gold tiling without any hint of a silver tiling, because all we’re using for the audio part is the movie soundtrack itself.
Pierre: I’m still not understanding. What I remember is that you said Dark Side of the Rainbow and The Rainbow Sphere acted as a perfect balance to each other, because one represented, um, heart and one brain… I can’t even remember which was which right now.
baker: Dark Side of the Rainbow represents heart, while The Rainbow Sphere is brain. Heart is silver; brain is gold. But SID’s 1st Oz is both silver and gold. It resolves the dichotomy of Dark Side of the Rainbow vs. The Rainbow Sphere, which mirrors the original dichotomy that Oz framed, being the argument between the Scarecrow and the Tinman over which was better: possessing a heart or having a brain.
Pierre: Okay I’m totally confused now. Perhaps I should read the first part of the interview again.
baker: No, we can wade through this. Remember at the first of the interview I was talking about the great desire of synchers to try to completely tile The Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon, or, after Dark Side of the Moon finishes playing in the Oz movie, to use another album or two or three to complete the tiling. At the time I described this as the attempt to turn silver into gold, as the alchemists of old tried to do when completing their metallurgic transmutations. But my counter-argument is that Dark Side of the Rainbow should remain silver; that is, one should stop the album after one play-through within The Wizard of Oz. That is, start the synch at the standard 3rd lion roar of Leo the Lion that also introduces the film itself, make sure that the bells of Time go off when the bike riding Gulch appears, and then make sure that the Tinman’s missing heart is filled by the heartbeats of Dark Side of the Moon that end the album, and that the Tinman subsequently seems to whisper to Dorothy to end the synchronicity, “There is no Dark Side of the Moon. Matter of fact it’s all dark”. So after this you just stop the synchronicity. You don’t leave Dark Side of the Moon on repeat, as it is shown in most theaters in the country. You just end it. This completes a perfect silver tiling where the Tinman’s missing heart is filled from the audio portion of the synchronicity, which acts as a kind of substitute [gift giving] Wizard, if you will. Now this interpretation is backed up by the fact that in The Rainbow Sphere, we have the Scarecrow’s missing brain being filled by the other part of the Wizard of Oz playing simultaneously. As I think I said at the time, this is too hard to explain here, but I go into a little more detail in my Rainbow Sphere site.
Pierre: You said this was a small site, though, if I remember correctly.
baker: Yes, it only contains the 3 posts originally found on my old Film/Album Synchronicity Board where I first describe the phenomenon of the film/film overlap to others.
Pierre: I’m still not quite grasping this, but perhaps you just have to understand The Rainbow Sphere better than I am before seeing what you’re seeing. But what I’m picking up on here is that you think that people are trying to force Dark Side of the Rainbow from a silver synch, where it matches the Dark Side of the Rainbow album, to a gold synch where the entire 1939 Oz movie is covered or tiled.
baker: Basically that’s it. My dissatisfaction with the idea of just letting Dark Side of the Moon repeat 2 1/3 times through the Oz movie, to make the two match time-wise, led to the revealing of The Rainbow Sphere for me, which ended my desire to do the same. To me, the Oz movie is simply able to tile itself in a very simple way. Remember the vesica piscis we discussed earlier in connection with the Walt SIDney archetype? Well, here we have the same principle underlying The Rainbow Sphere, because… well, I’m not sure I should say that now.
Pierre: Say what?
baker: I was going to… let’s just say here that the structure of The Rainbow Sphere is also based on the vesica piscis.
Pierre: This is interesting.
baker: Okay, here’s how I’ll describe it. Dark Side of the Rainbow is like a husband dressed in his day clothes, with the clothes here symbolizing the dubbing or “covering” of the movie by Dark Side of the Moon. When this man takes off his clothes, i.e., removes the Dark Side of the Moon covering, then he becomes merely the Wizard of Oz movie in that place with the soundtrack restored. Now, according to my theories — the theory that there is a whole Rainbow Complex of synchronicities and harmonics accompanying Dark Side of the Rainbow — there is actually a strong Dark Side of the Rainbow harmonic starting at the 2nd 3rd lion roar in the movie that we can see as a clothed woman, a direct counterpart to the man. Remember we talked about the vesica piscis being two overlapping circles, the center of one lying on the circumference of the other? Well, here the two circles are this man and woman, or Dark Side of the Rainbows no. 1 and 2, in a way. But the only way they can properly unite, like these two circles in the vesica, is by removing their clothes and becoming “as one,” shall we say. And when they shed their clothes to become one, this is the shedding of the outer Pink Floyd covering. Underneath is only The Wizard of Oz movie itself, the two naked parts of the film that should be one. And… (emits long sigh) I can tell this analogy is not helping either.
Pierre: Dark Side of the Rainbow becomes the story of Adam and Eve. I’m not sure if I can handle it.
baker: But this lies just underneath the surface of the ordinary Dark Side of the Rainbow story. It’s not that deep. It’s just hard to see because it goes against what we normally think about in the straight and linear world. Here you can actually see the heart and brain being filled from outside sources. [break]
Pierre: Okay we’re back and talking about the God’s creation of Man in terms of Dark Side of the Rainbow. So baker, take it away again.
baker: Great intro Pierre. I don’t know what really to add to this story except to say that, in the movie, the two 3rd lion roars that define our man and woman are separate from each other in time. Through the Rainbow Sphere they are directly overlapped. This is two becoming one, just as we have the line “TWO TO KNOW” in Syd Barrett’s Arnold Layne, a similar male archetype needing a mate to complete itself. In that case the mate was The Beatles’ single Penny Lane. And, bizarre as it sounds, I think these two vesica piscis structures, one underpinning the Rainbow Sphere and one the Walt SIDney archetype, actually are directly connected with each other. This is *definitely* too deep to go into here, but look at it this way: Arnold Layne, the first professional recording of Pink Floyd, develops and develops like a seed into a plant and eventually becomes the concept album Dark Side of the Moon. But, as Dark Side of the Moon, it is still lacking a mate, as Arnold Layne was lacking a mate and tried to remedy that by becoming hermaphroditic, in a sense.
Pierre: Wearing women’s clothing, in other words.
baker: Yeah.
Pierre: I personally think we’re way in over our heads. The wading through part stopped a couple of exchanges ago for me. Maybe we should shift back to SID’s 1st Oz. Let’s take the Return to Oz movie. I know this is based on several Oz books that followed the original Oz book, the, uh…
baker: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900. Yes, as the classic 1939 movie is based on this original Oz book, so the Return to Oz movie is based on the 2nd and 3rd Oz books subsequently written by Baum. It takes elements from both, but especially the 3rd book. These two books are, in order, The Land of Oz and then Ozma of Oz, both written several years after the first. As I said earlier, Walt Disney, at a certain point, bought the film rights to all Oz books after the first, which was owned by MGM. Actually, Disney wanted the rights to the first, but MGM beat them to the punch.
Pierre: The original movie was an MGM production, of course.
baker: And Return to Oz is by Disney. This was created in 1985, and represents a direct follow-up to the original movie. We have Dorothy’s second return to Oz, in other words, where she meets new characters as well as renewing old friendships, such as with the Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion. The original characters are de-emphasized in the Return to Oz script in favor of the newer ones, and I think this is a wise decision. The Return to Oz movie was not a hit in our country, and was rather scathingly criticized because, for one thing, it was very different in tone and feel from the original movie. We don’t have a musical, to give a prominent example, and the star who portrays Dorothy is actually a child in this case and not a young woman as was the case with Judy Garland.
Pierre: This is Fairuza Balk. I think she’s kind of foxy.
baker: She seems to be perfect as Dorothy, for sure. I haven’t seen any of her later movies such as The Waterboy or The Craft.
Pierre: She’s pretty foxy. Don’t tell Butchie I said that, though.
baker: Okedoke.
Pierre: Now I also remember you telling me before that you didn’t think that there was a good chance for another Oz movie, because the Oz series may simply not be strong enough to support an additional full length feature film. And you said, again if I remember correctly, that this was also the opinion of the producer of Return to Oz as well.
baker: Walter Murch, the director of Return to Oz who went on to win 3 Academy Awards for non-directing roles [film and sound editing, most recently in 1997], closely examined all the Oz books before deciding on a script for Return to Oz. As I said, he eventually decided to based it mostly on the third book, Ozma of Oz, but also using situations and characters from the second. The most important of these elements is where Ozma is made true and rightful ruler of Oz, replacing the Scarecrow. And through the rest of Baum’s series, and indeed through all the other Oz books written after his death, she always remains the ruler of Oz, its true heart and soul. This is important to emphasize because in the original movie, this rightful ruler status is not established, and instead we open with the humbug ruler [The Wizard of Oz], who gives up his throne at the end of the film to the Scarecrow.
Pierre: So you’re saying in Return to Oz the Scarecrow gives it up, in turn, to Ozma. Was there a battle involved or something?
baker: You still haven’t watched SID’s 1st Oz all the way through, have you?
Pierre: Admittedly I’ve tried twice, and got bogged down around 2/3rds the way through each time. Perhaps we should watch it together tonight.
baker: I think that would be an excellent idea. Perhaps we can talk better tomorrow about the synch. But I can understand how someone would not be able to make it through the synch, if only because of its length. It helps to know what is going on with the songs and how the synch is structured before viewing, in my opinion. Or, let me qualify that to say there are definitely benefits to studying the synch a bit beforehand, as well as just going in cold turkey, if you wish. I do think the synch stands on its own, though, and that there’s no need to watch the movie first. This is because so much of the dialog is added, especially in the Nome King region, that you should be able to get a basic idea of what is going on at any time. This, of course, is also aided by the fact that so many people are now familiar with the basic outline of the Oz mythology through the ultra-popular 1939 Oz movie. That is a definite benefit here.
