Classic for a Reason, or "How I Shed My Music Snobbery" (Discovering Pink Floyd)
Learning to listen out of context and appreciate things I had dismissed.
After becoming an underground/indie/alternative music snob in my teens and deliberately eschewing "classic rock" in defiance of the rest of society, it took me quite a while to let go of that adolescent contrarianism and realize that some things are "classic" for a reason.
In high school, I pretty much dismissed anything classic, or current rock in favor of the stuff that was the opposite of all of that, to my mind, and the opposite of what my high school classmates were listening to. I had found The Cure when they finally started to break in the US. My sister is a few years older and was hanging out with the kind of “cool” misfit kids I would have hung out with had I gone to her school. They turned her onto everything from INXS to Bowie to Lords of the New Church, etc. I not only wanted to be cool like her and her friends, I wanted to NOT be like the kids I went to school with. Once I found that place, I turned my back on anything mainstream for about 10 years, becoming really snobby about it. It was so basic and normal and lame. All that toxic macho Led Zeppelin crap. The caricature image of kids driving around in Camaros, smoking Marlboros and listening to Black Sabbath on 8-track became my worst nightmare. I wanted to be heady and intellectual and deep and poetic and wear black all the time, certain that no one could possibly understand me and my world, oh so pretentious and dramatic!
I finally started to mature and lower my drawbridge in my mid-20s. Having older friends who turned me onto a lot of great obscure music while also appreciating classic things without judgment was a big positive influence on me. At that time, I needed the validation of someone I thought was “cool” to tell me it was okay to like Steely Dan or Yes or Swing Out Sister for that matter. I won’t name names. Hopefully, you know who you are as some of you subscribe to this substack.
I think I was 24 when I finally got to listen to Dark Side of the Moon properly in one sitting, beginning to end. I’m pretty much a teetotaler so the sort of culture of sitting around, smoking weed and watching The Wizard of Oz that surrounded Pink Floyd really turned me off. Without someone sitting me down and basically making me listen to it, I might never have had this moment of epiphany (though, I’d like to think it would have happened eventually. I couldn’t stay a closed-minded misanthrope indie snob forever, could I?)
In order to prime myself for this moment, some things had to happen to hear it in the right context (or out of the "wrong" context). I had to hear the previous album, Meddle, first. Meddle didn't have any massive hits on it. I think I had only heard the opening instrumental jam "One of These Days" a few times before. Understanding Meddle allowed me to hear the band, itself, fully outside of the context of the saturation of classic rock radio repeating the same 200 songs over and over ad nauseum. I realized that there was so much more to the band, as individual musicians combining to make something unique and special.
Armed with this mindset, I was ready to take the journey. I listened to Dark Side of the Moon from beginning to end, sober, lights off, totally still, no distractions. I successfully lost myself into the album, suspended any outside influences. I got pulled into it the way that I think Pink Floyd intended. The way the music unfolded from the beginning to end was very deliberate and critical to how one gets hitched up to the wagon and stays the course to the end.
I was able to appreciate that the individual parts, performances, solos, vocals etc. are less important than the overall story that the album tells. I don't mean the narrative of the lyrics. I mean that there is a musical story that unfolds throughout. The drawn-out spaces, the slow-burning intros, the inter-connecting bits and pieces, the range of tempos... It was not accidental. It was very smartly put together. Very intellectual. Very artistic. Very British too, which I liked.
This isn't the album that a rock and roll band jamming in the garage would make. It’s not an album that an American band in 1973 would have made either. This is a very deliberately constructed undertaking with a common goal for each band member. Unlike later Pink Floyd records, this isn't a vehicle solely for Roger Waters' paranoia and bitterness, like The Wall is. It's greater than the sum of the crucial parts with each musician in the band contributing something very special and uniquely “them” yet no one stands out as the virtuoso or the leader. I heard the album as a band of equals, small and large, quiet and loud. Each sound as well as the silence between the sounds was special and necessary. Nothing gratuitous. Nothing obnoxious.
It’s important to acknowledge the additional parts added to the mixture by Dick Parry on saxophone (this is one of very few rock/pop records featuring saxophone that I don't dislike), Clare Torry and various other backup singers not to mention the perfect engineering of Alan Parsons (maybe even the soul of Abbey Road studios lends a piece to the puzzle as well). Remind me to tell you how they got that long tempo-synched echo on the vocal of “Us and Them” sometime. That sort of thing is a no-brainer now, but it took quite a bit of work back then.
I wouldn't normally even think about the "branding" of the album when I am so focused on the music, but I think the packaging of the record, with the striking image of the prism over a stark black background without other words or images, goes a long way in evoking the feeling of this record. It removes the individuals of the band and it establishes that it is its own “thing”. It’s both simple and a very deep image that you recognize immediately. It also puts it well outside of anything else contemporary with it. It's taken out of it's time. It does not look or sound dated. It's truly classic in the dictionary sense of the word.
Ironically, the only song I don't love, though it's still pretty great, is the song that was the single and the only song most people would know from it, "Money". Much like "Time of the Season" by the Zombies, a few years prior to DSOTM, the one song that people know is the one song that seems to stand out like a sore thumb amongst the perfection of the rest of the album that most people won't ever hear.
The way that the album ends reminds me of The Beatles' Abbey Road ends with "The End" with a very apt and poignant statement that sums up the journey you just went on (I don't think that we needed "Her Majesty" tacked on the end of Abbey Road, but that's just me). The final lyrics of "Eclipse" wrap up the story just perfectly.
I still like a lot of Meddle, but I rarely listen to it as an album lately. Dark Side, I listen to every few months and I still love it every time. No other Pink Floyd record has connected with me the same way. Later stuff became too bloated and overwrought with Roger Waters’ oppressive negative and paranoid energy that turns me off.
If you haven't given this album the full attention that it deserves at least just once, please do yourself a favor and put on a pair of headphones, shut off the lights and close your eyes and go where it leads you.
I’d like to give credit for inspiring me to write this to a great podcast that I recently found which did a great episode this week on Dark Side of the Moon, Strong Songs. This is one of the few music podcasts that I have really loved where the host can dissect songs in a nerdy way that I appreciate, as a musician, recording engineer and a listener. He delves into the tiny details that I gravitate to and feel like no one else notices. Check it out. He has many episodes to enjoy!