Wish You Were Here

Two men, one of them in flames, shake hands in a studio back lot. The image of a nude woman emerges from a red veil. A diver breaks the waves of a lake without creating a splash or ripple in the water. Those evocative images form the elements of the album art for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, released 40 years ago September 12. Wish You Were Here, a rueful meditation on absence and loss, is as memorable for its artful packaging as it is for its music.

Pink Floyd released Wish You Were Here in the wake of the massive commercial success of The Dark Side of The Moon, released in 1973. By the time the band started recording Wish You Were Here, the Floyd (David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright) was experiencing enormous pressure and dissolution. Before The Dark Side of the Moon, the Floyd was a popular progressive rock band with a cult following. The Dark Side of the Moon made the Floyd mainstream rock superstars. The band struggled with all the demands that fame thrust upon them, including the rigors of touring, making their fans happy, and living up to the expectations of record executives. An inability to handle fame contributed to an internal dissension that began to slowly destroy Pink Floyd (although the collapse of the Roger Waters-era Floyd would not occur for years yet).

The Floyd responded with an album that is both a sarcastic slap in the face to the music industry (through songs such as “Have a Cigar” and “Welcome to the Machine”) and a sad farewell to the band they could never be again (“Wish You Were Here” and “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” understood to be about ex-Floyd member Syd Barrett but also having broader meanings about the loss of a different time in the band’s history).