Pierre: So I think we should stop here, then, if you’re agreeable. What time should I come over to the house again tonight. How about 8ish?
baker: That sounds fine. I have to clean up the house a bit, but I can certainly take a break for such an important viewing. If you watch it all the way through and don’t like the synch still, though, I’ll understand. I know it’s not for everyone. But it definitely is a peak synchronicity in terms of the complexity of structure. There’s nothing in my work that comes close really… this is a summary, and also a true octave of the one tile Dark Side of the Rainbow in the same way.
Pierre: How many cues are in SID again?
baker: 26, the same as the number of letters in the English alphabet.
Pierre: I was wondering if you were going to throw that in.
baker: A complete T-I-L-E, as I said.
Pierre: Well, I’ll see you in a couple of hours, then!
baker: Till we meet again!
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 17 of 20
*****
baker: So let me set this up for you. Did you enjoy SID’s 1st Oz?
Pierre: I must admit that I enjoyed watching it with you better than alone. And this time I made it all the way through!
baker: My theory is that you have to watch it all the way through to get the real impact of the synch. It’s quite powerful, isn’t it, even for you?
Pierre: Watching it, in combination with the explanations you gave beforehand and even during.
baker: So where were we in the interview, speaking of explanations?
Pierre: We were, I think, talking about A Passion Play. It seems that we were going to talk about something else before starting with Jethro Tull, though.
baker: Perhaps we should just start with that and maybe the other thing will arise naturally.
Pierre: Sounds good.
baker: I think I talked about how the middle part of the album, the strange Hare Who Lost His Spectacles story, fits in with the whole motif of death and rebirth. Losing the spectacles here and your ability to focus may represent loss of the body, and at the end of the story the hare regains his spectacles, just as at the end of the album the protagonist, Ronnie Pilgrim, regains his body. But apply this to the middle of Return to Oz and a new meaning comes about. The lost spectacles, I think, represents the lost Princess Ozma, whom Mombi the witch has enchanted into a mirror world.
Pierre: You mean by mirror world an actual mirror here.
baker: Yes.
Pierre: I’m not sure if we really need to go into detail about A Passion Play. After all, you may want to save that for the *next* interview! But what I’m interested in presently is creating the big picture, and how you see SID’s 1st Oz as the true successor of Dark Side of the Rainbow. You said at the end of the last interview session, I think — maybe it was the session before — that you saw Dark Side of the Rainbow as the ultimate silver tile, I believe, and that SID’s 1st Oz is a TILE, though, with capital letters. Can you explain this to me? Or is this the wrong subject to delve into next?
baker: I think a better approach is to compare A Passion Play directly with Dark Side of the Moon right now. Let me get to the TILE thing in a moment. The obvious comparison between the albums is that both begin and end with heartbeats, or the equivalent thereof. While this may seem to be a conscious decision on one or the other’s part — and you would think of Tull here mimicking or perhaps even parodying Dark Side — this was probably not the case. Instead I think this is merely two artists, or sets of artists, thinking along the same lines at the same time. Tull’s Passion Play was basically released at the same time as Dark Side, and at one point they were in the top five selling albums on the same Billboard chart, with Dark Side at number one and A Passion Play at five, if I remember correctly. But what this identical frame means, overall, is that Dark Side and Passion Play are telling quite similar stories, with Dark Side focusing on the life of a single man. The main difference is that the Passion Play tells this story in retrospect from a sort of temporary death state. Come to think of it, they seem to be more like opposites, with Dark Side of the Moon talking about the pressures of life and Passion Play those of death. I haven’t thought of that. The heartbeats in A Passion Play actually slow down and stop near the beginning of the album, signifying this death, while the heartbeat is always a strong element in Dark Side of the Moon. Maybe Ian Anderson did design A Passion Play as a kind of reverse Dark Side of the Moon: life played against death, or two sides of one coin. This makes a type of sense.
Pierre: The heartbeats are used in a very similar way, and in Tull we have their sound as more artificial, like almost a parody of the real heartbeats we have in Dark Side of the Moon. So maybe you’re right here.
baker: On the other hand, we have the song “Easy Money” from King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic that was also released at the same time, and it begins side 2 of that album just like “Money” begins side two of Dark Side of the Moon. (pause). Well, I’ll simply have to study the matter more.
Pierre: How about the Hare himself, the figure at the center of the album? Dark Side of the Moon has a line that goes “run rabbit run.”
baker: And this is a line in “Breathe”, the first song of the album and the one that blends seamlessly into [the next song] “On the Run,” which is a continuation of the rabbit motif seemingly.
Pierre: But in the synchronicity, Dorothy symbolically dies during the winding down of the heartbeats at the beginning you mentioned, during her transition from Kansas to Oz at the time of the storm.
baker: Yeah, I’ll have to study that angle more. There’s a lot of stuff I’m still trying to figure out about SID.
Pierre: It does seem complicated. But just in terms of structure, it seems that each of the four regions you mentioned before…
baker: Kansas, Oz, Nome King, and Return… yes….
Pierre: …end with a selection from the Tull album. Is this correct?
baker: In all but one case. In the Nome King region, the Tull selection comes two from the end instead of right at the end. But this is also the selection that is broken off, so to speak, from the end and placed in the 3rd region instead.
Pierre: Yes, you told me that the music of the last region, the one that ends the album and mirrors Dorothy’s return to Kansas…
baker: Yes, Return.
Pierre: …takes up right where the Tull material in the 3rd region ends.
baker: A direct continuation. As I said, it’s like the Tull material was divided into beginning, middle and end, and then the end is divided in two again with the first part of it inserted into region three (Nome King) instead. But it is still obvious that A Passion Play represents a kind of *heart* of the synch, both in its frames and at its center I suppose you could say.
Pierre: And you said this is an equivalent silver tiling in itself.
baker: Yes, because the essence of the album remains, as supported by the visuals from SID’s 1st Oz.
Pierre: Okay then, let’s move on. Shall we go back to the Queen album now?
baker: Well, A Night at the Opera is used in a very similar way, in that we have the original album chopped up and the bits spread out among the various regions. But, again, this parceling out is not haphazard, but, number 1, retains the chronological order of these bits within the album…
Pierre: You said you use about ½ of the album again.
baker: Yeah, just as in the case with A Passion Play. So… then number 2, we also have two — no more and no less — recues of Queen within each of the four regions, making a total of eight. So while the Tull album has one selection or cue within each region, with the Queen album we simply double this number.
Pierre: Perhaps you should add that A Passion Play, at least the version you use, is actually one long track, and although the original album is divided into various songs, these blend into each other still as a continual giant song, as it were.
baker: But the CD is one giant track. It was a little of a pain to work with, actually, because I had to fast forward all the way from the beginning to get to the next cue.
Pierre: But in A Night at the Opera, you were able to use individual songs.
baker: First of all, let me reinforce that, once again, we have the equivalent of a silver tiling with A Night at the Opera, and for the same reasons as A Passion Play within SID. Each album plays about the same amount of time in SID. But the use of the album selections within SID has a very different style, and I mentioned this doubling — A Night at the Opera has exactly two times the amount of cues within SID that A Passion Play has. But here is another trick: of the six songs used from A Night — two of the songs used have two cues apiece within them — all but two are truncated within the synchronicity. And the two songs not truncated are the most positive, probably, and both end the first and second half of the synchronicity respectively, at least in terms of the Queen album.
Pierre: In other words, let’s see, you use four Queen selections in each half of the synchronicity, and you’re saying the two songs that are used in their entirety end both of these halves.
baker: Yes. The songs are”You’re My Best Friend” and “God Save the Queen”. The latter summarizes the symbolism of the album within the synch, with the emergence of Princess Ozma, true and rightful ruler of Oz, from the mirror world she has been enchanted into. She is Queen of Oz in the movie, though.
Pierre: Now I know you’re very enthusiastic about this synch, but I don’t think we want to get bogged down in details. Suffice to say here, and correct me if I’m wrong, that the use of A Passion Play and A Night at the Opera — while there are some stylistic differences in this usage, shall we say — ultimately act in a similar nature, and that both are very similar equivalent silver tilings, as you say.
baker: That’s fairly good. I would add that just as there is a trick in the Passion Play tiling — the division of the end part of the album into two parts — there is also one obvious trick or abberation in the Opera/Queen tiling, and this comes in region one, or the Oz region, where the two selections from the album are reversed in respect to each other. But here’s the odd thing perhaps: I synched the reversed section to the movie first and then inserted the rest of the song at an *earlier* point in the synch, later on in its development, I mean. And you know what? It fit perfectly into this slot. Too hard to explain here. Maybe I should explain, or reinforce perhaps, that I didn’t tile this movie front to back but instead like a jigsaw puzzle, fitting one part here and another part there until the picture was complete — the 100% gold tiling. It is as if I had all the pieces from the beginning, and just had to fit them together in the proper manner. The first piece — or tile — I began from and built around is the one at the end of region one [Kansas Region], or the beginning of the Tull album. I simply thought that Dorothy’s entrance into Oz may be a good visual accompaniment to the movement into death of Ronnie Pilgrim, and I was right. Then the original Queen part was fitted in right before the beginning of this album, and, again, it was a perfect fit. But I didn’t start out by saying, “Okay, I’m going to completely tile this movie with selections from four different artists and keep 3 of the 4 albums in the same chronological order throughout the movie.” No, I just began with what I call “openings” and let them take me where they desired, it seemed. The synchronicity unfolded in the most natural way.
