Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  Illustrating the work-in-progress nature of Pink Floyd’s new stage presentation, in this early live version of “Us and Them,” it’s Waters who takes the lead vocal, not David Gilmour. The melody lies near the top-end of the bassist’s vocal range, but he does a creditable job with the song.

  In its undeveloped state at the Guildhall concert, “Any Colour You Like” is a brief (under two minutes) piece—more an interlude than a song—that showcases David Gilmour on lead guitar and scat vocal. Musically it’s quite similar to the previous night’s instrumental version of “Breathe (Reprise).”

  The debut of “Brain Damage” reveals a tune based precariously upon a taped percussion part that feels quite out of place. Roger Waters’s lyrics, however, are fully developed. Taped voices fade in and out of the mix as the song nears its end. A careening synthesizer tone leads into a squealing, free-form instrumental that concludes the first complete performance of The Dark Side of the Moon. The song “Eclipse”—which would close the album in dramatic fashion—has not yet been written, and thus would not be featured as part of Pink Floyd’s live performance in Portsmouth and other dates around that time.

  The 1972 shows featuring the still-developing The Dark Side of the Moon concert set piece would be remarkably well-documented by bootleggers. No less than forty-five concerts were illicitly recorded, providing a nearly show-by-show chronology of the work’s ongoing refinement. But Dark Side came together into something resembling its final form rather quickly: while the set ended with sound effects following “Brain Damage” for the earliest performances, by February 12—three and a half weeks after the Brighton premiere—“Eclipse” had been added to The Dark Side of the Moon.

  “When you’re working in a band and you’re performing something willy-nilly, it develops and changes,” Roger Waters said in an interview for the 2003 documentary Classic Albums: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon. Nick Mason concurred, noting that it was a truly collaborative endeavor. “All four of us were there, and there was a discussion about putting the album together and making it into this themed—what is now called a concept—album.”

  The work would continue to evolve across numerous live performances throughout the year. But significant progress would be made within days of the premiere. “Since their Brighton tour opener, Floyd have tightened up a lot of their numbers,” wrote Tony Stewart in NME. He noted that the sound effects had changed a great deal in the two weeks between the premiere and a February 3 set at the Lanchester Polytechnic College Arts Festival. Calling The Dark Side of the Moon “a superbly constructed number,” Stewart went on to observe that at Lanchester, the band “managed to get right through it without technical hitches.”

  Though it would not always be played, The Dark Side of the Moon was most often the centerpiece of Pink Floyd’s 1972 concerts. When the band headed to Japan in March, Dark Side was performed in its entirety at all six shows. And when the band mounted a two-leg North American tour—all of April and most of September—The Dark Side of the Moon would be the centerpiece of those shows, though for the first leg the work was titled “Eclipse (A Piece for Assorted Lunatics).”

  The changes and refinements made to the onstage performances would inform the concurrent studio sessions for the album, and vice versa. By most accounts, audiences appreciated the opportunity to hear new material from Pink Floyd, even if it wasn’t fully developed. But not everyone was impressed. Writing for Great Speckled Bird, Steve Wise reviewed the band’s April 18 concert at Atlanta’s Symphony Hall. “Their first set featured, as far as I could tell, all new material,” Wise wrote. “But the band seemed a bit out of synch, and their usual power and intensity was dulled.”

  By November, a number of changes had been made to Dark Side, bringing it closer to its final form. While “The Travel Sequence” would still be an extended jam, a recording (created by audio engineer Alan Parsons) of clocks would open “Time,” and the song would be played faster, with David Gilmour adopting a slightly more aggressive vocal tone. “The Mortality Sequence” was now completely replaced by an instrumental of breathtaking beauty, Richard Wright’s “The Great Gig in the Sky.” The signature wordless vocal line that would be featured on the album had not yet been conceived; an audience recording from a Hamburg, West Germany, concert (November 12, 1972) shows that tapes of spoken-word recitations would be played along with Wright’s piano-centered melody. “Any Colour You Like” often took the form of an extended, bluesy reading alternating between subtle and musically intense sections.

  Pink Floyd’s last live performance of The Dark Side of the Moon prior to the record’s March 1973 release would take place on December 10, 1972, at Palais des Sports, in Lyon, France. An audience recording shows that “The Travel Sequence” has developed into a more cohesive piece (one that would go unused on the finished album). “Any Colour You Like” has mushroomed into a nine-minute piece. In the time between the Lyon concert and the end of February, Pink Floyd would complete recording sessions and post-production mixing for its eighth studio album.

  Chapter 26

  The Great Gig in the Sky

  In the thirteen months between the live premiere of The Dark Side of the Moon and its release on LP, cassette, and 8-track tape, tens of thousands—perhaps even hundreds of thousands—of concert-going fans had heard the developing work in its entirety. A heavy touring schedule took the band to concert dates in England, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, West Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, France, and Belgium. At those shows, Pink Floyd would perform the extended work known variously as “Eclipse,” “A Piece for Assorted Lunatics,” and The Dark Side of the Moon, plus a second set of songs from the band’s seven-album back catalog.

  But that which fans heard onstage and what they would find on the record released worldwide on Thursday, March 1, 1973, were two very different things. The band’s extensive performance schedule and countless hours in the studio had yielded a finished piece that—while it would preserve and reflect all of the stage performance’s best qualities—represented a far more refined, nuanced, and deeply textured work.

  The changes from the stage show would become clear to listeners mere seconds after the needle dropped onto the spinning vinyl record. Taking a cue from classical overtures—but applying the ideas in a decidedly modern manner—Pink Floyd opens The Dark Side of the Moon with a brief piece that sonically references and previews most, if not all, of the album’s themes in the space of just over one minute. Titled “Speak to Me,” the instrumental soundscape is a heady, dizzying mélange of sounds compiled by Nick Mason.

  “Speak to Me” fades in from silence to open with the simulated heartbeat sound that introduced The Dark Side of the Moon to concert-going audiences. Thirty seconds in, the sound of a ticking clock is added to the mix, followed by another clock. Seconds later, a man’s voice speaking in malevolent, threatening tones can be heard, boldly declaring that he’s “been mad for fucking years.” A ringing cash register can be heard. Another man states matter-of-factly that he’s “always been mad.” A third man speaks, but his words are obscured by the cacophony of the assembled sounds. A fourth voice enters the mix, but rather than speaking, this man breaks out in maniacal laughter. A droning, mechanical sound—created by the band’s VCS 3 synthesizer—enters the soundscape as all of the other elements continue to increase in volume and intensity. The whirring of the mechanical sound—along with the sinister laughing—begins to drown out all of the other sounds. Deep from within the mix, a minor chord from Richard Wright’s organ begins to emerge. A woman’s voice lets out a series of four terrified wails. The Dark Side of the Moon has begun.

  “Speak to Me” tumbles straight into “Breathe,” a tune credited jointly to Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Richard Wright. With the benefit of context and hindsight, it’s quite clear what each man has brought to the song. The two-chord pattern upon which the song is built had arisen during the earliest work sessions for what would become The Dark Si
de of the Moon; as E minor and A major are two of the most effortless chords to play on a guitar—and because they naturally go together—it’s likely that guitarist Gilmour came up with the pattern. “A lot of the musical ideas just came up just jamming away” in a rehearsal room in Bermondsey, London, Gilmour said in a 2003 interview filmed for a documentary about the album.

  Like all of the songs on The Dark Side of the Moon (and the four albums that would follow it over the next decade), the lyrics of “Breathe” are from the pen of Roger Waters. Beginning with the kernel of an idea that began during the sessions for an outside project, the collaboration with Ron Geesin on the soundtrack for The Body, Waters builds a set of lyrics around the phrase “breathe in the air.” Following on to his recently developed focus on writing with empathy—an interest that had begun with Meddle’s “Echoes”—Waters crafts lyrics that speak of opening oneself to others (“Don’t be afraid to care”), and self-determination (“Choose your own ground”). The song also expresses need and vulnerability (“leave, but don’t leave me”). And while “Breathe” displays guarded optimism (“Long you live and high you fly”), that point of view is quickly tempered by an admonition that to succeed, one must play by society’s rules, and further, that in the end, death is the inevitable outcome.

