Pink Floyd ~ Dark Side Of The Moon
The Darkside of the Moon
Pink Floyd In Concert
Initial idea for DSoTM had been discussed toward the end of 1971 at a band meeting that took place in Nick's kitchen. Thus the album was born...Roger began writing lyrics around the beginning of '72 while Dave and Rick concentrated on the music.
Jan. 1972 is the first time DSoTM is performed, at Brighton, as 'Eclipse'. Due to a technical problem the band never completed 'Money'.
The standard show at the time (Eclipse, pre-DSoTM days) consisted of two sets: the first featured earlier numbers such as 'Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun', 'Careful With That Axe Eugene', and 'Echoes'; the second consisted of what was to later be known as "The Dark Side of the Moon" (then without the 'Eclipse' finale which was yet to be written). 'One Of These Days' was reserved as a breathtaking encore.
The "Dark Side of the Moon" was recorded between June of 1972 and January of 1973, and was released in March of 1973. It spent 724 weeks on the Billboard top 200. It was on the Billboard charts for 591 consecutive weeks between 1976 and 1988. Yet, despite its longevity on the charts, it topped the Billboard charts at Number 1 for only one week.
March 1973 during 'Careful With That Axe Eugene', pyrotechnics damaged the PA system, showering the audience with debris. The 2nd set went off without incident.
The WW11 Spitfire prop, used on all Dark Side shows, was designed and built by Derek Maddings, who was responsible for similar models employed in James Bond movies.
The "Dark Side of the Moon" is one of the biggest selling albums of all time, although it has only been awarded 'Gold' status (meaning that it has sold 500,000 copies). The 'Platinum' designation for million sellers did not come about until 1976, and the awards were not given retroactively.
'Dark Side' has it's own CD pressing plant in Germany.
Rainbow Theater
Pink Floyd unveiled their new work, DSoTM, provisionally titled "Eclipse", by showcasing it in 4 shows in Feb. at the Rainbow Theatre in North London.
To obtain the interspersed spoken messages throughout DSoTM, Roger interviewed a range of people, among those questioned and tape recorded were the road manager of a rival band, Roger the Hat, Abbey Road doorman Jerry Driscoll, late PF roadie Pete Watts, and Paul and Linda McCartney...although the McCartney's voices were never used.
'Money' was the only hit single from the album.
Alan Parsons won a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album of 1973, for "Dark Side of the Moon".
The clocks at the beginning of 'Time' were originally recorded at an antique store by Alan Parsons.
Statistically, DSoTM should be playing somewhere on the planet every minute of every day.
The band Medicine Head had released an album titled "Dark Side of the Moon" in late 1971...so the planned title was changed to "Eclipse". When the Medicine Head album flopped, the original title was revived by Pink Floyd.
Pink Floyd's first commercial endorsement was for a french soft drink in 1972. Roger vowed never again to "sell out".
The original sleeve of "Dark Side", designed by Hipgnosis and drawn by George Hardie, was chosen to be used by the band, from among several other designs presented to them, and they did so in unison in about 3 seconds!
DSoTM was the *first* Pink Floyd album to have their lyrics printed on the sleeve (although recent reissues of earlier albums have had lyrics added retrospectively).
The sleeve includes 2 deliberate mistakes:
#1...no violet in the spectrum helped to amplify the design.
#2...rear sleeve showed the prism producing a converging spectrum, a physical impossibility but necessary to allow open-out sleeves to be arranged end-to-end forging a continuous design, useful for in-store displays.
Vinyl copies came with 2 free stickers and 2 posters, one a collection of live shots, the other a night view of the Pyramids of Giza. Both are different in American copies, while the Japanese edition came with a booklet.
'Money' is the most performed piece in the band's history. Dave has performed the track for over 800 concerts.
Rick originally composed 'Us and Them' as a simple piano piece for Zabriskie Point, with the working title 'The Violent Sequence'. Given just one pre-DSoTM live airing at a '70 gig, it was then 21 minutes long!
'Any Colour You Like' title was taken from a misquoted adverstisement for the 1st mass produced car, the Model T Ford...which offered buyers the choice of "any color you like, so long as it's black".
