"Thought I'd something more to say."

March 3, 2023 4:38 AM

Wednesday saw the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

One of the best-selling albums of all time, released in at least 1200 different editions, in the National Registry since 2012, it is now available in a lavish deluxe edition. You might have seen them live. Statistically, it's likely you've listened to it before, possibly accompanied by The Wizard of Oz (but you probably haven't created an animated video). Vulture celebrated the anniversary in their usual way.

posted by box (88 comments total)

50 years? Good grief. I was in high school when DSotM hit. It was a big, shiny gift to teenage stoners everywhere. And, no, it doesn’t really work as a Wizard of Oz soundtrack. Unless you’re a stoned high school teen, I suppose.

It’s an interesting listen, given the direction Floyd took in their work following this one. It’s a relatively gentle album, with Money really giving you a solid taste of what’s to come.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:04 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm also 50 years old, so it seemed like "old" music to be when I discovered it as a teen. Pink Floyd meant a lot to me growing up as an angsty kid. I had bootlegs of live versions of DSotM from both before and after they recorded it on vinyl, and it's still fascinating to listen to the evolution of the various songs. Listening to the album now is like putting on a old pair of comfortable but threadbare slippers.
posted by rikschell at 5:18 AM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Definitely a classic. Evidently Roger Waters has decided to re-record it as a solo album. [if this was already touched on in the links, I missed it] He has released the first minute of it and it's grim. I'm not sure what's going on with him as of late, but it's not good- supporting Russia in the Ukrainian conflict, becoming even further estranged from his former bandmates....
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 5:23 AM on March 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

Listening to the album now is like putting on a old pair of comfortable but threadbare slippers.

Listening to the album now is like putting on a old pair of comfortable slippers. Fixed it for you.
posted by MorgansAmoebas at 5:29 AM on March 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

@LarryDavidSyndrome: this is broscience bordering on q-anon-ery, but akin to finding out that leaded gasoline had a role in violent crime, I wonder if we won’t find that microplastics or hormones in meat has a role in flipping a switch that makes a Waters or Dennis Miller or Dave Chappelle into these proto-MAGA people. It’s a pattern.
posted by drowsy at 5:30 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

This album was so great because it was all the band members with all their talents working perfectly in sync - with the exception of Syd of course.

I think Richard Wright is such an underrated member of the band. The beautiful Great Gig in the Sky was all his. He also had a huge role in their next album Wish You Were Here, which is my personal favorite of all the Floyd albums.

After that period, the band became more and more Roger Waters. The Wall was a Waters album with some small but brilliant contributions from the other band members.

But Dark Side remains their greatest album and one of the greatest albums in Rock. I've listened to it repeatedly and it was the soundtrack for my teenage years. Yes, I listened to this while stoned with a friend, sneaking out of our summer camp in the hills of Ojai California and playing it in the dark while looking up at the stars.
posted by vacapinta at 5:31 AM on March 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

This seems to be the right thread for me to finally get this off my chest: I strongly believe that this album would be much better if Money were not included on it. It's an okay song but it doesn't fit with the rest of the album.
posted by ElKevbo at 5:34 AM on March 3, 2023 [24 favorites]

Oh back on topic, the DSoM edition of the “how we made this album” documentary series is good IIRC. Still find the New England classic rock outlets ( and ski mountains, ugh) have always been ready to play this. Saw the prism graphic painted on a few friends’ bedrooms and basement hang out growing up when the album was released. I didn’t hear it as much out in the Midwest USA. I am glad it exists.
posted by drowsy at 5:37 AM on March 3, 2023

BTW there are snippets of the recording of DSotM in the Live at Pompeii film - if you like The Floyd and have not seen it I highly recommend. Saucerful of Secrets is A+++.

“And the worms ate into his brain” describes Roger to a tee these days.
posted by whatevernot at 5:41 AM on March 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

Evidently Roger Waters has decided to re-record it as a solo album. [if this was already touched on in the links, I missed it]

Deliberate omission.
posted by box at 5:41 AM on March 3, 2023 [19 favorites]

I don't think it's a perfect album (though it may be the perfect Pink Floyd album). It took way too long for Clare Torry to get credit for her enormous contribution to "The Great Gig in the Sky" and "Money" IS tonally jarring (though arguable it's supposed to be). The synthesizer instrumental "On the Run" is a novelty. And yet it all builds to one of the greatest crescendos in Rock Music.
posted by rikschell at 5:44 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

“Though it may be the perfect Pink Floyd album”

Atom Heart Mother.

But I’m in the minority here I suspect.
posted by whatevernot at 5:46 AM on March 3, 2023 [10 favorites]

You're probably right there, whatevernot. haha
Here's a live version from after the record. I think they improved on "Any Colour You Like." Still looking for the before version.
posted by rikschell at 5:49 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

ElKevbo: “This seems to be the right thread for me to finally get this off my chest: I strongly believe that this album would be much better if Money were not included on it. It's an okay song but it doesn't fit with the rest of the album.”

You're not wrong, but it worked better in the flow of the album when you had to stand up and turn over the record to listen to side 2.

That's not just me yelling at clouds or talking about wearing an onion on my belt. You're sitting there feeling the feelings that “Time” and “Great Gig in the Sky” makes you feel, maybe thinking about the futility of modern life. You have to stand up, go to the record player, and physically handle the record. Maybe you look at the label and see the titles of the songs. You put the record on the spindle, start the player, hear the clunk of it dropping to the platter, the crack and hiss of the needle touching the grooves, and only then you're hit with the sound of cash registers. In that context it makes sense.

I never really heard any rock 'n' roll until I got to high school. My parents were more folk and "beautiful music" than Pink Floyd. I can say for certain the first time I heard DSotM. My freshman homeroom teacher played “Time” for us for a reason I didn't understand until I was much older.
posted by ob1quixote at 5:58 AM on March 3, 2023 [31 favorites]

i got this album on cd in the 90s when i was 13 or 14 (along with raekwons debut) both blew my mind. pink floyd seemed like perfect rebellion against my father’s endless listening to pre sgt peppers beatles and james taylor, bubblegum harmonies by immaculate boys. here i could say i also appreciated musicianship and melodies but by a band that fucked, that sung about more than just silly love songs. i know the beatles were more but they were dad music to me and pink floyd was the ultimate anti beatles for me. i could say: dad these guys are even older than you and they’re cooler, what excuse do you have for being such a square, etc
posted by dis_integration at 6:05 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

And yet it all builds to one of the greatest crescendos in Rock Music.

Assuming you are referring to "Eclipse" - when there was that eclipse back in 2017 or 2018, I made a point of bringing an iPad outside with me when I went to watch it, with that song queued up so I could play it at the exact high mark of the eclipse itself, because I'd read that its length exactly matched the duration of the depth of the eclipse. (The fact that I was outside on a city street and the speakers were shitty meant I couldn't hear it, but oh well.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:05 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

“Dark Side of the Moon is 50. It still rips.”—Polyphonic, 01 March 2023

Full Dark Side of the Moon Project on Nebula.

YouTube playlist of Dark Side of the Moon Project videos.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:05 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, and Danny Boyle also used it to great effect during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:06 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

... it worked better in the flow of the album when you had to stand up and turn over the record to listen to side 2.

I was thinking about this very thing this week as I contemplated the album. My friends and I generally took turns picking out a side of an album to play. DSotM is that rare album of that time which we usually flipped sides and continued on. I think Money is perfectly positioned as the opener to side two and stands in stark contrast to the ethereal close to side one. Taking that minute or two pause to flip the record is really helpful.
posted by MorgansAmoebas at 6:14 AM on March 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's a magnificent album. My friends and I used to listen obsessively to decipher the spoken words in the mix.

Fun fact: Along with the usual lullaby CDs, I used to play Side 2 of DSotM to lull my children to sleep when they were small. It worked like a charm, in part, I expect, because of the heartbeat rhythm that surfaces often.
posted by Gelatin at 6:19 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

This week also saw the closure of Pink Floyd fan forum Yeeshkul!, after its owner decided to retire from running it after 17 years, and the launch of its community-run replacement Raving and Drooling. Even the Echoes mailing list, launched in 1991, still gets the odd post.
posted by offog at 6:35 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

What, no love for Piper at the gates of Dawn? What about Meddle? While I love that the idiots on the right are losing their minds over rainbows and somehow missed that the one on Dark Side has always been there, I feel that it's one of their weakest (after Animals). It is a shame that they never made another album after Animals because of that tragic bus crash that took the life of Roger Waters before he could degenerate into your least favorite racist uncle.
posted by evilDoug at 6:36 AM on March 3, 2023 [15 favorites]

There’s no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact, it’s all dark.
posted by slogger at 6:54 AM on March 3, 2023 [8 favorites]

I got a copy of "Doom Side of the Moon" on vinyl (I work from home and can listen to music in my home office) as a Christmas present. I am fan of covers of songs in different genres and I feel this holds up quite nicely as a tribute to a masterpiece of rock music.
posted by grmpyprogrammer at 6:54 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think that I was probably pretty well along in my pop music education before I heard this as an entire album; I'd probably heard all the cuts on the radio, but not in order. Pretty sure that The Wall was the first Floyd album that I heard in its entirety in order, and it was probably some time before I heard anything else from the band, since that album and DSotM dominated so much. It really does hold up, and for some reason the record that reminds me the most of it is Pnilip Glass' Songs from Liquid Days, maybe because it too has some good and striking individual cuts but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I wonder if we won’t find that microplastics or hormones in meat has a role in flipping a switch that makes a Waters or Dennis Miller or Dave Chappelle into these proto-MAGA people.

I tend to think that it's the Circle of Life of pop-culture figures; at first, you're the new hotness and challenge the status quo, then you become the status quo and react to the new hotness.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:55 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

One of my neighbors bought this album when it came out and we all got together and listened to it in their basement with all the lights off. It was the perfect environment.

It was the first and only time I deliberately listened to any music in the dark.
posted by tommasz at 7:11 AM on March 3, 2023

Such a great album. If you want to mix things up a bit, Easy Star All Stars made Dub Side of the Moon -- a reggae version of the entire album that is a testament to how good the source material is.
posted by cubby at 7:15 AM on March 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

Roger was always an egotistical crank, a personality trait which really goes south when the person becomes Enormously Famous at a relatively young age. So I'm sure he surrounds himself with Yes People and shuts out the people who criticize him in any way, which leads to him both loathing Trump/Republicans and also supporting Russia vs Ukraine and ALSO supporting BDS, a completely incoherent set of positions to have at once.

In other news, DOstM is a perfect album. It was the first of many albums belonging to my aunt which I found in the basement as a 12 year old. She had debilitating MS and was by that time in assisted living. Her record collection basically was the soundtrack to my teen years.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:32 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

I didn’t know this when I set out to listen to it in a darkened room surrounded by speakers a couple nights ago, but it was a lovely experience watching my partner hear the album for the first time. Happy 50th, D.
posted by Callisto Prime at 7:34 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Pnilip Glass' Songs from Liquid Days

Perfect typo.
posted by slogger at 7:42 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

... it worked better in the flow of the album when you had to stand up and turn over the record to listen to side 2.

So many albums of the era were like this. Listening to music was as much a deliberate process as it was entertainment. It’s a little thing, but I definitely think it connected you to the music in a way that doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

To wit...
.....
You put the record on the spindle, start the player, hear the clunk of it dropping to the platter, the crack and hiss of the needle touching the grooves...

Owners of record changers always missed-out on one of the key sacraments the High Priests of the Turntables engaged in...The anointing of the Discwasher pad with D3 fluid, and careful application of the holy pad to the record, followed by the slow hand spinning of the record and the careful rotation of the pad, lifting dust from the grooves, cleansing the record and readying it for the careful application of the needle.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:44 AM on March 3, 2023 [19 favorites]

In case nostalgia is making anyone want to make a purchase that will send money Roger Water’s way, you might have a look first at what goes on at his concerts these days. CW for antisemitism. It’s from a Dutch news show, but you don’t need to understand the commentary to get the point.
posted by antinomia at 7:48 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

DSoTM was old when I first heard it, but Vulture's number 1 song is one I love but can't listen to often. I first heard it in a parking lot, a friend playing it in his car with the windows down, telling me, "You have to hear this!" Another friend, who owned the unfortunate moniker of mental mike, playing it and all Pink Floyd over and over, always, when he gave me rides here or there during that same era of my life. A decade later, Mike still hardcore with Pink Floyd, sharing songs, and us always going back to that one as the song of our friendship, when we were still hanging out constantly, day in and day out, me panhandling for cash so Mike and another friend and I could afford to hold down a booth in a restaurant and eat fries and drink way too much coffee all afternoon.

Decades later, Mike added me on facebook as his sister, because he had no blood family, and I was his, and he was mine. Still sharing Pink Floyd - Fearless was the song then, although we both loved The Wall for nostalgic reasons. Us coming together at a memorial for a mutual friend who took his own life in a psychiatric ward when he could no longer go on. Me, oblivious to Mike's longing to do the same for some years, calling him and us agreeing we'd stick it out, we'd stay here, on earth, and keep going, and do it together with nothing between us but an invisible phone line. Me pretending I didn't hear him (or in denial) talking about euthanasia in other countries. Him trying to donate a kidney to someone in the Netherlands because he heard that would get you citizenship. "It's a win-win!" He'd say, "I help save a life and I get to live where euthanasia is easier to get!" I would scoff and see it as him just being...a bit crazy, as he tended to be sometimes. I refused to see it.

So when I got a call some years ago from a woman who worked with Mike who found me via Facebook (his sister!) to tell me that Mike was gone, that he had checked out and been found in his van, parked in front of his place of employment, I was absolutely shattered. Shattered he left without me. Shattered he had been alone at the time. Shattered that I'd fallen into my stupid denial.

I can't listen to Pink Floyd much anymore. When I do, it is special. I had a memorial for him and played Fearless, because he was, for so long. For so many years he kept on keeping on, even though he wanted to go. I've mostly freed him now, in my head, accepted it. When his roommate sent me his laptop the only music he had on it was Pink Floyd. All Pink Floyd all the time. I could have been a better friend. When I do listen to Floyd it's intentional. It's to take a moment to remember Mike, with his crazy wide eyes and his inappropriate honking laugh, and the way you'd never say, "You know what would be funny? If..." because whatever it was he would do it. Every time. I'm still here though. Still going. I think he'd want me to.

Thank you for this post. Hi Mike, wherever you are! I still love you, you bastard!
posted by routergirl at 7:50 AM on March 3, 2023 [46 favorites]

… cleansing the record and readying it for the careful application of the needle.

All of which was preceded by carefully cleaning the stylus with the little brush and inspecting it with the little magnifying mirror on the flip side of said brush!
posted by TedW at 7:55 AM on March 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

Is this where I admit I went through a Pink Floyd Phase in high school (early-mid 90s)? I listened to DSotM so, so much. Still have that cassette somewhere. Maybe I'll dig it out, but... nah. Great album, but my phase was a phase for a reason.

Vulture's pick for the best Floyd song is absolutely correct, though.

“Though it may be the perfect Pink Floyd album”

Atom Heart Mother.

But I’m in the minority here I suspect.

Mine is probably Animals and I'm likely also in a minority.
posted by May Kasahara at 8:10 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

possibly accompanied by The Wizard of Oz

Alan Parsons, the audio engineer on DSotM, has recently addressed this.
posted by hanov3r at 8:11 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

it *does* work as the perfect soundtrack to Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 as Griffin McElroy discovered.
posted by dismas at 8:15 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Listening to the album now is like putting on a old pair of

what's the shoe wear equivalent of something that was once a wonderful fit but over time, due mainly to overuse, your feet pretty much immediately rebel? You take two steps and they're screaming at you -- "get these damned things off of us, please! For pity's sake!"

I can't really fault the record itself. It's just that, in my particular timeline, it got way too fucking popular. I first heard it shortly after its release. I was thirteen in March of 1973 and I didn't like it. Because I didn't like saxophones. I was an idiot obviously. Maybe a year after writing it off as not nearly as relevant as Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies or anything by Led Zeppelin, I noticed that the local cool radio station had rated it as The Greatest Album Of All Time.

This demanded a revisit. Which worked a charm. Also, I was smoking marijuana by now. Dark Side immediately became my go-to when high, even with the saxophones. Just put on some headphones, close my eyes and go high go deep. But then, possibly marijuana related, I started discovering other adventurous music -- Yes and Genesis and Jethro Tull and Queen and so much other great stuff of the age.

But try as I may, I couldn't get many other people to come along with me on these wilder adventures. They'd get a little high and say, let's put on Dark Side. I'd say, what about [other cooler, certainly fresher option]? They'd say, no, no, it's gotta be Dark Side, that part when the clocks all go crazy and ... ... ...

At some point, I just got allergic. I couldn't be in the same room with it anymore. Even as I enjoyed subsequent Pink Floyd releases, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall (for a while anyway, but then the same thing happened). Bottom line, I couldn't listen anymore.

Jump ahead to 2003, the thirtieth anniversary, which came with a big deal reissue, which a friend had bought. I was house sitting for him that summer, a nice place, rural, beautiful western view out the back, with an excellent sound system. I thought, now is the time to give this masterpiece a proper revisit. So I waited until evening, the sun starting to set. I smoked some high grade marijuana, I positioned myself just right. I started track one, everything rising profoundly as it does ...

I got maybe two minutes into Time (track three) and I had to take it the fuck off.

I think I ended up listening The KLF instead. That was cool. Still is.
posted by philip-random at 8:38 AM on March 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

Mine is probably Animals and I'm likely also in a minority.

I once spent an entire summer rotating home-made cassettes of Animals and Fear of Music on my Walkman. Animals is highly underrated.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:39 AM on March 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

My hot and unpopular take: I really like A Momentary Lapse of Reason. "On the Turning Away", to my ear, evokes the sound of old-school Pink Floyd. "Learning to Fly" is fun and contemplative and mellow.
posted by hanov3r at 8:42 AM on March 3, 2023 [8 favorites]

on the Animals tip, this is from the archives:

Pink Floyd loud on the stereo, from Animals, the album that most people are afraid of, but not me, I'm on board, all howling dogs and raging guitars, and the singer doing his baleful worst to denounce humanity in general, greedy capitalists in particular, as the sleet smacks the windshield in pretty much perfect time. Meanwhile there's a break in the clouds, a chunk of moon cutting through overhead, like here it is, winter 1978, starting to attack, no mercy. Something strange about the whole moment, like it really is speaking to me. But not in words, in portent, because whatever's going down, going up, going on, it's too big for words, too significant. Fuck I love this album.
posted by philip-random at 8:48 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Put me down as a vote for Meddle, please.

P.S. Annoyingly, on the official playlist the labels block two of the videos, because they're extremely stupid. So I had to link to a bootleg.
posted by ob1quixote at 9:02 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mine is probably Animals and I'm likely also in a minority.

The guitar work on Pigs (Three Different Ones) is so otherworldly great that it still sort of melts my brain into my heart or my heart into my brain or something every time I hear it.

"On the Turning Away", to my ear, evokes the sound of old-school Pink Floyd.

This song is very probably the reason why I (literally) survived my freshman year of college.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 9:04 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was introduced to this album via the song "Money" from my BFF in college.
Got DSOTM not too long later, just because it had Money on it and I liked the song.
I liked the album. A few years later, it became THE ALBUM for the late Mr. Nerd and I. "Us and Them" was something we said often, as it felt like it was the two of us against the rest of the world. (Amour Fou, natch.)

After Mr. Nerd died, it was VERY hard to listen to any song from this album. As time went on, it became a little easier. But I still have to skip over GGITS and UAT because I ball my eyes out thanks to sense memory.

Piper is my favorite Floyd album, though.
posted by luckynerd at 9:33 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

speaking of vinyl and record flipping...i do think something was lost without the hard constraint of 22"30'. it put a bit of a box around the artist to establish a creative narrative arc within.

so. many. great album sides. those times are gone. as gilmour said - maybe ten or more years ago, "i don't fit in the business any longer: i write albums; the industry sells songs."
posted by j_curiouser at 9:35 AM on March 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

When we were teenagers my friend and I would spend literally hours driving aimlessly around our nowhere area, chatting about stuff and listening to DSotM over and over and over on the 8-track player with its (unlike ob1quixote's poetic description of the vinyl album) disruptive noisy mid-song track changes. This album is in my bones; the fabric of it will probably leach into the nearby soil after I die, with unknown consequences.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:42 AM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

My cousin up on Long Island, in his late teens, had a fairly horrific bicycle accident. Cracked his head on the curb, ended up in a coma for multiple weeks. My aunt, having heard that people who came out of comas sometimes reported being aware of what was happening around them, played his favorite song for him, over and over and over, during the course of those weeks - "Comfortably Numb".

It's a good song, don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure it was the best choice in that situation. And that story really affected how I feel about the song (which may say more about my relation with and opinion of my cousin than anything else).
posted by hanov3r at 10:07 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's an undeniably great album but if I had to pick just one record from the Roger Waters era it would have to be Animals. That sucker just rips.

But in retrospect, I think something crucial was lost after Syd Barrett went away.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:09 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

loathing Trump/Republicans and also supporting Russia vs Ukraine and ALSO supporting BDS, a completely incoherent set of positions to have at once

It would be a completely incoherent set of positions to have at once if he actually supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Which he doesn't: the speech opens with

The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation was illegal. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.

He then goes off on a tear about also condemning others who have acted in ways he thinks helped provoke Putin into mounting his illegal invasion. And this is all of a piece with the contempt he's consistently displayed for his entire career for every political, military and/or religious leader whose actions could possibly be construed as warmongering, which is essentially all of them.

It's all there in Us and Them, to tie this back to Dark Side, and Amused To Death is an entire album's worth of it. Really the only thing that's changed as he's aged is that he's got more strident about it. Reading his present position as any kind of support for Putin's war is just weird.

Loathing Netanyahu/Likud is not an antisemitic position any more than loathing Trump/Republicans is anti-American. The Star of David on the flying pig prop, though, is indefensible - especially for somebody who objects to the pointless provocation of inflamed tensions as vociferously as Waters so often does.

But that's the thing about Roger: he's a flaming narcissist, always has been, and his oft-expressed support for the principle of universal peace and love and the brotherhood of man has always been rather abstract. The disinclination he's long shown toward seeking peace and love and brotherhood with his former bandmates is all of a piece with the way he's never once missed a chance to have a good old snipe at those he seems to consider his moral, intellectual and artistic inferiors, which appears to be pretty much everybody who is not Roger Waters.

It's a miracle:

We cower in our shelters with our hands over our ears
Lloyd-Webber's awful stuff runs for years and years and years
An earthquake hits the theatre, but the operetta lingers
Then the piano lid comes down and breaks his fucking fingers
It's a miracle

As somebody who vastly prefers Meddle to The Wall exactly because the latter is all Big Show Tunes stuffed to the gills with grandiose pseudo-orchestral Waters oom pah pah, I pissed myself laughing hearing him diss Lloyd-Webber like that. It's such a Roger thing to do.

He's been a cranky old fuck since he was five.
posted by flabdablet at 10:15 AM on March 3, 2023 [12 favorites]

The Strong Songs podcast has a good episode on this album.

Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" is an instantly recognizable, widely discussed album, played and replayed to the point that it's easy to forget that it was made by a handful of young people with some instruments and a mixing desk. So buckle in for a whirlwind tour of the entire record, with pauses along the way to highlight some of the sounds, styles, and techniques that made The Dark Side of the Moon such an artistic and technological breakthrough.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:15 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Atom Heart Mother.

If you’re talking about the live version without the orchestra, I wholeheartedly agree.
posted by panama joe at 10:33 AM on March 3, 2023

“ If you’re talking about the live version without the orchestra, I wholeheartedly agree.”

