50 Years Ago, One Flawless Rock Album Changed Everything
Story by Ian Spelling The beating heart of Pink Floyd’s remarkable career remains The Dark Side of the Moon. Released on March 1, 1973, this album catapulted Richard Wright, David Gilmour, Roger Waters, and Nick Mason to true international superstardom after having released seven previous progressive rock albums. That’s right, Pink Floyd was so good, that their most famous album was released almost ten years after they formed. It remains one of music’s most influential albums – and also one of the top-sellers of all time (at 50 million copies and counting). Let’s put Dark Side on the turntable for a lookback spin, at 33 1/3, of course.
Released on March 1, 1973, in the United States, and a few weeks later in the U.K., Dark Side of the Moon consists of 10 songs spread across 43 minutes. Despite its reputation, it’s not quite a concept album, though its tracks explore aspects of life familiar to us all: birth, fear, money, greed, mental health, mortality, and more. Highlights include the tense, even paranoid instrumental “On the Run;” the lush “Breath (In the Air), with its gorgeous harmonies; the powerful “The Great Gig in the Sky,” which is bolstered by guest vocalist Clare Torry’s stunning contributions; the catchy anti-consumerism number, “Money;” the elegiac, “Us and Them” (“And in the end, it’s only round and round.”), and “Brain Damage,” which acknowledges former bandmate Syd Barrett’s mental issues (“There's someone in my head but it's not me.”).
Believe it or not, Dark Side only spent a single week at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart, but quite legendarily, it remained on that very same chart for nearly 1000 nonconsecutive weeks – taking it into early 1990.
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