hanks to REG members Mathieu Collete and Martha Copeland, REG was able to reprint this wonderful article originally published in Mojo magazine, about the 25th anniversary of Dark Side of the Moon. Because of the size of the article it is reprinted for REG members in 2 parts. Part 1 was reprinted in REG issue number 20. Part 2 reprinted in issue number 21. Here then, is part 1 of First Men on the Moon.
They were bored, Stale and looking for inspiration. They found it in a masterplan to condense all our earthly woes into 43 cosmic minutes. Twenty-five years, 29 millions sales and one hell of a bust-up later, Roger Waters, David Gilmour and the rest of the Pink Floyd machine retread the small steps that added up to a giant leap - Dark Side of the Moon.
Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, aged 25 on March 24, 1998, is one of the great moments of rock history - as overwhelming aesthetically as it is statistically. That is, it's pretty dazzling that the album has sold around 29 million copies worldwide, already the biggest album by a British band ever, but is still shifting a million more every year; that despite never reaching Number 1 in the UK, it stayed in the top 75 for 310 consecutive weeks from the day of its release and, even now, puts in a periodic appearance during the record token season (Number 72 again just aft New Year 1998); that in America, where it did make Number 1 just once, it swanned around the Billboard Top 200 for 740 straight weeks, more than 14 years; that when Billboard introduced an American Back Catalogue chart in the early 1990s, it went straight to Number 1 and has stayed in the Top 5 ever since.
But it remains even more impressive to listen to it.
What's more it's not at all a sign of age or an admission of guilt in the court of cool to admit admiring it or perhaps loving it. Since punk gave Pink Floyd a generational kicking, Dark Side of the Moon has persuaded successive new waves of musical modes that their veteran credentials hold good. If anything, the '90s have regarded them with particular fondness. When dance music exploded and declared everything that went before obsolescent, the chart-topping Shamen were suddenly observed, hands aloft, proclaiming Pink Floyd a major source of inspiration. When Britpop reasserted the primacy of three-minute song, guitar and good time, there were Radiohead wafting airily through the jostling crowd and the weird, engrossing OK Computer, and a skein of reviewers inquiring who they'd been consorting with on the dark side of the moon, ha-ha.
Pink Floyd are influential yet, Dark Side of the Moon is the reason why, their sine qua non. Without it, they might have remained a fascinating eccentricity of the post-hippie era. After all, to return to those commercial indicators of status, none of their six previous albums had sold more than 250,000. Their 1967 Top 10 single, See Emily Play, proved their last hit for 12 years. In America, their albums had never risen higher than Atom Heart Mother's Number 55 in 1970.
The question"Why Dark Side of the Moon?" is honestly unanswerable except by generalities. The key appears to be the acute balance of opposites. It's full of electronics, technology, sound effects, synthesizers, space, intellectuality, but it's also full of soul, big emotions, voices singing - and speaking from the heart, guitars and saxophones doing the same. It's full of great big noises - and quietness that's almost subsonic.
Then there's the language. Quite consciously, Roger Waters concentrated on symbols of simple, fundamental extremes:"the sun and the moon, the light and the dark, the good and the bad, the life force as opposed to the death force," as he once put it. And somehow this did not come across as an academic exercise, an ABC of poetic imagery - perhaps because of what he expressed once when explaining what the album's title, taken from the song Brain Damage, meant to him:"The line 'I'll see you on the dark side of the moon' is me speaking to the listener , saying, I know you have these bad feelings and impulses, because I do too, and one of the ways I can make contact with you is to share the fact that I feel bad sometimes."
But plenty of artists can explain their work quite lucidly. It doesn't necessarily mean that their music will touch millions for a quarter of a century. Part of the album's power must lie in the background and experience of the four members of Pink Floyd. All of them middle-class, they had been touched by the mental discipline and orderliness of a decent education; Roger Waters and Nick Mason studied architecture and Rick Wright classical piano.
But only up to a point. Then they veered away into the electronic underground of late '60s London. Although they never lost the quintessentially English emotional reserve they all share, Pink Floyd learnt to dig out of themselves a sliver of the wildness of their friend Syd Barrett, the endless improviser, and they learnt to bring to bear some of the hard feelings they admired in Rhythm and Blues (Gilmour's forte) and traditional blues (which Waters grew up with via the cultural milieu of his mother's radical politics.
