Planet Waves | Saturday, April 30, 3005 I recently bought a Pink Floyd compilation CD -- true, a mere shadow of my various collections of their albums over the years, listened to during many days of tripping. The song 'Echoes' is in the collection (from the LP Meddle), one of band's early experiments using an entire album side and leaving behind the conventional structure of a 'song'. (If I recall, the first time they did this was on a truly magnificent earlier work called Atom Heart Mother). This soon became the band's main style, which they skipped for one album Obscured by Clouds (absolutely amazing) and brought back their next (which everyone knows), Dark Side of the Moon (sales statistics rivaled only by The Bible). To those who have not been initiated into early Floyd, you will be glad you took the trip; they are one of the great rock-blues bands, appearing the same year as The Doors. However, given that Pink Floyd's first album release was in the mid-summer of 1967 (literally, at Midsummer holiday on Aug. 5), any Deadhead will remind you that they are really riding the tide of the San Francisco acid rock movement that The Dead had begun around 1964. The Dead were equally influenced by early American music, such as bluegrass and related genres; Floyd is more solidly rock-blues, if we are splitting hairs. So anyway, I Googled the lyrics to Echoes, and read them for the first time and, well, here you go. Something stirs and something tries, and starts to climb toward the light. Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air  And deep beneath the rolling waves  In labyrinths of coral caves  The echo of a distant tide  Comes willowing across the sand  And everything is green and submarine  And no one showed us to the land  And no one knows the wheres or whys  But something stirs and something tries  And starts to climb toward the light  Strangers passing in the street  By chance two separate glances meet  And I am you and what I see is me  And do I take you by the hand  And lead you through the land  And help me understand the best I can  And no one calls us to move on  And no one forces down our eyes  And no one speaks and no one tries  And no one flies around the sun  Cloudless everyday you fall upon my waking eyes  Inviting and inciting me to rise  And through the window in the wall  Comes streaming in on sunlight wings  A million bright ambassadors of morning  And no one sings me lullabies  And no one makes me close ------ Here is a master index of the band's work. http://www.pinkfloyd-co.net/disco/disc_idx.html