Music Monday: Is This the Greatest Rock Instrumental of All Time?

Before introducing what I believe to be the greatest instrumental in the history of rock ‘n roll, allow me to acknowledge some worthy contenders to the title.

Link Wray’s “Rumble” may be the most influential instrumental in rock history that everyone has heard but fewer know the title. It also has the distinction of being the only instrumental ever banned on the radio, “Rumble” being slang for a brawl radio programmer in parts of the South thinking that a donnybrook would break out with the mere mention of the song’s title and Dsus2 to E Major vamp.

Surf rock has donated more than its share of contenders.

The Ventures – here with their slightly awkward dance routine being introduced by Dick Clark in a gentle swaying prop bed to mime to “Walk Don’t Run” on the Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show – can certainly claim a few.

Neil LeVang’s take on “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on the Lawrence Welk Show – he was a member of the band – is fantastic.

And, for good measure, I’ll toss “Theme From The Endless Summer” by The Sandals ,into the mix.

Excellent tunes each. Rush and Van Halen each had some incredible instrumentals.

I would contend, however, that Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” from 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon best them all, and it isn’t even close.

If you’re not familiar with the song or need a reminder of its power, cue up the below video with the lights off, the volume up and your eyes closed.

How the Song Came to Be

Part of the greatness that made The Dark Side of the Moon so iconic is that it was a combination of spare parts from other work and the fact that the record was road-tested for years by the band prior to release. The album’s closer, “Eclipse,” was once a jazzy instrumental. Roger Waters had penned a song at the end of the sessions for their previous album, Meddle, he called “The Dark Side of the Moon” which became “Brain Damage” on the final record. “On the Run” was originally a guitar-driven bluesy jam.

The origins of “The Great Gig in the Sky” lie in the band’s assignment to provide a soundtrack to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point. While the Floyd did make a couple of contributions to the soundtrack, they left a significant number of musical ideas and songs-in-progress on the cutting floor, much of which has since been released. Two of those musical ideas were “The Violence Sequence” and “The Mortality Sequence” or “The Religion Song.”

The former, fleshed out and with lyrics added, became “Us and Them.”

The latter, with several changes, became “The Great Gig in the Sky,” the title of which is a reference to mortality and Heaven being The Great Gig in the Sky.

While being road-tested, the band played the song as an organ instrumental with religious quotations and quotations from the Bible. At other times there were recordings of NASA astronauts playing along.

Things would change back at Abbey Road Studios. The music had developed to include all four members of the band. Then the band’s two primary writers of music, David Gilmour and the song’s composer, keyboardist Richard Wright, brought in, at the suggestion of session engineer Alan Parsons – who made quite a few critical contributions to the album as a whole, not least this, the clocks that begin “Time” and the coins sounds that begin “Money” – session vocalist Clare Torry. It was a three-hour session in late January of 1973 on a Sunday just weeks before the album was scheduled to be finished.

Gilmour and Wright went over the concept of the track with Torry and asked her to improvise a vocal. She did one take and was displeased with the results but, inspired to treat her voice as an instrument, sang through two more takes. When asked for a third, she obliged but threw in the towel halfway. She felt spent and that she was becoming repetitive.

She left the session with thirty pounds in her pocket for her troubles and a distinct impression that this was the last she would hear from Pink Floyd.

Back in the studio, however, Gilmour, Wright and Parsons were blown away by her performance. They pieced together the final vocal from bits and bobs of Torry’s last two-and-a-half takes and the song was done.

Easy as.

What This Has That No Others Do

The vocal dynamics are wild with this song. The others are nice – even great – tunes but they lack the alchemical combination of grandeur and intimacy of “The Great Gig in the Sky” that encapsulates the song’s theme far better than samples of a preacher or star-struck astronauts ever could. They lack the emotional pull, the soul, the depth. After listening to this song all else is hollow.

It’s fitting that the next track on the album is about the hollowest thing of all: money.

If you look back at the instrumentals above, you’ll find that they follow the structure of a song with verses and choruses. Maybe even pre-choruses, for those of you who like to get fancy.

“The Great Gig in the Sky” moves without such structure. It happens in movements and the movements begin with the peak of emotional intensity at the beginning, the least common place to put it. Why shoot your wad at the beginning, only to follow it up with less powerful movements?

This song dares to do just that and, in the opinion of this here writer, it absolutely works.

After the emotional high has sustained what it could, I, as a listener, need the prolonged decay and release to gather together and integrate and recalibrate myself.

And let’s talk, for a moment, about the attack of that first vocal section. If you watch the response videos, and there are many, on YouTube by trained vocalists one is left with the distinct impression that what wowed them was not what Clare Torry was doing, but that it would occur to so few to do it.

It also happens to be one of the few songs which cannot be improved by a live performance, as great as that performance might be.

Here’s one by Pink Floyd on their final tour, which I saw as a teen in a drizzly, misty Foxboro Stadium, with vocalists Sam Brown, Durga McBroom and Claudia Fontaine.

Bonus Beats

Check out this very different but very excellent cover by Rhett Shull and his band. Well worth the price of admission.