Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

This Musical Life: Essential Albums, Part 3 of 5

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

I hope you’re enjoying this “Essential Albums” mini-series. I encourage folks to listen to the albums with headphones, ideally in one go. That’s the way to let the alchemy in. Thank you for reading and sharing your own reflections, stories, reactions. Have a good start to your week. ~ Erin

Perfection. The Dark Side of the Moon is a quintessential concept album – carrying a story throughout – bound to blow one’s socks off if they are open-minded and have the time to sit and listen. Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and company create an environment, a landscape, and an odyssey through these songs. We are led through space and time – through outer space and hypnotic timelessness – and we have no desire to leave, only to stay alert for what might emerge next. We are first drawn in through the psychologically captivating cover art – the symbolic and beautiful chromatic prism and pyramid. We know we’re going somewhere psychedelic; we’ve taken the tab – and it’s the good stuff.

My first dose of Dark Side was not gently handed to me, no. Rather, it was a force-feeding, and a rather unpleasant one at that. At the age of twelve, I was living on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska with my mother and her much younger boyfriend, a wild-eyed southern boy named Billy Joe. B.J., as he was called, wasn’t just wild – he was madly brilliant and had a full-ride scholarship to earn a master’s in wildlife biology from the University of Alaska.

We had one car in our household, so whoever had to get somewhere earliest in the day set the pace. Meaning we’d have to get up in 20 degrees below zero weather, face the permafrost on the tundra, and get the old Ford Bronco started by unplugging the overnight engine block heater and warming it up enough before we’d pile into the truck. It was always pitch dark, whether it was 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. or 9 a.m.

B.J. had to get to class super early, and it was (did I say already?) always freezing cold and miserable. I was miserable. We had to ride with him (whom I resented for dragging my mother and me up to this God-forsaken place, forcing me to leave my friends and school in northern California), jacked up on coffee and raring to go for the day. My mother would then drop me at the middle school and continue to her job at the hospital.

We didn’t have much in the way of material perks, but my mother the music head made damned sure that the used Bronco got a fantastic sound system installed. B.J. popped in the cassette and turned it up loud to wake us all up. To wake up the entire frozen Alaskan Bush. The first things I heard were terrifying: helicopters reminiscent of Vietnam footage, diabolical laughter, and then a woman screaming – “Speak to Me.” The first track of The Dark Side of the Moon assaulted my tender tweenage ears.

“Turn it off!” I protested. In response, the wild one turned it up to ten.

I buried myself in my misery as Dark Side of the Moon took me on a rollercoaster I did not want to ride on. As we neared our destination, where we could stop the car and B.J. would get out and my mother would drive, the last track of Side A delivered with all its agony and glory: “The Great Gig in the Sky.” I thought I would die.

Clare Torry’s solo attacked me like a banshee. She was yelling, screaming, in some sort of agony or ecstasy, or both. She was either being attacked or having an orgasm (which I had read about in a Gothic novel somewhere) or having a child. I didn’t know, but it was the worst. Blood-curdling vocals hurled at me from Hell.

B.J. was smiling with glee. “This is pure genius, Reese.” My mother sat quietly. I felt assaulted. Get me out of here alive, God.

Such was the winter of 1983, the tenth anniversary of The Dark Side of the Moon.

Pink Floyd had become a more palatable part of my musical tastes in high school after discovering The Wall and its more accessible “Another Brick in the Wall” and “Comfortably Numb.” Around that time, I revisited Moon and fell in love; teenage angst worked well for understanding the album's complexity. And lucky for me, I got to see Pink Floyd perform live in 1988 on their Momentary Lapse of Reason tour, sans Roger Waters but featuring David Gilmour in all his guitar and vocal glory.

Fast-forward to college, some six or seven years later. My closest friends and I were – um – experimenting (but not inhaling). My conservatively raised Italian Catholic roommate had never, ever tried marijuana. It was her Big Night to not inhale. My boyfriend and I decided, of course, that the best thing to do would be to plant her in front of the speaker and put The Dark Side of the Moon on. What better music?

“Am I gonna trip?” she asked.

“Just listen,” I replied.

Providing a proper set and setting and remembering that first, harrowing introduction of my own, I opted to start slow and let the song “Time” work its gentler magic:

Home, home again. I like to be here when I can. When I come home cold and tired it's good to warm my bones beside the fire . . .

Auspicious for all, my roommate had a pleasant night with Pink.

Extra credit: Watch the making of this essential album here: Pink Floyd - The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon (49 min.) on Amazon Prime.