![]() ![]() This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. The drag of an after-school job: “Dig that hole, forget the sun/ And when at last the work is done/ Don’t sit down it’s time to dig another one.” The deadening IV drip of teenage existence: “Kicking around on a piece of the ground in your hometown/ Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.” The sense that the future was more of the same: “Up (up … up … up …) and down (down … down … down…)/ But in the end it’s only round and round.” The steady beat of the songs, Gilmour’s mournfully chiming guitars, and Wright’s piled-up clouds of synthesizers left a listener comfortably numb, unprepared for the plane-crash paranoia of “On the Run,” singer Clare Torry’s wordless wails of despair on “The Great Gig in the Sky,” or the 7/4 snarl of “Money.Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. “The Dark Side of the Moon” was lyricist Roger Waters’s attempt to catalogue the strains and enervations of the rock musician’s life and in doing so he solemnified and romanticized a generation’s sense of defeat. “I’d love to change the world,” the British band Ten Years After had sung a year or so earlier, “But I don’t know what to do/ So I’ll leave it up to you.” A lot of us knew exactly how that felt. If you were a teenager, you didn’t join protest marches like your older siblings you’d missed the revolution and Woodstock, and, anyway, what did protesting get you other than a Nixon landslide? Instead, you hung out with your friends at this new place called the mall, or you just stayed in your room and got high. Your parents watched “The Waltons” on TV and wondered what had happened to this country. The movie theaters were dominated by parables of corruption (“The Godfather” won a best picture Oscar the same month that “Dark Side” was released) and demonic possession (“The Exorcist” was out by the end of the year). ![]() military involvement in Vietnam had ceased in January, but the bombing of Cambodia continued for months. The Watergate scandal was a spreading stain leading to the door of the Oval Office U.S. Fellow musician John Etheridge later remembered thinking that Gilmour should “enjoy it while it lasts, because without Syd that band’s going nowhere” - one of the great wrong calls in the history of popular music. He was barely present on the follow-up, “A Saucerful of Secrets” (1968), and got jettisoned from the band shortly thereafter, with guitarist David Gilmour already drafted to take his place. The magic lasted through the group’s eclectic first singles, but as early as the tour for the 1967 debut album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” an LSD-addled, mentally ill Barrett was staring into the middle distance and playing one note for entire sets. As the new documentary makes clear, The Pink Floyd (as they were originally called, fusing the names of Barrett’s favorite American blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council) was very much a product of Barrett’s visionary acidhead whimsy, with bassist Roger Waters, keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason supporting the leader’s singing, songwriting and lead guitar. ![]() “Dark Side” represented the culmination of the group’s struggle to extricate itself from the long shadow of original leader Syd Barrett, the textbook case of a 1960s rocker who went the chemical distance and never returned. ![]()
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