Informed Speculation

Charlie Mars, a singer-songwriter from Tupelo, MS,  is enjoying a decent-sized hit currently with the charming, easy-on-the-ears pop of “Listen to the Darkside”.  Written to a young woman named Abigail who has apparently been hurt by a man unaware of her considerable charms, the song entreats her:

If you want to come over,

Come over and get high

We can listen to the Dark Side of the Moon…

For over 30 years now, people have indeed followed that advice: Dark Side Of The Moon, because of its incredibly layered, technically brilliant sound, is, of course, a great stoner’s album.

It is also rumored to be one of the great albums to make love to.

However, I know nothing about either of those allegations, having lived my life in a pristine state of serene, evenhanded contemplation of God’s creation.

The truth is this:  Dark Side of the Moon is one of the creative peaks of rock music, indeed, of popular music as a whole.  Those of you – the many, many of you – who own the album will mostly agree with that assessment.  After all, you have the evidence of your own ears.  What may surprise you is that despite their trippy reputation, and the well-chronicled, acid-fueled descent into schizophrenia that destroyed the normality of their initial frontman Syd Barrett, the remaining members of Pink Floyd were not heavily into drugs (they’ll admit to the occasional joint, but apparently even that was not consumed in abundance).  The story of Dark Side of the Moon is not that of a decadent descent into the depths of drugs, but rather of a confused band finally finding their second voice after their first one had gone, literally, mad.

The source of most of this information is The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece, by John Harris, a nifty, rather compact tome that puts the album into the context of the band’s career, avoids the heavy-breathing idolatry that comprises most writing about rock, and provides a lot of insights into the way the album came together, both on stage and in the studio (also essential is the 50-minute documentary Classic Albums: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon).

Following the mental collapse of Barrett, the band floundered through several albums of varying quality before new frontman Roger Waters essentially took the creative reins (though always supported by the excellent guitar work of David Gilmour).  Waters took some time honing his craft – some of his early work was laughably bad.  Eventually, however, he hit on a central theme that would guide the coming masterpiece:

“…the pressures and preoccupations that divert us from our potential for positive action…life is not a rehearsal…You make choices during your life, and those choices are influenced by political considerations and by money and by the dark side of all our natures.” – Roger Waters

In other words, echoing themes that he would further develop in the band’s second masterpiece, The Wall, Waters was trying to find a place for empathy and human dignity in the clutter that we call modern life.

To drive this theme home, and this is the crucial point, Water chose simple language, and the band, for the most part, eschewed the psychedelic trappings in favor of elegant, stately, and just plain beautiful arrangements – though all of this evolved over a period of many months, both during live performances and during several sessions at the famed Abbey Road studios.  Some of the most memorable touches were only added during mixing, such as Clare Torry’s unforgettable vocals on “The Great Gig in the Sky” and the spoken word interview responses sprinkled throughout (think ‘I certainly was in the right’).

The album itself opens with a one-minute montage previewing some of the musical themes that dissolves into the spacious “Breathe in the Air”.  Gilmour’s gorgeous double-tracked vocals lay down the first set of bookends for Water’s grand theme:

For long you live and high you fly

And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry

And all you touch and all you see

Is all your life will ever be…

Underpinning it all, as so often on the album, is Richard Wright’s breathtaking work on keyboards and Nick Mason’s drumming, Ringo-esque in its simplicity, and just as effective.

The band’s technical experimentation pays dividends with the instrumental “On the Run”, consisting of a eight-note figure fed into an early synthesizer (with the first ever sequencer), then sped up dramatically and subjected to a number of effects.  Inserted behind it all is a recording of an airline counter and the footsteps of a colleague at Abbey Road.  The whole thing ends in a tremendous crash.  To make sense of it all, it is useful to know that this track was originally known as “the travel piece” – for a band that spent so much time on the road, the artificial constraint of constant deadlines was very much a distraction from life’s potential.

