The Dark Side of the Moon

The Dark Side of the Moon (titled in the 1993 CD release as Dark Side of the Moon) is a concept album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released in 1973. 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", which incorporated ethereal, concrete sound techniques. 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. However, the work's softer touches of lyrical and musical nuance make Dark Side stand apart from its peers.

The Dark Side of the Moon explores the nature of the human experience with themes such as birth, time, greed, conflict, travel, mental illness, and death. The album is considered by many fans and critics to be the band's magnum opus and is generally hailed as the record that defined their sound.^[1]

All four members of Pink Floyd, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright, participated in the writing and production of the album, although it is the first Pink Floyd album with its lyrics completely credited to Roger Waters. Dark Side of the Moon has spent 741 weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart, the longest duration in history.

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. "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 and 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 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 recognize 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 Dark Side 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 Dark Side 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.

In a small garden shed-turned-recording studio at his home, Roger Waters both wrote all of the lyrics in the album and created the early demo tracks. It was in there he also created the intro to Money by experimenting with dropping a range of monetary objects.

Recording

Recorded 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 synthesizers 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.

Another novelty found on Dark Side is the metronomic sequence of sound effects played during "Speak to Me" and "Money." This was achieved by laboriously 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 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 harmonize 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.^[2]

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.

Voices

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?".^[3]

Recordings of road manager Roger "The Hat" Manifold were the only ones obtained through a conventional sit-down interview because the band members couldn't 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... 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."

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.^[4]

Reception

The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the best-selling albums of all time worldwide, and the 21st-best-selling album in the United States. Though it held the #1 spot in America for only one week, it spent a record total of 741 consecutive weeks (over 14 years) on that list until April 23, 1988. 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, Dark Side of the Moon achieved a combined total of 1500 weeks on the Billboard 200 and Pop Catalog charts.

Sales of the album worldwide total over 40 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 14 people in the U.S. under the age of 50 owns or owned a copy of this album.^[5] 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 9600 sales per week domestically.^[6]

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, Dark Side would eventually be certified platinum in 1990. As of January 2007, the album has gone 15x platinum. "Time", "Money" and "Us and Them" remain radio call-in request favorites, 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 rereleased several times on CD, as a 1992 Capitol/EMI remaster. MFSL remastered and rereleased the album again in CD form, and the album was again rereleased later as a remastered CD as part of the 1992 box set "Shine On." The 1992 remaster was then rereleased 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 SACD 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. 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.

Track listing

(*) The credits to Clare Torry for "The Great Gig in the Sky" were added for the first time in P.U.L.S.E. DVD release, due to legal battle won by Torry against Pink Floyd.

Miscellanea

• 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 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.

• 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.^[7]

• When the album is played simultaneously with the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, numerous images from the film appear to synchronize with the music and lyrics. Band members firmly state the phenomenon, dubbed "Dark Side of the Rainbow" by fans, is a coincidence.

• In 1990, Australian radio listeners voted Dark Side of the Moon the best album to make love to.

• From an astronomical point of view, there is no "dark" side of the moon, as the side of the moon opposite of earth does experience a day/night cycle. Both the rotation of the Moon and its revolution around Earth takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes. This synchronous rotation is caused by an unsymmetrical distribution of mass in the Moon, which has allowed Earth's gravity to keep one lunar hemisphere permanently turned toward Earth. However, the lunar sky is always black, because diffraction of light requires an atmosphere, and the moon has none.

For a list of covers of the album, please see Covers of Dark Side of the Moon

Credits

• David Gilmour — Vocals, Guitar, VCS 3 Synthesizer, Keyboards
• Roger Waters — Bass Guitar, Vocals, VCS 3 Synthesizer, Tape Effects
• Richard Wright — Keyboards, Vocals, VCS 3 Synthesizer, Hammond Organ, Wurlitzer Electric Piano.
• Nick Mason — Drums, Percussion, Tape Effects
• Pink Floyd — producers

with

• Lesley Duncan — Vocals (background)
• Doris Troy — Vocals (background)
• Barry St. John — Vocals (background)
• Liza Strike — Vocals (background)
• Clare Torry — Vocals (on "The Great Gig in the Sky")
• Dick Parry — Saxophone
• Alan Parsons — Engineer
• Peter James — Assistant Engineer
• Chris Thomas (record producer) — 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

Quotes

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

Album — Billboard (North America)

Album — Billboard (North America)

Album - UK album chart (UK)

Singles — Billboard (North America)

Notes

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

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