  Waters would be justly proud of his lyrics for “Breathe,” though in interviews he would sometimes speak self-deprecatingly of his words for the song. “It always amazes me that I got away with it, really,” he said in a 2003 interview, suggesting that the words to “Breathe” are typical of what a high-schooler might write. “It’s so sort of ‘lower sixth,’” Waters said. In that same interview, he shed some light on the song’s meaning, or at least how it might be received by listeners. “In context with the music—and then in context with the piece as a whole—people are prepared to accept that simple exhortation to be prepared to stand your ground and attempt to live your life in an authentic way.”

  Meanwhile, keyboardist Richard Wright’s musical contribution to “Breathe” should not be overlooked, as it’s a crucial one that helps the song rise above a standard-issue two-chord jam. Noting that his musical background was jazz, Wright explained what he created for the song when interviewed for the 2003 documentary, The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon. Wright had devised a transitional chord sequence that connects the end of the song’s first verse with the start of the second (there’s no chorus as such), and the idea came from a surprising source: it is, he says, “totally down to a chord I actually heard on a Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue.” That jazz influence upon the song—and others on Dark Side as well—would be one of several qualities to take the album beyond the musical areas explored by its predecessors; doing so would widen Pink Floyd’s appeal.

  Over the course of The Dark Side of the Moon’s development as a unified work, “The Travel Sequence” had been a frustrating sticking point for the band. Onstage, it took the form of a simple, relatively formless instrumental that featured Gilmour’s guitar solo and some electric piano fills from Richard Wright. “We’d been playing it live that way for some time as a guitar jam sort of piece,” Gilmour recalled in a 2003 interview for the Making of . . . documentary. “I think that we were—none of us—that happy with it as a piece,” he said.

  So for the album, Gilmour and Waters co-composed a new piece that would use the sonic textures of the VCS 3 (also known as the Synthi) synthesizer as a starting point. Debuting in 1969, the VCS 3 was one of the earliest available synthesizers, and unlike similar devices from American companies led by inventors Robert A. Moog and Don Buchla, the British-made VCS 3 had been designed as a relatively lightweight, portable machine housed in a suitcase.

  The new instrumental piece, “On the Run,” begins with a droning bass note that provides linkage with the final notes of “Breathe.” That droning sound is followed immediately by what sounds very much like Nick Mason playing a remarkably fast percussion pattern on his hi-hat cymbal. In fact, the relentless beat is a product of the VCS 3. A swirling organ note—run through a rotating Leslie speaker—adds a bit of organic musical character to the increasingly electronic soundscape.

  A low-frequency, gurgling pattern of notes fades into the mix; it, too, has been created using the VCS 3 and its built-in sequencer, a feature that allows a melody to be pre-programmed into the machine and then played back at the triggering of a switch. With that sequence playing on its own (so to speak), David Gilmour’s hands are free to further manipulate the sound, adjusting the treble, bass, and other sonic qualities, effectively in real-time.

  Around the thirty-second mark of “On the Run,” a female voice can be heard; her words are indecipherable, but her tone suggests the slightly officious demeanor of someone announcing a flight departure schedule at an airport. The urgent feel of the hi-hat percussion and the ceaseless sequence of notes from the VCS 3, coupled with the added sounds of running footsteps, only reinforces the notion of someone struggling to keep up with a schedule and timetable devised and maintained by other, unseen forces.

  Additional aural textures from the VCS 3 evoke mental pictures of spacecraft descending ominously toward the unnamed running everyman. Gilmour and Waters continue to manipulate the controls of the synthesizer, varying the tone color and character as the electronic “rhythm section” continues unabated. One of the male voices from “Speak to Me” returns; it, too, is unintelligible. But the portentous laugh that follows leaves little question that some kind of danger—or at least the dark unknown—lies close ahead.