All of this transitions nicely into the chiming bells that signal the onset of “Time”, followed by, courtesy of Gilmour and Mason, a passage reminiscent of nothing so much as an Ennio Morricone soundtrack to a spaghetti western.  The whole band then plunges in to one of the band’s most fondly cherished lyrics.  The four verses form not only the core of the album’s theme, but indeed, much of the thematic thrust of all of the band’s remaining albums, and thus must be quoted in their entirety:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

___________

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain

And you are young and life is long and there is time to kill today

And then one day you find tens years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

_________

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again

The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

________

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time

Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

Has any artist in any medium, including the great poets and novelists, ever captured the changing notion of time, through adolescence, middle age, old age, and even to the point of death, more succinctly or accurately?  Every person in every culture can immediately relate to those verses – it is this universality that explains the album’s continued, undiminished appeal.

After a brief reprise of “Breathe”, the album continues with the aforementioned “Great Gig in the Sky”, a unique vocal improvisation consisting mostly of moans that alternate between ecstasy and despair over an understated Richard Wright piano piece, followed by the overplayed single “Money”, a song that nevertheless retains its capacity to groove when the 7/8 time signature of the verses gives way to the 4/4 bluesy middle section.

Waters hits on another grand theme that would preoccupy him throughout his life in “Us and Them”, and that is war.  Waters’ own father was killed at Anzio in January, 1944, and of course England suffered greatly during the Second World War from the Blitz.  Waters again shows his lyrical brilliance by capturing the futile essence of war for the common solider in a mere eight lines:

Us, and them

And after all we’re only ordinary men

Me, and you

God only knows it’s not what we would choose to do

Forward he cried from the rear

and the front rank died

And the General sat, and the lines on the map

moved from side to side

The band’s original founding voice is remembered in spirit during “Brain Damage”, with Waters choosing to use his friend’s dementia as an exploration of the idea that we’re all pretty close to madness, particularly our political class:

The lunatic is in the hall

The lunatics are in my hall

The paper holds their folded faces to the floor

And every day the paper boy brings more

Waters then, in a passage that can only be interpreted as purely autobiographical, lets Barrett know that he’ll always be in the thoughts of his old mates:

And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear

You shout and no one seems to hear

And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon…

It all wraps up rather nicely with “Eclipse”, the bookend accompanying “Breathe”:

All that you touch

All that you see

All that you taste

All you feel

All that you love

All that you hate

All you distrust

All you save

All that you give

All that you deal

All that you buy,

beg, borrow, or steal

All you create

All you destroy

All that you do

All that you say

All that you eat

and everyone you meet

All that you slight

and everyone you fight

All that is now

All that is gone

All that’s to come

and everything under the sun is in tune

but the sun is eclipsed by the moon

It’s telling that Waters, in an album intended as a call to life, ends on such a pessimistic note.  Waters himself plays this off as a warning of what can happen if you don’t choose empathy and communication, but I suspect it’s more of a nod to fatalism; after all, under the best of circumstances, we’re all going to pass into the long eclipse of death.

When the album was unleashed on the public, the reaction was remarkable: not only did the record reach #1 in the United States, their first on this side of the Atlantic, but it stayed on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart for an unheard of 14 straight years : 724 weeks without interruption.  It reappeared 5 years later on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.  The album has sold over 30 million copies worldwide; the Harris book quotes a study that estimates that one in five British households owns a copy.

All of this is merely to say that the album has become a part of modern Western consciousness.  Even those who have never heard it have been influenced by it, because of its pervasiveness.  There are albums that have sold as many or more copies:  Thriller and Born in the USA come to mind.  Still, Dark Side has a continuing resonance these albums cannot match – because of the theme, because of the beauty of the music, and because of the directness of the lyrics.  No wonder Waters sees Dark Side as the end of Pink Floyd, despite the fact that the lineup would persist for another 11 years and four more albums: when a band has achieved everything in one shot – money, fame, and an enduring artistic statement – what else is there?…

Here’s a montage for Brain Damage/Eclipse I found on YouTube: