Originally Posted in The Playlist of Life, January 12 2013
Right about now I feel might be a good time to look into another
and who doesn't know this one?
There are many albums that have changed, or impacted strongly on my life and there are others that, while they didn't exactly provide an epiphany for me, turn me onto new music or answer any questions I may have had, remain an integral and important part of the music I listened to while growing up. Some, indeed many of these albums are classics, and that in itself brings up a difficult, but valid point: how do you review a classic album? Most people who know anything about music are going to know the album, probably inside out, and will have their own personal view of it, and what it means to them. How are your words going to interest them, when you're talking about something they have probably been listening to, or at least been aware of, for half their life? How can you criticise, or even wax lyrical about an album everybody knows? What can you add to the discussion about it, what new light can you shed on it, and who is really going to want to hear you drone on about a classic?
The only way, therefore, I could even attempt tackling such an almost sacrosanct album was to write for the kids who have never heard this: the ones growing up now and only finding out about bands like these. This is mostly, and usually, down to age: kids of sixteen, seventeen may have heard of these bands, but have never actually heard their music. It can also be the case that someone is crossing over from one genre to another and may not be that familiar with these legends of rock music, although in the case of some even that seems unlikely. Still, for those that are only now flowering into the first years of their musical knowledge, for those starting out on the long and exciting journey of discovery into rock, metal, progressive rock and space rock, I present this review of one of the defining albums not only of the band's career, but of rock music in general.
And yes, in that way, like it did to us all, it changed my life.
The Dark Side of the Moon --- Pink Floyd --- 1973 (Harvest/Capitol)
There's been far too much written about the place
DSotM occupies - deservedly - in the annals of rock music history, and people have said it far better than I ever could. The fact that this was Pink Floyd's first number one album, that it took them from relative commercial obscurity and thrust them into the mainsteam limelight, that it spent over seven hundred weeks in the charts and has sold over fifty million copies worldwide, has all been well documented. The groundbreaking innovations in the music - the use of tape loops, voices, echo and reverb, analogue synthesisers and more - the way it changed music - and Pink Floyd forever, and the fact that it was at least in part dedicated to or written about Syd Barret, original founder and vocalist who was suffering through some mental problems that has caused him to quit the band he had started. All of this has been written before, and there's no point in me rehashing old material, trying to outdo what rock and music writers have been doing for over forty years now. Similarly, there's no point in me copying-and-pasting a Wiki article, although I did consult such for some background information.
The only way I can approach this is by reviewing it as if for someone who has not heard it before, and in that vein, much of what I say in this review will seem trite, maybe even slightly offensive to those of us who know and revere the album. But remember, I'm writing this for those who do not know the album, so bear with me. Think of it this way: if you wanted to read a review of a classic jazz, blues or even electronica album and could find nothing but essays about how great it was, and how everyone knew it, would you be annoyed? I know I would. It should not be taken for granted that one hundred percent of the population of planet Earth have heard
Dark Side of the Moon - I'm sure it's closer to only ninety-five percent (!) - and for those who have not (yet) experienced this amazing album, I offer my description of a timeless masterpiece.
The first thing that always hits me about this album is its sense of space. Everything seems deep, from the lyrics to the music, and everything seems to constantly be in the process of expanding. You hear this from the beginning, as "Speak to Me" kicks off this opus of progressive rock. A low hum is joined and superceded by a thumping sound, a steady, rhythmic beat like that of a heart. As it continues on, snatches of what will be other tracks on the album - "Money", "Time", "Brain Damage" etc - spool through, and a voice speaks of being mad, while in the background but getting louder a maniacal laugh rises beside the
vocalise (vocals without words or phrases) of Clare Torry, the music climbing in pitch with her until on her scream we pound into the first track proper, "Breathe", with David Gilmour's incredibly full-sounding guitar taking the lead, he then also taking the vocal as the song begins.
Nick Mason's steady drumming and Rick Wright's keyboards form over a minute of instrumental intro before Gilmour begins singing and the song is the first part of a life cycle really, laying out the fact that we need to live our lives while we can, as it's over far too soon. Lyrics like
"Run, rabbit run/ Dig that hole/ Forget the sun/ And when at last the work is done/ Don't sit down/ It's time to dig another one" show us how petty and futile so much of the concerns we surround ourselves with, worry over and obsess over are. As Gilmour says near the end:
"Balanced on the biggest wave/ You race towards a early grave". The song is slow, almost a ballad, played on lazy guitar by Gilmour sometimes in a manner comparable to slide, with a laconic vocal that is double or multi-tracked and seems to echo as he sings, and an almost funereal sound to it. Like the rest of the album - as it was originally recorded, two sides of one record - each song flows seamlessly into the next, and so we slide on into "On the run", where Wright's bouncing, swirling, almost panicky synthesiser runs form the basis of this instrumental, with running feet, heavy breathing and sounds of airports and so forth creating the sensation of someone in a mad hurry, racing to some appointment or other, and harking back to the rabbit in the previous song, endlessly rushing and toiling but to what end? Racing towards an early grave, indeed.
Voices drift about in the ether as the piece continues, announcers' voices, people laughing, shouting, and the whole tempo of the thing is fast, manic, almost a "Flight of the bumble-bee" for the twentieth century. It ends on a big hard heavy powerful guitar riff and crashes into the sound of many clocks, which suddenly all go off, chiming, ringing, pealing as "Time" opens, Gilmour's hard echoey guitar pounding in and almost meshing with the sound of ticking, pendulums and metronomes, Wright's piano tinkling in and Mason and Waters setting up the backing rhythm, another sense of doom about the music. One of only two songs on the album to feature double vocals, Wright takes the mike beside Gilmour to give us another song about wasting your life. Time is the eternal enemy, and our lives must be spent with purpose and direction or else
"One day you find/ Ten years have got behind you" and it's already too late. Great guitar solo from Gilmour and powerful, effective backing vocals which will go on to define and be a major part of what will become the Floyd sound in the years to come.
By the time the protagonist in the song has decided he has to do something, that his life is slipping away, it's a race against death.
"So you run, you run/ To catch up with the sun/ But it's sinking/ Racing around/ To come up behind you again." Sobering words, and a sort of funk feel to the song, with a certain gravity and pathos, which then runs into "Breathe (reprise)", a short coda to the song before it flows into the fully instrumental "The Great Gig in the Sky", with vocals by Clare Torry which are, well, you just have to hear them to appreciate how different they are, and why this piece can still be called an instrumental even with vocals, of a sort. Almost sacramental slide guitar from Gilmour, and lush piano from Rick Wright, but it's the vocals from Torry that really make the song stand out, backed by heavy church-style organ from Wright and punchy percussion from Mason.
As such, that's the end of the first part, and was the first side of the original vinyl album, and so the music actually stops rather than segueing into the next track. This then is "Money", which opens on the sound of cash registers, coins, paper tearing and then a bassline from Roger Waters that was to become famous and instantly identifiable, joined by Mason's percussion as the song takes on a sort of marching rhythm, a twelve-bar blues kind of feel and Gilmour's guitar joins the fray, as does his voice again, extolling the virtues and vices of living just to make money. Probably unintentionally ironic, as "Time" was to become one of their most successful and thereby lucrative songs, one of the two massive hit singles to come off this album. Great smoky sax solo from Dick Parry adds to the almost jazzy sense of the song, and it fades out on the recordings of people talking about various things, until it recedes into the background and the sorrowful ballad "Us and Them" comes in on droning organ.
With a clever time-delayed echo on the vocal, so that instead of just
"Us and them" you hear
Us, Us, Us, Us, Us ... and them, them, them, them..." - mightily effective - it's a lament on how the have-nots are walked on by the haves, how there's no room in the world for mercy or pity or sharing the wealth, or looking after those who are worse off than us. It's Gilmour's last performance on vocals on the album, and again he's joined by Rick Wright, the song one of the most moving on the record. It also features a simply beautiful sax break from Parry which really just makes the song. The imagery in the song is striking:
"Forward! he cried, from the rear/ And the front rank died/ The general sat/ And the lines on the map/ Moved from side to side" and
"Listen son/ Said the man with the gun/ There's room for you inside." A lot of anti-war, anti-military rhetoric, but quite simple in itself, with a very sad ending as (it would seem to me anyway) where a war veteran dies because no-one will buy him the meal he needs to stay alive:
"Out of the way! / It's a busy day/ I've got things on my mind/ For the want of the price/ Of tea and a slice/ The old man died." More powerful backing vocals and some lovely piano work from Rick Wright and a rather abrupt end, which the first time I heard this took me by surprise, because you just don't expect it.
This leaves us with three tracks to go. "Any Colour You Like" (probably referencing the old Henry Ford mantra, "any colour you like as long as it's black") is the final instrumental, and if this album had, in some alternate universe, a weak track, this is what I would select as it. Compared to the giants that have gone before, and the two to come, it doesn't for me stand up as well. But it's still well above anything else that was coming out at that time, although it's really just a marker to take us to "Brain Damage", where we hear for the first time on the album the vocals of a man who would come to dominate not only vocals, but the whole band, and who would cause tensions within Floyd leading ultimately to his eventual departure.
Roger Waters does a great job of sounding like a madman himself, as he sings
"The lunatic is in the hall/ The lunatics are in my hall/ The paper holds their folded faces to the floor/ And everyday the paperboy brings more." More than any other song on the album, this is thought to be written about Syd Barret, and his struggle with dementia. It's quite a laidback little piece initially, taken in on Gilmour's soft, chiming guitar and Waters' steady bass, that is until the chorus when a big sweeping synth, thumping drums and a squealing guitar mesh with those soon-to-be-famous backing vocals - almost a choir really - to take the song to almost transcendental levels. The song also contains the album title, so is essentially the title track, and the climax, the point everything has been leading to. In an almost expected move now, there are grinning, laughing voices running through the song too.
"Eclipse", the closer, is essentially the same melody but changed a little, with a repeating lyric that lists all the things, people, events, dreams and nightmares we may and probably will encounter during our oh-too-short lives. Brought in on Mason's thumping drum and with a swirling, almost carnival organ from Wright, it's again Waters who takes the album out in complete triumph, the choir/voices setting up a spirited, gospel-like finale, and as the music fades out on the final lyric
"Everything under the sun is tune/ But the sun is eclipsed by the moon" we hear the sound of someone saying "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact, it's all dark", and just to bring everything full circle, the heartbeat returns, then stops.
TRACK LISTING
1. Speak to Me
2. Breathe
3. On the Run
4. Time
5. The Great Gig in the Sky
6. Money
7. Us and Them
8. Any Colour You Like
9. Brain Damage
10. Eclipse
So, what makes a classic album, then? Is it just that X number of people have to listen to it? Is it that it has to shift Y number of units, or have Z number of singles? Well, no I don't think so, because many albums I would consider far, far from classics can fulfill any or all of these statistics. Is it that it becomes so well known that almost everyone has at least heard of it? Again I think no, because again there are albums I could name that just about anyone would know, but they are not considered classics.
Personally, I think a classic album is not made, it is created, which is to say, it's not after the album has been released and bought, listened to and rated and raved over that it is recognised as a classic. I think it happens in the studio. When the artiste recording it has recorded a classic, they will instantly know it. Musicians know when they've created something special, and I think Pink Floyd knew this about
Dark Side of the Moon. When Roger Waters played the rough tapes to his wife, she burst into tears at the end, and he knew then they had something special.
In essence, for want of a better phrase, classic albums aren't made, they're born. Right from the off, you know they're going to be a classic from the moment you first hear them; and every time after that, you remember how you first realised this album was going to be remembered, praised, played everywhere and that it would take its place in music history, forever.
That, in my considered opinion, is what a classic album is.
That's what Pink Floyd's "The dark side of the moon" is.
You hear it once, and nothing, nothing is ever the same.
Nor should it be.