Pierre: You said it took about a week and a half to complete. That’s quite a short amount of time for such a complex tiling.
baker: Yeah, I thought so too. But it fits the pattern of all of my synch finds. The only reason this took longer is that it is so complex and large. We’re talking about 26 cues, after all, with numerous dialog bits inserted as well, both between and within the cued musical regions.
Pierre: So I guess next we should talk about the remaining two artists, and this would be Roger Waters and Syd Barrett, the two Floyd representatives.
baker: We should also add Ron Geesin here, who is kind of a substitute Floyd. Although The Music From The Body is considered Roger Waters’ first solo album, it was Geesin who wrote most of the material, and the music I use from the album in SID’s 1st Oz only amplifies this domination. As the title suggests, this is more Syd Barrett’s Oz than Roger Waters’ for sure. Waters has already had his Oz tiling in Dark Side of the Rainbow. That’s the way I look at it anyway.
Pierre: It seems like every time that Waters begins to sing in SID’s 1st Oz, he is quickly faded out and replaced by a Barrett song instead. I think you mentioned that to me while we were watching the synch the other night, but it is pretty obvious if you know the structure of the synchronicity and who’s singing at what times.
baker: But, in contrast, none of the Barrett songs are ever prematurely faded, or even edited or truncated in the least. And the only place we have Waters singing a song of his all the way through, of the three we have in the synch, is the very last song of the album, and the very last one used in SID as well: “Give Birth to A Smile”. But, once again, this is a different situation because this is actually the only time the Waters-led version of Pink Floyd that created Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, and others plays in the synch.
Pierre: The rest of the Floyd songs come from earlier in their career.
baker: They are all Barrett compositions, yes. But I’ll get more into that particular aspect of the story in a moment. Let me back up here, Pierre, and say that the employment of Music from the Body in SID is a little different from either Tull’s or Queen’s album because quite a bit more of the album is used. This is another silver equivalent tiling, but even moreso, because, beginning at track 3 of the album, we have *all* subsequent tracks of the album used, and most are used intact or almost intact, perhaps with a fade added at the end. I’m thinking of the two solo Waters’ songs in particular for the fades.
Pierre: You said one of these songs is also an early version of “Breathe” from Dark Side of the Moon.
baker: Right. Exactly. And this encapsulates my earlier ideas about this being Syd’s Oz and not Waters’ almost perfectly, because instead of “Breathe” introducing an Oz movie and leading to all other songs, as it does in Dark Side of the Rainbow, we have the premature end to “Breathe” in SID, which is instead quickly replaced with a Barrett song.
Pierre: But this trend also ends when Pink Floyd, as a whole, plays at the end of Body.
baker: Yes. It is almost as if Barrett and Waters play tag throughout the synchronicity, and then, in the end, Barrett has to give up the ghost, once again, and let Waters take over when he is able to adjust his ego properly with newcomer Dave Gilmour, who was Barrett’s replacement in the band. And, correspondingly, we have no Barrett compositions in the fourth and last region of SID. And in this void we instead have the one Pink Floyd song with Gilmour in it.
Pierre: Perhaps it should be added that although all the members of Pink Floyd played on “Give Birth to A Smile,” and this was, what, in 1970, right?
baker: I think so. Yes, 1970, when both Waters’ and Barrett’s first solo albums were released.
Pierre: But they weren’t credited on the album.
baker: No. The other three members of the band were paid as session players and left uncredited. But make no mistake about it. This is Pink Floyd playing, and only two years removed from Dark Side of the Moon down the road. It is often talked about as the strongest composition on the album, but I would disagree with this. It is simply the most rock-like song on the album dominated by otherwise excellent classical-type compositions, courtesy of Ron Geesin.
Pierre: But this is interesting, and something I don’t think I picked up in our former conversations. You’re saying much more of The Body is used in SID than either the Queen or Tull album?
baker: Yeah. I decided almost right out of the gate not to use the first two tracks from Music From The Body, simply because the burping and farting type noises from the first song bothered my ears, and the second song was simply a repeat of the “Breathe” music with different lyrics. But the third track is a beautiful string quartet piece composed by Geesin alone, and, as it turns out, it fit really nicely with the beginning of the movie. I simply cued the appearance of the movie’s title with the beginning of the music and then inserted some dialog. But, just as with the Queen and Tull album, there is a very symmetrical division of this album throughout the synchronicity. Except for the last region, I use 2 sections of this album in each region, and, also, in each and every one of these cases except the first and last section, I use exactly two successive tracks from this album, with no breaks in-between. Now I mentioned I also use two Queen selections or cues in each region, but the difference is that the Queen selections are *always* altered between the two, although they also represent two successive tracks from that album. So there is a different style we are applying to both.
Pierre: This is complicated. I’m not sure I’m following you here.
baker: Let’s put it this way. The Music From The Body is used in a very much unbroken way in the synchronicity — that is, beginning with track 3, as I said, we have almost the entire rest of the album used in the synchronicity, ending with “Give Birth to A Smile”. It is almost exactly like you chopped off tracks 1 and 2, and then kept chopping tracks, 2 at a time, and inserting them, unbroken, into the synchronicity. There are two exceptions to this rule, though, as I said. Just counting out the tracks from the album, the first selection of the album, which begins at track 3, also extends, unbroken, through tracks 4, 5, 6, and 7. Track 7 is the first solo Waters composition of the album, or Chain of Life, which is prematurely faded and then replaced by the first solo Barrett song of the album, or Long Gone from The Madcap Laughs. Then also in region 1, the Kansas region, we have, later on, tracks 8 and 9 inserted as a whole. Then moving on to region 2, or the Oz region, we have one section using tracks 10 and 11, and then the 2nd section with 12 and 13. Basically these are used whole and as continuous songs. Moving to region 3, Nome King, we have a reversal, with tracks 14 and 15 used second here, and tracks 16 and 17 that follow as the first selection from the album within the region. *Then* in the last region, Return, we simply have the rest of the album playing out in an unbroken manner, or tracks 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. Track 22 is the same as “Give Birth to A Smile”.
Pierre: Phew! Well, I think this may be a good place to end our session for tonight. But I think I get the gist of things, although someone who hasn’t watched the synch and isn’t familiar with its structure would most likely be quite confused at this point.
baker: But it’s just like I described it. If you see the album as a kind of sausage links with 22 individual sausages representing the 22 tracks of the album, then it’s just like we separated the first 2 sausages and threw them away — say they’re bad or something — and then lopped 5 off from the beginning, 5 off from the end, and then divided the, what, 10 remaining sausages into 5 groups of 2. Then let’s say each region is like a paying customer going through a line: Kansas, Oz, Nome King and Return. So, remembering that we threw the first two sausages out already, then Kansas would get the first 5 sausages, plus two more, then Oz would get two and two, Nome King would also get two and two — but let’s say the butcher put the last two in his bag first…dunno — and then Return would get the final two paired sausages, plus the remaining 5 sausages. That makes it easier to understand, doesn’t it?
Pierre: Er, I suppose. But what I’m getting out of this the most is that The Music From The Body is used in a more undivided fashion in SID than either A Passion Play or A Night at the Opera. And I guess this would contrast with the Barrett compositions, because, as you said, these are pulled piecemeal from two separate albums. Is that about the lay of things?
baker: I guess that’s good enough for tonight. As you said we simply can’t get too deep into this synch or it will swallow us whole.
Pierre: Like a link of sausages I suppose.
baker: Yeah, why not.
Pierre: So alright baker. Let’s try for tomorrow night, same Barrett time, same Barrett channel.
baker: Oooh. That’s pretty bad!
Pierre: Sorry. So I’ll see you then.
baker: Have a good sleep.
*****
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 18 of 20
*****
Pierre: So are we ready again bake?
baker: Let’s give it a try Pierre. I think so.
Pierre: So, let me see. We were talking about Music From The Body, and how it resembles a link of sausages divided up between the various regions. We were using an interesting analogy at the end of our last discussion. But I think we’re also about ready to move into Barrett and then an overview of SID as a whole. So do we have anything else to talk about concerning the Waters/Geesin solo album?
baker: For now, let’s leave it as the most complete silver tiling of the three silver tilings embedded or nested within the overall gold tiling of SID’s 1st Oz. This because it uses more of the album, and also each track from 3 to 22 after discarding the first two, although a handful of these tracks are prematurely faded.
Pierre: And you mentioned all of these fades occur in the Waters songs, which are then all replaced by a Syd song.
baker: There are several other fades of sorts but they come much closer to the end of the respective songs in contrast to the Waters’ fades. This is then basically a correct statement you just made.
Pierre: So we’re up to the wildcard entry in our tilings, and this is the material of Syd. Now I know that, here again, we have Syd compositions strewn through each of the 4 regions.
baker: Actually I think I may have told you wrong at some point. The final region, Return, really contains no Syd compositions. It simply represents each of the three albums used in the three silver tilings of the synch playing out until the end of the album.
Pierre: Do you think it would be wise to go into each of these four regions and discuss what’s going on, as we have done with each of the albums, or will have very shortly?
baker: When I read back over almost all of the interview yesterday, I noticed that at the first we seemed to be moving noticeably quicker through the synchs, and with that in mind, I think I’d like to avoid indepth discussions about each region. But I’m sure that will come later.
Pierre: You mean in your future writing, or perhaps a future interview between you and I… or you and somebody else for that matter?
baker: No, I’m very happy with you right now as conductor sir!
Pierre: But you’ve switched before. The first interview you did like this, although it was about ½ as small.
baker: Actually this interview is going to be probably four or five times as large as the one with Willie concerning Jordan’s Rule, if that’s what you’re talking about.
Pierre: Really!?
baker: We’ve covered a lot of ground. This is truly a book length interview, one could say. I think we’ve done an excellent job. The key is simply to keep chipping away at the material, and also having an end goal in mind helps to move the process along. We knew from the beginning that we had to basically begin and end at Dark Side of the Rainbow and SID’s 1st Oz respectively, the alpha and omega of the Oz synchronicities and The Oz/Floyd Paradox as a whole. I’m not sure that, despite its length, I like it any better than the similar Willie interview, but length, I guess, certainly counts for something. But, of course, this is also going to be part of the 10×10 as well. This is most likely a type of attachment file to the 9th tier of 10, as my interview with Willie was seen as an attachment to the 4th tier of the same. And… I’m going astray here again, aren’t I?
Pierre: Well, I don’t know if we can discuss the whole 10×10 thing, but the concept certainly is an interesting one. To understand me, Pierre, the interview conductor, one must understand the 10×10. This is where you raised me, so to speak, or where my character was developed.
baker: Oh, I didn’t realize you had access to those memories when conducting this interview. What else do you remember?
Pierre: Well, I certainly remember living in Denver City, Texas and working in the oil refinery by day and then in Abdul Jabbar’s Mediterranean Style Cafeteria at night.
baker: Oh, by the way Pierre. Did I tell you they actually opened a place called Mythos in [delete town]. There’s a Mythos in Mythopolis now! And to top it off, at least for now, there was a giant sign advertising the place right on the road where I always tell Swordfisht that we’re now entering Mythos, right at the bottom of the first hill where the corner of Mythos is first encountered. You know which one I’m talking about?
Pierre: No. Maybe we should shift back to the interview, though. Are you bored tonight? We’re reaching a culminating point, baker!
baker: Syd’s relationship to SID. Yes, I know.
Pierre: This is one of your idols. You identify with this guy, being a fellow composer and recluse and all.
baker: Well, I’m not really a recluse. I just haven’t advertised my compositions yet. I’m planning to, though.
Pierre: But baker, if you subtract the drugs, there are a lot of similarities. Why are you the one who’s come up with this Walt SIDney archetype? Take… well, take this whole Mythos thing you are involved in. This comes from your childhood… how you bottle up your whole childhood creativity; lock it into a particular block of land surrounding your parents’ home. Remember when that roommate told you that your true name was Syd. Well, this Mythos synchronicity, if you will, seems to be saying something of the same thing.
baker: What are you trying to say, Pierre? You seem to be rambling.
Pierre: Wait for it. Wait for it. I know there is a point to all this.
baker: Well, let me go into Barrett then, because I’m not really sure what your on about tonight. Are you feeling okay? Do you need some more of my latte, because I saved some in the refrigerator in case you wanted some during the interview. In fact, I think I’ll have a mug right now.
[break]
baker: But getting back to Barrett, to me SID’s 1st Oz represents his last great hurrah. I would be very hard pressed to find additional Barrett material to create another synchronicity from, or even part of a synchronicity. I used about all of the additional material not found on albums in SID, and also the most usable part of The Madcap Laughs. While Madcap has its strong points, it is also obvious that Syd was heading downhill in listening to the music. Octopus is a highlight, and so is Golden Hair, the next song on the album. Both of these are used in SID’s 1st Oz, along with the song after them, or Long Gone — my favorite from the album, most likely — and also the deeply disturbing Dark Globe, which contains such lines as “I”ve tattooed my brain all the way,” and “Wouldn’t you miss me at all?” But in all of these songs, and also the singles that I use such as See Emily Play and Apples and Oranges, there is evident Syd’s wonderful gift for lyrical abstraction, even though the abstraction is becoming extreme here. There’s a wonderful late autumn beauty, shall we say, to these songs, even thought they are shortly to be followed by the long winter in terms of his music.
Pierre: Now Barrett did a second solo album, if I remember correctly?
baker: Yes.
Pierre: But you seem to be saying that it’s not as strong, and that the Barrett magic ran out with Madcap.
baker: I think so. To me, the second album is pretty much a complete mess. I like the first song, Baby Lemonade, and a couple of the other songs have promise if they were cleaned up a bit — shortened in the case of Gigolo Aunt. Some people actually prefer this second solo album to Madcap, because it is more traditional sounding. To me, there is no comparison. Barrett (title of second album) is not a good album, with almost all of the songs weaker than any one from Madcap. And then about the only other really good song he wrote in his solo period is Opal, although I haven’t heard that particular one since it isn’t on the two solo albums I have. But I found it interesting in studying Madcap for SID that David Gilmour, who partly produced Madcap, said that the non-inclusion of Opal on the album was simply an oversight, which is tragic because he said it may be his best solo song. So it didn’t get the exposure through Madcap that some of his other songs such as Octopus did.
Pierre: The Madcap Laughs is rather famous for being quite disjointed. I mean, this is part of its charm, for sure, but also speaks about Barrett’s mental health as well…
baker: Especially given the fact that the second album is so crappy, because it is an attempt to be more commercial and traditional sounding — according to the day — and this approach just doesn’t work for me. Barrett is Barrett. He was meant to be weird. Madcap, to me, represents a kind of beautiful, colorful sunset before ensuing darkness. Some of his best work can be discerned here, or the promise of his best work if he was able to pull the production part off better. For example, you can really hear a contrast between the Floyd/Barrett compositions in SID’s 1st Oz and even Octopus, which has a much sparser feel to it. It works in SID because it is a powerful composition, as are all the compositions from Madcap I use in SID. But I can’t think of a better way to put it. There’s a sense of sunset here: this is Syd’s last great push to get his sound out to the world. One can only imagine what Pink Floyd would have turned into had he remained sane. Octopus, I think, gives us a glimpse. I mean, I know I said that the architects had to take over, and I think this is still true. We see their talent coming forth in a big way as early as the title song off A Saucerful of Secrets.
Pierre: Used in Full of Secrets, yes.
baker: But I also think there could have been a compromise, a balance, between the Syd material and Waters’ own growth as a lyricist/composer. Maybe; possibly. We’ll never know, though. Could things have been different had Waters and the others handled the dumping of Syd better, as well as the treatment of him while he was obviously fading away during his final days with Floyd? I’ve read a lot of material now about those days. Really, only Waters and maybe Gilmour and the others could make an educated guess about this. They were the only ones in the thick of it. But I also found it interesting that Rick Wright, the Floyd keyboardist, said that if he really thought Syd had had his shit together he would have joined forces with him instead and left Waters and Mason and Gilmour behind. Floyd would have fractured into two separate bands, in other words.
Pierre: This would have been around 1968 or so?
baker: I’m not sure when Wright said this. Syd was forced to leave the band in early 1968, as I remember. Floyd’s management team at the time — two fellows named Pete Jenner and Andrew King — followed Barrett into his short lived solo career, deciding that the rest of Floyd weren’t a viable commercial product. That’s how much they thought of Syd, and they weren’t alone. David Bowie, at the time, said that Syd, to him, was Pink Floyd, and that the rest of the band seemed quite ordinary in comparison. But, of course, now we know better. Waters had a lot of hidden talent, and was already demonstrating leadership skills. And David Gilmour was destined to become one of rock’s great guitarists, it seems. So the only way Barrett could have survived within Floyd was to blend with the newly emerging talent of Waters and Gilmour. As I said before, I think that there’s a very good chance part of Barrett’s collapse was caused by this realization, even if he only realized it on a subconscious level. But you look at such songs as Octopus and Long Gone and you see the potential he had if he could have mustered the needed energy to carry on and make that crucial compromise with the others. As it was, Barrett never gave up on the idea that Floyd remained his band, even after he was kicked out by the others. The story goes that he would stand outside the studio with guitar in hand, ready to play, while the other Floyds were inside recording. He just didn’t realize that he was given the boot in many respects, or he blocked this out for the most part. It must have been a *very* weird time for the other Floyds, and especially Gilmour perhaps, since he was walking into a totally new and wacko situation.
Pierre: So you’re saying that you don’t think you could create another Barrett synchronicity even if you tried really hard?
baker: No, because I don’t think the songs are there to try it with, although I haven’t heard Opal. One song, though, as I’ve said or at least hinted at before, does not make a synch. You have to have supporting material. With Barrett’s second album, there simply isn’t any material outside the first song, Baby Lemonade. But even it isn’t as strong as Octopus, Golden Hair… any of the ones, really, that I use on SID.
