Forgotten Songs: Elf Power’s Andrew Rieger on Pink Floyd’s “Vegetable Man”
Discovered Via The Jesus and Mary Chain
Oct 17, 2013
Elf Power
Forgotten Songs is our recurring series where a musician or one of our writers examines a song they love that they feel has been overlooked. It could be a song by an artist who never made it big, or it could be a B-side/rarity or unheralded album track by a more well known artist. It could even be one of the artist’s own songs. For this edition of Forgotten Songs, Elf Power frontman Andrew Rieger writes about Pink Floyd’s 1967 song “Vegetable Man” by way of The Jesus and Mary Chain. Elf Power’s twelfth studio album, Sunlight on the Moon, was just released on Darla and Orange Twin. Read on as Rieger recounts discovering the song and then stream both versions of the forgotten song below.
Growing up in a small town in South Carolina in the 1980s, it took some effort to discover weird, underground, non-mainstream music. The Internet didn’t exist and there was no college radio station within earshot. Sometimes you could get your hands on a music magazine like Option, The Bob, or Maximum Rock N Roll and read about bands that sounded like they might be interesting or cool, but you never really knew for sure.
I remember reading an article in the mid-‘80s in the British magazine NME about a band called The Jesus and Mary Chain, heralding them as the new Sex Pistols. The next time I made it to a record store in the neighboring town, I picked up their debut single, “Upside Down,” and when I got home and put it on the turntable, the shrieking noise clouding the pop song was so alien sounding and perplexing to me that I was certain I had gotten a defective record. At that point, I’d not yet heard Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth, so the idea of purposeful guitar noise and feedback was new to me. I soon realized that these sounds were intentional and grew to love the song.
Even stranger was the B-side, “Vegetable Man,” a plodding, monotone ball of fuzz, painfully dissonant and yet strangely catchy somehow. A few years later, in the early 1990s when I had moved to Athens, GA to attend the University of Georgia, my friend Raleigh Hatfield and I were listening to records, and when I played “Vegetable Man,” Raleigh said, “Great version, but the original Pink Floyd version is even better.” My mind was blown. I had no idea it was originally a Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd unreleased outtake from 1967, though it made perfect sense, especially considering the alienated, acid-damaged lyrics.
Raleigh had a bootleg cassette of the song, which I dubbed and listened to over and over. It was like an early psychedelic blueprint of punk rock, howling guitars, and sarcastic, self-deprecating lyrics making fun of the hippie cliches that Syd felt himself and Pink Floyd had become (“In my paisley shirt, I look a jerk”). The connection from Pink Floyd’s “Vegetable Man” to Sex Pistols to The Jesus and Mary Chain was clear to me now. Revelations and discoveries like this have always been my favorite part of being a music fan, keeping me enthralled and searching to this day.
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