  A squalling sound—again from the VCS 3—seems to fly across the aural landscape. The unknown spacecraft makes several passes overhead, each time veering ever closer to its intended target. At the three-minute mark, a loud explosion is heard, followed by its rumbling aftermath. But the protagonist has survived to live another day; he can be heard running and breathing heavily as the after-effects of the booming sound recede into the sonic distance.

  Recording the many sounds that would make up “On the Run” would be merely the first step in creating the track. Crafting the densely textured tapestry of sounds for “On the Run” would involve pushing the capabilities of the recording console to its limit; all four members of Pink Floyd along with engineer Alan Parsons took part in the final mixing of the track, at which time the various sonic components would be faded in and out of the piece in real time as a completed recording was made. “A mix in those days was a performance, every bit as much as doing a gig,” David Gilmour observed in 2003.

  The calm atmosphere created by the near-silence that follows “On the Run” is joined by the sound of a few gently ticking mechanical clocks. That reverie is jarringly punctured by the sudden clamor of countless timekeeping devices striking their alarms, chiming the top of the hour, and so forth. “Time” has come. As that racket begins to subside, a different kind of ticking is heard. Once again it’s the mechanical, percussive tones of the VCS 3 synthesizer, joined by the “heartbeat” sound; the two are in sync.

  More than forty seconds into “Time,” a single, low-register note (E) is struck simultaneously on David Gilmour’s guitar, Roger Waters’s bass, and the VCS 3. Explicitly making use of the concept of time, the band waits a full eight seconds before hitting the next note (F♯). The effect of the long pause—four measures in musical notation—is to convey the tension associated with waiting; the long space between notes suggests the manner in which anticipation (and/or dread) can cause one to perceive that time is moving slowly, or even approaching a standstill. The subtle fills on Richard Wright’s electric piano do nothing to relieve the tension.

  Nick Mason adds some inventive percussion to the extended introduction of “Time.” Using rototoms—small, rack-mounted drum heads with steel frames that can be rotated on the fly, thus tuning to specific (and generally high-pitched) musical notes—he colors the sonic palette, adding even more tension in the process.

  Taken at a pace ever so slightly quicker than Pink Floyd’s original live versions of
a year earlier, this “Time” is nonetheless far more dramatic, thanks to an overall sharper attack on the instruments, even in the introduction before the song-proper has begun. After the bass notes establish the basis for the song’s chord structure a few times—joined by ever-busier rototom work—Mason signals the beginning of the main section of “Time” with a familiar drum fill.

  David Gilmour enters immediately on lead vocal. Where the earlier live readings of “Time” had featured dual lead vocals (Gilmour and Wright), with the two gently harmonizing, here Gilmour initially sings alone, adopting a much harder, more aggressive vocal demeanor.

  As the guitarist sings Roger Waters’s lyrics about the dullness of everyday existence (“You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way”), he adds bluesy, inventive fills on guitar in the spaces between vocal phrases. The synthesizer’s excellent ability to generate deep and sustained low-frequency notes helps provide an even more solid bottom-end to the song than Waters’s bass alone could ever provide. The feeling of anticipation created by the introduction is made explicit as Gilmour sings of “waiting for someone or something to show you the way.”

  As he has done in the live version of “Time,” Rick Wright takes a solo lead vocal for the next few lines, the song’s “bridge” (“Time” has no chorus in a traditional sense). Waters’s lyrics have been changed from “lying supine in the sunshine” to the more direct “tired of lying in the sunshine.” Meanwhile, another new sonic element has been added: for the first time ever on a Pink Floyd record (save for the choral sections on 1970’s “Atom Heart Mother Suite”), female vocals are used. Four session singers—Barry St. John, Liza Strike, and Lesley Duncan, all from Great Britain; plus American rhythm and blues singer Doris Troy—lend their talents for a variety of soulful, harmonized “ooh”s and “aah”s, all filtered through effects on engineer Alan Parsons’s recording console. The net effect of the female vocals is to introduce an earthy soul and jazz sensibility to the music. When Wright reaches the third line of lyrics, David Gilmour joins on harmony vocal as the two sing of time having slipped by without notice, taking opportunities with it: “You missed the starting gun.”