Pierre: You’ve talked about the four Madcap songs used in SID. What are the others? I know all of these are early Floyd songs, and also early Floyd singles except in one case.
baker: We’ve talked at length about Arnold Layne in connection with Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000, and how it represents Pink Floyd’s first professional recording, as well as their first released single. Well, in SID we have the second and third released singles of Floyd, both Barrett compositions again. See Emily Play, the second single, was an even bigger hit in Britain than Arnold Layne… I think it reached no. 6 in the pop charts. And it, along with the release of the album Piper at the Gates of Dawn around the same time, made Pink Floyd one of the hottest bands in the country. As I said, Barrett began to collapse for real around the release of See Emily Play. He couldn’t handle pop stardom and all the attached trappings. But, moving on with the singles, we also have Apples and Oranges used in SID, and this is their third single, recorded around the same time as See Emily Play and released several months later. However, it was not the next big hit Floyd expected, and already we have signs of internal strife within the band. I agree with most others that it is still an excellent song with excellent lyrics. The production is rather shoddy, however, in comparison to Emily, and this may have something to do with Barrett’s excessive use of feedback here. In any case, it should not have been released as a single in the shape it’s in. Then the next Barrett/Floyd composition used in SID is Vegetable Man, which really begins to show Syd breaking up. As producer Peter Jenner describes it, Syd was just sitting around his apartment and made a song up about the clothes he was wearing. But many view it as an autobiographical statement about the state of his mind, and this goes along with some of the lyrics from the Madcap songs of SID, where, for instance, we have “I”ve tattooed my brain all the way.” And, correspondingly, as you pointed out earlier I believe, “Vegetable Man” is playing when we are introduced to the character of Jack Pumpkinhead in the film and synch.
Pierre (singing): His head did no thinking, his arms didn’t move…
baker: No, silly. That’s Scarecrow from the Piper album!
Pierre: Oh… right. But it still applies somewhat.
baker: Well, certainly we have an Oz character whose head does no thinking here. He is truly a Vegetable Man in more ways than one, it seems. The overlap with the Barrett song here is, in my opinion, quite spooky.
Pierre: Just to review, Jack Pumpkinhead is a character appropriated from the second Baum Oz book, and he was simply a pumpkin, I believe, stuck onto a bunch of sticks tied together to make more or less functional limbs.
baker: That’s right essentially. And then this creation was brought to life through Mombi’s Powder of Life, which is also in the film.
Pierre: Tell us more about the Oz characters in the film. We know about the Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion from the first film, of course, and also, obviously, Dorothy. Now I know that Toto doesn’t return to Oz in the second film.
baker: That’s right. Toto is in Kansas with Dorothy, though, before she goes to Oz and then when she returns he’s right there with her again… he’s the first one to find her, actually. But in the film, the role of Toto is largely replaced by that of Billina, a talking hen, or at least this Kansas hen is able to talk in Oz.
Pierre: So animals can talk in Oz? Why didn’t Toto talk, then? Is this correct?
baker: Yeah, as I understand it, all animals have the ability to talk while in Oz. As I remember, Toto didn’t talk in the first book, but in a later book it is revealed, however, that he had the ability to talk all along. Toto’s reason for this: he simply had nothing of importance to say until that particular time. I think I’m remembering that correctly.
Pierre: So in the first film we have Dorothy and her non-talking dog in Oz, while in this second, follow-up Oz film we have a talking animal companion for Oz in the form of Billina the chicken. Tell us about some of the other characters she meets while in Oz. Just to get you started, I know that the Wicked Witch of the West isn’t around any more, since she was killed in the first movie and also the first book, I believe. So in the second book we instead have another witch named Mombi…
baker: But Mombi is not the chief bad person in the second film. Mombi is actually controlled by the Nome King, who is just as much of a threat to Oz as the wicked witches [West and East] were in the first movie/book. And, actually, in the Return to Oz film, the Nome King was able to conquer the Emerald City and all of Oz through the ruby slippers worn by Dorothy during her first visit. This motif is continued from the first film: the all powerful magic of these slippers. Another difference is that the Nome King actually lives outside of Oz, across the deadly desert that surrounds the Oz continent. The wicked witches, in contrast, represent an internal threat. And, moreover, the Nome King is the bad guy in several of Baum’s books, culminating in The Emerald City of Oz, which, as we discussed before, represents the end point of the first run of Oz books, before Baum temporarily deserted the series.
Pierre: But you said he returned to the Oz books?
baker: Yes, just as Gilmour reformed Pink Floyd, after learning the similar lesson that proven brand names sell creative products. You can stamp a name on a product, as Baum did with his Oz books — all the titles are something or another “of Oz,” or someone “in Oz.” That kind of thing. Similarly, the name Pink Floyd is stamped on each Gilmour-Mason-Wright album now. And both continuations suffer the criticism involved with keeping a name brand past its original incarnation. Is it simply a marketing gimmick? And so on. Because, in both cases, there was criticism that the product had weakened. I would argue against this in terms of the Oz books at least, and also with the Gilmour led Floyd albums as well to a certain degree, especially after finding the excellent synch between his “Sorrow” with the Firebird section of Fantasia 2000. And I haven’t given up, totally, on finding other Floyd synchs with the Gilmour band. Not totally, especially after the success of the Roger Waters match in Quadrospirited.
Pierre: We seem to have gotten off the subject a bit again. We were talking about Oz. So let me help you again. Now Dorothy, at the beginning of the movie, is sent to that insane asylum where they attempt to give her a primitive form of electroshock treatment. But she escapes with the help of Ozma, who mysterious appears in Kansas also. And then she climbs in the corn crib, as you stated before, and then the torrential river she is in dissolves into the deadly desert of Oz and, just like that, she is standing right outside the Oz continent, which she can reach through stepping stones.
baker: Yeah, if she would have fallen off the stones, however, the desert would have consumed her, just like it does later on in the movie to several pursuing Wheelers, when Dorothy crosses the desert again to get to the Nome King’s mountain domain.
Pierre: So she gets to Oz and sees the old house that landed in Munchkinland. And this is the same farmhouse from the first movie.
baker: Yes. But the Munchkins are gone, as the dialog indicates in SID’s 1st Oz — the bleed through here I mean. Then she sees the Yellow Brick Road, which is torn to pieces, with bricks scattered all over the place and in a complete state of disrepair. So when Dorothy sees the dilapidated road, she knows something awful has happened, and then runs full speed toward the Emerald City. Now, how she got there so fast has often been remarked about in criticisms of the film. In contrast, in the first film it takes her, what, at least 30 solid minutes of film to get to this city from the crashed house, and, along the way, she meets all three of her companions from her journey inside Oz, or the Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion. But, symbolically, I think it makes sense. The second movie acts as a balance to the first, and as the yellow brick road symbolism has been fully developed in the first, there is no need to repeat this detailing in the second. So while the very quick journey to the Emerald City in Return to Oz doesn’t make sense logically — applying the space of the first Oz movie to the second — it does in a symbolic way. Dorothy could be said to simply “run through” the space of the first, and, actually, it could be compared to understanding that very familiar space in the world, say, where we walk all the time, has considerably shrunk over the years as we pay less attention to all the details. This has happened to Boulder to a large degree. Swordfisht and I are always amazed that every time we walk around the town, a mile will turn into several miles.
Pierre: Moving to the Emerald City, there is also a stark contrast awaiting Dorothy when she arrives in comparison to the first movie.
baker: Well, it is essentially destroyed, with all the people living in it turned to stone. This is a quite strong visual in the movie, actually.
Pierre: The Nome King has destroyed it.
baker: That’s right, and has left Mombi behind, his slave for all practical purposes, to control the remains, and she is aided in this control by the Wheelers.
Pierre: Then she meets Tik Tok, and, after holding court with Mombi and seeing all her heads… another strong visual in the movie…
baker: Yes.
Pierre: …then she is locked in an upstairs room awaiting to be beheaded and her own head added to Mombi’s collection. This room is where she meets the two other characters that will accompany her till the end, and this is Jack Pumpkinhead and also The Gump. Can you tell us about these characters, along with Tik Tok? And, if you wish, how they are highlighted in SID’s 1st Oz? Because I know that each meeting with these characters is correlated with a particular song from one of the involved artists. And, really, this applies to the Wheelers as well, and also Mombi. This is really quite an impressive synch, baker!
baker: Thanks, but I can’t take credit, except for piecing the puzzle together. All the major Oz characters are actually met by Dorothy in region 2, or what I call the Oz region, which is the longest of the four and lasts about 33 minutes. And, you’re right, it’s uncanny, really, how the songs go with characters, almost like an opera or something — maybe that’s a bad comparison, but each character, up front, has a particular song attached to them. I think this may be too deep a subject to go into here. Maybe we should just stick with the overall Oz story and then wrap up a discussion of SID’s 1st Oz from there.
Pierre: You know what would be really cool? If Butchie and I simply quit our jobs in California and became what we really want to do, and that’s be artists. I could restart the studio; she could start writing newspaper articles again… and just free ourselves from the corporate business world in general. What I’m thinking is that if Butchie and I make this important, important decision, then I wouldn’t have to fly back to California after this interview is over. Maybe we could just live here with you! [baker audibly gasps]. Oh, don’t worry, I’m just kidding about the actual “living with you” part. But I think we really need to move. Blue Mountain may be as good a place as any. And that way we could create a second interview after this dealing more with an in-depth discussion about Dark Side of the Rainbow and also, probably, SID’s1st Oz.
baker: I like the idea of continuing the interview, perhaps. I’m not sure I want to keep the same format though. Pierre… there’s something I really need to tell you about yourself, and also Butchie.
Pierre: What’s that?
baker: Um, you’re not real. I made you up. You’re a part of the 10×10, and just as fictional a character as, uh, say Tik Tok or Jack Pumpkinhead. You don’t really have to move to Blue Mountain to escape your troubles. You are unbound already. Tell me what you want to do and your wish is granted, as far as the natural constraints of the 10×10 allow me to do such things. What do you really want Pierre? It’s as simple as Dorothy clicking the heels of her ruby slippers three times and wishing for her heart’s desire.
