For Pink Floyd to wish Barrett were here is to wish that none of their good fortune had occurred, that all this great music would be erased-and perhaps their burden of guilt along with it. Had Barrett not lost it, in other words, we wouldn’t have Wish You Were Here (or Dark Side, or Animals, or The Wall, etc).

First, it was Barrett’s breakdown that prompted the hiring of Gilmour to come in as guitarist and vocalist, and allowed Roger Waters to emerge as one of the great songwriters of his time. Thematically, the album divides in two again, with two songs lamenting Barrett’s fate, and two songs concerning the dark side of the stardom they’d just achieved. One of those songs is divided into two tracks, creating a gap for the other three songs to fill, so that the album’s opening song is also its closer.

It’s easy to forget that Wish You Were Here, for all its turmoil and richness, consists of just four songs. Just glance at the landscape of cover versions: Dark Side has sprouted all manner of tributes and reinterpretations-some of which have taken on lives of their own, with anniversary reissues and the like-while Wish You Were Here remains practically virgin territory for other musicians to explore. In its wake, Floyd guitarist David Gilmour called Dark Side “a benevolent noose hanging behind us.” Many a Floyd aficionado loves Wish You Were Here more than its predecessor (even some Pink Floyd members count it as their best), but among the general populace nothing eclipses Dark Side. Wish You Were Here had the thankless task of following The Dark Side of the Moon, the success of which is hard to overstate. At the same time, “You” refers to anyone you ever loved and lost, which is part of why the album and its title track are so enduring. The “You” in the title refers to Syd Barrett, who led the band until his disintegration in the late ’60s. Those two themes-of tragic loss and outsized stardom, absence and success-are at the heart of their 1975 Wish You Were Here album. But that’s the main thrust of the Pink Floyd saga. Few bands have lost their star and their leader, the writer and singer of their songs, and only then rocketed to stratospheric levels of success.

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