CoronaVinyl Day 314 (P): Meddle by Pink Floyd

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Today's CoronaVinyl category is "P," and I chose my only Pink Floyd album on vinyl, their sixth studio album, Meddle, which was released on Halloween in 1971.

I've always had kind of a love-hate relationship with Pink Floyd.  Well, maybe not hate, but love-meh.  Some of their stuff is brilliant, but I find a lot of their stuff to be too drowsy or proggy.

Meddle is, predictably, pure prog.  Hell, the second side is one 23-minute song.  It was the band's 4th album after Syd Barrett was kicked out, but the band was still transitioning from their more psychedelic sounds at the beginning of their career to the prog rock that they would become known for.  Also, unlike later albums, where Roger Waters was the primary songwriter, all four band members contributed to songwriting on this album, as half of the album was written by all four members, with two more tracks written by both Waters and David Gilmour, and the other track written solely by Waters.

The album only went to #70 on the Billboard album chart, but it went to #3 on the album charts in their native UK, as well as #2 in the Netherlands and #7 in France.  

Of course, the band would go onto have massive success, particularly beginning with 1973's Dark Side of the Moon, which is the fourth-best-selling album of all-time worldwide (with 45 million sales) and has been on the Billboard 200 album chart a record 958 total weeks as of last month.  For those counting, that's a combined 18+ years that it's been one of the top 200 selling albums in the U.S.  As if those stats aren't crazy enough, it's estimated that one out of every 14 people under 50 in the U.S. owns or has owned a copy of Dark Side of the Moon.  The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

Favorite song from Side 1:  "One of These Days"
The first song on the album is the most rocking.  It has an uptempo bass line that drives it (played on two basses).  Then it gets a little weird in the middle, and then it returns to more of a psychedelic jam.

Favorite song from Side 2:  "Echoes"
I decided to go with this one because it's the only song on the side.