Ayup. Live Floyd (any era) is best Floyd.
posted by whatevernot at 10:34 AM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Put me down for Animals as well. It capped off a great trilogy of albums as good as any band has made. Some really neat early stuff, but not an entire cohesive album. DSOTM was my intro to Floyd after hearing “Money” on the radio, but is my least favorite of the three. I find the Wall overrated; it is the album where Roger Waters really took over, to the detriment of the band.
posted by TedW at 11:04 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you want to be depressed AF, listen to The Final Cut. Despite its reputation it's actually a pretty decent album, but it tends to get me super down because it makes you realize nothing has really changed in international politics in the past 40 years. It's really the ultimate "fuck everybody and fuck all this shit" composition. The Fletcher Memorial Home delights me every time.

Wish You Were Here is totally my #1 Pink Floyd album, though. Shine On You Crazy Diamond is a sonic adventure all on its own. It probably helped that it happened to be the first Pink Floyd album I owned. I enjoyed DSoTM when I first heard it as a young teen, but eventually grew a bit tired of it after a few years. I didn't really get back into it until I saw Polyphonic's Dark Side project on Nebula and regained my appreciation for the album as a result.

Thinking back it's actually kind of surprising I didn't get entirely Floyded out in my teens and twenties given that I lived in a college town that was chock full of old dirty hippies who all listened to their Floyd vinyl on repeat. As much as I heard it it may as well have been pop music. Still love it, though.
posted by wierdo at 11:04 AM on March 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

As for Roger and his politics, I'm usually with him about 80% of the way. I think he represents a kind of lefty anti-war-at-all-costs stance that is actually pretty rare and unfashionable these days — but he is consistent about it, so you can't exactly say he isn't principled. Still, he absolutely does cross the line sometimes. Criticizing the Occupation? Right there with you, Rog. The Star of David on the inflatable pig? Bad bad bad bad bad. The Joe Rogan interview? Okay for the most part. That one interview with the German magazine? WTF were you thinking, Rog???

As for the bandmates' squabbles, it is unfortunate that these rather elderly gentlemen can't seem to settle their differences after all these years. I know I will win no friends in either camp by saying this, but I think if Waters and Gilmour were to be completely honest with themselves about the quality of their post-1985 musical projects, they would have no choice but to reunite the band, if for no other reason than just out of sheer embarrassment. The problem is, Gilmour actually does think the Division Bell and AMLOR are good, and Waters truly does think Depressing Remake of Comfortably Numb was a worthy endeavor.

I got to see Roger on his last tour and then I saw Nick's band a few weeks later, and I have to admit I enjoyed Nick's show more. Mostly because Roger's show was such a buzzkill, and also because I'm partial to the Floyd's more psychedelic material. Of course, the best was seeing Roger and Nick at the Beacon a few years back play Set the Controls, but that was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I can honestly say I saw 1/2 of Pink Floyd. Heh.

And yes, of course Fearless is the best Pink Floyd song, everybody knows that. It's about Roger and David's creative partnership — a more loving rivalry has never been set to music. Before age and success and everything else drove them mad and drove them apart. They had a damned good run — twenty years is nothing to sneeze at.

You say the hill's too steep to climb...
posted by panama joe at 11:19 AM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm still having a hard time feeling the Floyd ever got any better than this eruption from the scene of a previous eruption, October sometime, 1971.

Though this kind of stuff feels like it's getting pretty close.
posted by philip-random at 11:34 AM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

@LarryDavidSyndrome: He doesn't support Russia. He doesn't support either side, in fact. Roger is vehemently antiwar, and as such there are people who have misconstrued his words to mean that he supports this person or that person.

You can read about what he's actually said here.
posted by schlaager at 11:47 AM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Live Floyd (any era) is best Floyd.

1987 at the Hoosierdome in Indianapolis argues against your assertion. Gods, what a shit show.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:03 PM on March 3, 2023

DSotM, along with Sgt. Pepper's, was a foundational weed album for me. That said, I have to vote for WYWH as my favorite, with Meddle and DSotM neck and neck behind it. I semi-lost my virginity to WYWH, so, for that reason alone, it's the sentimental favorite, but I think that, song for song, it's a better album.
posted by the sobsister at 12:06 PM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

And yes, Animals > The Wall or anything that followed it as a group or solo artists.
posted by the sobsister at 12:08 PM on March 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

another streaming peeve...there is literally no way to listen to a continuous set of interlocking songs. you can kinda messed up fake it with personal settings. but now, and into the forseeable future, no one will hear dsotm, or animals, or wywh, or Live/Dead as originally released. that coherent connection of songs is lost. makes me sad.

worse, why would any artist attempt that, knowing it's absolutely, objectively useless?

s/ old bitter hippie
posted by j_curiouser at 12:16 PM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Youtube's actually a good option sometimes if you detest interruption (and yrrr running an adblock).
posted by philip-random at 12:33 PM on March 3, 2023

well, yeah, but i already know how those pieces are supposed to sound. none of the kids do.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:47 PM on March 3, 2023

This thread has left me in a Floyd hole.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:35 PM on March 3, 2023

I don't want to go too far down the road of a Roger Waters politics detour, but given that I'm being directly addressed:
@LarryDavidSyndrome: He doesn't support Russia. He doesn't support either side, in fact. Roger is vehemently antiwar, and as such there are people who have misconstrued his words to mean that he supports this person or that person. You can read about what he's actually said here.
posted by schlaager at 2:47 PM on March 3 [+] [!]

He said that "Russia was provoked" and thinks that "Ukraine should pursue peace with Russia." What a complete and utter tosser. Criticizing both sides as being somehow at fault in this context is siding with Russia.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 2:20 PM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

can we please stop this derail?
posted by philip-random at 2:27 PM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Silence in the Studio!
posted by whatevernot at 2:36 PM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

You're not getting the experience of flipping the album, but YouTube Music, among others, will happily do gapless playback. It did not when it first launched, which is one reason I kept using Play Music until the bitter end.
posted by wierdo at 2:39 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Griping about Roger Waters is less a derail and more a standard component of all Pink Floyd Discourse, as near as I can tell. And that includes most of it coming from the members of the band themselves.
posted by Ipsifendus at 3:42 PM on March 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

I was a slobbering PF fan for pretty much all of my teen and university years. OBSESSED. Although weirdly maybe the gateway album for me was Momentary; learning to fly was their first piece that made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight. Favorite albums have varied over time, I used to say Final Cut was my favorite (someone upthread mentioned The Fletcher Memorial Home and I agree) but I am not sure what my fave is these days. I love them all for different reasons.

my daughter has gone off to university and discovered my black acid wash jean jacket with the full back patch sewn on from the album cover for Delicate Sound of Thunder, but she only started listening to the music to combat the broheim quizzing her about whether she knew the band when they saw the jacket. She's currently obsessed with DSOM and quotes it to me all the time.

I didn't care that much about the new dune movie when it came out but I was pretty stoked that they used Eclipse in the trailers.
posted by hearthpig at 4:02 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Griping about Roger Waters is less a derail and more a standard component of all Pink Floyd Discourse,

I don't mind the griping about Roger Waters, particularly in the context of what he did/didn't do to Pink Floyd. It's the tipping into the substance of his controversial (to many) recent sociopolitical leanings that won't get us anywhere remotely fruitful in the context of a discussion about the fiftieth anniversary of Dark Side of the Moon.
posted by philip-random at 4:03 PM on March 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

I once spent an entire summer rotating home-made cassettes of Animals and Fear of Music on my Walkman.
You know, most people who hate themselves find much more interesting and socially acceptable forms of self torture, like cutting themselves, mixing organic and man made fabrics, or voting for republicans. I applaud your intestinal fortitude. Though you should always append a tale of derring-do with "and lived to tell the tale!"
posted by evilDoug at 6:32 PM on March 3, 2023

In October of '76 (I think) the local FM station for Halloween played a radio show (obviously recorded elsewhere) that played the entirety of Alan Parsons Project- " Tales of Mystery and Imagination". It started with the narrator giving a sort of spoken resume' of Alan Parsons' work. The quote fragment I remember: "...and Pink Floyd's legendary "Dark Side of the Moon", along with Ambrosia, earned him a pair of Grammy nominations..."
I loved "Tales of Mystery and Imagination", so I found and bought DSotM, based solely on that adjective. OH YEAH, THAT'S THE STUFF! Between us, my brothers and I eventually had pretty much the whole Pink Floyd discography. I've had different favorites at different times in my life, sometimes Meddle, sometimes Animals,sometimes DSotM, (for a while UmmaGumma?!?, that was a weird time). Hard to believe it has been 50 years. Time just keeps happening.
posted by coppertop at 6:37 PM on March 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Alan Parsons is also the one responsible for bringing in Clare Torry to sing on The Great Gig in the Sky.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 7:38 PM on March 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

By the way, which one is Pink?
posted by hwyengr at 10:03 PM on March 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I loved "Tales of Mystery and Imagination",
posted by coppertop

Me too. The original version, not the later one. (Tip to artists: when you put out a masterpiece, however flawed, leave it the fuck alone.)

TMI grabbed me hard the first time I heard it, in my late teens. There might have been certain substances involved. It was a long time ago, I can't quite remember. One hell of a debut album.

As to DSOTM, it is a big one for me, but Animals and WYWH are bigger. Meddle and Obscured By Clouds are pretty high up my list too. The Wall was the last PF album I paid any real attention to. Their glorious run came to an end there.

Also a big fan of Rick Wright and Nick Mason. They are as important as Gilmour and Waters.

Wright's piano solo for the opening of Sheep, on Animals, is the sort of playing the Fender Rhodes was born for.

