One Giant Step for Pink Floyd; 20 Years Ago, 'Dark Side of the Moon' Began...

The Piper · #1 06-04-2002, 09:29 PM

Copyright 1993 The Washington Post
The Washington Post

April 28, 1993, Wednesday, Final Edition

SECTION: STYLE; PAGE C1

LENGTH: 2209 words

HEADLINE: One Giant Step for Pink Floyd;
20 Years Ago, 'Dark Side of the Moon' Began Its Cosmic Trip

BYLINE: Richard Harrington, Washington Post Staff Writer

BODY:
It was 20 years ago today that Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" went to
No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. It stayed there only a week.

"I thought it was a good record," recalls Roger Waters, the British band's
songwriter and bassist. "It happened to strike a certain chord at a certain
time with lots of people."

Still, Waters and Pink Floyd had no particular commercial expectations for
"Dark Side of the Moon," based on the fact that none of their seven previous
albums had so much as dented the Top 40 in the United States. "We'd have danced
naked around the Lincoln Memorial if we'd thought it would sell records," Waters
says. And that wasn't in Capitol's marketing plan, because there was no
marketing plan.

This album didn't need one. Though its stay at the top was brief, "Dark Side"
hung around on the Top 200 chart for a while longer -- well, actually, for 724
consecutive weeks (740 weeks altogether). It didn't drop off until July 13,
1988.

That 14-year stretch is considered one of pop music's untouchable records
(the next longest run: "Johnny Mathis's Greatest Hits" at 490 weeks). Michael
Jackson's "Thriller" may have sold the most copies ever -- 40 million -- but it
only spent 122 weeks on the album chart.

Although it is still officially listed as having reached "gold" status for
sales of 500,000 copies, "Dark Side of the Moon" has sold more than 25 million
copies, including 12 million stateside. The problem is that the Recording
Industry Association of America didn't institute its "platinum" status for
million-sellers until January 1976, and refuses to certify anything
retroactively. When Billboard introduced a back catalogue chart in 1991 (to
monitor sales of reissued albums), "Dark Side of the Moon" entered and has been
there ever since, currently at that unfamiliar No. 1 spot.

While "Dark Side of the Moon" was charting, disco, punk and new wave all
came -- and went. As did Waters, who left Pink Floyd in 1983, later sued the
other members to keep them from using the name Pink Floyd, and remains harshly
critical of their subsequent work (more on this later).

Twenty years ago, Pink Floyd had envisioned a box containing bumper
stickers, posters and other treats, but Capitol was too cheap, particularly
since this was the band's last record before switching to Columbia. (In fact,
Pink Floyd took a royalty cut so that posters could be included without
raising the cost of the original record.) Now Capitol has released a
limited-edition commemorative edition of "Dark Side" -- in a box, containing a
newly remastered holographic picture CD, a color booklet and postcards.

"Dark Side of the Moon" was released on March 31, 1973, its first notes
striking that certain chord (actually bouncing back and forth between an E minor
and A major on "Breathe In the Air"). As Waters puts it, "it's gone on
striking chords with people." It's become something of a rite of passage for
generations of rock fans, and it still sells more than 1 million copies every
year.

Why?

Certainly the reviewers at the time didn't spot anything special, including
British critics who called it "a stereo fetishist's wet dream" and faulted the
album for "too much sound effects, too little cohesive music."

In Rolling Stone, the "Dark Side" review ran below those for Judee Sill's
"Heart Food," Alice Cooper's "Billion Dollar Babies" and "Best of Bread." The
reviewer noted that the record "seems to deal primarily with the feelings and
the depravity of human life, hardly the commonplace subject matter of rock," and
called it "a fine album with a textural and conceptual richness that not only
invites, but demands involvement."

It demands involvement right from the start, actually, with the slow cosmic
heartbeat of "Speak to Me." The songs that follow -- "Breathe In the Air,"
"Time," "Money," "Us and Them," "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse" -- do seem obsessed
with alienation, the banality of everyday life and the inexorable encroachment
of death, a world-weary pessimism that the Times of London attributed to "the
melancholy of our times."

"It was more realistic than a lot of pop music," Waters, who wrote all the
lyrics, says from London. "The end of the record is pessimistic, except that it
allows that all things are possible and that we human beings, individually and
collectively, must have our potentials and possibilities in our hands. We make
decisions and do things that make our lives more positive or negative -- whether
the positive is couched in terms of the amount of love that we exchange with our
family or friends, or whether we allow the dark sides of our past to overtake us
and make our lives more negative.

"We all fight small battles in that war between the positive and the
negative, between good and evil, between God and the devil, however you want to
couch it, every day of our lives," says Waters, who turns 50 this year. "I'm
obsessed with truth and how the futile scramble for material things obscures our
possible path to understanding ourselves, each other and the universe in ways
that will make human life more fulfilling for all human beings. That's what
'Dark Side of the Moon' is about, and what most of my records have been about."

When he says "my records," Waters is talking about Pink Floyd's four
post-"Dark Side" albums and his three solo albums following the acrimonious
split in 1983. Before "Dark Side," the band still operated in the shadow of
singer-writer Syd Barrett -- who, along with Waters, keyboardist Rick Wright and
drummer Nick Mason, was a student at Cambridge University, where Pink Floyd
coalesced in the mid-'60s. (The band took its name from two American blues
singers, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.) With their electronic rock and
mind-expanding light shows, Pink Floyd became the darling of the London
underground, but Barrett lost his mind to drugs and left in 1968, replaced by
guitarist-singer David Gilmour.

For the next several years, the band was best known for its exploratory jams
and movie soundtracks, its sonic architecture serving as a blueprint for the
progressive rock movement. What it lacked was songs.

"Nobody else in the band could write lyrics," says Waters. "There were no
other lyricists after Syd. David's written a couple of songs but they're nothing
special. I don't think Nick ever tried to write a lyric and Rick probably did in
the very early days, but they were awful."

According to Waters, who is seldom reticent in criticism of his former band
mates, when he told the others his ideas for "Dark Side," "they went, 'Okay,
that's a good idea.' In the 'histories,' it always comes out sounding like 'we'
did this and 'we' did that and 'we' decided it was going to be a concept album.

"But there was none of that. There was never any question of sitting around
and discussing what we might do. I have to say it's not all my work -- I only
wrote all the lyrics and two-thirds of the songs. Gilmour's contribution was
very slight. The other major influence is Rick Wright, who did the music on 'Us
and Them' and the instrumental 'Great Gig in the Sky.' "

Recorded at Abbey Road Studios on its brand-new 24-track equipment, the album
came together over a nine-month period, and as it developed, "it sounded
special," Waters recalls. "When it was finished, I took the tape home and played
it to my first wife, and I remember her bursting into tears when she'd finished
listening to it. And I thought, yeah, that's kind of what I expected, because I
think it's very moving emotionally and musically. Maybe its humanity has caused
'Dark Side' to last as long as it has."

There was also the sound of it -- the album's only Grammy went to Alan
Parsons for "Best Engineered Album of 1973"; it launched his own recording
career with the Alan Parsons Project.

One thing that struck Waters when he listened to it recently was "how loud
the sound effects -- the cash registers [on 'Money'], the clocks [on 'Time'] --
were mixed. The record very much focuses on important information, so if it's a
vocal you can hear it, if it's a guitar solo you can hear it and if it's a
sound effect you can hear it. That's because the drums are very quiet all the
way through the record. That's one thing about the record that sounds really
old-fashioned because these days we tend to have drums up really loud, which
leaves less space for other information."

Waters says that 'Dark Side's" sonic reputation -- not only was it the most
popular tool to demonstrate hi-fi equipment in the '70s, but it was voted the
most popular soundtrack for sex shows in Amsterdam -- is overblown. "I think the
sonics derived directly from the ideas and because of the ideas. Space is the
important thing in good-sounding records, and certain elements were allowed to
exist very much in their own space. That's why the record sounds good."

It looked good too, with its now-famous cover, by the Hipgnosis design firm,
showing white light refracting into a rainbow prism, homage to the old light
shows (it made Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest album covers of all
time). Oddly enough, "Dark Side of the Moon" almost required a different name
because a band called Medicine Head had released a similarly titled album the
year before. That album stiffed and Pink Floyd dropped its alternate title,
"Eclipse."

There also was a downside to "Dark Side."

Though its records had never sold particularly well, Pink Floyd had built a
loyal cult following through its mind-bending performances, which attracted
reverential audiences. But with the success of "Dark Side," the audience changed
not just in size -- the band was now playing in sports arenas and stadiums --
but in character. Instead of listening, it began demanding the group's first and
only hit single, "Money."

"That's why after 1977 I refused to play stadiums," says Waters, "because the
larger the audience, the whole thing becomes more about commerce and less about
communication, music, human feelings and values."

Those same issues exacerbated the tensions that had been building within the
band, though Waters says the line in "Brain Damage" that gave the album its name
-- "And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes, I'll see you on
the dark side of the moon" -- is actually about Syd Barrett. But after "Dark
Side," he says, "It started to turn sour."

Waters believes Pink Floyd was finished at that point, but it made four
more albums, the most notable being 1979's "The Wall," which also still sells 1
million copies a year. "The Wall" is a musical autobiography whose central image
and theme is the absence of communication in the modern world. By then Waters
was perceived, by Gilmour in particular, as a dictatorial egomaniac and
control freak given to overly serious themes and grand theatrical gestures, and
1983's "Final Cut" was also a final straw. Rick Wright left the band and Waters
said he could no longer work with Gilmour and Mason. When those two announced
their intentions to record and tour as Pink Floyd, Waters sued them
(unsuccessfully) over the rights to the band's name and assets.

That situation had its own ironic precedence in the scathing line from 1975's
"Wish You Were Here" album, in which a greedy would-be manager says he loves the
band and asks, "Which one's Pink?" The band always had a shadowy public profile,
and people apparently didn't know who Waters was or what he did, a fact brought
home following a 1975 concert at Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium. To avoid the
traffic crush -- the stadium is reached by several bridges -- Pink Floyd
simply walked back to their hotel through the crowd. "And not a single person
recognized any of us," says Waters.

That may explain why Pink Floyd tours still sell out stadiums while Waters
plays to half-empty arenas, why his three solo albums haven't done well
commercially, while Pink Floyd's 1987 album, "Momentary Lapse of Reason"
(which Waters calls "a clever forgery") was double platinum, and why, when
Waters staged "The Wall" in a wall-less Berlin in 1990, many papers simply
attributed the event to Pink Floyd.

"I know David and Nick are in the studio now to record a new album for next
year, and that they'll tour," Waters says. "As far as the public is concerned,
that is Pink Floyd. The idea of separating any of the work from the brand name
is extremely inconvenient, not only to the consumer but to the business, to
everybody, really, except me."

That's why Waters isn't all that happy about " Pink Floyd Shine On," the
expensive, eight-CD box released in November by Columbia. It does not include
1983's "The Final Cut," his last work with Pink Floyd, but it does include
"Dark Side of the Moon," though they knew the Capitol version was already well
along. "It was a travesty and if I had any power, it would have never been out,"
says Waters.

But Pink Floyd is a four-director corporation and Waters is always
outvoted. "I don't even go to meetings anymore because I get no say in any of
it," he chafes. "None of them have any imagination, they don't understand the
work, they have no idea what any of it was about -- and yet they're
administering the back catalogue."

In other words, don't hold your breath waiting for a Pink Floyd reunion.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, ROGER WATERS: "I TOOK THE TAPE HOME AND PLAYED IT TO MY FIRST
WIFE, AND I REMEMBER HER BURSTING INTO TEARS. ... AND I THOUGHT, YEAH, THAT'S
KIND OF WHAT I EXPECTED.", RICHARD HAUGHTON; PHOTO

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