'Speak to Me': The Legacy of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon

Russell Reising

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138459663
• eBook ISBN: 9781351218122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

The endurance of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon on the Billboard Top 100 Chart is legendary, and its continuing sales and ongoing radio airplay ensure its inclusion on almost every conceivable list of rock's greatest albums. This collection of essays provides indispensable studies of the monumental 1973 album from a variety of musical, cultural, literary and social perspectives. The development and change of the songs is considered closely, from the earliest recordings through to the live, filmed performance at London's Earls Court in 1994. The band became almost synonymous with audio-visual innovations, and the performances of the album at live shows were spectacular moments of mass-culture although Roger Waters himself spoke out against such mass spectacles. The band's stage performances of the album serve to illustrate the multifaceted and complicated relationship between modern culture and technology. The album is therefore placed within the context of developments in late 1960s/early 1970s popular music, with particular focus on the use of a variety of segues between tracks which give the album a multidimensional unity that is lacking in Pink Floyd's later concept albums. Beginning with 'Breathe' and culminating in 'Eclipse', a tonal and motivic coherence unifies the structure of this modern song cycle. The album is also considered in the light of modern day 'tribute' bands, with a discussion of the social groups who have the strongest response to the music being elaborated alongside the status of mediated representations and their relation to the 'real' Pink Floyd.

Part I
'Any colour you like' General discussions

Chapter 1
On the waxing and waning: a brief history of The Dark Side of the Moon

Russell Reising

The Goddess Astarte … had more phases than the moon. She knew the dark side of the moon like the palm of her hand.

– Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

What is this thing called The Dark Side of the Moon? And how did Pink Floyd readjust their controls, steering away from the sun and towards the dark side of the moon? How did they transport themselves from the lush submarine environments of ‘Echoes’, the final cut on Meddle, to the airless aridity of lunar space? Surely, titles like ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, ‘Astronomy Domine’, and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, had already established the Floyd as spacey, otherworldly? The essays in this collection address this question in various ways, but I think fundamental questions will remain as to the album’s significance, endurance, appeal, and essence. Is it a mere collection of fragments pieced together over a couple of years, or is it the apotheosis of album coherence and grand unification? Sound or light? Group effort or realization of individual genius? Morbid descent into lunacy or inspiring testament to transcendence and empathy? Adolescent psychodrama or mature ethical statement? Frenzied rush or mellow soporific? Frigidly esoteric, impersonal, and abstruse ‘space music’ or pumped-up blues funk? Despairing personal wail or bracing political statement? Erotic or violent or spiritual or philosophical or ethical or psychological or existential or solar or lunar or terrestrial? None of these either/or propositions does any justice to The Dark Side of the Moon, and the case is better understood as both both/and and either/or for each of these dichotomies. Like the Beatles in Revolver, Pink Floyd on The Dark Side of the Moon set their controls for the heart of the moon, settling for nothing less than a total apprehension of life and what it means to be human. And that means that no dividing lines are tidy; perhaps none is possible.

The Dark Side of the Moon, like many great artistic achievements, cannot be rendered as regular and predictable as the groove on vinyl, the magnetic clusters on a VHS tape, or the digital bits ‘burned’ on a CD or DVD. In fact, the suite waxed and waned into and out of its 1973 realization in several distinct phases, many of which exist in easily found (and often downloaded) commercial audio and video forms. As David Gilmour noted in an interview with Chris Welch in 1973, ‘A lot of the material had already been performed when we recorded it, and usually we go into the studio and write and record at the same time. We started writing the basic idea ages ago, and it changed quite a lot. It was pretty rough to begin with’ (MacDonald, 1997, p. 300). Beginning with the tentative experiments we see and hear on Pink Floyd’s Live in Pompeii video, through the Earls Court Pulse and Roger Waters’s In the Flesh audio and video documents, The Dark Side of the Moon has morphed through a series of phases as lively and fecund as anything found this side of the Sea of Fertility. My goal here is to organize and account for the significance and meaning of the phases The Dark Side of the Moon has passed through and to speculate on what they reveal about the overall impact of Pink Floyd’s accomplishment. Since most of the other essays in this collection focus on the 1973 recorded version of The Dark Side of the Moon, approaching it from various cultural, musicological, and thematic perspectives, I will focus on the earlier and later performances of Pink Floyd’s suite, including those performed after the official breakup of Pink Floyd. Of course, my commentary on these alternative moons carries with it my sense of the work’s essence.

