Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  Gilmour once again takes the lead vocals, singing Waters’s words that express the seemingly inevitable frustration of losing the battle against time’s relentless march forward, as the sun is “racing around to come up behind you again.” In the end, Roger Waters’s lyrics assert, each day will find you “shorter of breath and one day closer to death.”

  In a plaintive voice, Richard Wright voices Waters’s further observations in a resigned, mournful tone, singing of plans coming to naught. After the memorable lyrics about the English character trait of “quiet desperation,” Wright resignedly sings, “The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say.”

  After an inventive series of chords that transitions out of “Time,” a reprise of “Breathe” begins. Here, David Gilmour sings—in a slightly more hopeful tone—of home fires and resting one’s bones. After Waters’s lyrics about a distant iron bell tolling, people dropping to their knees to pray, and magic spells being spoken, the brief reprise of “Breathe” ends.

  At this point in the original stage presentation of The Dark Side of the Moon, the band had played Richard Wright’s instrumental “The Mortality Sequence,” featuring tape playback of religious-themed speeches. Wright played a “churchy” sounding Hammond organ melody, and the rest of the band would provide subtle, understated musical support. For the finished album, all of these elements have been discarded in favor of a completely new song and arrangement from the band’s keyboardist.

  A stately piano melody, “The Great Gig in the Sky” was written by Richard Wright sometime in 1972, and the basic musical track was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in June of that year. The song would replace “The Mortality Sequence” in the live The Dark Side of the Moon around that same time. Wright’s grand piano is the central instrument in the song’s arrangement; he plays a lengthy series of “jazzy” chords (that is to say, chords with voicings more complex than standard major and minor combinations of notes, and often making use of four or even five notes in the right hand). The melody is somber and contemplative, with few of the quasi-religious musical trappings so prevalent in “The Mortality Sequence.”

  “The Great Gig in the Sky” opens with Wright playing alone. Subtly, David Gilmour joins in on pedal steel guitar, and Waters plays bass guitar. Taped voices ruminating on death and dying (“You gotta go sometime”) are folded into the mix. At the one-minute mark, Nick Mason begins keeping time with clicks on his drum sticks, and after two introductory hits on his snare drum, the song’s vocals begin.

  But “The Great Gig in the Sky” features no ordinary vocals. The wordless performance is by a session vocalist, Clare Torry, who was paid £30 (the equivalent of about $475 today), double the standard EMI rate because the session took place on a Sunday. After a few tries at singing along to a playback of the finished backing track, Torry had found herself at a loss as to what the band wanted. In a 2005 interview with author John Harris, Torry recalled the minimal direction she was given: “Well, they did say, ‘Be more emotional.’” Torry turned in a wholly unexpected, searing, and deeply sensual vocal performance, the like of which she had never done before. She related to Harris what happened next. “I said, ‘I hope that’s alright.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, lovely; thank you.’ And I left.”

  Torry’s vocals on “The Great Gig in the Sky” are a landmark in the Pink Floyd catalog. While session vocalists had been used before, the idea of ceding lead vocal duties to someone outside the band was highly unusual for the group. Certainly no member of Pink Floyd could have brought forth a vocal performance remotely similar to what Torry had recorded in a mere three attempts. Richard Wright’s original concept for the song did not include female vocals. But Torry’s performance on “The Great Gig in the Sky” stands as one of the most remarkable vocals ever to be found on a pop album. Prior to her one-off session date for Pink Floyd, Torry had made her living providing vocals on budget-priced “sound-alike” records featuring anonymous musicians covering the hits of the day. After the Dark Side session, Torry would go on to work on sessions for Alan Parsons, Meat Loaf, Johnny Mercer, Culture Club, Tangerine Dream, and many others, including Roger Waters’s 1987 solo album, Radio K.A.O.S. She toured as a member of Waters’s post–Pink Floyd band, and sang with the David Gilmour–led lineup of Pink Floyd at a live concert in 1990. Some years later, Torry would lobby successfully for a composer’s co-credit on “The Great Gig in the Sky.”

  As the breathy final notes of Clare Torry’s bravura performance fade away, Richard Wright plays the song’s final chord on his Steinway grand piano. Those notes are left to decay into silence, and as they do, engineer Alan Parsons manually adjusts the tape speed, bending the note upward and then downward again. With that, the first side of The Dark Side of the Moon comes to a close.

  Chapter 27

  All You Create

  Pink Floyd had flirted with unusual time signatures before The Dark Side of the Moon. But most of the songs written by Roger Waters, David Gilmour, or Richard Wright or some combination thereof had been in either rock-standard 4/4, or in a meter based around a three- or four-count. “Echoes” is in 12/8, but its beat doesn’t feel odd to most listeners because the beat is based on multiples of four. Even a rhythmically unusual (for Pink Floyd) song like “Burning Bridges” (from 1972’s Obscured by Clouds) is in “waltz time,” 3/4. Not since the days of Syd Barrett had Pink Floyd traded in unconventional—within the confines of pop music—time signatures on songs like A Saucerful of Secrets’ “Jugband Blues,” which shifts between 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, and 6/4, all in the space of three minutes.

  Simply stated, there would be little precedent in the Pink Floyd catalog for a song such as “Money,” the opening track on the second side of 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon. But from his earliest home demos for “Money,” Roger Waters had applied a 7/4 beat to his fairly conventional, blues-based chord progression. The song opens like no other song in recording history, with a tape-based audio construction made of sound snippets (coins falling, cash registers, tearing paper meant to represent bank notes) put together to establish both the song’s motif and its time signature.

  After the taped sequence runs through two measures, Waters joins in on bass guitar. David Gilmour comes in on guitar with Nick Mason on drums; Rick Wright adds electric piano fills in between Gilmour’s lead guitar phrases. Gilmour sings lead, voicing Roger Waters’s cynical, first-person lyrics about grabbing that “cash with both hands” and extolling the pleasure of automobiles, caviar, and owning a football (soccer) team.

  In the song’s second verse, Gilmour continues the ironically self-centered lyrics by threatening those who would want some money for themselves. He wishes for a Lear jet, and dismisses charity as “do goody good bullshit.” All of these lyrics are set against the backdrop of the tune’s stomping 7/4 beat.

  The third verse of “Money” introduces yet another Pink Floyd first: a saxophone solo. Dick Parry had been a member of Jokers Wild with David Gilmour, and by 1972 had played on a half dozen album sessions by various American and British recording artists. For “Money,” Parry delivers a full minute-long, rhythm and blues–flavored solo that’s heavy on memorable melodic lines and complementary to David Gilmour’s electric guitar solo that follows.

  As Gilmour leans into his solo, the band—Waters, Wright, Mason, and Gilmour himself playing rhythm guitar on a separate track—breaks from the 7/4 meter into a straight 4/4, playing a spirited version of the “Moonhead” melody developed some two years earlier. After forty-five seconds or so, the rhythm section brings the intensity down, allowing more sonic space for Gilmour. In turn, he shifts his soloing style to a series of sparse, bluesy licks with as much silence as sound; the spaces between his notes serve to further emphasize the guitar melody. After a descending full-band melodic line that recalls Syd Barrett’s favored approach, the spirited arrangement returns, with Gilmour resuming his soaring, slashing, heavily reverberating guitar solo. That solo emphasizes the highest notes that the guitar is
capable of achieving. As a whole, the instrumental section of “Money”—Dick Parry’s sax solo plus David Gilmour’s three consecutive solos—takes up three full minutes. Not a second is wasted.

  Gilmour returns to the vocal mic to sing Roger Waters’s final verse, quoting the biblical wisdom of 1 Timothy (“Money . . . is the root of all evil today”), but inserting a qualifier (“so they say”) into the middle of the aphorism, and concluding that anyone asking his or her boss for a raise (a “rise” in British parlance) should not be surprised to learn that “they’re giving none away.”