And if you want a masterclass in the economy of lyrics, check out Arnold Layne, by Sid Barrett.
posted by Pouteria at 2:55 AM on March 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

I had Obscured By Clouds at one point. It's good in that it captures the essence of the sound of the time, but it's not as musically interesting to me.
posted by wierdo at 4:11 PM on March 4, 2023

And yes, Animals > The Wall or anything that followed it as a group or solo artists.

For me, The Wall is Floyd’s Tommy.* It could have been a nice, tight, single-LP that effectively told the story, and would practically be end-to-end hits. Instead, it’s just too long and too full of filler.

I’m a big Floyd fan, but The Wall is rarely the album I reach for when I want to get my fix.

*Note: This is not praise. I have never liked Tommy. It’s agonizingly self-indulgent, and practically a parody of itself and the genre it, arguably, invented.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:54 AM on March 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

You put the record on the spindle, start the player, hear the clunk of it dropping to the platter, the crack and hiss of the needle touching the grooves.. the anointing of the Discwasher pad with D3 fluid...

And sitting and looking at the album cover while listening.
posted by neuron at 9:02 AM on March 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

And sitting and looking at the album cover while listening.

Unless the cover is a book-fold. Then you spend some time cleaning the seeds from your cheap midwest weed, using the inside gutter.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:52 AM on March 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

I still have my original DSotM vinyl record I bought in my teen years, and it has the requisite razor slices on the inside where one of my roommates chose to use my album cover to cut up his weed while I was out. I always took meticulous care of my records, and I didn't even smoke the stuff, so it was doubly infuriating.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:30 AM on March 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

The toking yoof of today will never know what was lost when music went digital (first as CDs, then downloads) and the vinyl-era double album cover became redundant.

Finest tool ever for sorting weed from seed.
posted by Pouteria at 12:14 PM on March 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Second finest. Best ever is when your roommate filches a brand new large pan pizza pan from their job. The only way that could have been better were if it was one of the rectangular Bigfoot pans, but that was a bit early for us. ;)
posted by wierdo at 2:53 PM on March 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't think I've ever listened to this as an actual record, but my mp3 tracks are DSoTM-Side1 and DSoTM-Side2 -- thank you to this thread for helping me to appreciate why!

They really are two separate pieces, you're supposed to go to intermission before starting act 2.
posted by bjrubble at 12:43 PM on March 8, 2023

This thread has sent me on a Pink Floyd kick after years of abstinence (itself preceded by decades of self-induced oversaturation).

The opening of Shine On You Crazy Diamond Pt 1 remains the most stunning edifice of music I've ever heard.
posted by bjrubble at 1:00 PM on March 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

That opening is absolutely emblematic of everything Pink Floyd was doing that other popular musicians of the time were not doing, and I fully agree that that approach is what made them great. They were not at all afraid to give a piece time to breathe when that's what it needed. Listening to Shine On is like watching a seedling unfold from its casing and turn into a mighty shade tree.

The Wall, to my ear, has none of that feel, and that's probably why I found it so disappointing on first listen; it certainly marks my I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff moment for that band. Gilmour's solos are all worth waiting for but it's a pity to find myself consciously doing do. Roger, the quintessential English bore, requires you to know at great length exactly what he has decided to tell you today and it's a bit of a shame that the others allowed him to bully them into making a record that displays that so strongly.

I'm still very sad that Richard Wright is no longer with us, and fully endorse everything said upthread about the electric piano opening on Sheep.

And for what it's worth, I love love love the brass band work on Atom Heart Mother. Probably more than the brass band involved did, if the accounts I've read are reliable.
posted by flabdablet at 12:39 AM on March 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Late to this, but team Animals as well -- and Sheep in particular, both for Wright's opening and for Gilmour's furious guitar at the end. I feel like I kinda overplayed the other albums and while they're good they're over-familiar. Animals still surprises; and also has the quality that you can dip into it for a song or two without feeling obliged to listen to the whole album.

wrt Waters: I re-listened to Amused to Death during the height of the pandemic and: ooof, it has not aged well. It's an album of fantastic and meticulously-produced music utterly ruined by Waters' lyrics; all "the Arabs" and "the Jews" and all the snide jabs at his former bandmates and collaborators and oh my God the fetishizing "my yellow rose" stuff in Watching TV and it's just all so, ugh ... I can't see myself listening to this as a total work again ever. That final track though, when it takes off into the "we watched the tragedy unfold" verse: rips hard.

Lloyd-Webber's awful stuff runs for years and years and years

This is, of course, another long-standing grudge being aired: Waters feels that Lloyd-Webber stole the riff to Phantom of the Opera from Echoes.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 9:48 AM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Which is obviously nonsense. He's just annoyed that people have been calling that slice of Echoes the "Phantom of the Opera" riff since Phantom first came out, just because the actual Phantom riff is also a descending run that sounds a bit chromatic. It's not the same as the Echoes riff at all.
posted by flabdablet at 12:33 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]