1973: Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon
This year, until the year 2000, every week a special album will be reviewed. By doing that we're counting out time ... until 2000.
The albums which will be reviewed are either milestones in the history of progressive rock, or good examples of the catalogue of a certain band. Of course, we cannot review every special album and we cannot satisfy everyone's taste with our choices, which will be revealed over the year.
Our goal with this list of albums, is to show the quality and the diversity of different groups and different styles. So you won't find 6 Pink Floyd-albums, or 5 Genesis-albums, even though these bands have recorded many classics.
On this list, (almost) every week a new year is reviewed. For some years we will use two weeks, but at the end of December we will have reviews of every year, including the "dark" eighties...
We hope you will have lots of fun in the coming weeks with this selection of special albums that had been selected by the DPRP-team, especially for you!
Time
Dark Side of the Moon is Pink Floyd's eighth album and is probably the most influential album of the most influential progressive rock band. Pink Floyd had their first album released in 1967, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, with Roger Waters on bass, Richard Wright on keyboards, Nick Mason on drums, and Roger "Syd" Barrett on lead guitar and vocals. Although Barrett was already replaced during the recording of the second album by David Gilmour, he left a huge impression on the rest of the band, something that they never got rid of until the mid eighties when Waters left and Pink Floyd refreshed itself.
In my opinion, one can roughly divide the history of Pink Floyd in three stages. The first period is from the start in 1967 until about '71 - '72, the psychedelic period, influenced by the musical inheritance of Barrett. This ended with Obscured By Clouds, a much underestimated movie-soundtrack.
Their second period is the period of Waters and massive albums, starting with Dark Side Of The Moon and ending with The Wall (not considering The Final Cut here).
The third period is the Gilmour period, with two studio albums, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason and The Division Bell, and two live albums. On the last live album, Pulse, the integral Dark Side Of The Moon is featured. This stresses the importance that DSOTM, as the album is often acronymed, has to the band.
A Piece For Assorted Lunatics
DSOTM was not written completely in 1972/1973. The "oldest" track on the album is Us And Them, originally titled The Violence Sequence, and written in 1969 by Wright for the openings-sequence of the movie Zabriskie Point. The director of the movie decided not to use this sequence...
In 1970 Roger Waters worked with Ron Geesin on the soundtrack of the documentary The Body. One of their tracks is called Breathe. It is not hard to imagine which track this would eventually become!
While recording their 1971 album Meddle, Waters writes a song about a "lunatic on the grass", called Dark Side Of The Moon. Although this song is not used on Meddle, it becomes the basis of their next studio album, together with the above mentioned tracks.
Waters proposed to link these songs with the general theme of "madness" and make that into their new album. The band loved the idea and thus DSOTM was born.
Time and Money were the first tracks especially written for the project. Having laid down the general theme, the rest of the album is written remarkably quickly, in 6 weeks time.
The first time that DSOTM is performed in 1972, it had the subtitle Piece For Assorted Lunatics. At that time, On The Run did not exist yet and instead a song called The Travel Sequence was performed. This almost 8 minutes long improvisation by Gilmour and Wright never appeared again.
Also, there was a track called The Religion Sequence with Saucerfull Of Secrets-like organ tunes that was featured instead of the not-yet-written Great Gig In The Sky. Since The Religion Sequences featured voices of priests and Pink Floyd did not want to offend people, they decided to rewrite and rename it to the The Mortality Sequence, and eventually TGGITS. Time was played much slower than on the final album.
Since the band was told that another band, Medicine Head, wanted to market an album with the same title, the suite was called Eclipse for a while. When it turned out that album was a flop, they changed the name back into DSOTM. With Alan Parsons as sound engineer, the album was recorded and sound effects were added. According to Gilmour "the role of Parsons in the whole process was not as big as he wants people to believe and we could have done the same job without him, but in general he is a fine chap."
The Dark Side Of The Moon
The final album consist of 10 songs (not counting Breathe (Reprise) as a separate song). Since I assume that everybody has at least once listened to this album, I will not describe the musical contents of the individual songs, but rather give some funny details and themes.
The album opens with Speak To Me, a collage of sound effects and themes of the rest of the album, thus providing DSOTM with an ouverture. It has evolved from the opening of Echoes on the Live At Pompeï movie. Although album credits give Mason as composer, Waters claims (and Gilmour confirms it) that he has conceived this piece. Speak To Me is what Alan Parsons used to say at the start of the recording sessions to adjust the recording volume, hence the title.
Breathe (In The Air), sung by Gilmour but written by Waters, deals with the frustration of chasing empty goals in live. As mentioned before, the song evolved from the Music From The Body album by Waters and Geesin.
On The Run had to be about paranoia. The band experimented with the EMS VCS#3, a brand-new synthesiser they just purchased until they had the repetitive sound they wanted. In fact, the whole track including bass etc. was done on this machine, hardly without any overdubs!
Time is about man's fixed habits and people waiting for their life to start. The track starts with a cacophony of clocks and bells, all recorded separately by Alan Parsons in an antique store near the recording studios. The pace of the song has increased dramatically during its final recording with respect to the early versions, with Gilmour singing the fast parts and Wright the slow parts. It is followed by Breathe (Reprise), put here due to the textual overlap of Breathe and Time.
The Great Gig In The Sky was originally intended to be about how religion can drive people to insanity (The Religion Sequence), but later changed into the fear of dying (The Mortality Sequence), later renamed to TGGITS. The decision to add the vocals came only after the recording of the main track. The session vocalist Clare Torry was told only the theme of the song and improvised on it. The result is known...
Money, about the pressure money can give in people's every day life, was almost finished when Waters brought it to the studio to let the others hear it. The band only added a middle part, and there it was. The most difficult parts were the sound effects of a cash register in 7/8, a masterpiece of Parsons and his tape-cutting-and-pasting abilities.
Us And Them was written by Waters using Wright's 1969 The Violence Sequence. The song deals with three contradictions: rich and poor, employers and work crew (illustrated by generals and dying soldiers), and "us" and "them" (the differences between individuals which lead to more general phenomena like racism). All the spoken sentences on the record are answers to (unheard) questions. In this case: "have you ever been violent?" and "were you right?".
Any Colour You Like, originally called Dave's Scat Section, is the only song on the album that goes back to Floyd's past of improvisation and is the only song not (co-)written by Waters. The title is due to a roady of the group who told them they could have it in "any colour you like" when asked to do something he didn't want to do. So in fact he told them they could let him do anything...
Brain Damage, originally called Dark Side Of The Moon is written by Waters when a feeling of nostalgia hits when picking material for the Relics album, and is originally about Barrett. For the album, the context is broadened to the person behind the facade that the outside world sees.
Originally the suite ended after Brain Damage, but the group realised it needed a stronger ending. Therefore, Waters wrote Eclipse, a song in the form of a summation using the image of the cold, dead moon eclipsing the warm, live giving sun, in this way summing up all the contrasts encountered on the album, bringing the album to its climax and ending. A true masterpiece had been created.
After The Eclipse
After the release of the album, Money was released as a single. The modest success of the single (#13 in USA), caused a dramatic change in the type of audience for the Floyd. Before Dark Side, people were quiet and listened to the music. Now, they scream for the hit-song and yell.
Eventually, Waters will be so fed up with that, that he's going to write a new album about his reactions, but that is a different story. Dark Side has been in the Billboard list for the total of 591 weeks and it is estimated that 1 in 4 British households owns a copy of the album, and 1 in 14 people in the USA. A total of over 35 million copies have been sold, stressing how deep the impact of the album has been and still is.