10 minute instanity5/18/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters wrote down a series of questions on cards about sanity and mortality that were linked to the lyrics he’d written for the album, and a multitude of associates of Pink Floyd and people passing through Abbey Road sat in a vocal booth and answered the questions. The 65-second track that opens Dark Side is both an overture and a collage, combining sounds from the songs that would follow (the cash register from “Money,” Care Torry’s vocal from “The Great Gig in the Sky”) with spoken vocals. When that equipment was upgraded to 16-track, Pink Floyd agreed to return to work on what was planned as an album of shorter songs with segues, in contrast to the increasingly ambitious, 20-minute epics such as “Atom Heart Mother” and “Echoes.” The first few Pink Floyd albums had been recorded there, but the band tracked 1971’s Meddle elsewhere due to the limitations of the studio’s eight-track mixers. In May 1972, Pink Floyd commenced nine months of sporadic sessions for its self-produced eighth album at Abbey Road, the EMI Records-owned London studio favored by the Beatles. In fact, the only things the band watched together during sessions for the album were football matches and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. For decades, fans have listened to it at planetariums and laser light shows or synced it up to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz as an urban legend-fueled dorm room pastime, despite all evidence that Pink Floyd never planned such a stunt and any synchronicity is purely coincidental. The mind-boggling scale of the album’s success does little to explain its enduring mystique, from its hypnotic melodies to its haunting, philosophical lyrics. But its staying power has been both remarkable and record-breaking, having now spent 974 weeks on the tally in one form or another. 1 on the Billboard 200, knocking Alice Cooper off the top of the chart before being replaced by Elvis Presley. In a matter of weeks, however, Dark Side transformed the members of Pink Floyd into transatlantic superstars, despite the band’s aversion to interviews or appearing on its album covers.ĭark Side spent only one week at No. ![]() Since emerging during the 1967 “summer of love” with its proto-psychedelic debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd endured the departure of troubled frontman Syd Barrett and released a series of expansive, improvisatory albums that made it a rising star of the progressive rock movement. In March 1973, the London quartet Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon, an enigmatic but richly melodic concept album about madness and mortality. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |