Chicago Tribune

Syd Barrett co-founded and named Pink Floyd, wrote most of its early songs, anticipated the psychedelic era of the “60s – and then all but disappeared from the British rock scene he helped transform, a victim of drug abuse and mental illness.

Barrett’s death at age 60, announced Tuesday, ended one of the saddest declines in rock annals. A Pink Floyd spokeswoman said Barrett died several days ago, but she did not disclose the cause. He had suffered from diabetes.

Though Barrett dropped out of the music world in 1972 and lived out his years at his mother’s home in Cambridge, England, his stature and allure never faded.

“Syd was the guiding light of the early band lineup and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire,” his former bandmates David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright said in a statement.

“His impact on my thinking was enormous,” David Bowie wrote on his Web site. “A major regret is that I never got to know him.”

Such was Barrett’s impact that he inspired his former bandmates even in his absence. He showed up unannounced at Floyd’s recording studio during the sessions for “Wish You Were Here” in 1975. Overweight and bald, he was not immediately recognized by his old friends. He proclaimed himself ready to help but grew impatient after a few hours and left. After he departed, Waters cried.

The moment resonated deeply with the band because the song that was being recorded when Barrett appeared, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” had been written with their departed leader very much in mind.

“I think one of the best, warmest experiences (for the band after Barrett left in the “60s) was making “Wish You Were Here,”‘ Gilmour said in a 1992 interview. “I remember coming up with this jangling guitar riff and it just set Roger off on this melancholic mood, which became “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.’ It was a tribute to absence, but to Syd in particular.”

Roger Keith Barrett was born Jan. 6, 1946, in Cambridge, and attended high school with Waters and Gilmour, where he was given the nickname “Syd.” Waters, Mason and Wright had been playing in an R&B band and asked Barrett to join in 1964. He dubbed the quartet the Pink Floyd Sound, after Georgia blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, whose music he had been playing in a folk duo with Gilmour.

Within weeks, he began shaping the new quartet’s sound, transforming it from a standard white-blues outfit into something far more distinctive. He borrowed the chord pattern from a song by the Los Angeles orchestral-pop band Love to create “Interstellar Overdrive,” and it became the centerpiece of Floyd’s hallucinatory live performances. The band’s sets at London’s UFO Club in 1966 anticipated the arrival of the psychedelic era with trance-inducing rhythms, long improvised passages and an eye-popping light show.

Barrett’s songs could sound both sinister and child-like. The 1967 single “Arnold Layne” was about a transvestite who stole women’s clothing off wash lines. Another Barrett single, “See Emily Play,” cracked the British Top 5 in ’67 and paved the way for Floyd’s landmark debut album, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”

Barrett wrote or co-wrote 10 of the album’s 11 songs, which served as a blueprint for the era’s different strands of experimental rock. “Astronomy Domine” literally counts in the space-rock era, with band manager Peter Jenner reading the names of the stars and galaxies through a megaphone. With bike bells and alarm clocks ringing, sound effects melded with Barrett’s whimsical imagery to create a sinister fairy-tale world populated by gnomes, unicorns and a Siamese cat named Lucifer Sam. Barrett’s deceptively gentle vocals contrasted with his distorted guitar playing, in which he used wah-wah pedals, echo boxes and slide to create mind-bending soundscapes.

Barrett began working on a follow-up album with the band, but his behavior grew increasingly erratic and he started missing shows. Mason’s 2005 book, “Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd,” says Barrett was taking up to four LSD trips a day. It also suggests that Barrett did not share the all-consuming ambition of his bandmates: “Maybe it was the rest of us who were causing the problem, by pursuing our desire to succeed, and forcing Syd to go along with our ambitions.”

The damaged singer presaged his own exit in the lyrics for one of his last Floyd songwriting credits, “Jugband Blues”: “I’m most obliged to you for making it clear that I’m not here.” Gilmour was drafted in February 1968 to bolster the guitar playing, and the Floyd was briefly a quintet until Barrett was finally let go for good in April 1968. Five years later, the band released its most popular album, “Dark Side of the Moon.”

Barrett’s creativity was far from spent, however, and he cobbled together enough songs for two solo albums, “The Madcap Laughs” and “Barrett,” both released in 1970. Gilmour even assisted as producer on some of the recordings. Though neither album made much of a dent commercially, they suggest a warmer, more bucolic version of Floyd’s epic psychedelia.

Another album, “Opel,” was released in 1989; it contains fragments and outtakes from the 1969-“70 recording sessions, and it’s a difficult listen. The effect is almost voyeuristic as the listener hears a once-brilliant mind unraveling.

Without that cracked genius, however, Pink Floyd might never have existed. His early inspiration, as much as the conceptual artistry of Waters and the musicality of Gilmour, was a key reason why Floyd became one of the most revered and unique bands in rock history.

Barrett never understood that he had been booted out of Floyd “because he always thought of them as his band,” his former manager Peter Jenner once said. “He just drifted back to the Floyd always.”

And, as “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” demonstrated, they to him.