Dark Side

Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side’: 40 Years Later, 40 Mind-Blowing Facts About The Mad Classic

By Chris Willman | Stop The Presses! – 

Sure, like everybody else, you’ve listened to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon so many times that you can recite not just every line but every heartbeat, clock tick, and cash register ring by heart. But how much do you really know about the landmark prog classic, which is celebrating its 40^th anniversary this month?

To celebrate the 40 years we’ve been listening to what is arguably the preeminent rock album of the 1970s, here are 40 things you ought to know about Dark Side. Because lunacy breeds albums about lunacy, and albums about lunacy breed lunatic obsessions with album trivia. Let’s start with that iconic cover art, shall we?The original prism coverThe band members spent three minutes deciding on the front cover. Designer Storm Thorgerson brought seven designs into the Abbey Road studio where they were still recording. “The band trooped in, swept their gaze across the designs, looked at each other, nodded, and said ‘That one,’ pointing at the prism. Took all of three minutes,” Thorgerson recalled in liner notes for the 2011 deluxe box. In an 2003 interview, the designer elaborated, “No amount of cajoling would get them to consider any other contender, nor endure further explanation of the prism, or how exactly it might look. ‘That’s it,’ they said in unison, ‘we’ve got to get back to real work,’ and returned forthwith to the studio upstairs.”
One of the rejected designs involved a then-popular Marvel comic book superhero. Imagine how differently we’d think of the album if the Floyd members had expressed any interest in one of Thorgersen’s alternative ideas, to have the cover feature… the Silver Surfer!
The band had always hated having their photos in the artwork. “When Storm showed us all the ideas, with that one, there was no doubt,” guitarist David Gilmour told Rolling Stone in 2003. “It was, ‘That is it.’ It's a brilliant cover. One can look at it after that first moment of brilliance and think, ‘Well, it's a very commercial idea: It's very stark and simple; it'll look great in shop windows.’ It wasn't a vague picture of four lads bouncing in the countryside. That fact wasn't lost on us.”
It was keyboardist Rick Wright who was insistent that the cover not feature any photography at all, even conceptual photos. The Hipgnosis design team was famous for elaborately staged and photographed covers, like Wish You Were Here, which came out two years later. But in this instance, as Thorgerson remembers it, Wright “said, ‘Storm, let’s have a cool graphic, not one of your tatty [figurative] pictures…’ I protested. ‘Rick,’ I said, ‘I do images, I don’t do cool graphics.’… Whereupon Rick said, ‘Why don’t you try to see it as a challenge.’”
The prism design was partly inspired by Floyd’s extravagant live light shows. “The refracting glass prism referred to Floyd light shows–consummate use of light in the concert setting,” Thorgerson said in an interview for the album’s 30^th anniversary. “Its outline is triangular and triangles are symbols of ambition, and are redolent of pyramids, both cosmic and mad in equal measure, all these ideas touching on themes in the lyrics. The joining of the spectrum extending round the back cover and across the gatefold inside was seamless like the segueing tracks on the album, whilst the opening heartbeat was represented by a repeating blip in one of the colors.”The infra-red pyramids posterThe designer went to Egypt to shoot infra-red photography of the pyramids for an inside poster. Pyramids are triangular, like the prism on the front cover, so there was that angle. But Thorgerson also figured pyramids tied in with the album’s running theme of insanity, being “fantastic structures intended to elevate Pharaohs and assist in transporting worldly goods skywards to heaven—and how mad is that?”
For a while the album had a different working title. It was to be named Eclipse (A Piece for Assorted Lunatics].
The reason it had a different title for a while was because there’d just been another album come out called Dark Side of the Moon. A group called Medicine Head beat them to the punch with a 1972 release by that title, which made Pink Floyd temporarily drop it as theirs. But when the Medicine Head album flopped, the original title was a go again.
“Money” is one of the few hit singles ever to utilize a 7/4 time signature. Roger Waters has made it sound like David Gilmour wasn’t down with that weird rhythm. “Occasionally,” Waters told Rolling Stone, “I would do things and Dave would say, ‘No, that's wrong. There should be another beat. That's only seven.’ I'd say, ‘Well, that's how it is.’ A number of my songs have bars of odd length.” But part of the song does take place in a traditional time signature. As Gilmour said, "We created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo (but) made the poor sax player play in 7/4."