syd barrett, r.i.p.

Right after I post an early Pink Floyd video comes word that Syd Barrett — the band’s “troubled genius” — has died.
Syd was a strange character. For those who don’t know the history, he founded the band and wrote and sang nearly all of its early songs. But thanks to a potent admixture of schizophrenia and lysergic acid diethylamide, he lost his mind. The rest of the band gently eased him out and went on to global superstardom. For the last 30-plus years, Syd’d been a crazy man living alone in Cambridge, painting abstract canvases and living off Floyd royalties.
Because he’s gone private, Syd lived on primarily as an image — inspiring tribute songs like “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” Fans imagined him as a kindhearted child in need of protection, an injured songbird. His musical production consisted of only one good album and a bunch of unlistenable solo work, interspersed with occasional glimpses of sense. But from that body of work — and one extended exercise in mythmaking — developed a legend.
Here’s Joe Boyd, the band’s early promoter, on the Syd he knew; he makes the worthwhile and undernoted point that the band succeeded in part because Syd “was incredibly good looking: he had these dark eyes, and this curly black hair, and he was very, very appealing; girls loved him.”
(Today, that seems strange on a couple of levels. First, because the remaining band members post-Syd are, well, quite unattractive sorts; and second, because the post-Syd band and their fans are both so drearily self-conscious about how intellectual and profound they each are. When I was in eighth grade, liking Pink Floyd was a marker that I was a serious person, and it was the complete absence of fun post 1972 that eventually drove me away. So I really like the idea that the most “serious” of classic rock bands, the only one that would inspire Tom Stoppard plays, got an early edge because its lead singer was hot. On the other hand, it also gives his descent into crazy eyebrow-shaving fat man status in the 1970s a sort of awful resonance.)
I linked to a bunch of early Floyd videos a few months ago, and most of those links still work. But the best is this video of “Interstellar Overdrive” from the 1967 doc Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London.