Beyond such rationalization, naturally, lies an unfathomable 90 per cent of the music, the music makers and the way their listeners respond to them. For sure, Pink Floyd thought they had made a great album and then millions of other people did too. But within that satisfactory outcome, many of the detailed ramifications had nothing to do with the band's character or intentions.
Dark Side of the Moon was widely enjoyed as great drug music, the soundtrack to a perfect trip on the listener's narcotic vehicle of choice. It was widely assumed that Pink Floyd wrote and recorded the album while similarly loaded. But, interviewed by MOJO for this feature, David Gilmour insists that this is one of the great, enduring misconceptions about Pink Floyd."Roger's and Nick's largest indulgence was alcohol, mine and Rick's might have involved the occasional reefer," he allows."but at the time we were nothing like our image. I'm not sure Roger's ever taken LSD - it certainly wasn't on our menu after Syd left [April, 1968]. We've never got away from that reputation, though, not to this day."
By late 1971, when they started to write Dark Side of the Moon, Gilmour was the only unmarried member of Pink Floyd. Mason and Wright both had their first children. They were serious men with serious lives making a serious album. But success took it beyond their control, beyond their plans, beyond anything they meant (or thought they meant). The fate of The Great Gig In the Sky, closing vinyl side one, perhaps best illustrates how far music can get away from its creators. Conceptually proposed as the track about death, in the '70s it was known to be the favorite backing tape for Amsterdam sex shows. Then in 1990 Australian radio listeners voted it The World's Best Song To Make Love To. And in 1994 Neurofen adopted it, through a facsimile re-recording, as their soundtrack to a god-awful headache and its cure. Magic is a funny business.
Nowadays, Think Pink Floyd and you think years in the studio, hundreds of takes, weighty deliberation, obsessive perfectionism, come out to play once every five years if they can be arsed. Because of its monolithic standing, Dark Side of the Moon has been absorbed into that picture of rock in its grand old man phase. But the true story is of non-stop tearing around.
It started in a rush. Albeit a sit-down-and-think sort of rush. A North American tour closed in Cincinnati on November 20 1971. The band reconvened in Broadhurst Gardens, near West Hampstead tube station, with a view t o writing a new album. But there could be no idle waiting on a visitation from the muse. A harsh deadline had presented itself.
Their first substantial British tour for four years was booked to start on January 20. Their concert schedule was already laden through to 1973 leaving little time for recording. Yet reviewers had been saying for some months that heir show had gone stale for lack of new material. In the context of the times, the band tended to agree. Indeed, in interviews earlier that year, disappointed by their last two albums Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, they had spoken with disenchantment of their life and work in Pink Floyd. Waters pronounced himself"bored with most of the stuff we play", and Mason sighed from even more noisome depths of ennui that he was"dying of boredom."
However, not despondent, they saw their latest, Meddle, just out, as a step in the right direction - especially the side-long track Echoes, described by Waters as"an epic sound poem". They fancied some more of that and used to testing out new material on tour, they decided that the songs for their next album should be ready and road worthy to form the first half of their live show within 6 or 7 weeks.
Nothing high-flown about their next move."When we started on a new album we'd always dredge through old tapes to see if there was anything left over we could make use of," says Gilmour.
 |
This was hardly a sign of desperation: a fairly prolific band, always involved in several fringe projects outside their own albums, they could generally come up with a lump or two of somewhat tarnished gold. And again it worked. Waters began to kick around an instrumental called Breathe which he had written for the soundtrack of The Body (a renowned docu-movie about human biology). Wright excavated a piece Michelangelo Antonioni had rejected for the Zabriskie Point soundtrack, which later took shape as Us And Them. He also resurrected an apparently moribund sequence of piano chords -"one of those things the band just didn't know what to do with," Gilmour recalls - which, in due course, found new life as The Great Gig in the Sky. |
But this was just craft and graft, knocking something together, they knew not what. They needed a Eureka! moment and they got it.
"When Roger walked into Broadhurst Gardens with the idea of putting it all together as one piece with this linking theme he'd devised, that was a moment," says Gilmour.