One small step for Floyd

The video Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii (dir. Adrian Maben, 1972) contains the earliest recorded traces of Pink Floyd’s work on The Dark Side of the Moon. In addition to documenting their performance amidst the ruins of the ancient stadium, the video captures the band members chatting, responding to interview questions, and, most importantly for our purposes, in the recording studio, experimenting on guitar, keyboard, and synthesizer riffs that will eventually become The Dark Side of the Moon. Beginning and ending musically with ‘Echoes’, Live at Pompeii captures Pink Floyd at the apogee of their pre-Dark Side power, basking in their sense of significance and playing such early classics as ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ and ‘Saucerful of Secrets’ as well as much of Meddle, all for an audience of their sound and recording assistants, a film crew, and the breathless ghosts from the Vesuvian-scorched city. In an interview included as an extra feature of the ‘Director’s Cut’ DVD, Maben refers to his film as an ‘anti-Woodstock’, indicating that he believed the audience-less quality of his Live at Pompeii broke away from the clichéd concert film convention of focusing on audience reactions to ordinary stage performances. Interview footage incorporated into the film plumbs the group’s and each individual member’s identity, their sense of nostalgia for their earliest days together, and their sense of where they’re heading musically. Roger Waters muses on the group’s relationship to technology, and David Gilmour assures viewers that Pink Floyd isn’t a ‘drug orientated group’. At other times, the entire production suggests nothing more than a parodic Floydian revisitation of the Beatles’ early stadium shows or Grand Funk Railroad’s sold-out stadium extravaganzas. Pink Floyd, however, play to an empty coliseum where, could their echoes still be heard, the agony of dying gladiators would have surpassed the din of screaming fans. The Beatles and the Monkees capered, as though joined at the hip, for cameras in movies and television shows. Pink Floyd, however, cavort among lava vents and bursts of steam from the still volatile topography and play their inimitable brand of psychedelic music to film footage of ruined Pompeii mosaics and exploding volcanoes. This is clearly rock documentary with a difference, filmed even before Pink Floyd themselves explode with the release of The Dark Side of the Moon.

Punctuating his presentation of Pink Floyd playing Pompeii, filmmaker Maben inserts several snippets of early Dark Side materials from Waters, Gilmour, and Wright, tucking them amid Floyd’s performances, interviews, and endless shots of Nick Mason’s drumming and an equal number of their equipment, clearly stenciled ‘PINK FLOYD. LONDON’. The film documents Pink Floyd playing and reproducing their unearthly sounds without any of the appurtenances of studio technology, and the version of ‘Saucerful of Secrets’ performed entirely live on guitar, drums, gong, grand piano, bass, and organ is a bracing reminder that Floyd, unlike many highly technologized groups with elaborate recording regimens, could always perform their work on stage.

