#1 LP of All Time

Dark Side of the Moon is the #1 Album of all time and was recently voted #1 by the listeners of KLOS 95.5 over the Labor Day weekend in Los Angeles.

Pink Floyd will stand the test of time for their very unique style of music that appeals to people of all ages.

PINK FLOYD

pink floyd

The 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 devide the history of Pink Floyd in three stages. The first period is from the start in '67 until about '71-'72, the psychedelic period, influenenced 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 ). The third period is the Gilmour period, with 2 studio albums, A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell and 2 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.

The Dark Side of the Moon

dark side album cover

The album opens with Speak to Me, a collage of soundeffects and themes of the rest of the album, thus providing DSOTM with an Overture. 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 frustation of chasing empty goals in live. On the Run had to be about paranoia. The band experimented with the EMS VCS#3, a brand new synthesyser 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 tracks opens with a kakaphonia of clocks and bells, all recorded seperately 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 soundeffects of a cashregister 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 workcrew (illustrated by generals and dying soldiers) and "us" and "them" (the differences between individuals which lead to more general phenoma like racism). All the spoken sentences on the record are anwsers 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 in the album, bringing the album to its climax and ending. A true masterpiece had been created.