From the hubbub of the subsequent brainstorming session and the passage of memory through the years come diverse accounts of the big idea Waters presented to them."The concept was originally about the pressures of modern life - travel, money and so on," Mason has said."But then Roger turned it into a meditation on insanity." On another occasion, the drummer cheerily reported it was a bleak prediction of a future involving"a lot more unpleasantness and general ghastliness".
Rick Wright tends to remember Waters' catalytic concept in terms of reference to his own life. On one level, he thought, it was a satirical critique "about the business". But when it came to the notion of death, and the deployment of his own The Great Gig In the Sky to cover that theme, it hit home:
In this urbane way, Gilmour will loosely remark that it was "about life, wasn't it", but then he knuckles down to express how much Waters' thinking, and writing meant to him:
"I didn't pull my weight when we were writing DSOTM though that wasn't true when we were playing it live and recording. But I went through a bad patch, I didn't work myself as hard as I should have. Hence the credits, you see. But Roger worked all sorts of hours on the concept and the lyrics while the rest of us went home to enjoy our suppers I still feel appreciative of that; he did a very good job.
"I think at that time he was finding himself as a lyric writer. He was realizing that he could get to grips with more serious issues, some political and others that involved him personally [Pink Floyd shorthand for both the death of Waters' father on the beach at Anzio in 1944 when Roger was a few months old, and the mental collapse of Syd Barrett]. His style had developed and improved. I remember him saying that he wanted to write this album absolutely straight, clear and direct, for nothing to be hidden in mysteries, to get away from all the psychedelic warblings and say exactly what he wanted for the first time."
They had to get on. Time and Money, high-concept titles came quickly enough. Then from December 13 to 21 they decamped to Paris to record and shoot more footage for the Live At Pompeii film, begun on location that October. After Christmas they switched operations to the rolling Stones' warehouse studio in Bermondsey, writing while rehearsing their full set for the tour.
Come January 20 at the Brighton Dome, what was then titled Eclipse was still a work in progress. But that didn't bother Pink Floyd overmuch. In effect, for them, that was the point. They could change the songs on the hoof if they needed to and jam the between-song segu music they planned for the album, see what fitted.
"For me, one of the pressures of being in the band was this constant fear of dying because of all the travelling we were doing in planes and n the motorways in America and in Europe."
'The concept grabbed me. You see, nobody back then had problems with the concept of the concepts, so to speak. Their fall from grace happened later and I've never gone off the idea myself.
| As it happened, Brighton lost the retrospective honor of a world's first complete performance when the effects tape for Money snagged terminally and they had to move on to Atom Heart Mother. According to Glenn Povey & Ian Russel's new In The Flesh: A Complete Performance History, a full run-through ensued the following night at Portsmouth Guildhall. Pink Floyd pushed on round the circuit, enjoying the usual privations and laughs. At the Lanchester Polytechnic Arts Festival on February 3 their magnum opus was wheeled on at 2.30 am, immediately after Chuck Berry had left the stage. |  |
As they went they tweaked the new songs this way and that. Time had begun life much slower than in its recorded form and accelerated in performance; the vocals shifted from Gilmour/Wright harmony throughout to solo leads by Gilmour on the verses and Wright on the bridge.
But for Pink Floyd the whole tour felt like a build-up to four gigs at The Rainbow, February 17 20 featuring the re-titled "DSOTM- A Piece For Assorted Lunatics", as advertised. Evidently, the band had that Broadway feeling. They will still boast that no one had filled so many nights at the Finsbury Park venue before. Gilmour admits it was nerve-wracking playing our home city again" and, in truth, remembers nothing of any live performances before they reached London, not even their Brighton debacle.
Happily, they felt able to pronounce the shows"terrific". The ordinarily stolid Financial Times went further, proclaiming that"the Floyd have the furthest frontiers of pop-music to themselves". However, their joy was alloyed, in part when they discovered that a quality bootleg of DSOTM at The Rainbow had hit the racks at all bad record shops. It went on to sell an estimated 120,000 and deterred Pink Floyd from ever developing unreleased material in concert again.
So far, so purposeful. Eleven weeks on from starting to write the album and they already had a hit bootleg. But they were still more than a year away from releasing the official version. Theirs was a life of distractions, some planned, some not. One of the stranger aspects of the making of this epochal record is that, once written, it seems to have been recorded in fragments, when they had a moment, on odd days, if they could tear themselves away fromrecording another whole album of new music, for instance.