The lyric about "the lunatic on the grass" is taken from an un-recorded song Waters wrote during the 'Meddle' sessions in '71. The title was....The Dark Side of the Moon!
'On the Run' was a guitar and keyboard improvisation.
The 'Great Gig in the Sky' was widely known to fans at the time, as 'The Mortality Sequence'.
'Brain Damage' was written at the time of 'Meddle', but not used on the 'Meddle' album.
The Pink Floyd Ballet
In November of 1972 Pink Floyd played for the Roland Petit Ballet in Marseilles, France. The Pink Floyd Ballet was a ballet in four movements.
In late 1973 Steve O'Rourke, the band's manager, signed a deal with CBS, who, like EMI in the UK, were prepared to give them the artistic freedom they wanted and had the financial muscle to successfully market and promote them on a much larger scale.
By the end of the year, sales of DSoTM was still on the charts in the US and the UK, and by then over 700,000 copies had been bought in the UK alone.
The "Dark Side of the Moon" has, to date, sold over 40,000,000 copies worldwide, and sales continue to grow every year.
Quotes
Pink Floyd 1973
"I think every album was a step towards DSoTM in a sense. We were learning all the time, and our writing was getting better." Rick
"The album was intially about the pressures of real life-travel, money, madness-and then it broadened out a bit." Nick
"At the start we only had vague ideas about madness being a theme. We rehearsed a lot just putting down ideas and then in the next rehearsal we used them. It flowed really well. There was a strong thing in it that made it easier to do." Rick
"We thought we could do a whole thing about the pressures we personally feel that drive one over the top...the pressures of earning a lot of money; the time thing, time flying by very fast; organized power structures like the church or politics; violence, aggression." Roger
"It was not a deliberate attempt to make a commercial album. It just happened that way. We knew it had a lot more melody than previous Floyd albums and there was a concept that ran through it all. The music was easier to absorb." Rick
"It had to be quick, because we had a tour starting. It might have been only 6 weeks before we had to have something to perform. We went somewhere in W. Hampstead for a couple of weeks and we got a lot of pieces together." Roger
"Sometimes I look at our huge truck and tons and tons of equipment and I think 'Christ, all I'm doing is playing an organ'." Rick (comments made during the DSoTM tour)
"The drums used on the 'Time' track are roto-toms. I think we did some experiments with some other drums called "boo-bans", but the roto-toms actually gave the best effect." Nick
"I never sit down and try and think of ideas, ideas arrive, and I'll go...hmmmm, that's not a bad idea. Sometimes to write the last verse becomes an absolute nightmare." Roger
"We thought they were the best for us (CBS), largely because of their size. They're well organised. When we left Capitol they were badly organised. Also, we'll be the only act of our type on CBS. When you're competing against similar acts on the same label, someone is bound to be squeezed. We didn't want that." Rick
"That was the 1st Pink Floyd album that I had liked, that I thought was a total package. To me, that was the emergence of 4 years of Dave being with them, and having gotten their music a bit more rounded, a little less esoteric. And the lyrics were marvelous, real one-liners which really strike home." Clive Welham
"Dave made people enjoy it, and Roger made them think." Nick Griffiths
"In their own terms, Floyd strikingly succeed. They are dramatists supreme." Derek Jewell, The Sunday Times, reviewing PF's 4 day gig at Rainbow
"You have objectives, goals, desires and with DSoTM they were all achieved." Dave
"The amazing success of Dark Side put a lot of pressure on us." Rick
"It changed me in many ways because it brought a lot of money and one feels very secure." Rick
In 1988, when asked for insights about Dark Side's astounding longevity, Dave, Nick, Rick and Roger had this to say:
"It hit a chord, obviously. It still doesn't sound dated, it still sounds good when I listen to it. But I can't really say why it should achieve that longevity over some of the other great records which have been out. We always knew that it would sell more than we had sold of anything before, because it was better than anything we had done before-more complete and more focused. A better cover. Every detail was well attended to." Dave
"No idea at all, after we'd made it, actually sitting down listening to it for the first time in the studio, I thought 'This is going to be big. This is an excellent album'. Why it goes on and on selling, I don't know. It touched a nerve at the time. It seemed like everyone was waiting for this album, for someone to make it." Rick
"I don't think there is a clear reason for it. It's almost certainly a number of different things, which comprise the record itself and what's contained in it. Plus being the right record at the right time-and generating its own momentum, because it was in the charts for so long people start to think 'oh...that's the one that's been there awhile'." Nick
"It's very well balanced and well constructed, dynamically and musically, and I think the humanity of its approach is appealing." Roger
1. Dark Side has sold approximately 40 million copies worldwide.
2. The album hit number one on the US charts for one week in 1973. David Gilmour had had a bet with manager Steve O'Rourke that the album wouldn't crack the US top 10.