Pierre: A character, eh? Well, I guess that makes sense in light of the Willie interview, because Willie is only a character in the 10×10 as well. But I just want to tell you something: my love for Butchie is very real. You can’t take that away from me.
baker: I wouldn’t think of it. The same goes, actually, for Tommie and myself.
Pierre: But Swordfisht is Tommie.
baker: No, Tommie is Swordfisht. Or maybe you’re right. Who am I anyway? My real name’s not baker.
Pierre: Maybe it’s Syd. Or SID. Maybe you’re Walt SIDney. Maybe you doubled Arnold and Penny La(y)ne with Mickey and Minnie Mouse to reinforce the paring. Just like you created Butchie and I as a pair at a certain point, to save me from the frigid environment in Boulder and elsewhere. I’m Billy the Mountain and she’s my wife Ethel living on my shoulder. This goes along with your Mythos, which is also created by a Zircon and also a Zapper, I guess you could say. Who put that Mythos sign on the highway right on the limit of your Mythos if no one but ST knows about that boundary? Are you a character as well in someone else’s story or play? Who are you baker? What is your heart’s desire?
baker: Well, we’ve *strayed*. This is a pretty tangential conversation, actually… er, interview…whatever. But I think we should finish the story behind Return to Oz/SID’s 1st Oz… perhaps not tonight, though. Did I shock you by calling you a character?
Pierre: No, not really. But you control the shock as well.
baker: Ah, it’s good to be king.
Pierre (underneath his breath): King of a mole hill that is Mythos.
baker: Hey, I heard that. Cheap shot!
Pierre: But you made me say it!
baker: Stop it Dave. Stop it. Stop it.
Pierre: Stop.
baker: Seriously, see ya tomorrow hopefully.
Tape: Stop.
*****
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 19 of 20
*****
baker: Wow that was a pretty weird session last time. Let’s do an even stranger one today!
Pierre: No baker. On today’s docket is a rather quiet wrap-up of SID’s 1st Oz, and then, if possible, moving on into Fantastic Aspic and Tronesis and perhaps even Quadrospirited. Not today, of course, for the latter, but one or two or three interviews down the road.
baker: I don’t think we need to deal with these additional synchs in any detail. Merely give their relationship to the concept of tiling.
Pierre: So in terms of the Return to Oz review, we have Dorothy as a prisoner of Mombi, in which state she meets two more friends in Oz, or Jack Pumpkinhead and The Gump. Now we’ve talked about Jack a little, but the Gump is interesting in that, Frankenstein-like, they create this, uh, thing, from a sofa… what is it?
baker: Palm leaves, and, uh, the mounted *head* of a Gump.
Pierre: Oh, I didn’t get that part. So the Gump is actually a real creature as well.
baker: Well, it was until it was shot! I guess it’s a little like an Ozian elk. Best way to describe it perhaps.
Pierre: So now they put all these different things together.
baker: Even providing a tail for navigation, yes.
Pierre: And then use it to escape from Mombi across the Deadly Desert and away from the Emerald City and, I suppose, Oz altogether. They head toward the Nome King’s mountain across the desert, where, by now in the movie, they know that the Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion are imprisoned.
baker: I was thinking about this journey across the Deadly Desert before work today. Remember how we talked about Dorothy’s run from Munckinland to the Emerald City was covered in an impossibly quick time according to the space of the original movie? Well here we have something of the opposite, because, like Dorothy and her friend’s journey to the Wicked Witch’s castle was not shown in any detail in the 39 classic, so here we have a much longer journey across the deadly desert, in movie time, to get the main bad guy of this second major Oz film. But, come to think of it, it didn’t take long for them to reach the Deadly Desert again. Maybe the shrinkage of Oz is justified as artistic liberty. If I remember correctly, these same time and space discrepancies concerning Oz geography showed up in Baum’s Oz books as well, especially during the first several books when he didn’t realize the concept was going to result in a series.
Pierre: And then Dorothy destroys the Nome King, just as she destroyed the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.
baker: Right, and both are by accident, shall we say, with the culprit here being a simple egg laid by Billina, which, when accidently consumed by the Nome King, caused him to disintegrate. Eggs are poison to the Nomes, and that’s why they are so concerned about the appearance of the Billina chicken in Oz. You pick up some of this concern in the dialog bleed throughs occurring in the synch.
Pierre: And then everyone is magically returned to Oz via the ruby slippers, which have been removed from the pile of rubble — all that remains of the Nome King.
baker: He stole them — or “appropriated them” might be a better phrase — when he found them in the Deadly Desert. They dropped off Dorothy’s feet during her journey back to Kansas from Oz at the end of her original visit. This according to the first Oz book, if not the ’39 movie based on this book.
Pierre: And with these slippers he was able to conquer the Emerald City and Oz, as you said before.
baker: Yes.
Pierre: And then we wrap it all up with a joyful return to Kansas, accompanied by the last piece from the Passion Play album. I really like the way Ozma shows up in the mirror with all that brightness behind and around her when Tull is singing about the stone rolling away, and night turning from darkness to day.
baker: “Everday” is how it is phrased [in the album]. That’s a very important transition in the film, and leads directly to the ending heartbeats. It’s a culmination of the album as well, and is inspired by the resurrection of Jesus who, like Tull’s Ronnie Pilgrim, rolled the stone away from his tomb when resurrected.
Pierre: I feel much more could be gone into here. Ozma as a Jesus figure. Now, that would stir up some controversy in your conservative neck of the woods.
baker: There’s a lot of Jung that would apply here, and we have to keep in mind, all during any potential interpretation (in my opinion), that Ozma embodies both sexes, although this is not shown in the movie. Ozma was born a girl, then transformed into a boy named Tip, and then changed back into a girl when she was instated as true and rightful ruler of Oz. This comes from the end of Baum’s second Oz book. [coffee break, etc.]
Pierre: Wow, you know this sounds a lot like Tommy/Tommie’s story.
baker: You are so observant Pierre! Picked right up on that, did you?
Pierre: Oh, right. I guess that was on purpose.
baker: Tommy is Oblio but born with a point instead of without one. Tommie is an inverted Oblio magically erasing a point at the end of The Point of The Wall. But like the characters in the Wizard of Oz, he had a point all along, but he just didn’t recognize it. One could say his point was to be without a point.
Pierre: Hmm, you’re talking phallic objects here aren’t you. Smutt’n up the place, eh?
baker: It’s simply a matter of being pointed or rounded. No smuttiness implied.
Pierre: So baker, I’m just going to leave all that last part alone. Wait, I can’t resist. You’re doubling The Who’s Tommy with The Wall’s Pink here, but saying they’re mirror images of each other; inversions of each other, in other words. Pink is Oblio and Tommy is Horton according to your synchs within The Oz/Floyd Paradox as we’ve discussed it.
baker: And then both, I guess, are also Dorothy, as well as her own double in SID’s 1st Oz: Ozma. At the end of the movie, Dorothy requests, “I wish I could be in two places at the same time,” indicating she understands that she must return to Kansas and her uncle, aunt, and dog, but also greatly desires to remain in Oz with her friends there. So, voila, Ozma appears in the mirror behind her, an obvious double. Walking toward each other — just as your image in a mirror would walk toward you if you approached it — Dorothy then puts her hands out to meet Ozma’s hands and then, miraculously, pulls her out of the mirror world that Mombi trapped her in. This through the power of, once again, the ruby slippers she is wearing at the time.
Pierre: They seem to get Dorothy out of any jam.
baker: And then Dorothy gives Ozma the ruby slippers and Ozma sends her back to Kansas. Then she returns — is reunited with the aunt, uncle and dog — and then recontacts Ozma in the mirror, as we discussed, right at the end of the movie, as a final twist in the plot. But this is like Oblio having a point all along. Oblio is his own double, but pointless and pointed at the same time. Horton, when it is learned that his Whoville is not imaginary after all and everyone else begins to hear the tiny Whos, thanks to their great efforts in this direction, then Horton also has a point to what was considered insane ramblings before by his peers. There is something to all these doublings I think. This is from SID’s 1st Oz and then the two Oz/Floyd Paradox synchs prior to it. This is where we first have stories totally integrated, more or less, with each other — combined from formerly separate video and audio sources. Horton the Elephant becomes the same as Tommy; Oblio the same as Pink; and Dorothy, um…
Pierre: The same as Ozma. You said this was an internal doubling, then.
baker: Let me back up. Ozma is a little different. Take the case of Oblio. At the end of The Point, and also The Point of The Wall, Oblio doesn’t become the ruler of the Pointed City but is still subservient to a kind and rightful king. In Return to Oz and SID’s 1st Oz, Dorothy, through her exact double, actually becomes the ruler of Oz, as Ozma that is. This is a new twist created by Walter Murch — the primary scriptwriter for the Return to Oz movie — and is not found in the Baum book. It is a clever reinterpretation, and seems to fit in. And I guess they decided not to bring in the idea of Ozma as a boy, since this would make the story overcomplicated, and also perhaps be a little controversial for a Disney flick, being essentially a sex or gender change and all. Actually, in the early 60s when Shirley Temple played Tip/Ozma in an abbreviated interpretation of Baum’s Land of Oz in the first show of her tv series…
Pierre: You’re talking about The Marvelous Land of Oz, Baum’s second Oz book and partial source for the Return to Oz movie?
baker: Right. But the brief point I want to make about this is that the sex change at the end of the show from Tip back to Ozma caused some controversy among those more closed minded to such things. This is also a significant event because Shirley Temple, if you remember, was slated to play Dorothy in the 1939 movie before 20th Century Fox decided not to let MGM borrow their hot young star. Oh, that makes her sound like a porn star, doesn’t it?
Pierre: Didn’t you say Ozma, the person who played that role in the film, actually became a porn star later on. Great segue, eh?
baker: I believe I did hear that. Do you think she’s prettier than Faruza Balk?
Pierre: Um, not really, although it’s kind of a Ginger or Mary Ann question.
baker: Hmm, okay. Ozma as Ginger. Interesting. Mary Ann was from Kansas, though. Do you remember that? And she sometimes wears a blue gingham dress if I remember correctly, just like Dorothy.
Pierre: Wow, we’re really going astray here. But, actually, I guess not, since Ozma, as you say, is such an important character in The Oz/Floyd Paradox. A culminating character. And, to you, her story is very similar to the Tommie we both know and love now.
baker: There’s more to this story. But here and now isn’t the place to go into it. The words are lacking still. Page space is not provided yet.
Pierre: All right then. Are we possibly finished with SID’s 1st Oz? If so, we can probably get through everything else in one more interview session. Do you think so baker? Then we’ll make a decision what to do next: whether Butchie and I will return to California and continue our Beefheart/Zappa worship, or else we stay here and continue our Beefheart/Zappa worship or perhaps continue this worship in yet another place. But, of course, you, baker, must make these decisions.
baker: No, I gave you a mouth and a mind. You can make them yourself. You and Butchie together. I don’t control you.
Pierre: Yes you do.
baker: I really don’t see it that way Pierre, although I may joke sometimes that I’m the master and you’re the slave. But, in many ways, you’re just as real as me. All I am are words written on a page to others, just like yourself. We are interacting together as two real human beings as far as everyone else is concerned.
Pierre: Pull me out of the mirror, baker. Pull me, pull me.
baker: We are not doubles. This is not Dorothy and Ozma all over again.
Pierre: Here’s an interesting thought, baker. Queen, the group, created their name to synch with the appearance of the true queen of Oz in the synch SID’s 1st Oz. Freddie Mercury, after all, is an alchemical symbol of the philosopher’s stone, the all knowing, all powerful duplex who found in the highest vaults of the heavenly cathedral and also the lowliest, smutty pits of hell. The figure of Mercury, or Hermes, is very the embodiment of paradox. What is both highest and lowest?; bestest and worstest?; smuttiest of body and purest of heart and mind? And so forth. See, I can spout out some alchemical jargon as well. Conjuntio and Separatio. Ablutio and Incarcetratio.
baker: Now you’re making up things.
Pierre: I am the Walrus. Let’s take a switch to Paul’s hinny.
baker: And now you’re additionally getting silly. (holds up coffee cup to the light). Did you drink *exactly* half of my latte again. No wonder you’re getting a little strangish.
Pierre: Yes, exactly half. You do the math.
baker: So it looks like this is the end once again Pierre.
Pierre: You said you wanted this to be a weird session.
baker: So I did. Goodnight Pierre.
Pierre: Goodnight John Boy.
baker: Uuugh.
*****
Interview of baker b. by Pierre Schaeffer re The Oz/Floyd Paradox
August & September 2003
Charleston, South Carolina
Part 20 of 20
*****
Pierre: Okay baker. Good morning.
baker: Morning.
Pierre: So I think our mutual feeling about the rest of the interview is that we can basically rush through Fantastic Aspic and Tronesis, the two synchs created immediately after SID’s 1st Oz, and then move on to other things.
baker: Right. Well Fantastic Aspic is an overlap between King Crimson’s Larks Tongues in Aspic…
Pierre: Yet another 1973 concept album…
baker: …Right. And the visual component this time is a nifty foreign animation called Fantastic Planet, which also happened to be released in 1973. Now to me these two are a natural match, not only because they came from the same year but they also have a very similar feel to them.
Pierre: I like this one very much. But the method used to created Fantastic Aspic is quite different from SID’s 1st Oz. Can you describe it?
baker: Basically we can say I took a completely opposite approach when cobbling together Fantastic Aspic. At an early point in the process, I decided to keep the album intact — Larks’ Tongues in Aspic — and edit the movie down to fit the straight run of the album.
Pierre: This sounds like a different method for creating a synch than you’ve talked about before.
baker: In looking back, I think it is. In terms of our tiling terminology, this would be a full silver tiling but also an equivalent gold tiling. That is, we have the basic meaning of the movie, front to back, conveyed in the synch, even though the entire movie is not seen in the synch. I eliminated a couple of fighting scenes, for instance. But the album, as I said, is left intact. This would be exactly like the way I run Dark Side of the Rainbow, then, where the Dark Side of the Moon album is left unaltered.
Pierre: When we were talking about this synch before starting the interview this morning, you mentioned that in Larks’ there isn’t the cohesive storyline that we had before in A Passion Play, Tommy and The Wall. But there are still lyrical matches between film and album.
baker: Definitely. Once I discovered the importance of lyrical matches in Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000, I didn’t want to easily give up than element in my synchs. And we have this full blown again in Tronesis, the following synch.
Pierre: How much of the movie did you edit? Also, could you tell us a little about the movie? Not a lot, mind you, but just a capsule summary. As you said, you consider this to be an important synch in your work, if not as important as SID’s 1st Oz.
baker: I’d say it is about as important as anything else, though. But, really, it acts as a balance to SID. What was the other part of your question?
Pierre: I asked about the movie’s plot and also how much you edited the movie for the synch.
baker: Oh yeah, right. Well, the album is about 45 minutes long, and the movie must run close to an hour and a half. Actually I think it’s about 70-75 minutes. So that would be less than half of the movie edited to fit the synch. As far as the plot goes, this is a story about oppression of what appears, on the surface, to be a lesser race — us humans, actually — by a more intelligent and physically much larger race of alien beings called Traggs. On the planet where the story is set, humans are actually viewed as pets, or either they are considered “wild” by the ruling race, like we would consider primitive tribes of people in New Guinea, perhaps. But the story focuses on one of these pet humans, a boy named Terr, and we see him rebel against his master and, armed with an important learning device stolen from the Traggs, join the wild humans, eventually educating and civilizing them, as he was. At the end, the Traggs must make peace with the evolved humans in order for the two races to coexist as equals on the same planet.
Pierre: Thanks for that explanation. Is there anything else we should add here about Fantastic Planet?
baker: Although I didn’t use digital methods to edit the movie, I purposefully allowed a lot of leverage in the editing process. In the end I used about fourteen of what you could call video tiles to completely cover the Larks Tongues in Aspic album end-to-end, creating a full silver tiling. And, as it turned out, the last part of the film turned out to make a very manageable straight take with the album — a large tile. And this same thing happened in SID’s 1st Oz, when I was able to play out the last part of Music From The Body toward the end of that film, about 12 minutes worth. And in both cases, this large tile seems about as strong as anything else in the synch.
Pierre: This also reminds me of the one tile you used to cover the final two animations of Fantasia 2000 in you Walt SIDney creation.
baker: Exactly. Sometimes straight is better, and more impressive. But if straight isn’t working, go ahead and feel free to bend.
Pierre: I like the way you called this particular tiling a faceting of the movie down to the length of an album. Like you’re creating a gem out of some raw potential. Now you mentioned to me that you personally think SID’s 1st Oz may be stronger than the movie you used for its base [Return to Oz]. How about this one? Do you think Larks’ works better as an accompaniment to Fantastic Planet. Great name, by the way, on this one: Fantastic Aspic.
baker: I’m tempted to say that the synch is better than the album, but on second thought I’ll reserve that special status to SID. Let’s just say that it provides a very nice alternate way to listen to the album, much as Dark Side of the Rainbow provides a nice alternative for the enjoyment of Dark Side of the Moon.
Pierre: How may edits did you make to the film?
baker: As I said, in this case there were about 14 recuings of the movie within the album. Some reshuffling of the order of the movie is used to create this tiling, but not a lot. You should be able to grasp the story, and this is made easier in my version — much easier, actually — by the use of captions. In fact, I would strongly recommend including the captions here.
Pierre: This is the first time you’ve used captions in a synch?
baker: I think so… unless you count the captions in the Black Lodge that are part of the video itself.
Pierre: Oh, right. Forgot about them. So are we ready to move on to Tronesis tonight? (baker nods). Let’s do then. And we have yet another 70s concept album in the spotlight in this case.
baker: Yeah, this is another good one: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by the Peter Gabriel fronted Genesis. Now Lamb, like A Passion Play — and unlike Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, and, to a degree, Dark Side of the Moon — has a rather cohesive plot attached to it, following the adventures of a traveler through a surreal landscape, in this case a Puerto Rican New Yorker named Rael, a kind of pre-punk tough guy. Much as with the case of Passion Play, we have what appears to be the death of this character early on in the album, or at least the equivalent of a death scenario, or a near death scenario… or maybe just a dream. It’s very hard to tell, because the story is told so abstractly in the verse that Peter Gabriel wrote for the album.
Pierre: This is before he split and became a successful solo artist. And also before Genesis became a pretty commercial sounding outfit.
baker: Back then they were cutting edge progressive rock for sure, right up there with Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and about anyone else in terms of complexity. Make no mistake about it: Phil Collins was considered one of the best progressive rock drummers bar none. All of them were excellent musicians, as well as songwriters.
