And to think that “The Dark Side of The Moon” is the title of an album released in 1972 by Medicine Head, an English heavy rock band, who made a flop with this record and who no one remembers today. A fate opposite to that befallen the Pink Floyd which celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of one of the absolute masterpieces of music, a work that goes far beyond rock. Already because “The Dark Side of the Moon” was the title that Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright e Nick Mason they had in mind for that new project that would change their lives and move the concept of recording far forward. They were burned on time come on Medicine Head and so he was chosen “Eclipse”: then, after the aforementioned flop, they returned to the original idea thus adding another right piece to a mosaic that will turn out to be perfect, the adjective used most often to define this work which is one of the best-selling titles ever and which from March 1, 1973 to today it has remained in the charts almost continuously.
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“The Dark Side of The Moon” is a magical combination of musical ideas, technology, art design and that visionary imagination that has been the band’s hallmark since its inception, but which in this case captures not only the spirit of a time already in transformation but manages to fix on vinyl a music that has won the challenge of time. The cover is one of the most iconic in rock history. Created by the English graphic designer George Hardie with the contribution of Storm Thorgerson e Aubrey Powell by the Hipgnosis studio, represents a ray of white light which, through a prism, with the exclusion of indigo, is broken up into its constituent colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Inside the cover, the ray forms the heartbeat of the light spectrum that recalls the one that opens the album. The underlying themes are those that will characterize the subsequent production: the pressure exerted by power, money, the sense of bewilderment, madness, obviously linked to the conditions of Syd Barrett, il “Crazy Diamond” who had founded the band and who had already closed himself in the labyrinths of his mind.
Like all self-respecting masterpieces, “The Dark Side of The Moon” also has a history made up of unpredictable episodes and some of these concern, directly or indirectly, Alan Parson, the brilliant sound engineer who created the soundscape of the album, working with razor blades and tapes, coming to conceive the idea, crazy for the time, of recording in quadriphonic mode, a technology that in fact was not only not available in 1973 but still today can only be used for events and in conditions details. During the recordings Parson often found himself working alone in the studio, because Roger Waters watched the matches of “his” Arsenal but above all Pink Floyd did not miss an episode of Monty Python’s “Flying Circus” which was so popular on the BBC at the time that the band, along with other rock stars, contributed to the budget of their first film, the hilarious “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. Parson was nominated for a Grammy for this extraordinary work, but saw the relationship with the band crack which publicly did not fully recognize his merits: it was then that he decided to start his own business with the Alan Parson Project.
Even the now legendary vocal part of “The Great Gig In The Sky” owes its debt to the case and, for a change, is tied up in legal aftermath. The idea was to add a female voice to the track: Alan Parson called Clare Torry, a recording studio vocalist who was 22 at the time. Torry recorded her own tracks and after a couple of sessions she was paid £60: it seems she was even intending to write an apology to the band because she felt her performance might have sounded too emphatic. Only after publication did he realize that his name was part of the album’s credits: the story continued in the courts until 2005, when a judge recognized Torry’s lost earnings, attributing to her 50% ownership of the song and 50% % of royalties making her a millionaire. The anecdote is endless: “Us and Them” for example was written by Richard Wright for “Zabriskie Point” but Antonioni rejected it, “Money”, with all those noises and clangs and cash register sounds wanted by Waters and recorded analogically, it is one of the most famous 7/4 time signatures in rock history (“but for the guitar solo, David Gilmour recalled, we went back to 4/4 time to make things easier for me”). Like all authentic masterpieces, “The Dark Side of The Moon” after 50 years keeps intact that special aura that takes music elsewhere that the many studies and the most accurate reconstructions fail to capture because it remains unfathomable. A work conceived as a concept album without singles (“Money” was released in the USA on the initiative of the record company) drying the performances from the long instrumental improvisations that characterized the music of Pink Floyd, thus obtaining a wonderful, perfect synthesis with astonishing effects, because on March 1, 1973, the language of the future emerged from a vinyl record.
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