10/1/23
Newsletter #475
The Crack of Dawn
A minor point of pride in my youth was that I was actually a Pink Floyd fan before Dark Side of the Moon (1973). I owned their earlier album, Meddle, on 8-track. Previous to Dark Side almost nobody had ever heard of Pink Floyd. They had had a moment in the spotlight in 1967 (before I was buying albums) with their hit psychedelic song, See Emily Play, written and sung by their original lead singer, guitarist, songwriter, Syd Barrett. Syd was an early victim of drugs in rock & roll, and apparently took so much LSD that he never came down. By 1969 Syd was such a wreck that Pink Floyd fired him. In most circumstances, should you lose your lead guitarist/vocalist/songwriter, your band would be a dead duck. Well, Pink Floyd wasn’t ready to break up, and since they did have a hit song and album (albeit the creation of the bandmember they had just fired), the record company was apparently willing to stick with them for a minute. However, replacing your lead guitarist/vocalist/ songwriter isn’t such an easy thing to do. Pink Floyd quite promptly replaced Syd with David Gilmour, a Cambridge schoolmate of Floyd’s bass player, Roger Waters. The fact that David Gilmour existed in the first place, was a pal, and was available is a miracle.
Pink Floyd then bumbled their way through a number of albums, like Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma, that are simultaneously awful, and kind of interesting, but didn’t sell at all. What saved them from extinction was that two European film directors – Barbet Schroeder and Michelangelo Antonioni – both liked Pink Floyd’s music and used it in their movies. Barbet Schroeder had Pink Floyd score his films, More (1969) and La Vallée (1972), and Antonioni featured their music on the score of Zabriski Point (1970).
In 1973 Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon, which holds and retains a singular place in rock & roll history – no other album has ever been so popular for so long. In the course of going 14x platinum (45 million copies sold), Dark Side remained on the Billboard Top 100 chart for just short of a flabbergasting 19 years – 1973 to 1992 – meaning 981 consecutive weeks. It’s ridiculous.
The fact that I love the album The Dark Side of the Moon so much only goes to show what standard, run-of-the-mill, jejune taste I have. I pretty much love exactly the music that my demographic is supposed to love. I have owned Dark Side of the Moon on a vinyl album, an 8-track tape, a cassette tape, a compact disk, and if it’s released in pill form, I’ll buy and ingest it.
Because of Dark Side of the Moon, I committed the only thievery of my life. And I was somehow proud of it. And didn’t do it once or twice, but like twenty times. Included with album are two shockingly ugly posters that I never put up, but also two bumper stickers that I liked a lot.
Well, to be able to give them away with every album, they were manufactured of the cheapest, crappiest, most insufficient materials humanly possible. What this meant practically was that every time it rained, the front paper side of the Pink Floyd bumper stickers (affixed to my 1968 VW Beetle) would crinkle up and begin dislodging themselves from the bumper. Soon thereafter, in the next rain, they’d just fall off.
Therefore, often when I was at parties throughout the 1970s (I’d like to believe that I was done with this bad habit by 1980), I’d check out people’s record collections. Should I come across a copy of Dark Side of the Moon – which was pretty certain for a while there – I’d look and see if the stickers were there, and they always were. So, at an appropriate moment, I’d steal them. At home I had a drawer full of them. When I would inevitably find the white sticker dangling from my bumper (with all of the ink faded away), I’d just replace it. I repeated this routine many, many times. Eventually, I moved on to other cars to which I never stuck a Pink Floyd sticker. However, if I cared to look hard enough right now, I could probably still find a couple of those stolen stickers.
Plus, I bought the new vinyl edition of the album, and it has the stickers in there.
Welcome to October.
Loved DSOTMoon too. Immediately when it came out ~fifty years ago. One line really got to me back then , looking ahead at life "And then one day you find . ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run , you missed the starting gun." I completed and submitted my applications to 3 universities Within a week after hearing it.