Maben juxtaposes such exciting live footage with their preliminary work on materials that eventually become The Dark Side of the Moon, filming those scenes, quite understandably, under the artificial lighting and within the confines of recording studios, signaling, perhaps, a new departure in Floyd’s musical and technological odyssey. A significant amount of the interview footage addresses the possibility that the band have become extensions of their equipment rather than the other way around. Waters comments: ‘it’s just a question of using the available tools when they’re available. And more and more there are all kinds of electric goodies which are available for people like us to use.’ Gilmour expands on Waters’s notion by adding, ‘I mean it’s all extensions of what’s coming out of our heads. You’ve got to have it inside your head to be able to get it out at all anyway.’ Then, during Roger Waters’s experimenting with a synthesized portion of ‘On the Run’, the first actual musical references to The Dark Side of the Moon, he comments, ‘it’s like saying give a man a Les Paul guitar, and he becomes Eric Clapton. It’s not true. Give a man an amplifier and synthesizer and he doesn’t become … us.’ Slightly later in the film, the camera lingers on Rich Wright playing some of the piano line to ‘Us and Them’, with Wright and Waters then discussing precisely what it is that Rick is doing in that section.

The most remarkable and extended passages in which the film samples The Dark Side of the Moon occur in tandem with the group’s commentary about their past and future as a group. The segment begins with Waters recording the bass line to ‘Eclipse’, a scene that fades into him also discussing the general economics of the rock music industry. The film then morphs into Nick Mason discussing the way in which Pink Floyd still, for many people, functions as a nostalgic reminder of ‘their childhood of 1968, the underground in London, free concerts in Hyde Park, and so on’. David Gilmour then counters the common notion that Pink Floyd was a very ‘drug-orientated group’ by assuring the viewers, ‘Of course, we’re not. You can trust us.’ Back to Nick Mason, once again, who notes that Pink Floyd is ‘doing other things [now], cause [they] want to do other things’. At that point, the film returns to Rick Wright recording the final piano lines to ‘Us and Them’. Quite a remarkable retrospective portion of the film, and, quite significantly, Maben chooses to frame the most extended and serious commentary on the group’s history and sense of themselves with their work on The Dark Side of the Moon. Just before the final two live numbers, Maben includes one more view of the Dark Side recording sessions, this time, David Gilmour recording two different guitar sections for ‘Brain Damage’. Gilmour and Waters discuss whether the work is too ‘toppy’, Gilmour asks for a second take, and then, providing a coda for the Dark Side footage included in Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, Gilmour complains that he has to re-record another section by asking, ‘Christ, where would rock and roll be without feedback?’

It is in his framing of the ‘Director’s Cut’ of Live at Pompeii that director Maben most clearly accentuates his film’s relationship with The Dark Side of the Moon. In fact, virtually every significant difference between the original VHS and the DVD version adds to the sense of Pink Floyd on the verge of the The Dark Side of the Moon. Even the blasted landscapes of Pompeii come more and more to resemble scenes from the dark side of the moon. Most notably, however, Maben frames his film with a sonic tribute to The Dark Side of the Moon, and the only sounds heard against a totally black screen at the very beginning and very ending of the film are a heartbeat and slow rhythmic breathing, clearly recalling the album’s first two tracks, ‘Speak to Me’ and ‘Breathe’. In another framing device, Maben includes spacey shots of planets and various forms of cosmic debris flying through space, finally resolving into a close-up of the lunar surface and the earth emerging from behind the moon. In other words, Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, The Director’s Cut begins and ends with the earth being eclipsed by the moon.

