32. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon

I was only eleven when it was released, so I didn't pick up on it until a couple of years later when rummaging through an older cousin's albums. It wasn't until high school that I gained a full appreciation for DSotM, when it became the soundtrack to our smoke-filled, hazy nights. We sat around debating the whole concept of the record. We had theories and guesses and every lyric was a metaphor for life and death and all the crap that comes in between.

Mary (whose car, a big white boat of a vehicle, was named Floyd) had an egg-shaped chair in her basement that had speakers built into it. Sort of a pre-cursor to today's surround sound, but with an embryonic feel to it. So I would sit there in this womb of a chair, Dark Side playing over and over, the tightly rolled joints and whatever other illicit substances we came up with for the night being passed around and I drifted off into other worlds, worlds where - in the folly of my youth - only Pink Floyd and some nice Panama Red could take me.

Breathe, breathe in the air...

And thus began my journey. Every song held the secret key to life. Every lyric was profound.

Speak to me/Breathe was sort of a desolate song. The words that seemed so deep and meaningful under the cloud of smoke were rather succinctly summed up better by the Godfathers many years later: Birth, School, Work, Death.

In fact, the whole album could be summed up in those four words. But unlike my obsession with other bands of the time, Pink Floyd was more than the sum of their poetry. It was the music. My fling with the Doors was based on the words of Jim Morrison; I really didn't care for the music at all. Waters and company changed that. It was the sheer art of the music that lifted me out of that egg chair and into other planes.

The slow, haunting tune of Brain Damage, the eventual build up of sounds in Eclipse and the feeling as if you had been dropped off of a cliff when the album ended and the pops and scratches faded to black as the needle picked itself up off of the vinyl.

Again, one of us would whisper, and the needle would drop once more and all would be quiet while we each took our own personal musical journeys through the Dark Side of the Moon.

More than 30 years later and the album still holds up well, better than some 30 year old people I know. The lyrics are still relevant, the music is still at once disquieting and soothing, alternating in waves of musical madness that could certainly form the soundtrack to anyone's journey through birth, school, work and death.

Favorite song: Eclipse
DSotM at the Pink Floyd hyperbase