3. In the UK the album made it to the number two spot. When it was re-mastered and re-released for the 20th anniversary in 1993 with special packaging it made it to number 4.
4. In Belgium and France it was No. 1, No. 2 in Austria, No. 3 in Australia, and No. 4 in Holland; it was No. 5 in Spain, Finland and Germany but not at the same time, and made it to No. 8 in Brazil in August 1973.
5. The album is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for being on the charts longer than any other album in history, namely 591 consecutive weeks or 11.4 years in Billboard top 200! A total of approx 14 whole years (741 weeks) in and back in top 200, and a staggering 26 years in some Billboard chart or rather.
6. SoundScan, the chart tabulators in the US, recently listed the top 200 selling albums of the year 2002. Dark Side was again on that list. It sold roughly 417,000 copies in the US last year, making it the 200th top selling album. It is by far the oldest album on the list.
7. The original title for the album was Eclipse (A Piece for Assorted Lunatics). The band were upset to find out that the progressive folk rock act Medicine Head had released an album with the title of "Dark Side of the Moon" as recently as 1972 on John Peel's Dandelion label. Since the release was less than successful sales-wise, the band decided go ahead with their plans.
8. The music and lyrics for the entire album were written during a seven week period in which the band were preparing for a tour in which they desperately wanted to premier new material.
9. Cue Cards with generic questions were written up by Roger and given to roadies, anyone at Abbey Road, doormen, and members of Wings including Paul and Linda McCartney. Approximately 20 questions were asked along the lines of, "Are you afraid of dying?". "When was the last time you were violent and were you in the right?", and "What does the phrase 'The Dark Side of the Moon' mean to you?". The most spontaneous answers to these questions appeared on the album. Paul and Linda didn't make the cut but Wings' guitarist Henry McColluch did providing the "I don't know I was really drunk at the time" response to the question regarding violent behaviour used at the fade out on Money.
10. The "stoned" laughter used in the background of Speak to Me and Brain Damage is from Peter Watts, a road manager for the Floyd pictured on the back of the Ummagumma sleeve.
11. Studio time would be typically interrupted for one of two reasons, either soccer or Monty Python television broadcasts. In fact, Pink Floyd were such Python fans that they used some of the money they made from the initial success of the album to help fund Monty Python's The Holy Grail film.
12. The album was recorded at Abbey Road on then state of the art 16-track equipment. Roger created the tape loops necessary to achieve the rhythmic chiming of the sound effects for Money. Due to the technology of the time, this meant physically cutting and mending bits of tape together in precise measurements using a ruler and feeding these manually into a tape machine for duplication.
13. The slide guitar heard on Breathe was a pedal steel that David Gilmour purchased in a pawnshop in Seattle back in 1968.
14. Alan Parsons recommended Claire Torry for vocal duties on The Great Gig in the Sky. At the time Torry was an EMI staff songwriter who wanted to branch into vocals. Torry was paid double the standard session wage at the time for this particular session since it was on a Sunday. At the time, she was very happy with what she received. No one could foresee the impact and longevity the resulting album would have.
15. Australian radio listeners voted the album the best album to have sex to in 1990.
16. The album marked the first time that Roger Waters wrote all of the lyrics. He has stated that he made a conscious effort to employ words that were very straightforward and easy to understand.
17. The album was first performed live at the Dome in Brighton, England on the 20th of January 1972. Due to a tape malfunction, the concert only made it as far as 'Money' that evening, but the band continued to perform the suite at almost every show after that date right up until a performance at Knebworth on the 5th of July 1975.