  As the strains of “Money” fade away, taped voices—creepy laughter and random comments about being “in the right” in a physical altercation—lead into an ethereal, church-like organ with a character reminiscent of the final “Celestial Voices” section of Pink Floyd’s 1968 track “A Saucerful of Secrets.”

  Roger Waters’s lyrics for “Us and Them” sit atop the piano melody Richard Wright had composed for Zabriskie Point back in 1969; the instrumental was then known as “The Violent Sequence,” as it was created to accompany the film’s footage of police crackdown on protest marches and similar conflicts. But because director Michelangelo Antonioni chose not to use the piece—or, for that matter, most all of the other music Pink Floyd custom-created for his movie—Wright’s melody was ripe for its re-purposing as a key part of The Dark Side of the Moon.

  After a thirty-second organ introduction, the shimmering rhythm section joins in. Waters’s understated yet assured bass line supports Wright’s piano, while David Gilmour picks the individual notes of chords. Nick Mason provides a subtle backbeat. After another thirty seconds, Dick Parry enters on saxophone, playing a smoky, romantic lead. Parry takes full advantage of Wright’s jazz-inflected piano chord shadings to explore “blue” (non-standard pitch) notes on his sax.

  David Gilmour’s vocals on “Us and Them” are a thing of beauty: dreamy yet concise, yearning yet somehow assured. Roger Waters’s lyrics focus on the spaces between people and the often futile nature of modern existence (“in the end it’s only round and round”). The repeating-effect delay applied to the end of each of Gilmour’s vocal phrases (“us . . . us . . . us”) provides an aural representation of the emotional distance between individuals.

  One of the unique qualities of Roger Waters’s lyrics for The Dark Side of the Moon is his complete avoidance of traditional vocal chorus/refrains. Other than restatement of a key word or phrase—“Money,” for example—his lyrics move forward in each song, never circling back upon themselves in the manner of most conventional pop songwriting. “Us and Them” stands as a key example of this: the title phrase appears at the beginning of Gilmour’s vocals, never to be repeated. The chorus (as such) of “Us and Them” features not a refrain but a new set of lyrics each of the three times it comes around. And the massed vocals on that chorus—Gilmour, Wright, and the four-woman ensemble of singers—sing Waters’s words in glorious, close harmony. Waters’s belief that citizens, most especially those in the military during time of war, are often mere pawns in a game controlled by others is vividly given voice with this line: “‘Forward!’ he cried from the rear, and the front rank died.”

  Calling attention to one specific example of Rick Wright’s inventive flourishes on “Us and Them” creates the danger of overstating its importance, but it’s worth mention nonetheless. For the first and third word in each verse (“Us and them,” “Me and you,” “Black and blue,” etc.) a repeating, “echo” effect is applied to David Gilmour’s vocals, emphasizing the sense of empty spaces, distance, and loneliness. The few bars that follow musically have “holes.” That is to say that the absence of new sounds is intentional, and itself part of the music.

  But during the phrase “Up and down,” Richard Wright playfully adds the tiniest bit of filigree. As he has been doing, in the first lines of each verse, Wright is playing a melody based on a D major chord, leaving space after the vocal phrases. But in the sonic emptiness after Gilmour sings “Up,” Wright’s right hand jumps up a full octave, playing a quick D major chord. It’s a literal musical expression of the concept of “up,” the kind of sentimental filigree one might not expect on a rock record. But its judicious use—a single time on the record—makes its application inspired, and those familiar with the song would likely find it odd if Richard Wright’s decorative “up” chord were missing.

  As “Us and Them” winds its way toward a conclusion, the vocal chorus delivers one of Roger Waters’s bleakest, least-hopeful lyrics ever, one that shines a light upon humankind’s selfish tendencies: “For want of the price of tea and a slice the old man died.”