For their pre-1973 live performances of what was then called Eclipse, Pink Floyd open with the signature heartbeat effects and some industrial rumblings before opening up to David Gilmour guitar strums and Roger Waters’s thunderous bass rumbles. Absent is Richard Wright’s keyboard work that eventually comes to dominate the earliest minutes of The Dark Side of the Moon. Pink Floyd perform, and Gilmour certainly sings, ‘Breathe’ at what seems, in retrospect, glacial slowness, a pace relieved by the guitar-strum dominated transitional piece ‘On the Run’, which sounds more like a jazzy guitar jam, or like something reminiscent of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. Gilmour’s guitar work is unrelated to the heavily synthesized work Wright contributed to the recorded version. In 1972, however, the keyboardist limits his input to a very jazzy piano accompaniment punctuating Gilmour’s frenetic strums, while Waters and Nick Mason set down a rapid, yet conventional beat, with Mason’s few flourishes coming on the high-hat cymbals. As the suite moves towards ‘Time’ (without any of the airplane crash effects or jangling clock sounds!), Wright contributes more synthesized machine-like effects, all of which fade out of audibility, giving way to Mason’s roto-tom percussive introduction to ‘Time’, when Gilmour’s and Wright’s playing builds up to the vocals. Mason complicates his roto-tom work, by adding a backbeat that industrializes the opening bars of his drumming. Floyd protract the instrumental introduction to ‘Time’, but the piece never quite escalates in intensity of foreboding, and Gilmour and Waters sing a vocal duet that lumbers out in mournful, nearly lugubrious, strains. The pace of these early versions shocks the listener used to the album and subsequent performance versions, a pace that Gilmour’s guitar solo reproduces. Most of the notes are there, as is the general trajectory of the solo, but Gilmour slurs most of his playing, and the pace sounds like a 45rpm record played at 33⅓ rpms. Gilmour and Waters achieve interesting vocal effects, with one frequently either singing slightly behind the other or adding wordless harmony to the primary vocal line. The reprise of ‘Breathe’, with Gilmour’s ‘Home, home again’ line, maintains this pace before easing into what constitutes one of the most remarkable differences between these preliminary versions and the 1973 recorded piece.

As the ‘Breathe’ reprise fades out, Wright fades in playing what can only be described as funereal church music with pipe organ strains accentuated by rolling bass. In the background of what was then called ‘the mortality piece’, Waters chants in prayerful tones and inserts televangelistic solicitations, before actually reciting ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ to Wright’s organ work. As he concludes the so-called mortality section, Wright’s playing resembles Keith Jarrett’s work on Hymns and Spheres, surging with spiritual atmospherics and intricate keyboard work. Prior to the 1973 recording, no Clare Torry or any other female vocal work eases the performance out of ‘Time’ and into the syncopated coin sounds introducing ‘Money’, with rhythmic complexity added by a tambourine. Again, the vocal presentation proceeds in carefully modulated and very slow pace until Wright sets out on a solo that will eventually be replaced by Dick Parry on the saxophone. Here also, Gilmour’s guitar solo, which bursts out on the record and in post-1973 concert performances, eases out of Wright’s keyboard work. Gilmour eventually does rise to some soaring intensity near the end of the solo and approximates the jazzy rendition he played live, up to and including the Pulse performance. These 1972 performances already reveal a Pink Floyd experimenting with their opus. In the Sapporo, Japan versions, they eliminate the final vocal verse of ‘Money’, and the conclusion of Gilmour’s solo more or less coincides with the end of the song. In one of the London shows, however, the structure of ‘Money’, and the segue from ‘Money’ into ‘Us and Them’ have already taken on the colouring and embellishments of the recorded version.

‘Us and Them’ begins with Gilmour playing more than he will by 1973, and both Gilmour and Waters provide vocal effects that will be replaced by more of Wright’s keyboards and synthesizers. It is in the bridge sections of ‘Us and Them’ that the suite approaches the edge and intensity of the recorded performance. Gilmour and Waters’s voices, as well as the entire instrumentation, surge out of the mellow vocals and keyboard melody with a sense of uncontrollable rage and bitterness. In these moments, we can hear the glimmerings of the more symphonic presentation that will come to define ‘Us and Them’ from 1973 onward.

At this point, Pink Floyd seems to have begun realizing the potential of the manic juxtapositions th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 'Assorted lunatics': Contributors' biographical notes
• Foreword: The Floydiam slip
• General Editor's preface
• Introduction: Life on the dark side of the moon
• Part I: 'Any colour you like': General discussions
• Part II: 'Everything under the sun is in tune': Musical and structural discussions
• Part III: 'There's no dark side of the moon': Theoretical discussions
• Part IV: 'Speak to me': The influence of The Dark Side of the Moon
• Works cited
• Index