I am not a big music guy. I also don’t care much for the sixties, or sixties psychedelia for that matter.

And yet, big hypocrite that I am, I love Pink Floyd. I’ve rationalized this in many ways:

1.      The band wasn’t into drugs. Or at least they weren’t after founding member Syd Barrett went psychotic partly as a consequence of his extended use of LSD. As a matter of fact, Floyd’s breakthrough albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall were all inspired by Syd’s descent into insanity. Read closely, their music from this period deals much more with themes of mental illness and maladjustment to the modern world than with the politics and lifestyle of cultural revolution. Which leads me to my second point…

2.      The band achieved fame and maturity during the seventies. This is not to discount the wonderful work they did prior to Dark Side (1973), but Floyd’s rise to iconic status was contemporary with what artist R. Crumb (himself a counterculture legend) called “the Burnout Decade.” This was when the party ended, the economy began to fall apart, crime rates exploded and materialism came back in vogue. The band’s signature brooding, spacey, isolated sound reflects this period of newfound pessimism and uncertainty in the wake of the upheavals of the sixties. Which leads me to…

3.      My third point. Pink Floyd has never made good party music, not even when it was new.  Among my fellow lovers of Floyd we have a gentlemen’s agreement that this music be reserved for more subdued company, for periods of quiet, private reflection and withdrawal from the world. With the exception of a couple of songs (think the stuff you always hear on the radio, Money and Another Brick in the Wall Part 2) their stuff can be a downer that no measure of substance abuse can lift one from (and it’s meant to be that way—that’s what makes it beautiful).

You need not agree with this, I’m only giving you insight into my own elegant thought process with regard to the matter.

With that, I give you this rare little gem, from a jam session during the BBC’s live coverage of the Apollo 11 mission, 40 years and three days ago today, as Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were en route to the Moon: