On March 1, 1973, Pink fluid He threw The Dark Side of the Moon (The Dark Side of the Moon), his eighth album and one of progressive rock’s most famous conceptual workscreated by the band formed by Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright.
Spectacular for its sound and songs like Money AND Timethe album was an instant classicwith millions of dollars and sustained sales over the decades. The musicians of the group got rich.
More than 15 million copies sold in the US and over 45 million worldwidethe album spent 972 weeks on the Billboard 200 and Pop Catalog charts
Much had to do with this sonic alchemy the talent of the Abbey Road sound engineer, a 24-year-old Alan Parsonswhich he managed to obtain from the recording sessions carried out between May 1972 and January 1973. The technician would later launch a successful career as an artist with his own compositions.
A story that began with a suite
One day in 1971, the band embarked on a 12-day work in a rehearsal room at Decca Studios in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, West London. The object of the work was a suite that took shape under the title Eclipse.
“It started in a small rehearsal room in London,” Gilmour said of the album’s early days. “We had quite a few pieces of music, some of which were left over from previous works,” the guitarist admitted at the time. Thing confirmed by Waters, who speculated for the first time the role of lyricist:
“I think we had already started improvising some pieces at Broadhurst Gardens. After writing a couple of lyrics for songs, I suddenly thought: ‘I know what would be cool: to do an entire album about the different pressures that apply in modern life‘” he pointed.
The song’s lyrical themes include greed, aging, death, and mental illness.
The album slowly began to take shape. In 1972, rehearsals had moved to the Rolling Stones’ rehearsal room; a disused Victorian warehouse at 47 Bermondsey Street, South London. A big enough stage for a creative project that would ultimately eclipse Floyd’s previous output in both scale and ambition.
“We started with the idea of what the record would be: the stresses and strains in our lives“explained Mason. With that guiding idea, the musicians took on some musical ideas that had been left out meddleincluding music by Us and them and the beginning of breatheand there they were, looking for their new challenge.
The theme of each topic
The five tracks on each side of the vinyl reflect various states of human life.. The album begins and ends with heartbeats; explores the nature of human experience and, according to Waters, “empathy”.
speak to me AND breathe emphasize the mundane and futile elements of life along with the ever-present threat of madness and the importance of everyone living their own life.
runawaya synth-heavy instrumental, it evokes the stress and anxiety caused by modern transportationparticularly Wright’s fear of flying, leading the song’s plot to an airport.
Time delves into how the passage of time can control one’s life and offers a vehement cautionary tale to those who waste time clinging to the more mundane aspects of life. This song is followed by the theme of retreat into solitude and refuge in the song Breathe.
The first part of the album closes with The great concert in the sky, a metaphor about death, where the singer Clare Torry shines with a spectacular vocal solo.
It opens with the sound of a cash register and the ticking of coins, the first track of side B, Money, makes fun of greed and consumerism, with ironic lyrics and sound effects related to wealth. Famous is the anecdote of Alan Parsons who creates a tape by hand with the noise of the cash registers.
Us and them talks about ethnocentrism and conflict and the use of simple dichotomies to describe personal relationships. Any color you like it’s an instrumental that has a kind of psychedelic trip.
brain damage is about mental illness resulting from putting fame and success above one’s needs, and the album concludes with Eclipsewhich speaks of the concepts of otherness and unity, forcing the listener to recognize the common traits of all human beings.
The live premiere of the material
Naturally, at the same time the band continued to perform live, and on 20 January 1972 they had to play again in Brighton, at The Dome, a venue not new to them, as the start of a tour which included 16 shows. The thing is, excited about the idea of an upcoming concept album, the Floyds decided it was an excellent opportunity to release the new materialmore than a year before its official release at the Rainbow theater.
For both the public, who paid a pound to enter the ‘venue’, and the press, the proposal to present something completely new to their audience does not seem to have come as a great surprise. Indeed the Brighton Gazettewarned in advance: “It would be hard to remember a Floyd concert at the Dome that didn’t feature something totally new and unexpected…”
And he concluded: “They are the true representatives of the technological age, and for this alone they already deserve total success”. In keeping with the commentary, the quartet understood that their proto-work Eclipsealready renamed Dark Side Of The Moon – A piece for assorted fools, it required an ambitious and demanding staging.
Among the requirements that had been imposed was that of create a light show to accompany the performance and, due to the complicated nature of some of the songs, tape work, including recitation of Bible verses and prayers, was also required to complement the live instrumentation.
According to a review in New musical expressthe band was still arranging it and it would not be recorded until later in the year. Unfortunately, the concert was cut short by a power outage.“
“in those days we haven’t figured out how to separate the power between sound and lights sufficientlyFloyd’s former assistant Mick Kluczynski said.
“It was the first concert that a group did a luminaire powerful enough to make a difference. So we had this wonderful situation where the fans were actually inside the auditorium, and we had[engineers]Bill Kelsey and Dave Martin on either side of the stage yelling at each other and arguing in front of the crowd.”
According to reports, audiences were quickly “wowed upon” by the new material, which one reviewer thought was establishing a new jazz sound for the band. Pink Floyd performed Dark side… in the same order it would be on diskWhile runaway it was a drum and guitar jam called The Travel sectionand the title of The Great Concert in the Sky era The sequence of mortality.
The reconstruction of the events indicates that it was playing MoneyWhen a sustained noise and hissing began to come from the sound system, smothering everything Pink Floyd has touched. Perplexed, Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright all decided to leave the stage. “We stopped because there was nothing we could do,” Mason later explained.
Eventually, the band members returned to the stage, but they left what was left of the work intact for another opportunity. Instead, after Waters apologized, they continued the show with older material, including Atom mother heart, Someday AND echoes. For the encore: A bunch of secrets.
Revenge and starting point
The rematch would come the next day, in Portsmouth, and the second attempt was a success. A couple of weeks later, the group played the entire piece for the London press and the set continued for the tour undertaken by the quartet in 1972 which took them to continental Europe, Japan and North America.
The 1972-1973 “Dark Side of the Moon Tour” through Europe and the United States gave them the opportunity to improve the quality of the songs. In between gigs on the tour, rehearsals for the recording began in England on 20 January, although the band traveled to France in February to record music for La Vallee, a French film by director Barbet Schroeder. They then played in Japan and returned to France in March to complete work on the film.
They then performed in the USA, before returning to London to begin recording the album, from 24 May to 25 June 1972. This was followed by another series of concerts in Europe and the USA, as well as recording in October of the bonus material to be included in the 1974 version of the film Pink Floyd: Live in Pompeii. Pink Floyd only returned to the studio on January 9, 1973 to complete the recording of the album.
In addition to its sound, the plate is also recognized for the famous cover with a prism that refracts light, created by Storm Thorgerson of the graphic design collective Hipgnosis. The image today is as iconic as the songs, confirming that it is an integral, conceptual and unique work.
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Source: Clarin
