On March 1, 1973, the album "The Dark Side Of The Moon", Pink Floyd's eighth studio album, was released.
This is one of the best-selling albums in the world...
It was the band's breakthrough album, which turned it from a psychedelic-progressive rock band revered by students and freaks, into one of the leading bands in the world of rock...
This is an album that has become a milestone in the development of many music artists...
The "Dark Side of the Moon" by "Pink Floyd" is without a doubt and unequivocally an immortal album. An album that will never grow old. An album that whenever you play it will feel like it has just been released!
This is the band's first full concept album, in which all members agreed to align with the idea of Roger Waters, who also wrote all the lyrics in the album. The lyrics refer to many aspects of pressure on the person and musicians in particular. Topics like wealth in "Money", military conflicts in "Us and Them", madness in "Brain Damage", existential questions in "Time" and death in "The Great Gig in the Sky".
So much has been said and written about it, that it will surely be difficult to renew anything about this exemplary album, so this time we chose to focus on a few less common facts:
1. "Pink Floyd" performed with all the songs from the album a year before its release, even in the same song order on the album. This gave them the opportunity to experiment and improve the songs at each performance, the song "On the Run" is the only one that went an extreme transformation compared to the original versions vs. the rest of the songs.
2. The album's original name was "Dark Side of the Moon", but since an English blues rock band called "Medicine Head" used that name for their 1972 album, "Pink Floyd" initially changed the album's name to "Eclipse". After "Medicine Head's" album failed commercially, "Pink Floyd" members decided to go back to the original name.
3. Each side of the album consists of one track that is divided into five parts but with continuous playback.
4. The album was recorded on a 16-channel tape and not 8 as before, with a Quadraphonic mix, for four speakers and not for two as in Stereo. This gave the band the flexibility and ability to use many different effects, synthesizers, samples, and sounds to create the atmosphere that Roger Waters was so looking for. The one who managed all this was Alan Parsons who served as the technician for the album and from there broke into success, both as a producer and as an artist in his own right.
5. In terms of the lyrics of the songs, we mentioned above. This is the first album where the band prints the lyrics on the record sleeve. Until that album, it did not happen, maybe because they were not confident in themselves. But this time they felt they wanted the listeners to understand and read the poignant texts. This is also the band's first album Roger is the sole writer of the lyrics.
6. On 27 February 1973, a press conference was held at the London Planetarium to unveil the album, during which the album was played to journalists and other celebrities. The band boycotted the "play party" as the auditorium in the hall supported Stereo rather than Quadraphonic. Instead of the band members' presence, the members' characters made of cardboard were placed on stage, this of course did not adversely affect the party and the critics were thrilled with the new album.
7. The song opens with the rustling of coins and the sounds of the cash register, "Money". Is of course the most successful song from the album. It is so special musically that it is a song with an asymmetrical weight of 7/4 when in a guitar solo it becomes 4/4 and at the end of the solo it returns to 7/4.
(Photo: Kim Gottlieb Walker)
8. Roger wanted to have a connection between the songs in the album, so in addition to the music, he added people speaking voices. He took the band's stage staff, the Abbey Roads studio staff where the album was recorded, and recorded interviews with them, asking simple questions as well as hard and deep questions about death and insanity. Paul McCartney was one of those interviewees, but his recording did not enter the album because Roger claimed he was "trying too hard" and trying to be funny instead of being real.
9. Aside from being a dizzyingly successful album, this album is also responsible for the masterpiece "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" movie, sounds weird ?? The band members who used to watch the TV series "Monty Python's Flying Circus" during breaks during the recordings of the album, heard that Python's members were trying to make a full-length film but the production ran out of money. They took some (very small) of the money they received for the album and invested it in producing the film when they helped it to be finished and released.
10. The song "Us And Them" was originally written in 1969 for the soundtrack of the film "Zabriskie Point", but the director of the film thought it was inappropriate and chose three other songs that the band wrote for the soundtrack.
11. Keyboardist Rick Wright wrote the piece "The Great Gig in The Sky" as an instrumental piece that describes how life slowly fades, through the exit of the soul to death. In the first part, the man did not succumb to death and struggle with it and in the second quieter part he has already come to terms with the death and liberates. In the middle of the section in the transition between the first and second part, there is a whisper in which the following words are heard: "If you hear the whisper you are dying"
12. The band did not want there to be words in this segment. Alan Parsons brought in singer Clare Torry who improvised the entire piece using her voice like a musical instrument. She sued the band in 2004, demanded royalties for the writing, and won.
13. The opening track "Speak to Me" is the only Pink Floyd track in which the writing credit is given to Nick Mason exclusively.
14. The one who laughs at the crazy laughter in this segment is Peter Watts, the director of the "Pink Floyd" tour at the time and the father of actress Naomi Watts.
15. The section "On the Run" was written inspired by the fears and pressures that flights and travel brought with them. The whole section is performed by a synthesizer. Only 5 notes are played in it that are played in a loop and at high speed.
16. Each of the clocks heard in the song "Time" were recorded separately in an antique shop, with Alan Parsons then putting them all together. Parsons recorded the clocks to serve as a model for testing a Quadrophonic system, but eventually, the recordings were used for the purpose of the album.
17. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the album, the band released a special edition called "The Dark Side Of The Moon' 50th-anniversary reissue". The special edition includes remastered versions on CD and Vinyl and also includes Blu-Ray with 5.1 channel, Atmos, and stereo sound. A live performance at Wembley in 1974 and a book of the same name with never before seen photos and material.
18. The one who obviously had to interrupt the celebration is Roger Waters who claimed that this album was his alone and not "the band's" and he decided to re-record the whole album.
This album broke sales records and time in the charts when in 2011 he made a re-entry into the American Billboard which caused it to cross the 1,000-week mark in the charts.
Listen to the album on: Spotify, Apple Music