There will be no reunion of the classic lineup of Pink Floyd. Keyboardist and founding member Rick Wright now plays in the great gig in the sky. He was 65.

In the band's overlooked era after the drugged-out departure of leader Syd Barrett and before the colossal success of The Dark Side of the Moon, Rick Wright was a force in a Pink Floyd struggling to find its identity. Aside from his sometime ethereal, sometime surreal keyboards, Wright performed lead vocals on the Beach Boys-esque "Summer of '68" from Atom Heart Mother and the mellow "Stay" from Obscured by Clouds. On the band's seminal album, The Dark Side of Moon, Wright penned the orgasmic "Great Gig in the Sky."

But by the mid-1970s Wright's musical contributions to Pink Floyd had largely dried up and his decision to take a vacation during the summer of '79 when Roger Waters was obsessed with finishing The Wall led to his firing. "Whatever bond Rick had enjoyed with Roger in the previous fifteen or so years was terminally broken," Mason writes in Inside Out, "and Rick's downfall was swift." Mason notes that Wright's acceptance of a deal that allowed him to continue as "a salaried performer" for The Wall shows proved fortuitous: "[H]e was the only one of us to make money from the live shows. The remaining three of us shared the losses."

After eight years away from Floyd, Wright rejoined the group on its two post-Roger Waters efforts. He even took lead vocals on "Wearing the Inside Out," whose title later lent itself to drummer Nick Mason's biography of the group. Three years ago, he reunited with Waters, Gilmour, and Mason for what turned out to be a farewell-my-friend rather than a hello-again concert for Live 8.

My favorite Rick Wright moment, nay, one of my favorite moments ever recorded, is the faint sound of a few notes of "See Emily Play"--a 1967 Pink Floyd pop hit written by Syd Barrett--in the last seconds of the group's 1975 "Wish You Were Here" album. It was a poignant touch for an album that paid homage to the group's fallen leader Syd Barrett, a casualty of the sixties drug culture whose body in 2006 finally caught up to his brain's death in the late 1960s.

In memory of Richard Wright, I will be bombarding my ears with that crashing organ of "Brain Damage/Eclipse," that spacy synthesizer of "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," the light-speed keyboards of "One of These Days," and other Rick Wright contributions that can never be killed by cancer.

Terrific piece! Thanks, Dan.