![]() ![]() ![]() It even handed the group its first American hit single, “Money,” not to mention a whole lot of actual money. Only a few earthlings have seen the actual dark side of the moon but somewhere around 50 million of us have experienced this Pink Floyd album. The result: one of the four or five most commercially successful albums in the history of rock. In short, the band on The Dark Side of the Moon manages to find a sweet spot between adventurous and accessible. ![]() And half a century later, they still resonate. It doesn’t hurt that Pink Floyd lined up a more than capable support team, including sound engineers Alan Parsons and Chris Thomas, saxophonist Dick Parry, and backup singers like Doris Troy (best known for “Just One Look”) and Clare Torry, whose unforgettable wails enliven “The Great Gig in the Sky.” As for Roger Waters’s cynical lyrics, which address subjects like money, societal constraints, insanity, and mortality, they proved a perfect fit for their time. The album retains psychedelic influences, a flair for experimentation, and a penchant for sound effects, and even delivers a few howls, but its 10 songs are frequently lilting and always tightly constructed: six of them clock in at less than four minutes each, and there are no extended instrumentals of the sort found on the earlier LPs. The brilliantly produced Dark Side of the Moon doesn’t exactly represent an about-face from such earlier work, but changes are noticeable throughout. Another audience-shrinker may have been the group’s frequently abstruse lyrics, such as those on Piper at the Gates of Dawn’s “Astronomy Domine,” which begins: “Lime and limpid green, a second scene / A fight between the blue you once knew / Floating down, the sound resounds / Around the icy waters underground.” Certain listeners were perhaps put off by tracks like Ummagumma’s “Careful with That Axe, Eugene,” a nine-minute rock “Bolero” that climaxes with blood-curdling screams, or Atom Heart Mother’s “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,” a 13-minute number that opens with the protagonist mumbling about what he likes to eat in the morning. While some (including this writer) loved Pink Floyd’s previous work, the relatively small audience for its earlier LPs suggests that not everyone did. What the group did do with this eighth studio album in 1973 is make its music more inviting to the masses. And unlike the Mac, Pink Floyd didn’t have to make any personnel changes to grow its audience. The Dark Side of the Moon did for Pink Floyd what Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous 1975 album did for that band: transformed it from a long-time cult favorite into a gigantic worldwide phenomenon. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |