The Dark Side of the Moon
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The Dark Side of the Moon (titled in the 1993 CD release as Dark Side of the Moon, and often abbreviated as DSotM) is an album by the British progressive rock band Pink Floyd, released in 1973. It is notable for its the use of Musique concrète and philosophical lyrics, something that would eventually become a trademark of Pink Floyd's music. The album was a landmark in rock music, as it featured radio-friendly songs such as "Money", "Time", "Us and Them", and "Brain Damage/Eclipse". Some music critics use the album as a point of reference in determining between "classic" blues rock and the then-new genre of electronic music.[1] However, the work's softer touches of lyrical and musical nuance make The Dark Side of the Moon stand apart from its peers.
The Dark Side of the Moon explores the nature of the human experience. For example, "Time" deals with aging and the overwhelmingly fast approach of death. "Money" deals with materialism with tongue-in-cheek lyrics and wealth-related sound effects. "Us and Them" deals with conflict, ethnocentrism, and the belief that a person's self is "always in the right."[2]
The Dark Side of the Moon is widely hailed by many critics and fans as Pink Floyd's magnum opus, and is generally considered their definitive album.[3] In 1990, Australian radio listeners voted The Dark Side of the Moon the best album to make love to,[4] and in 2003, Rolling Stone heralded The Dark Side of the Moon as the 43rd greatest album of all time.[5]
The Dark Side of the Moon has spent 741 weeks on the USA-based Billboard 200 album chart, the longest duration in history.[6] It is also the fifth highest selling album globally of all time, selling more than forty million units.[7]
Recording
Recorded by the band and engineer Alan Parsons at Abbey Road Studios between June 1972 and January 1973, the album sessions made use of the most advanced techniques available for recording instruments and sound effects in rock music at that time. Along with the conventional rock band instrumentation, Pink Floyd added prominent synthesisers to their sound as well as some unconventional noises: an assistant engineer running around the studio's echo chamber (during "On the Run"), myriad antique clocks chiming simultaneously (as the intro to "Time"), and a specially-treated bass drum made to sound like a human heartbeat. The heartbeat is most audible as the intro and the outro to the album, but it can also be heard underneath most of the album — the song "Time" and "On the Run" has the low thudding underneath the rest. Roger Waters both wrote all of the lyrics in the album and created the early demo tracks in a small garden shed-turned-recording studio at his home. It was in there he also created the intro to "Money" by experimenting with dropping a range of monetary objects.
Another novelty found on The Dark Side of the Moon is the metronomic sequence of sound effects played during "Speak to Me" and "Money." This was achieved by labouriously splicing together recordings of ringing cash registers, clinking coins, tearing paper, and buzzing counting machines onto a two-track tape loop (later adapted to four tracks in order to create a unique "walk around the room" effect in quadrophonic presentations of the album). Due to the sonic experimentation on the album, many songs on The Dark Side of the Moon (particularly "On the Run") required every member of the band to operate the faders simultaneously in order to mix down the intricately assembled multitrack recording.
Pink Floyd also perfected the use of other studio techniques such as the doubletracking of vocals and guitars (allowing David Gilmour to harmonise flawlessly with himself), flanging effects, odd trickery with reverb and the panning of sounds between channels. To this day, audiophiles use The Dark Side of the Moon as a reference standard to test the fidelity of audio equipment despite the fact that it was originally mixed from third-generation tape with Dolby noise reduction.[8]
All four members of Pink Floyd, which included guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, bassist and lyricist Roger Waters, and keyboardist Richard Wright, had some form of participation in the writing and production of the album, which is a rarity among later Pink Floyd albums. However, it is the first of five consecutive Pink Floyd albums with lyrics completely credited to Roger Waters.
On most CD pressings, a barely-audible orchestral version of The Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" is audible after "Eclipse", playing very faintly over the heartbeats that close the album. It is unknown why this was included, but it may have been the consequence of a mastering error. The bootleg recording A Tree Full of Secrets includes an amplified, re-processed version of this oddity, which allows it to be heard clearly. This is not found on the original vinyls.
Although the title The Dark Side of the Moon was the planned title of the album, upon the discovery that the band Medicine Head was to release an album of the same name in 1972, the year prior to The Dark Side of the Moon's release, the band changed the album's title to "Eclipse: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics". However, the Medicine Head album flopped, so Pink Floyd was able to revert to the original title without trouble.
Voices
The vocals for "The Great Gig in the Sky", which are intended to make the listener think of death, were done by Clare Torry. However, in 2004 she sued EMI and Pink Floyd for songwriting royalties, claiming that she co-wrote "The Great Gig in the Sky" with keyboardist Richard Wright. She was originally paid £30 for Sunday studio work. The High Court concluded that Torry was correct but the terms of the lawsuit have yet to be decided.[9] On Pink Floyd's 2006 live DVD P*U*L*S*E, Torry is credited with the vocal composition for "The Great Gig in the Sky" segment.