  Holding to The Dark Side of the Moon’s seamless continuity, there is no break between “Us and Them” and the album’s third instrumental work (or fourth, if one considers the wordless “The Great Gig in the Sky” an instrumental). One of Nick Mason’s signature drum fills links directly to “Any Colour You Like.” A funky beat and celestial, highly melodic synthesizer work from Rick Wright characterize the tune, credited to Wright, Gilmour, and Mason. Wright’s keyboard textures here, realized on a then relatively new and compact analog synthesizer called the Minimoog, preview the keyboardist’s further sonic explorations on Pink Floyd’s next album, 1975’s Wish You Were Here. “Any Colour You Like” also features a kind of call-and-response between multiple tracked versions of David Gilmour’s heavily effect-laden electric guitar. In its musical structure, “Any Colour You Like” follows “Breathe” quite closely, right down to Rick Wright’s jazz-flavored ending transitional phrase. But this time, that transition leads the listener into “Brain Damage.”

  Lyricist and bassist Roger Waters takes his first solo lead vocal on The Dark Side of the Moon with “Brain Damage.” As part of a suite of songs concerning the pressure of everyday life, “Brain Damage” is perhaps the most explicitly dour, concerned as it is with insanity. That condition would have been one that hit remarkably close to home for Roger Waters and his Pink Floyd band mates; at the time of The Dark Side of the Moon’s release, the band’s original leader and songwriter Syd Barrett had been gone from the group for more than five years. Though the band’s first musical attempts after Barrett’s departure took the form of self-conscious attempts to follow in his musical style, Pink Floyd soon established a new musical identity of its own. Yet the shadow of Barrett remained with the band, and each of the three albums that would follow The Dark Side of the Moon would deal with his memory in its own way.

  “The lunatic,” as Roger Waters sings in each of the three verses of “Brain Damage,” is never very far away at all. First he is “on the grass,” then “in the hall” (“in my hall,” Waters sings the second time, making the personal connection even more direct), and finally “in my head.” The solutions offered to deal with the “lunatic” are unsatisfying: brain surgery is suggested, as is solitary confinement. But nothing provides a suitable resolution, as Waters writes and sings, “you shout and no one seems to hear.” In The Dark Side of the Moon’s most direct reference to Syd Barrett—who is never named on the record—Waters sings, “the band you’re in starts playing different tunes,” a nod to the situation in which Syd Barrett found himself in late 1967.

  David Gilmour’s whistle-like fills on slide guitar punctuate Waters’s vocal phrases; as the song progresses, the singer is joined by Gilmour on harmony vocals. And while The Dark Side of the Moon is no Broadway musical, the stagecraft technique of bringing cast members back to the spotlight as the production nears its end is used to good effect on “Brain Damage.” In between lyrical phrases, members of the female chorus sing soulful, wordless moans, and all join in on the song’s final line: “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”

  “Eclipse” closes The Dark Side of the Moon in grand fashion. The song has the feel of a credits-roll, with its cascading lines of vocal harmonies, tumbling one after the other with some twenty-four lyric lines before a resolution. “Eclipse” enumerates a litany of things that a person can
observe or experience through one’s senses (touch, see, taste, feel), emotions (love, hate, distrust), actions (save, give, deal, buy, “beg, borrow or steal,” create, destroy, do, say, eat, meet, slight, fight). Gathering together all of the album’s vocalists (save Clare Torry)—David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Lesley Duncan, Barry St. John, Liza Strike, and Doris Troy—The Dark Side of the Moon concludes by asserting how very small each individual truly is in the grand scheme of the universe. Everything that currently exists, everything in the past and the future, and “everything under the sun is in tune,” in the words of Pink Floyd lyricist Roger Waters, but inevitably “the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”

  As the album’s signature heartbeat fades to nothingness, the doorman from EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, Gerry Driscoll, gets the final word: “There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.”

  The Dark Side of the Moon was released worldwide on March 1, 1973. It reached the top spot on album charts in the United States, Canada, and Austria, making it to the number two spot in Australia, the United Kingdom, Norway, and the Netherlands. Remaining on the U.S. charts for a staggering 741 consecutive weeks, it finally slipped off the Billboard 200 during a year in which the chart was dominated by the Dirty Dancing film soundtrack and releases by George Michael, Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses, and U2. The songs on The Dark Side of the Moon quickly became a staple of rock FM radio stations, and remain popular on classic rock radio to the present day.