Recording studios are meant to be spaces for creativity, but with one wrong push of a button they can become tools of destruction.
David Gilmour discovered this the hard way when his second guitar solo on Pink Floyd’s “Dogs” was erased during the creation of the group's 1977 masterpiece, Animals.
Sandwiched between 1975's Wish You Were Here and 1979's The Wall, Animals was Floyd's 10th studio album and part of the progressive-rock group's career-defining run of success.
As the track after the album-opening snippet “Pigs on the WIng 1,” “Dogs” establishes the album's mood and theme over its 17-plus minutes. But construction on such a lengthy track happened over several sessions. In the course of it all, Gilmour's original second guitar solo was wiped by accident.
“We had the whole first half of the song,” Gilmour explains to Rick Beato in a new interview. “Then we had a middle breakdown, which became all that weird stuff, and that was filled with white two-inch leader tape.
“Eventually, the rest of the song was tagged on there while we were thinking about and working out what to do with it.”
Leader tape would typically be inserted between sections of recorded music, such as songs or takes, on a reel. Visually, it serves to alert the engineer that a recording has ended, and it's a safeguard against continuing to record or erase tracks past their end point and into the song that follows.
But apparently Gilmour's bandmates — bass guitarist Roger Waters and drummer Nick Mason — missed the cue
“There was something on the first half that we wanted to erase,” Gilmour explains. “Roger and Nick put it into 'erase,’ and then forgot that it was in 'erase,’ and went right through the leader tape by two minutes, and then took away my second guitar solo. Completely erased, gone forever. Done. ”
Although the solo was lost, the guitar part that was tracked beneath it avoided a similar fate, as Gilmour had it backed up.
“Luckily, I do take mixes home, and I'd taken a rough mix of that, so I had to go and re-create it from my rough mix,” he explains. However, he says he was unable to recapture the spontaneity of his original solo.
“You never quite feel 100 percent satisfied,” he says with a sigh. “Although every note has been learned and rehearsed and played, you think, Oh, there's something about the feel that had before that is gone forever.”
Gilmour had just become a father for the first time and was less hands-on with the record than he'd been with Floyd's previous efforts. That led to Snowy White being asked to provide a solo for "Pigs on the Wing" in his absence. White was in Floyd's camp to assist with live performance, but when he showed up at the studio to discuss his role in the band, the band put him to work.
“We went back into the control room, and Roger says, ‘While you’re here, why don’t you play a solo on this song I’ve just done called ‘Pigs on the Wing’?" White told Guitar Player in 2023. “I picked up a white Stratocaster [Gilmour's guitar bearing the serial number 0001 ] and it sounded all right. So the track played through once and I fiddled about, and then they did a take, and that was it.”
Unfortunately for White, his work was cut from the vinyl album release, although it did appear on the eight-track cartridge versions of Animals. Nearly 10 years later, another guitarist, Phil Manzanera, carved his name into Pink Floyd history after his demo became a cut on the band's final 13th album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Elsewhere in his interview with Rick Beato, Gilmour reflects on the first time he saw Jimi Hendrix play guitar in a room filled with music greats.
“I went out the next day, trying to find records by this character Jimi Hendrix,” he recalls. “But he didn’t exist.”
Gilmour released his latest solo album, Luck and Strange last year, referring to as the best thing he’s written since The Dark Side of the Moon. The guitarist has historically seen each solo album released after years of inactivity, but he’s intent on bucking that trend with its follow-up, and he's now issued a timeline for its release.