Snippets of dialogue between and over the top of the songs are also featured on the recording. Roger Waters devised a method of interviewing people, whereby questions were printed on flashcards in sequential order and the subject's responses were recorded uninterrupted. The questions related to central themes of the album such as madness, violence, and death. Participants were commandeered from around Abbey Road, placed in the darkened studio in front of a microphone, and told to answer the questions in the order which they were presented. This provoked some surprising responses to subsequent questions. For example, the question "When was the last time you were violent?" was immediately followed by "Were you in the right?"[10]
Recordings of road manager Roger "The Hat" Manifold were the only ones obtained through a conventional sit-down interview because the band members could not find him at the time and his responses (including "give 'em a quick, short, sharp shock..." and "live for today, gone tomorrow, that's me...") had to be taped later when the flashcards had been lost. Another roadie, Chris Adamson, was on tour with Pink Floyd at the time and recorded his explicit diatribe that opens the album ("I've been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, over the edge for yonks...").
Pink Floyd's executive road manager Peter Watts (father of actress Naomi Watts) contributed the repeated laughter during "Brain Damage" and "Speak to Me." The monologue about "geezers" who were "cruisin' for a bruisin'" and the often-misheard "I never said I was frightened of dying" (during the middle of "The Great Gig in the Sky") came from Peter's wife, Myfanwy Watts.
The responses "And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do I don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying, there's no reason for it you've got to go some time" (during "The Great Gig in the Sky") and closing words "there is no dark side of the Moon really... as a matter of fact it's all dark" (over the "Eclipse" heartbeats) came from the Abbey Road Studios' Irish doorman at the time, Gerry Driscoll. Paul and Linda McCartney were also interviewed, but their answers were considered too cautious for inclusion. McCartney's bandmate Henry McCullough contributed the famous line "I don't know, I was really drunk at the time." (Apparently in answer to the question "Why does anyone do anything?", which immediately preceded it.)
Alan Parsons engineered the album while on staff at Abbey Road. He once said in an interview that he swapped shifts with colleagues in order to work on the whole project.[11]
LP packaging
The album was originally released in a gatefold LP sleeve bearing George Hardie's iconic refracting prism on the cover. Inside were two posters, one bearing pictures of the band in concert with the words PINK FLOYD broken up and scattered about, and the other being a slightly psychedelic image of the Great Pyramids of Giza taken on infrared film. Also included was a sheet of stickers of the pyramids. In 1991, the refracting prism album cover was #35 on Rolling Stone's 100 greatest album covers of all time list.[12] In 2003, VH1 named Dark Side's cover the 4th Greatest Album Cover of All Time on their 50 Greatest Album Covers of All Time special. Insert non-formatted text here
Concept
The Dark Side of the Moon deals conceptually with the pressures of modern life that can drive normal human beings to insanity: materialism, the increased pace of life and travel, the encroachment of old age and death, and the inhumanities of society and armed conflict. These themes are not just delivered by words but are suggested with the sounds of the album. For example, the sound of an airplane crash in the track "On the Run" can represent a fear of flight (Wright suggested this could bring fear of death for some). "Time" discusses how quickly life can and will slip by those who are unaware of it and uses actual alarm bells to wake the listener at the beginning of the track. "The Great Gig in the Sky," which had a working title of "The Mortality Sequence," comments on the nature of death as a sad state of being, evidenced by the sounds of the screaming woman throughout this generally instrumental track. The lyrics and sound effects of "Money" flippantly endorse greed for ironic effect, and states that it is "the root of all evil today." "Us and Them" deals with interpersonal conflict, the insanity of warfare and xenophobia. The meaning of "Any Colour You Like" is not as clear as the other songs, but it is thought to represent the fear of taking risks when making choices — the song title came from an answer frequently given by a studio technician to questions put to him: "You can have it any colour you like," which was a reference to Henry Ford's (apocryphal) description of the Model T: "You can have it any color you like, as long as it's black." "Brain Damage" reaches out to the outsiders ("lunatics") who may be the only people that recognise society's faults. It also is about their former member Syd Barrett, who was forced to leave the band due to mental illness. Finally, "Eclipse" describes the true essence of a person through the impact they have left on others.
