"You have to learn 'Wish You Were Here' when you get your first guitar," my father said to me, his favorite track from the album of the same name. And after listening to it, I did.
Anecdotes aside, the slowed-down ballad track from the conceptual Wish You Were Here LP featured not just a 12-string acoustic juxtaposed with a riffing six, but a fully orchestrated band crooning to the departed Syd Barett and Waters' lonely feelings of isolation.
But a rare, alien track sat in the mix, buried beneath the weight of the band's great ambient playing (and recording devices). Stephane Grappelli, a violinist, was slighted and his performance didn't make the cut.
Nick Mason, Floyd's drummer, recounts, "It was something that I assumed had been lost forever. I thought we'd recorded over it. Actually what was fantastic was that it still exists."
And, thus, in an Immersion reissue of the 1975 album, the track gets its glory and takes the place of Gilmour's riffing guitar.
"I think that was the jewel in that particular crown," Mason tells Sonic Reality.
A happenstance collab because Grappelli was working in an adjacent studio, the Django Reinhardt and Quintette du Hot Club de France violinist having clout at the time of production.
Sadly, he never heard the reissue or saw the final installment.
A travesty indeed, make your own conclusion with the revisited track below.
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