Shine On, Pink Floyd Experience in Concert

Shine On, Pink Floyd Experience: "We're Trying to Faithfully Recreate Their Music"
by Lyn Jensen

Pink Floyd's symphonic rock deserves a live experience, such as the one you’ll get at a Shine On concert. Since the eleven-member Orange County band pulled off an amazing and memorable performance of the entire Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon at the OC Pavilion in Santa Ana a couple of years ago, complete with Pink Floyd's original videos and saxophonist Scott Paige, who played with the legendary British rock group in the late eighties, they’ve kept busy providing fans with an unique flashback experience. They’ll return to the Pavilion June 25.

When Bill Lawrence and Aaron Broering performed some Pink Floyd music for a church service at The Crossing in Costa Mesa about five or six years ago, Shine On began. "I don't care for the title, tribute," says Lawrence, who plays drums and sings the Roger Waters vocals. "We title ourselves a Pink Floyd experience ... We're not trying to be them. We're trying to faithfully recreate their music."

As Lawrence now recalls, it went so well they got together "a pool" of several other musicians, most of whom attended the same church, and kept the project going. The budding band’s pianist, Robin Canada, formerly of Exude and NC-17, suggested the name Shine On, after a track on Wish You Were Here.

The November 2008 Pavilion show was Shine On's second live performance of a Pink Floyd album, having previously taken on Wish You Were Here, start to finish, in its entirety, at the Pavilion in early 2008. "I just felt it was time to do all of Dark Side of the Moon, being that it is one of the all-time greatest-selling LPs," Lawrence says. "[and] because Dark Side of the Moon is probably one of the first theme albums. It really is an album that's meant to be played from start to finish."

"It was really a vast open canvas to tonally paint across," adds Broering, who plays guitar and sings the David Gilmore vocals.

Lawrence gives a major share of the credit to Broering for being able to recreate Pink Floyd's music, with, "Aaron took the time to learn the guitar parts faithfully and not just the licks, but [he] has the ability to recreate the emotion and the intensity that David Gilmore performs live, and marry that with his ability to sing it as well as he does."

"Great wonderful borderline symphonic musical landscape," says Broering of Dark Side and its place in rock history. "There's not a lot of bands that got away with it and were successful at it, and will probably never be successful at it again, because of the state of the record industry at this point. The music industry will not allow freedom anymore for a band to ...make an album like Dark Side of the Moon."

Casual fans may know Dark Side of the Moon best by the hit, "Money," not the Beatles' "(Give Me) Money," but the song with the ching-ching beat and the "keep your hands off of my stack" hook, a staple of classic rock playlists. Broering notes its very unorthodox time signature, a combination of 7/4 and 4/4 time, an example of Pink Floyd's symphonic approach to rock.

Lawrence adds "Money" helped make Dark Side Pink Floyd's breakout hit, but not without irony, "they were thumbing their nose at the aristocracy ... So they had quite a conundrum, we were the very thing we were against, what do we do, do we give it all away? Or do we--yeah, I think we'll keep it."

As for what it's like to play Pink Floyd, "only a handful have the luxury of saying they've played that entire body of work," says Broering. "You...stop and gasp for air when you're done."

"It's all of my artistic dreams," Lawrence adds. "Probably the biggest challenge is keeping yourself focused and doing what you're supposed to do and not screwing up and listening to all of the different wonderful ear candy that's going on during the performance and then remembering I've got this cue coming up."

With Pink Floyd being one of the first rock bands to tour with a full media production, Shine On's technical crew attend rehearsals and rehearse cues along with the musicians. Lawrence says the actual Pink Floyd videos used on-stage took about three years to stockpile.

Of what's next for Shine On, Lawrence says, "I'm joyfully looking forward to cherry-picking our favorite songs, and concentrating on songs we do best." Shine On is looking for more shows, but with eleven musicians and a multi-media show, finding proper venues is a challenge. They're looking to get some bookings at Indian casinos, maybe Las Vegas. For keeping up with Shine On shows and other information, the band's Web site is flashbackexperience.com and they also have a MySpace.