Precursors to the The Dark Side of the Moon concept can be found in many of Pink Floyd's earlier works. The band had previously performed a conceptual piece, The Man and the Journey, based on the everyday life of a man during their 1969 European tour. Roger Waters' lyrical obsession with insanity was in part precipitated by the departure of Syd Barrett (a founding member of Pink Floyd) following his mental collapse. Perhaps most important to the gestation of The Dark Side of the Moon is the song "Echoes" from "Meddle," which also deals with interpersonal relationships using progressive ambient music. However, the decision to tackle individual parts of life in an album-length concept work is said to have been conceived during a band meeting in Nick Mason's kitchen circa late 1971.
Reception
The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the best-selling albums of all time worldwide, and the 20th-best-selling album in the United States. Though it held the №1 spot in America for only one week, it spent a total of 741 consecutive weeks, approximately fourteen years, on that list until April 23, 1988 only to be removed by a rule change. To this day, it occupies a prominent spot on Billboard's Pop Catalog Chart, reaching №1 when the 2003 hybrid CD/SACD edition was released and sold 800,000 copies in the U.S. alone. On the week of May 5 2006, The Dark Side of the Moon achieved a combined total of 1,500 weeks on the Billboard 200 and Pop Catalog charts.
Sales of the album worldwide total over forty million as of 2004, with an average of 8,000 copies sold per week and a total of 400,000 in the year of 2002 — making it the 200th best-selling album of that year nearly three decades after its initial release. It is estimated that one in every fourteen people in the U.S. under the age of fifty owns or owned a copy of this album.[13] According to an August 2 2006 Wall Street Journal article, although the album was released in 1973, it has sold 7.7 million copies since 1991 in the U.S. alone and continues to log 9,600 sales per week domestically.[14]
The LP was released before platinum awards were introduced by the RIAA on January 1 1976, and it initially only received a gold disc. However, after the introduction of the album on CD, The Dark Side of the Moon would eventually be certified platinum in 1990. On April 6, 1998, the RIAA certified the album at 15x platinum, denoting sales of fifteen million in the United States alone - making it their second biggest-selling album there. "Time", "Money" and "Us and Them" remain radio call-in request favourites, with "Money" having sold well as a single in its own right.
In 1979 The Dark Side of the Moon was released as a remastered LP by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MFSL). It has since been re-released several times on CD, as a 1992 Capitol/EMI remaster. MFSL remastered and re-released the album again in CD form, and the album was again re-released later as a remastered CD as part of the 1992 box set "Shine On." The 1992 remaster was then re-released by itself as a 20th Anniversary box set edition with postcards.
The Dark Side of the Moon was re-released as a 30th anniversary hybrid Super Audio CD with a 5.1 channel DSD surround sound version remixed from the original 16-track studio tapes. Some surprise was expressed when longtime producer James Guthrie was called in to mix the new surround mix rather than the original LP engineer, Alan Parsons who had already produced a definitive Quadraphonic mix shortly after the original album was released. [5] This 30th anniversary edition won four Surround Music Awards in 2003. The Dark Side of the Moon was also re-released in 2003 on 180-gram virgin vinyl and included reprints of the original posters and stickers that came with the original vinyl release, along with a new 30th anniversary poster.
Some of the profits from The Dark Side of the Moon were invested in the making of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The members of Pink Floyd were reportedly huge Monty Python fans, to the point of interrupting recording sessions to watch the Flying Circus.[15]
Dark Side of the Rainbow
When the album is played simultaneously with the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, numerous images from the film appear to synchronise with the music and lyrics. All band members (save one) have firmly stated that the phenomenon is a coincidence. This effect has often been called Dark Side of the Rainbow.
Track listing
| Track title | Credited to | Vocals | Track times for individual releases | Vorbis sample
| |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Original release 1973 LP | Original CD and 1994 remaster | Shine On box set and 1993 rerelease | 2003 SACD | ||||
| "Speak to Me" | instrumental | 1:30 | 1:00 | 1:13 | 1:08 | ||
| "Breathe" (or "Breathe in the Air")1 |
|
2:43 | 2:59 | 2:46 | 2:48 | ||
| "On the Run" |
|
instrumental | 3:30 | 3:35 | 3:34 | 3:31 | 112K |
| "Time" (containing "Breathe (Reprise)") |
|
|
6:53 | 7:04 | 7:04 | 7:06 | 271K |
| "The Great Gig in the Sky" | 4:15 | 4:48 | 4:44 | 4:47 | |||
| "Money" |
|
|
6:30 | 6:24 | 6:32 | 6:23 | |
| "Us and Them" |
|
|
7:34 | 7:49 | 7:40 | 7:48 | |
| "Any Colour You Like" |
|
instrumental | 3:24 | 3:26 | 3:25 | 3:25 | |
| "Brain Damage" |
|
|
3:50 | 3:50 | 3:50 | 3:50 | |
| "Eclipse" |
|
|
1:45 | 2:04 | 2:02 | 2:06 | 102K |
Notes:
1 Some releases merge "Speak to Me" and "Breathe"
2 Clare Torry was credited for vocal improvisation for "The Great Gig in the Sky" for the first time in the P*U*L*S*E DVD release, due to legal battle won by Torry against Pink Floyd.
