There are hit albums, and then there is Dark Side of the Moon. The disk of pink floyd has sold more than 15 million copies in the United States since its launch on March 1, 1973, and more than 45 million units worldwide. A true classic rock colossus, the album made its creators (Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Write and Nick Mason) incredibly rich, and they spent 937 amazing weeks on Billboard.
Roger Waters I had written lyrics to albums pink floyd from A Saucerful of Secrets from 1968, but Dark Side marked the first, although not the last, in which the bassist took the lyrical reins of an entire LP of the group. Waters wanted this album to have more lucid and direct lyrics than the band had written before.
From the beginning, the band intended to call their new album Dark Side of the Moona reference to madness, as opposed to outer space, but when the British Medicine Head released an album of the same name in 1972, the group considered naming it Eclipse. “We were upset because we had already thought about the title before the Medicine Head album came out,” the group acknowledged. But when the album Medicine Head fell into oblivion, pink floyd they felt free to return to the original title of their album.
Although the textures and arrangements make it seem like a purely studio project, the band performed all the songs in concert, in the same sequence as they would appear on the album, plus more than a year before the album’s official release. The band premiered Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics (as it was provisionally known at the time) at the Brighton Dome on 20 January 1972.
In an attempt to unite the songs more, Roger Waters came up with the idea of ​​recording interviews with Abbey Road employees and anyone else who worked in the studio, asking them a series of questions on topics ranging from the banal to the most serious and inserting some of the interview fragments into the final mix. Near the end of Eclipsethe song that closes the album, you can hear a passage from an orchestral version of Ticket to Ride” of the Beatles; Apparently, the song was playing in the background in the studio, while the doorman at Abbey Road said: “There’s no dark side to the moon, really. In fact, everything is dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun.”.
With its suggestive and striking prism that converts light into color, the album cover Dark Side of the Mooncreated by the English graphic designer George Hardie, It is one of the most emblematic designs of a record. “When Storm showed us all the ideas, with that one, there was no doubt,” Gilmour said in an interview. “It is a very commercial idea: it is very clear and simple, it will look very good in the shop windows”.
Cover of Pink Floyd’s album ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, released in 1973. / Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Given this album’s multi-platinum sales figures, it’s easy to forget that The first seven of the band did very poorly in the United States. Thanks to a promotional push from Capitol Records, Dark Side of the MoonThey rose to the top of the Billboard 200 within two months of their release.
Like Dark Side of the Moon Not a pop cultural milestone in itself, the album’s success was also partly responsible for the existence of the 1975 absurdist film comedy The knights of the square table and their crazy followers. The members of Pink Floyd used to watch the series Monty Pythonso when the British comedy troupe struggled to raise money for its first feature film, Pink Floyd offered them 10% of the film’s initial budget.