Pierre: So then, Tron…
baker: Tron is the first full length computer animation film, and although the plot is the standard good vs. evil imbroglio, the visuals are still fantastic, and have aged well in my opinion. This is because they are a very clever combination of live action and computer graphics. It still holds together. The plot, as I said, is minimal, though, and I actually like the movie better with the Genesis music and lyrics superimposed on top of it.
Pierre: What is the tiling scheme in this case? And how is this different from other synchs you created, if any?
baker: I consider SID”s 1st Oz, Fantastic Aspic, and Tronesis to be on a different level than anything I’d done before. SID’s 1st Oz is obviously the major synch here, but Fantastic Planet is also important in a totally opposite way. Something that had to be done: this editing down of a movie to album length, I mean. And then Tronesis provides a perfect wrap up for this particular cycle, bringing the complexity of SID back down to the simplicity of Dark Side of the Rainbow in many ways. For one thing, there are only 4 cues in Tronesis, as opposed to 26 in SID and about 14 in Fantastic Aspic, the two synch found immediately prior to it. So we’re returning, for the first time in my work, actually, to something of an original state. Another way I like to see it is that SID’s 1st Oz is a full flowering of the plant that represents my growth within the audiovisual synching field, with the seed being Dark Side of the Rainbow and also The Rainbow Sphere. Perhaps we could have MessiaenSphere as the place where the resulting sprout broke ground, and then Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000 as an elaborate leaf perhaps. But, to me, SID is the flowering, and then in Fantastic Aspic and Tronesis, we have the natural wilting away of this flower after the blooming, returning it to a seed state again, if you will. And I would also add here that The Point of The Wall would be the bud of the flower, right before the opening. Perhaps that’s why I had to follow this Wall synch immediately with SID’s 1st Oz, to keep the momentum of this opening going.
Pierre: Very interesting analogy baker, and one that perhaps puts all the things we’ve been talking about in a better perspective. You’ve mentioned the lessening of cues as a reason you think Tronesis is closer in spirit to Dark Side of the Rainbow. Can you go into that a little more?
baker: When you have larger and larger tiles to deal with, the focus shifts away from the structure of the synch back to the meaning within each individual tile, and how these large clumps of meaning fit together. For me, you have a lot of density in Tronesis, even though the musical matches aren’t as close as, say, SID’s 1st Oz or Fantastic Planet, or even Dark Side of the Rainbow for that matter. This is a strong lyrical match, though. Also, I should mention that about 20 minutes of both the album and the movie are edited out, and I consider this to be both an equivalent gold tiling as well as an equivalent silver tiling. Some of the songs I edited out of the synch, for example, are what I would consider some of the weaker from the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album. Correspondingly, and more obviously, a lot of the static, talking scenes from the real world part of the Tron movie — before the main character Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, is sucked into the computer world full of people-as-programs — are dropped for the purposes of the synch. And, also, there are some twists.
Pierre: Twists?
baker: Well, although the movie is run in completely chronological order, albeit with two edits or drops, the album is totally rearranged, making this quite different from other synchs. The simplest way to explain this is that Lamb, when released in 1975, was a double lp made up of four sides. Well, in the synchronicity we have basically the rearranging of these four sides — in simplistic terms, again — as follows through the straight run of the movie: 2, 4, 3, 1. That is, at the first of the synch, we don’t hear the music beginning Lamb also starting out in the Tronesis synch. Instead we hear the music of side 2 — actually it is the end of side 1 we hear first, but I’m trying to explain things in a simple way here, just to touch the surface. Then we have the 1st [largest] movie edit, and after this edit we have the last side of the original double album played in full. Then side 3… and the *ending* the synch of the movie we have playing the *first* side of the album, beginning with the very first song. This seems to be a strange way to tile this particular movie, but when you watch it, things appear to fit together quite nicely. The lyrical matches are consistent all the way through, and then we also have a type of Sophie’s No. 9 abstract piece in the 3rd tile, which is matched to a very abstract part of the album originally called The Evil Jam.
Pierre: I don’t think we need to go into too much detail here about Tronesis, especially details about the album and/or movie. This scrambling of album order within the movie seems interesting, though. Wouldn’t this mess up the story line of the album?
baker: You would think so, but when collaged into movie it really doesn’t. The album has a very abstract plot, anyway, so not a lot of linear storytelling is lost here. Despite its surface simplicity in comparison to the ones found immediately before it, I consider Tronesis to be complex symbolically. It is as complex, say, as Dark Side of the Rainbow, although it may not embody quite the same universality of themes. Maybe.
Pierre: Well, baker. Is that it for Tronesis? And are we through with discussions of the surface aspects of SID’s 1st Oz? Could it be that we’re *finished*?
baker: I did want to mention that the structure of Tronesis is reminiscent of the Alice-Wall combination we spoke of much earlier in the interview, in that we almost have here a 1 to 1 match between a full album and a full movie. In both cases, the movie and the album are about the same length. If you remember, the most popular way, perhaps, to run the Alice-Wall synch is to drop one song from the album — Comfortably Numb — to make both components begin and end at almost exactly the same time. Well, we have a similar technique used in Tronesis, except that both the movie and album are edited in somewhat larger ways. But there is definitely a similarity that I thought should be mentioned. This is definitely a gold equivalent tiling, as have been all my finds beginning with Pink Vertigo, almost a 2 year period now…
Pierre: With SID’s 1st Oz being your own full “24 carrot” gold tiling. It isn’t an equivalent tiling, in other words.
baker: Right. And in the same way that Fantastic Aspic is a full silver tiling and the first of that kind since, well, since Psychogumma perhaps. The entire album is used, just as we have in Dark Side of the Rainbow and also Dark Side of the Yellow Submarine. All other silver tilings mentioned in the meantime are also equivalent silver tilings. SID’s 1st Oz is unique in this respective for containing multiple silver equivalent tilings — three to be precise. This is different.
Pierre: Well, bake, if I’m counting right, this only leaves Quadrospirited as a synch you’ve created that’s left to discuss. This was actually created in the middle of this interview process, and I had the pleasure to help you with this work.
baker: You helped a whole lot. I don’t think I could have done it without you. Check that: I *know* I couldn’t. Also there was another syncher who pointed me in the right direction named Virotti, a somewhat newer addition to the board.
Pierre: Yeah, I’ve noticed that you’ve been talking to him quite a lot in the past month or two, but I haven’t made any personal contact with him.
baker: It’s really too early in his development to say if he will be a major player in the future in terms of synchronicity development. We’ll just have to see. And there are a number of other newcomers that I think have a good deal of promise as well. It’s good to see fresh blood on the board. Oh, sorry, didn’t mean for it to come out that way. Sounds like we’re making human sacrifices or something.
Pierre: Right. So if we don’t want to go into Quadrospirited, and from what you’re telling me both now and before the interview, you don’t think it is a good idea…
baker: Well, I’ll just say that this is yet another gold tiling, in an equivalent way again, and is structured in quite a similar way to Walt SIDney’s Fantasia 2000. It also has a very strong center, making it somewhat like SID’s 1st Oz in this respect. But I’ve not seen a center reinforced like that yet, even in SID. The synch is like a sine wave, with the center of the movie, corresponding with the center of the synch as well, like the peak of this wave. The synch gently lets you in and then gently leads you out of this intense middle. Walt SIDney’s Fantasia, in contrast, is something like a rolling wave, which crashes at the end of the synch in a spectacular spray of synchronicity. I would also here like to reinforce that the animation used, the fantastic Spirited Away anime by Hayao Miyazaki, is yet another Disney funded production, like we have in — counting backwards in my synchs — Tronesis, Return to Oz, Fantasia 2000, Fantasia, and Nightmare Before Christmas. In each of these cases, however, they could be considered special additions to the Disney oeuvre. Spirited Away, for instance, has little to do with Disney, and the only thing they added were the English dubs. Miyazaki is considered the Walt Disney of Japan, although, as I understand, he loathes the comparison, and perhaps rightly so. This is not taking anything away from Walt Disney, but only what Disney has become in many ways: a business making safe, melodramatic animations that don’t take too many risks overall. However, in each of the movies I use for my synchs, we have risk taking. That’s why I call them different from the main Disney line of products. And, as I said, the Fantasia film had a special place in Walt Disney’s heart, because he knew its experimental value. My hope is that audiovisual synching, although a very strange continuation of his dream, is still a continuation nonetheless, and that some day, the best products coming out of the synching world will be viewed as artistic creations of merit in their own right. This is my hope, anyway.
Pierre: Great ending baker. I think this is where we’ve run out of words to put on the page. Anything else?
baker: We must make plans for what is to come next. We have several options.
Pierre: As soon as the tape is shut off, we’ll begin to plan then. Good morning to you baker and thanks so much for explaining in such great detail about this tiling business. I know this interview took much longer to make than originally planned, but I think the end result made it all worthwhile. And I look forward to future collaborations with you as well, both from a synching standpoint as well as a writing one. I think we have more business to do together.
baker: Well, thanks you so much Pierre for agreeing to do this interview. I know that you had to considerably alter your lifestyle to accommodate the interview, and that you’ve had to take a lot of time off from work. You also had to traveled all the way across the country to get to Blue Mountain, bringing along your wife Butchie as well at a certain point. I just wanted to reinforce those points to people who are reading this thing. I agree with you that there seems to be more on the docket for us in the near future, and that I consider you now a lifetime friend, as well as Butchie. I guess I better stop there.
Pierre: So I’m turning off the tape now. Thanks again.
baker: Thank you so much Pierre.
END OF OZ/FLOYD PARADOX INTERVIEW
Sunklands 