18. Hipgnosis studio suggested the album be issued as a gatefold with inserts of two posters, one for fans (photos of the band) and one for art (photo of pyramids), and two stickers, day and night, which refer to the touring aspect in the lyrics . All this was to be housed in a card box. EMI agreed to everything except the box. Hipgnosis provided the outer cover design, the prism against black, which referred to the band's inventive use of lights on stage, the triangularity symbolising mad ambition, and the cool graphic in answer to a request from Richard Wright for something less pictorial and more iconic.
19. The design of the inner spread of the gatefold, featuring the spectrum heartbeat, echoing the audio heartbeat at the beginning of the album, was an idea from Roger Waters.
20. Us and Them was originally written by Richard Wright in 1969 as an instrumental piano solo intended for use in Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point film which the band had been commissioned to score. The piece, then known as The Violent Sequence, was to be used over slow-motion scenes of student / police riots at UCLA. It was rejected for the film and resurrected for Dark Side after Waters penned the lyrics. Tapes exist of the band performing it as The Violent Sequence early in 1970.
21. The Great Gig in The Sky was originally known as The Mortality Sequence. It featured a similar piano introduction but no female vocals. Instead, taped readings from the Book of Ephesians, a recital of The Lord's Prayer, and a narrative from Malcolm Muggeridge, a controversial host of a religious program on the BBC, were used.
22. A rough version of Brain Damage was written around the time of Meddle and was actually known as "The Dark Side of the Moon".
23. The inspiration for Breathe was from a song Roger Waters had written and recorded in 1970 as part of the soundtrack for a film about human biology called "The Body". The opening lyric is the same in both songs. The original song was a protest of man's destruction of nature for profit, a theme that has appeared on more than a few Waters' compositions.
24. Although the band made a point of not releasing any singles in Great Britain for ten years after 1969's Point Me at The Sky failed to make an impression, two singles from the album were issued in the States. An edited version of Money was issued in May of '73 backed with Any Colour You Like. This peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Top 40. An edited Us and Them backed with Time ("severely" edited with the rotatoms spliced unnaturally onto the end of the song in place of the Breathe reprise) was also issued in February of '74. Despite heavy FM airplay, the track wasn't AM radio friendly enough and the record only made it to 101 on the chart.
25. The album has been released in various audiophile pressings and limited collector's editions including coloured vinyl editions. Colour completists would need to find a German pressing on white vinyl from 1977, both blue and clear vinyl versions from France also pressed in the late 70's, an Australian pink vinyl version (of the quad mix!) from 1988, and another white one from Holland also from 1977. In addition, there are two official picture discs of the vinyl version still circulating the collector's markets, one from the US on Capitol, and one from the UK only briefly available as part of a box set "The First XI" that was released in 1979 (only 1000 were made available to the public).
26. EMI organized a launch of the album for the press at the London Planetarium. An interesting choice since at this time the band was trying hard to shed their image as a space-rock band. The quadraphonic mix, supervised by Alan Parsons, was to be used for this reception but instead the band learned that the record would be played back in stereo and through an inferior sound system. Only Richard Wright showed up. Life size cardboard cut-outs of the other band members were used in their absence.
27. Pink Floyd were excited to be able to develop new material on the road but were horrified to learn of a bootleg album that was released of a complete performance of the piece recorded in February of 1972 at the Rainbow Theatre. The bootleg was issued a mere six weeks after the concert, about a full year prior to an official release. Professionally packaged, the unit reportedly sold in excess of 100,000 copies, many thinking it was the real thing.
28. Throughout the 1990's rumours persisted that the album was intended to be played back while watching The Wizard of Oz. Many similarities were depicted between the music, lyrics, and the film. The band have denied that the classic film made an impression on them while recording the album, but if you want to judge for yourself be sure to start the CD at the third roar of the MGM lion at the start of the film!
29. The album was initially released on EMI's Harvest label, an operation set up in 1969 as an outlet for more progressive bands. The label forged on through the mid 1980's before it was abandoned leaving the Floyd on EMI Records in the UK and Capitol in the US.
30. The supporting tour featured an almost life size model spitfire airplane which "flew" across the top of the arena and crashed into flames on the stage during the climax of On the Run.
The Dark Side Of The Moon 1973
20th Anniversary Cover
30th Anniversary Cover
Pink Floyd ~ Time