Given Pink Floyd's penchant for stately progress through the 80's and 90's, it's remarkable to encounter the spontaneity of earlier days."Barbet Shroeder, whom we had made the More soundtrack album for in 1969, said would we like to work on another film with him", remembers Gilmour."We said yes. And off we went."
On February 23, in fact, for seven days, followed by another five days from March 23, both stints at the 'honky' Chateau D'Herouville, near Paris. The film, La Vale, concerned a bunch of hippies wandering round New Guinea in search of said lost valley and, inevitably, the meaning of life. Pink Floyd could relate to that and they set to in ultra-professional vein.
We sat in a room, wrote, recorded, like a production line," says Gilmour, who had recovered his compositional form by then."Very good for one to work like that sometimes - under extreme constraints of time and of trying to meet someone else's needs."
 |
He's quite clear that Pink Floyd's seemingly artistic-butterfly approach in 1972 was far more pragmatic than it looks, reflecting the reality of their musical lives at the time: as middle-class boys from comfortable backgrounds, they still felt uncertain and insecure enough about their future in a pop group to explore other avenues which might extend their careers."I suppose it seems silly now," he muses."But we thought of films as one of our possible futures." They still had to fulfill alot of touring commitments, playing and revising the putative album as they passed through Japan (March 3-16), Manchester (March 29-30 replacing a show aborted by a power cut), North America (April 14-May 4), Germany and Holland (May 18-22). |
Then finally, just as Obscured By Clouds, the La Valée soundtrack album, was released, they moved into Abbey Road to but a good 18 days' work on Dark Side of the Moon between June 1 and 24/5. The basic tracks for Us and Them were taped on June 1, Money June 7, Time June 8, and The Great Gig in the Sky June 25.
But the studio sequence was broken when they played two nights at the Brighton Dome. Proving the value of their roadwork, Waters came back from America with a new song to close the album, Eclipse."the piece felt unfinished to me when we were doing it on the road," he says."I came in one day and said, Here, I've just written the ending and this is it." Brighton heard the world premiere.
At this juncture, it seems appropriate to ask how Pink Floyd coped with such a hectic, erratic, unfocused schedule. Gilmour shrugs it off;"I didn't find it a problem. Go off to America, come back, do three or four days work on an album, off again - we were used to it. Nick has the year planners from those days and every day is full. Record in the morning, drive up to Newcastle for a gig in the evening, that sort of thing every single day that whole year.
These young whippersnappers today don't know what work is, do they ? On the other hand, PF then took two months off, not a note recorded until mid-October.
"The Hollywood Bowl, that was a wonderful show," says Gilmour, summoning up one image from their second North American tour of 1972.
Thinking back to those road-test gigs, Rick Wright's memories seem to be rather more fraught with the hazards of olde-tyme technology,
After their holidays, Pink Floyd plunged back into the maelstrom of activity on which they professed to thrive. Fifteen concerts in North America through September. Nine days on the album in October, but three more dropped so they could play a benefit for War On Want at Wembley Empire Pool on October 21. Sounds reviewer noted that,"They gave the packed stadium a faultless demonstration of what psychedelic music is all about Dark Side of the Moon is an eerie title for an equally eerie piece of music that takes the listener through a host of different moods."
No sweat with regard to completing the album, although October 27 turned out to be their last day at Abbey Road until January 18. Throughout that period, between short bursts of gigging in Europe, they gave much of their attention to a grandiose and ultimately preposterous project proposed by Roland Petit, eminent avant-garde choreographer of Les Ballets de Marseilles.
"It started off with discussions about us doing the music for an epic ballet and move of Marcel Proust's," says Gilmour."Again, we were interested because we thought of it as one of the possible ways to extend the scope of what we could do in the future."
Naturally, Pink Floyd were expected to read the source material. Legend has it that Gilmour waved a white flag on Proust after 118 pages, while Waters asserts he did plough through Swann's Way Volume 2 before concluding,"Fuck this, I can't handle it, it goes too slowly for me." When this critical judgment was conveyed to Petit, he resourcefully suggested realignment to Scheherezade's One Thousand and One Nights - which sounded like a long job.
