Perhaps another influence that Barrett had on Pink Floyd, and that many younger players are completely unaware of, is the fact that much of the band’s most popular later work was directly inspired by Syd’s ongoing battle with mental illness.

From the album “Wish You Were Here,” which is said to have been a tribute to their former bandmate (Shine On You Crazy Diamond is an obvious reference to Barrett,) to “The Wall,” which, well… the correlations on that one are obvious.

Anyways, definitely the passing of a great one.

But to do this would be to do a wonderful musician a wonderful disservice. To glibly ignore Syd is to ignore the experimental nature, the (perhaps unparalleled) attention to aural details that Pink Floyd embodies. To do this would be to ignore the profound contributions that Syd Barrett left in his own right in but a few brief years – in less than half a decade, Syd accrued a mythos that most rock groups spent decades building.

I can’t say that Syd Barrett was a favorite musician of mine (though Terrapin was the first thing I learned on the guitar, and I find both The Madcap Laughs and Piper At the Gates of Dawn fantastic), but I truly feel as if something meaningful was lost to me today. Something that I never really knew, something that I’ll never really know.