It isn’t contestable: Pink Floyd simply is one of the greatest rock bands in history. It’s all there, the folkloric legends, the banned record, the madness, the “this-band-isn’t-big-enough-for-the-two-of-us” explosions, vast album sales, hermetic avoidance of the media, mythical performances, and the music – soaring, epic, unique.
Did I mention flying pigs?
In its original manifestation, with Syd Barrett as psychedelic muse, Pink Floyd swiftly became a cult fixture in mid-’60s London’s tripping underground scene – with music pitched between quirky, odd-ball ditties and bizarre, searching instrumentals. Ironically, and perhaps necessarily, the band properly came into its own only after leaving behind the erratic, burning star that was Planet Syd.
Following their majestically strange debut Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd played around with itself over the course of Saucerful of Secrets, Ummagumma, and Atom Heart Mother. All were wildly divergent, if consistently experimental. With 1971’s Meddle – and specifically the album’s centerpiece, the 24-minute “Echoes,” the sound most associated with Pink Floyd came into being. By 1973’s magnificent Dark Side of the Moon, it was perfected.
My dad gave me my first copy. I was scruffy, shoulder deep into grunge at the time. Our band was starting up. He introduced Dark Side simply: “This, is music. It’ll grow on you.” I rolled my eyes when I saw the release date; I rolled my eyes at the silly triangle with silly rainbow beaming out. (I didn’t know a prism from a jail cell.) I think I listened to the first two minutes, frowned and popped Generation X back in.
My next attempt (“Hey cool, where’s that weird CD with the noises?”) was under the spell of marijuana, where the sound effects and stretches of silence became overwhelming – an audio labyrinth from which I had to escape, preferring to wander outside in the night-aquatic streets with omniscient crickets for company, following brightly metamorphing, swirling UFO’s emitted by street-lamps, cupped in my glowing hands and leading me … oops, I digress.
As my journey into music continued and evolved, my copy of Dark Side waited patiently, invisibly, in my expanding collection. One day, it knew, I would be ready. When I eventually returned to the LP, it expanded around my ears like a revelation, a slow epiphany.
My dad had been right, only it felt more like I’d grown into the album. And with Dark Side of the Moon, one gets the feeling that technology itself had finally grown into Pink Floyd. The medium for their expression was finally rich enough to properly represent them – the leap forward in production and recording techniques emblemized by the album was merely an arriving home for the band. (Their peers’ jaws must’ve dropped to the ground on first listen, and the album soon became a must-have for audiophiles and hi-fi salespersons of all persuasion.)
From the opening to closing heartbeat, Dark Side of the Moon sees the central themes and motifs of their earlier outings distilled: The sonic and conceptual sci-fi imagery, the samples and sound effects, the spatial evocation of questing sound all merged into signature – and raised to new, cohesive strata.
Ushering in the golden decade that would boast Animals, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, Dark Side of the Moon saw two new gravitational centers unveil: David Gilmour’s blues-meets-outer space, melancholy-meets-urgency guitar solos, and Roger Waters’ lyrical obsession with madness and estrangement – his take on the human experience situated in that vast, apathetic majesty of the cosmos.
The impact of the album is immeasurable, countless bands have cited it as a major, shaping influence. In a sense, Dark Side of the Moon also ushered in the ’70s, with its new focus on sound and sound quality. What is perhaps most phenomenal about it all is that this album, so unique and uncompromising in style and expanse, has become one of the biggest-selling of all time.
Its strange nebulae has outshined the popular glow of the mundane, while retaining its inherent mystery even decades on.
[First published in Muse magazine.]
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