One of my favorite PF albums is Wish You Were Here, especially “Have a cigar.” Too much fun.

The other choice was country, and I was terrified he would put in Rhinestone Cowboy.

If you haven’t listened to The Final Cut much, give it a try. It has the same meat as The Wall but said better.

Please, Lex, tell me that’s not all you think The Wall is. There’s so much more than that. It puts much of the British experience during and after WWII to music. It’s social criticism. It’s satire. It follows a man’s descent into madness and illustrates how celebrity could be perverted into creating fascism.

As genius as it is, however, it’s not my favorite PF album. It takes too much out of me emotionally.

Listening to Roger Waters bitch about how terrible it is to be a rock star just makes me want to start kicking puppies.

They excelled, though, when they ventured far afield — to foreign affairs, to be exact. The Final Cut, about the British invasion of the Falkland Islands, is easily my favorite album of theirs. (Though Piper at the. . . is a close second.)

This at the end of the third full set sets the bar pretty god-damned high. (http://www.last.fm/music/Clutch/_/A+Shogun+Named+Marcus-live+In+Flint?autostart)

I voted for Floyd because the dentist would drug me up for root canals and put The Wall thru the headphones

Quite a tribute: Music to endure root canals by.

Give me The Nile Song, Green is the Colour, Free Four, Wots…Uh The Deal and that sort of Floyd and i think they compete with The Who.

The memories of a man in his old age
Are the deeds of a man in his prime.
You shuffle in gloom of the sickroom
And talk to yourself as you die.

Life is a short, warm moment
And death is a long cold rest.
You get your chance to try in the twinkling of an eye:
Eighty years, with luck, or even less.

I voted for Floyd for a reason, though. Both are massively important as bands in their own right and both are massively important as influencers. Both were, to come back around to Darrell’s main criterion, “game-changers.” But influence ebbs and flows. A band may lie relatively unnoticed for years and then, all of a sudden, along comes a new wave of young artists who appear to have listened to nothing else but that one band (right now that band seems to be Joy Division).

The world is currently full of great bands influenced by both The Who and PF. But, for my money, the “noise rock” side of the street is more vital right now. The Who hasn’t stopped mattering, and hopefully they never will, but Floyd has mattered more and more and more as the years have passed. Their influence is still growing and cresting in ways that I think surpass any of our “classic rock” ancestor bands – and that includes The Beatles. Floyd is more important today than they may ever have been, but I’m not sure The Who or Les Fabs are more important today than they were in 1975. And The Stones, well, they seem to have gone in the other direction since, oh, say, SOME GIRLS. Or earlier, even.

I see two incredible, important bands without a lot to pick between. The differentiator, in my view, is that still-growing influence on the more vital contemporary artists. But maybe we run this contest again in ten years and that’s all changed – hard to know….

I actually agree with everything you said, and as much as I hate voting against one of my favorite bands I had to based on influence good or bad.

Interesting comment, Darrell – and I won’t argue with it. I voted for The Who, I think, for much the same reason. I think Pink Floyd’s influence has not been good for rock – too much single chord droning and spacy, echo laden 3-4 chord melodrama with lyrics full of self-absorbed angst that I find alternately cringe inducing and annoying….If more players had tried to emulate The Who (more difficult though that is), rock might be a lot richer for it.

fikshun is a player, and I know you are, too – and so am I. What I’d like to hear is WHY you all think PF has been so much more influential than The Who. I have my pet hypotheses, but I’d like to hear from you guys since you’re more sanguine about PF than I….

http://www.netflix.com/StrangerLists?prid=28812526&showList=289501&lnkce=mdp-stranger-list

lol I voted for Floyd because the dentist would drug me up for root canals and put The Wall thru the headphones worked for me