…and they made great videos as well.
Dark Side of the Moon was released on March 1, 1973. In honor of the album’s fortieth anniversary, Forbes’ contributor Michele Catalano posted an appreciation, which in part reads:
Dark Side was not an album of hits, though. It was a concept album, something to be listened to from start to finish with the only pause being the twenty seconds it took you to flip from side one to two. While other people saw its meaning in other things – such as syncing it up to The Wizard of Oz – the true appeal and wonderment of Dark Side of the Moon was in the entirety of the story within. No, it’s not a story in the truest sense, not like The Wall, but there is a deeper story within the songs, one that each listener interpreted differently or related to their own lives and mindsets in different ways. It reached millions of people on a deep level because there was a different story in between the lines for everyone. Madness, death, the passing of time, greed, tension. Everything you needed to fuel your existential crisis was found within the grooves of Dark Side of the Moon. (Continue Reading…)
It is strange that the band wasn’t inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame until 1996, which was the eleventh class of inductees. Here is the beginning of the profile at the site:
Pink Floyd’s hallucinatory presentation of lights and music at London’s Roundhouse in 1966 brought psychedelia to the U.K. scene. The group carried rock and roll into a dimension that was more cerebral and conceptual than what preceded it. What George Orwell and Ray Bradbury were to literature, Pink Floyd is to popular music, forging an unsettling but provocative combination of science fiction and social commentary. In their early years, with vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett at the helm, Pink Floyd were the psychedelic Pied Pipers of the “London underground” scene. In the Seventies, with bassist Roger Waters providing more of the songwriting and direction, Pink Floyd became one of the most influential rock bands of all time.
Before they settled on Pink Floyd, the group went by the names Sigma 6 and the Architectural Abdabs, and they mainly performed rhythm and blues covers. Singer-guitarist Syd Barrett provided Pink Floyd with most of its original early material, including the British hits “See Emily Play” and “Arnold Layne.” Barrett’s elfin, tuneful psychedelia made him the Lewis Carroll of the pop scene. Pink Floyd’s debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is a classic of psychedelic whimsy that epitomized the remarkable year of 1967 at its most playful and creative. As the British music magazine Q opined in 1995, “Piper at the Gates of Dawn is, even counting Sgt. Pepper, possibly the defining moment of English psychedelia and Syd Barrett’s magnum opus.” Among its highlights was a nine-minute instrumental, “Interstellar Overdrive,” that represented one of rock’s first forays into deep space. It was a preoccupation of Pink Floyd’s that would later surface in songs like “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” (from A Saucerful of Secrets) and the group’s masterwork, Dark Side of the Moon. (Continue Reading…)
“Comfortably Numb” is above.
I’m using the Vimeo version of the great Another Brick in the Wall video. It is clearer and, despite the subtitles, easier to watch than the YouTube version. The person who posted it at YouTube noted that the video actually is a combination of Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 and The Happiest Days of Our Lives.