Credits
- David Gilmour – vocals, guitar, VCS 3 synthesiser, keyboards
- Roger Waters – bass guitar, vocals, VCS 3 synthesiser, tape effects
- Richard Wright – keyboards, vocals, VCS 3 synthesiser, Hammond organ, Wurlitzer electric piano
- Nick Mason – drums, percussion, tape effects
- Pink Floyd – producers
Additional personnel
- Lesley Duncan – background vocals
- Doris Troy – background vocals
- Barry St. John – background vocals
- Liza Strike – background vocals
- Clare Torry – vocals (on "The Great Gig in the Sky")
- Dick Parry – saxophone
- Alan Parsons – engineer
- Peter James – assistant engineer
- Chris Thomas – mixing consultant
- James Guthrie – remastering supervisor on 20th anniversary edition, remastering on 30 anniversary editions, 5.1 mixing on 30th anniversary edition
- Doug Sax – remastering on 20th and 30th anniversary editions
- Hipgnosis – design, photography
- Storm Thorgerson – 20th and 30th anniversary edition designs
- George Hardie – illustrations, sleeve art
- Jill Furmanosky – photography
- David Sinclair – liner notes in CD re-release
- Drew Vogel – art and photography in CD re-release
Singles
In some countries, notably the UK, Pink Floyd did not release any singles between 1968's "Point Me at the Sky" and 1979's "Another Brick in the Wall (Part Two)". However, the following were released in the U.S. and many other countries:
- "Money"/"Any Colour You Like" – Harvest/Capitol 3609; released June, 1973
- "Time"/"Us and Them" – Harvest/Capitol 45373; released February 4 1974
The latter is sometimes considered a double A-side.
Charts
Albums
| Year | Chart | Position | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | Billboard's Pop Albums (North America) | 1 | Initial album release |
| 2003 | Billboard's Pop Catalog (North America) | 1 | 30th Anniversary Hybrid SACD Edition |
| 1973 | UK album chart | 2 |
Singles
| Year | Chart | Single | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | Billboard Pop Singles (North America) | "Money" | 13 |
| 1974 | Billboard Pop Singles (North America) | "Time" | 101 |
| 1974 | Billboard Pop Singles (North America) | "Us and Them" | 101 |
Notes
- ^ [1]
- ^ http://users.wpi.edu/~vamend/general.htm
- ^ Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. "The Dark Side of the Moon review". Allmusic. All Media Guide, LLC. Retrieved 2006-12-23.
- ^ http://www.abc.net.au/news/arts/articulate/200612/s1803065.htm
- ^ http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5938174/the_rs_500_greatest_albums_of_all_time
- ^ http://www.rockandrollreport.com/2007/05/29/cover-story-dark-side-of-the-moon-by-hipgnosis/
- ^ "Record Breakers and Trivia : Albums". Retrieved 2007-05-06.
- ^ The Dark Side of the Moon 30th Anniversary Special on YouTube
- ^ [2]
- ^ Henderson, Peter; Surcliffe, Phil; and Bungey, John (1998). "The First Men on the Moon Part 2" (html). REG. MOJO Magazine. Retrieved 2006-12-23.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Pink Floyd and Company. [3]
- ^ http://rateyourmusic.com/list/fedderedder/rolling_stones_100_greatest_album_covers
- ^ Schoenmakers, Remco. "Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon" (php). Counting Out Time. Dutch Progressive Rock Page. Retrieved 2006-12-23.
- ^ Gomes, Lee. "Many companies still cling to big hits to drive earnings". The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Retrieved 2006-12-23.
- ^ IMDB trivia for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. [4]
References
- The "Dark Side of the Moon": The Making of the "Pink Floyd" Masterpiece, John Harris, Fourth Estate, (2005) ISBN 0-00-719024-7 (United Kingdom); Da Capo Press, (2005) ISBN 0-306-81342-4 (United States); Jorge Zahar Press, (2006) ISBN 8571109605 (Brazil)
- "The Complete Guide to the Music of Pink Floyd", Andy Mabbett, Omnibus Press, (1995) ISBN 0-7119-4301-X
External links
- The official The Dark Side of the Moon webpage
- Musical analysis of The Dark Side of the Moon
- A full conceptual analysis of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon
- Recording and history of the album
- The Coverville podcast's all-cover track by track version of "The Dark Side of the Moon"
