Pink Floyd

In 1973, Pink Floyd released their eighth album. Initially meant to be a reflection on the trivial difficulties of life on the road, Dark Side of the Moon evolved into a more personal (and, therefore, more universal) meditation on life and time and war and sanity. By that time, the group had been together for six years and had already outlasted circumstances that would’ve killed most other bands.

Initially fronted by the legendary Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd was one of the first full-fledged psychedelic bands. Although rooted in the blues (their name is taken from two old Blues musicians – Pink Anderson and Floyd Council), Pink Floyd soon developed a following due to their exotic stage shows, some of the first to incorporate multimedia and cutting-edge lighting techniques and, especially, their sonic adventurism in the studio. Relentlessly creative, they dressed up their blues and pop sensibilities in some of the most outrageous clothes they could muster. Pink Floyd was singer, lead-guitarist, and songwriter Barrett’s band through and through. So when he started going insane, it looked like the band was over. One of the first and most famous acid casualties of the '60s, Barrett started unraveling and self-destructing and taking the band with him. They hired another guitarist to help play the live shows that Barrett was becoming incapable of playing, but it wasn’t long before interior pressures forced him out of the band entirely. Because he was the band’s singer, songwriter, and guitarist, the band’s management company threw his backing band out and focused on Barrett and his (short-lived) solo career.

Against all odds, that backing band stuck together, kept the name, and went on to achieve worldwide popularity at a level very few bands ever achieve, while Barrett disappeared into his head and became a footnote and cautionary tale.

At any rate, the band was settling into its niche, and had released a few interesting albums to mild popular acclaim. And then they recorded Dark Side of the Moon. Nobody, inside the band or out, had any idea that they weren’t just making an album, they were making the album. Using the blues as their continuing foundation, the band, with the help of engineer Alan Parsons (who would achieve popular success with his Alan Parson’s Project group of rotating musicians and impeccable production) added sound effects and synthesizer sequences and anything else they could think of to polish up the tracks. Instead of become an unfocussed, indulgent mess, Dark Side of the Moon gelled into a perfectly realized album. The album was released to wide critical and popular acclaim, and was the first album of theirs to really break in the states, where it entered the album charts in 1973 and eventually crawled up to number one. By the time the album left the charts, it was 1985, and it had completed an incomprehensible 741 consecutive weeks on the charts.

I first heard it in the glory days of my introduction to popular music. When, at 13, I finally decided to see what all the rock fuss was about, there were many friends who were only too willing to show me the way. Many of those paths led nowhere (Bob Segar? Kiss? Kris Kristofferson?), but a few recommendations were spot on. When my mom’s best friend Su found out that I was starting to explore rock, she gave me Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I was certainly familiar with a lot of the songs, since the Beatles are apparently encoded into our DNA now, but hadn’t actually listened to one of their albums all the way through. It was, needless to say, a revelation. Now, I must say for the record that Sgt. Pepper, for all of its groundbreaking and record setting, is not a perfect album. True, that which is good is phenomenal, but there are a couple of incredibly odious songs on it that people tend to gloss over. Sure, A Little Help from My Friends, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, She’s Leaving Home, and When I’m Sixty-Four are all absolutely brilliant. And it’s easy to make the argument that one of the most astonishing songs ever recorded by anybody is the chilling, gorgeous, frightening album closer, A Day in the Life. But what about Good Morning? Or the execrable Within You Without You? The truth of the matter is that, although they were far and away the greatest band that ever existed (or will probably ever exist) they didn’t make any perfect albums. They came close a couple of times (they very nearly hit the mark on their last real album, Abbey Road), but there’s always at least one song – usually more – on each album that drags it down.

Su’s husband Craig offered me the flip side of psychedelia, Dark Side of the Moon, and when I heard it, I was absolutely transfixed. Because my mom was so sensitive to noise (she once berated her mother for darning too loudly because the prick of the needle through the sock was more than she could bear), I had to listen to the album on headphones, which actually made it all the more intense and immersive. There is not one bad moment on the entire album, from the faint heartbeat that starts the album through to the faint heartbeat that ends it. The songs are well-constructed ruminations on mortality and morality, seamlessly sequenced and buffed to a glorious sheen. There are many highpoints to be found, but one of the highest is this track, centered on side one. The first time I heard it, the startling alarms at the beginning of the track practically made me jump out of my skin. Then as the song starts, there’s such an immense feeling of spaciousness to the sounds, with the huge guitar chords echoing to oblivion and the steady heartbeat of the woodblocks and the tom-tom accents drenched in reverb, building up unbearable tension until, with three sharp snare strikes, the song really locks in and the vocals start. The lyrics are wise and sad, the guitar solo aches, and the whole package comes together for a phenomenal effect. This is actually two songs, Time and Breathe Reprise, but they are so closely linked (Like Sgt. Pepper/A Little Help from My Friends) that they will forever be played as though they were a single track.

The rest of the album is no less impressive, ending with a haunting rumination on insanity that dissolves into the aforementioned heartbeat that bookends the album. I was completely entranced and obsessed by the album for a while. I even drew up a film scenario for the album and spent time designing a logo (it was to be called Lunatic). I had never heard a rock album that spoke to me and for me so eloquently and it became one of my favorite albums of all time.

As it turns out, that’s largely the reason for the album’s phenomenal success. There’s a joke my friends and I make about discovering the album, where we imitate a trembling 14-year-old boy clutching the album to his chest and wailing, “it’s about me”. Turns out almost every 14-year-old-boys thinks the album is about him, and that’s why it stayed on the charts as long as it did.

Although not much of a singles band – they prefer developing their themes over an album (helping pave the way for the popular AOR (album-oriented rock) radio format) – one of the tracks, Money, did receive a fair amount of airplay. It’s a good track, like everything else on the album, but it’s probably more famous for being the biggest-selling single ever written (mostly) in 7/4 time. I once saw a junior high talent show in which a nascent band tried their stubby little hands at playing it, and just couldn’t get their heads around the time signature, so they added an extra beat to the distinctive phrase that underlies the song so the drummer could hit an even number of beats.

Pink Floyd continued exploring their themes of alienation and despair on subsequent albums, and continued their remarkable run of remarkable albums for several years, through Wish You Were Here (with its side-long tribute to Syd Barrett called Shine On You Crazy Diamond), Animals (a rough musical equivalent of Orwell’s Animal Farm), and peaking with their last (semi) great album The Wall. After this, the band started falling apart and, in a supreme bit of irony or karma, the nominal leader and main songwriter (Roger Waters, in this case) was jettisoned to pursue a mediocre solo career while the backing band retained the name and went on chalking up huge sales around the globe. They have long since burned out of the original creativity that made them so interesting and their personal themes have become far too personal to hold much universal appeal (who really wants to hear about how hard it is to be a fabulously wealthy rock star?), but Floyd ruled the 1970s and has shown uncountable legions of adolescent boys the way in to their forever beating heart of darkness. Pink Floyd is about more than the blues, about more than rock’s power to transform ennui into energy. It’s about more than life’s trials and tribulations, about more than the bloody razor-thin line between genius and madness. Pink Floyd is about more than just life and death. It’s about me, man.