Nonetheless, Pink Floyd did their bit, rehearsing the company through a program comprising 'One Of These Days,' 'Careful With That Axe Eugene,' 'Obscured By Clouds,' 'When Your In,' and 'Echoes,' then backing the dancers live in Marseilles, November 20-26, then again in Paris, two shows a day, on January 13-14, 1973, and February 3-4. Although Sounds' ballet correspondent pronounced himself impressed with the dnouement to Echoes when the leading male dancer dragged the prima ballerina "right across the width of the stage with her in the splits position", the band emerged rather disabused of their aspirations in this particular field of high art.
"In the end," rekons Gilmour,"the reality of all these people prancing around in tights in front of us didn't feel like what we wanted to do long term."
Just as well, really. They still had an album to finish - accomplished, if accounts are accurate, in 11 more days at Abbey Road between January 18 and February 1: a total of 38 days in the studio spread over seven months.
A diffuse process, then, but Waters' concept held strong through all the diversion and digressions. Whenever they were at Abbey Road, the album would quickly fall back into focus again and their mutual support was never in doubt."We were stuck in a small room for days on end and we did work very well together as a band," says Gilmour."If we weren't playing, Roger and I would be at the mixing desk usually and grabbing the talk-back to say our piece; Rick and Nick sat in throughout and gave their thoughts if they wanted to. They still do, even though it takes so much longer to record a Pink Floyd album now."
"We still didn't have any films to go with DSOTM and we couldn't sell the place out then, it's so enormous. They partitioned off the back half. But what made it was we hired a lot of those big searchlights they used at LA film premieres. We fanned them out backstage and pointed them up at the sky. It looked fantastic. There's a picture of us taken that night which I specially like. We're all pink and mauve."
"It was a bit scary. We'd always have problems with cue tracks to keep in sync with the sound effects and visuals we were one of the first bands to use them, click tracks they're called now. It was a massive headache because the equipment was pretty unreliable. There were a lot of missed cues and struggles to get back in time, whereas today with everything digital it goes like clockwork."
"There were long dinners with Petit, Rudolf Nureyev and Roman Polanski which came to nothing," Gilmour recalls. Waters is prone to suggesting that it all ended in"much poovery" among the ballet types, but little progress on the planning front.."Eventually," says Gilmour caustically, the grand design crumbled to"a bit of old ballet danced to a bit of old music".
| At this apogee of co-operation, they brought out the best in each other. Waters felt free to explore with words and sounds, while Gilmour diligently rummaged through his extensive library of rockist ideas - he enjoys confessing to the theft of Eric Clapton's Leslie speaker sound from"Badge" for"Any Color You Like," and borrowing the alternation of echoey and dry sounds on"Money" from Elton John. Engineer Alan Parsons notes that Gilmour took several hours to prepare his guitar sounds for each track, but then recorded straightforwardly with one mic, very fast and at"wall-shaking" volume. |  |
When, during the October session, they wondered whether a sax might do the trick for"Money" and for"Us and Them," they were uncertain, says Gilmour, because they had never used the instrument solo before. So he persuaded the band to try his old mate Dick Parry, who he had played with in a Sunday night jazz band at the Dorothy Ballroom in Cambridge. Although this was not necessarily a world-beating credential, Gilmour says,
"It's nice to involve your friends, people you have empathy with. There were several big names we could have gone to, but it can be tedious bringing in these brisk, professional session-men. A bit intimidating."
Conversely, when Waters suggested that a drop of vocal might set the sea on"he Great Gig in the Sky," none of the band had heard of Claire Torry. They simply accepted a recommendation from Parsons."We'd been thinking Madeline Bell or Doris Troy, and we couldn't believe it when this housewifely white woman walked in," says Gilmour.
"But when she opened her mouth, well, she wasn't too quick at finessing what we wanted, but out came that orgasmic sound we know and love."
Pink Floyd were in there youthful prime. They stretched themselves, they stretch others, they stretch technology.
Curious about the latest gizmos, they mad the VCS3 synthesizer a feature of Dark Sid of the Moon after Gilmour visited the inventor, former BBC Radiophonic Workshop staffer Peter Zinovieff, ant his home in Putney:
"He built this thing in his garden shed. He showed me the original machine, masses of wires and hundreds of components all around the walls, floor to ceiling, which he had miniaturized down to a briefcase model. I've still got one and we used it on the last album."
