Entering my teens in the wake of the punk rock explosion of 1976, I had little time for what my peers considered the boring meanderings of Pink Floyd and the other prog rock ilk of that era.

Thankfully, I grew out of the petty Balkanization of rock ‘n’ roll that went on to give us alt-rock college radio or “Classic Rock” stations that play the same dozen or so songs ad infinitum — e.g., “Freebird”, Led Zep’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll”; in the New York City area, anything by Billy Joel, in Los Angeles, anything by The Eagles, etc., etc. — and I went on to attend a couple of Pink Floyd laserium shows during the early-1980s.

OK, I may have been under the influence at the time, but in the darkness of the planetarium, Floyd sounded AMAZING, a truly incandescent experience. As I said, it might not have just been the music. Let’s face it, Pink Floyd were always the thinking man’s Grateful Dead; amazing soundscapes, dark lyrics rich in metaphor, feelings of alienation and disconnect. If the Dead offered a long, strange trip to filthy hippy ur-slackers, then Floyd were somewhat malevolent tour guides, offering up the more harrowing destinations on the road: the dark side of the Moon or the Wall.

Earlier this week, it was reported that the Johns Hopkins’ University School of Medicine completed a study involving the revered and — depending on your school of thought and /or political affiliation — the reviled natural hallucinogenic drug, psilocybin.

The 36 volunteers, the AP reported, described the mind-blowing experience “as one of the most meaningful or spiritually significant experiences of their lives. Some compared it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.”

Sweet!

Actually, maybe not. At least a third of the participants had really bad trips, a “downer” as they say in the hippy parlance of yore. However, the other two-thirds found the experience somewhat life-affirming, some even “said the experience had changed them in beneficial ways, such as making them more compassionate, loving, optimistic and patient. Family members and friends said they noticed a difference, too.”

Dude, righteous buzz!

Levity aside, it’s important to remember that the mind is as mysterious and multifaceted as the Universe or the Earth’s deepest oceans. Psychology and psychiatry have barely scratched the surface of how our minds work.

In a wistful twist, the study’s release coincided with the report of the death of Syd Barret, tragic troubadour of the nascent psychedelic rock scene of mid-1960s Britain and the founder of Pink Floyd.

Obviously talented, Barrett was what used to be considered “sensitive” — and not in that snickering frat boy sense of the word. By all accounts he was a handsome, musical lad with an open charm that endeared him to fans and rock critics alike. But as a child of his era — and of his profession, pop star — Barrett consumed a lot of psychedelic, hallucigenic drugs, specifically LSD.

Once upon a time, LSD, or acid, was a once-legal pharmaceutical used by some scientists to better understand such mental illnesses as schizophrenia. Acid causes euphoria, flights of almost tangible fancy, hallucinations, and on the downside, somewhat depressing and harrowing trips. By 1966, the drug had been criminalized as it was by then the party favor of choice for hippy kids and swingers of all stripes, including Barrett.

Barrett became an acid casualty. A man so consumed by the inward journey the drugs led him on that he soon became unable to function in his role as bandleader and songwriter for Pink Floyd. He’s not the only one, of course, but to a certain degree he is one of the more famous; mythologized by the indie-rock intellectuals and mainstream media.

Personally, I find Floyd’s first LP a little on the twee side with too many references to dwarves, pots of tea and English gardens. (FYI: An LP is a “Long Player”, a 12-inch black vinyl disk where the music was engraved into grooves on the platter’s surface. Difficult to download, but way too easy to scratch, especially if you were on acid.) I supposed a lot of people would consider it “pastoral”, but poncey would be my adjective of choice. (The second Floyd record Saucerful of Secrets is a little more interesting.)

Anyway, while revisionism would make it appear that Barrett’s musical contributions defined his life and changed rock, I think that this honor, sadly, goes to his personal meltdown and to his slow, painful decline into diabetes-related death at at 60 that spurred the remaining members of his band, specifically Roger Waters and David Gilmour, to later greatness.

As the band edged into the 1970s, Barrett’s spirit helped define some of their greatest moments: “Brain Damage” from Dark Side of the Moon, all of Wish You Were Here and of course the protagonist of The Wall, a claustrophobic amalgam of Waters and Barrett.

Commenting on the recent psilocybin study, Charles Schuster, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at Wayne State University and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse told the AP that “we’ve lost 40 years of (potential) research experience with this whole class of compounds,” due to the criminlization of such hallucinegenic drugs.

Shuster is correct of course, sometimes laws aimed at protecting the general welfare of the population can be too draconian, and exemptions should be made to allow for scientific study. But while I would throw my support behind a sensible policy that allows for the study of drugs like psylocybin, I can’t help but think that while Academia lost 40 years of research, during that time, Syd Barrett lost 40 years of his life.