13 Fascinating Facts About Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon
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On March 1, 1973, one of the most iconic albums of the 1970s was released: Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon….
1. The album's title was initially chosen as Eclipse (A Piece For Assorted Lunatics) after the band saw that the folk rock group Medicine Head had released an album titled Dark Side of the Moon. The album ultimately flopped, so Pink Floyd decided to call it Dark Side of the Moon after all.
2. The hysterical laughter in the background of "Speak To Me" and "Brain Damage" is Peter Watts, the band's head roadie. He's featured on the back of the "Ummagumma" album cover and is the father of actress Naomi Watts.
3. The guitar heard on Breathe was a pedal steel guitar that David Gilmour bought at a Seattle pawn shop in 1968.
4. Dark Side is Floyd's first album where all the lyrics are written by Roger Waters.
5. The studio recordings were interrupted several times when a Monthy Python show was on. The Floyd members were such big fans that they used the album's proceeds to finance a segment in the film Monthy Python's The Holy Grail.
6. A demo version of Brain Damage was written around the time of the album Meddle and was then titled The Dark Side of the Moon.
7. Alan Parsons was the album's recording engineer. He won the album's only Grammy, for "Best Engineered Album."
8. The design of the inside of the fold-out cover was an idea of Roger Waters
9. Not everyone knows that at the end of Eclipse, just before the voices say, "There is no dark side of the moon, really, as a matter of fact, it's all dark," a Muzak version of The Beatles' "Ticket To Ride" can be heard in the background. Apparently, this was played during the recording in the Abbey Road offices and picked up by the recording microphones.
10. Money contains a piece derived from Booker T and The MG's Green Onions. David Gilmour said: “we brought an R&B influence to the song's instrumental breaks. “I was a big Booker T fan, I had the Green Onions album when I was a teenager. And in my previous band… we played 'Green Onions' onstage… It was something I thought we could incorporate into our sound without anyone spotting where the influence had come from. And to me, it worked. Nice white English architecture students getting funky is a bit of an odd thought.”
11. Us and Them was originally written for the soundtrack of the film Zabriskie Point. However, director Antonioni felt the piece didn't fit the visuals and rejected it.
12. The band didn't want any photos of themselves in the artwork. When Storm Thorgerson showed the band his ideas, including the famous cover of "Dark Side," everyone was convinced that that had to be the cover. Gilmour told Rolling Stone in 2003: "It was, 'That is it.' It's a brilliant cover. One can look at it after that first moment of brilliance and think, 'Well, it's a very commercial idea: It's very stark and simple; it'll look great in shop windows.' It wasn't a vague picture of four lads bouncing in the countryside. That fact wasn't lost on us.”
13. It was Alan Parsons' idea to have singer Clare Torry do the female vocals on The Great Gig in the Sky. Torry only knew the song "See Emily Play" and wasn't a fan. "If it had been the Kinks, I'd have been over the moon," he said. Torry also appears on Alan Parsons' 1979 album, "Eve."