But they were also determined to improvise and try to achieve whatever they heard in their imagination, no matter how donkey-cart the equipment available to them then. Their click track was a miked-up metronome. And unorthodox vibrato effect could be created by a patient band member wiggling an oscillator with his finger throughout a track. To produce certain echoes or delays, tape could be spooled around a mikestand on the other side of the control room and hand-fed into the struder recorder."The Floyd were famous for using every machine in the studio, with wires trailing down the corridors and mangled tape strewn over the studio floor," says Parsons.
Even so, perhaps the crucial factor that elevated Dark Side of the Moon to the rock pantheon was the year-long summer of love between Waters and Gilmour. Parsons watched them cheek-by-jowl in the control room and found it impossible to deduce which one was the leader. So relaxed were they that "they produced each other - Roger would produce Dave playing guitar and singing and Dave would produce Roger doing his vocals."
One of Gilmour's sweeter memories of his erstwhile colleague concern his lead vocals on"Brain Damage" and Eclipse:
"He'd rarely sung leads before and he was very shy about his voice. I encouraged him. On occasions, he would try to persuade me to sing for him and I wouldn't."The truth is that our working relationship remained very good even through making most of"The Wall." There were many moments when we were really talking well together and told each other so. We had huge rows, but they were about passionate beliefs in what we were doing. Roger is a very intelligent and creative person and I am very stubborn and pig-headed, but I think I have a good musical sense. Sometimes he would be willing to sacrifice all sorts of musical moments to get his message across. Our roles were complementary, at least in theory. We recognized each other's strengths and weaknesses. We would prevent one another's works excesses and indulgences."
Gilmour recognizes the insight behind an oft-repeated Waters remark about Pink Floyd being divided between the architects, (himself and Mason) and musicians (Gilmour and Wright):"That's fair. Roger believed he could bring to bear on our work elements of what he had learnt about the structure of dynamics." He's equally acquiescent when it comes to an aperu from another Pink Floyd sound engineer, Nick Griffiths, who said that "Dave made people enjoy it and Roger made them think".
"I wouldn't argue with that," nods Gilmour."A bit simplistic, but it'll do. It's a great combination if you can please both minds and hearts." "There was a moment when it all came together," says Gilmour, insouciance quivering a little for once at the magnitude of this memory."Eventually we'd finished mixing all the tracks, but until the very last day we'd never heard them as a continuous piece we'd been imagining for more that a year. We had to literally snip bits of tape, cut in the linking passages and stick the ends back together. Finally you sit back and listen all the way through at enormous volume. I can remember it. It was absolutely..." He teeters on the edge of some precipitous adjective, but at the last second Englishness tugs him back to safety - and bathos."It was really exciting," he sighs.
While Pink Floyd had the chance to display their capacity for hauteur when only Rick Wright turned up for Dark Side of the Moon's press launch because EMI had failed to install a quadraphonic system for the play-back at London's Planetarium, they could not remain aloof when, on March 31, it topped the American album chart, boosted by"Money" reaching the singles top 20 and a revived promotional shove from Capitol.
As Mason succinctly put it,"That changed everything."
Andy Warhol came to see them at Radio City Music Hall, New York, on March 17; 20,000 came to see them at Earls Court on May 18-19 (where a plane swooped down from the roof to crash on stage and the band appeared to fire a barrage of rockets into the audience). Suddenly Pink Floyd were both chic and enormous. "I think we were underground until Dark Side of the Moon," says Gilmour."Before, we were seen as some form of intellectual rock'n'roll. But its success as our defining moment. You can draw a line from the release of that album to our current global scorched-earth policy."
It was "Money" that made the difference rather than Dark Side of the Moon," says Gilmour."It gave us a much larger following, for which we should be thankful. But it included an element that wasn't versed in Pink Floyd's ways. It started from the first show in America, {Madison Wisconsin}. People at the front shouting, 'Play Money! Gimme something I can shake my ass to!' We had to get used to it, but previously we'd been playing to 10,000-seaters where, in the quiet passages you could hear a pin drop. One always has a bit of nostalgia for the days when we could perform without compromise to that level of dynamics.
"I think that tendency is what culminated for Roger in the Famous Montreal incident at the end of the Animals tour when he spat at a fan. Something's lost and something's gained in every day, you know - Joni Mitchell said that.
End Part 1
(Part 2 continued in REG #21)