Eclipse - A piece for assorted lunatics

That's what it was called in its early avatar. Pink Floyd started playing Dark Side of the Moon in their live shows much before they actually thought of recording it. Thank God they finally did decide to record it. That they made history in terms of sales and number of weeks on the charts are no more than figures to me, and perhaps to most people. More than that, much more than that,

Dark Side of the moon is a statement of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out.

-Roger Waters, Making of Dark side of the Moon DVD

I thought of it in pretty similar terms but watching the making DVD gave words to my feelings. That’s perhaps the magic of the album too. It gives words to the quiet rebellion and emotional apathy faced by the entire generation at the time when the album came out. Actually, it wasn't just that generation. As David Gilmour says,

The ideas that Roger was exploring apply to every new generation.They still very much have the same relevance that they had

Consider the issues in question here: Time (or perhaps the lack of it), Money (or more accurately, greed), Death (that mystifying obsession), War and peace, pressures of traveling (who'd know better than rock bands?) and finally, the combined effect of all these leading a person to Insanity (perhaps considered an issue for the first time).
Waters is a philosopher much more than a musician, there's no doubt about it. Perhaps he can be compared to another contemporary, Pete Townshend of The Who, but his words had much more of the seething anger and political activism, and at the same time humanitarian pathos than even Pete's. This was the first time he wrote the entire lyrics for a Floyd album, and the effect is more than apparent. This one was much more tight in its lyrical content than all its predecessors. It was, in many ways, one of the first concept albums, if you please! Of course, The Who's Tommy preceded it by more than four years, so did S.F.Sorrow by The Pretty things. But the chief difference between DSOTM and the above two, as well as the numerous other concept albums that followed, including Floyd's own The Wall, was that the conscious attempt to knit it around a theme wasn't there. It evolved out of itself, which is perhaps the most breathtaking part. At no point does it appear that an attempt to narrate a story is being made. Yet there is a definitive mood to the album that gradually builds up and reaches a crescendo towards the end. In the words of one of the editors of Rolling Stone magazine,

The concept is there, the songs are there, the spaces in the music are there, but it doesn't take anything away from the imagination.

One of the most popular concept albums at that point was probably Sgt. Pepper's lonely-hearts club band by none other than The Beatles. It still is the greatest album of all time according to numerous surveys and ratings. Well, yea maybe the greatest rock album of all time, but Rolling Stone forgot to specify that. Clearly, I don't agree. No true blue Floydian will ever agree that anybody, absolutely anybody could top Floyd when it came to a concept album.
Yea yea I can see many people shaking their heads in disagreement already. (Assuming of course that many people actually read this blog!).
To each his own, I say!

Anyway, moving on.... consider the content of Floyd's songs before this work. They had started out with Syd Barrett as their leader and chief songwriter. He was a very talented songwriter, there is no doubt.Very imaginative, his influences were varied. But mostly limited to pop fantasies, as is pretty clear in songs like Astronomy Domine and Arnold Layne. The latter was about an actual person who went around English backyards sniffing girls' panties. As I said before, it was his imagination that allowed him to even think about writing a song on such a subject. But what has to be kept in mind is, he wrote pretty shallow stuff. For all his popularity, which followed his disintegration, one must remember that he was an unusually experimental but still not the most talented songwriter and musician. When he was around, what Floyd had was a clear direction, and that was psychedelic music, or as many people put it, Space Rock!
Their sound was otherworldly. People hadn't heard anything like that before, which was probably the reason their debut album, The Piper at the gates of dawn, was a big hit in its own right. I'm not sure what would have been the fate of the band had Syd stuck around, but the fact is he didn't. His schizophrenia combined with the adverse effects of some of the drugs he was experimenting with, led to such a severe dissociation from reality that he's still not completely attached to it after nearly forty years!
His downfall was a tragedy for the other band members in more ways than one. Not only had they lost a good friend, but also a charismatic and talented leader. As Waters himself says, "We were fumbling in the darkness, looking for direction".
They didn't have many ideas to begin with. They continued with the sonic experimentation techniques, now making the pieces longer and more elaborate than ever, thanks to the immensely talented David Gilmour who replaced Syd as the lead guitarist. The content was still pretty much in keeping with their image of a space rock band, what with numbers like Set the controls for the heart of the sun and Let there be more light. Perhaps the very first time Waters' gave vent to his feelings was in Corporal clegg. The song is about a soldier who lost his leg in World War II, and his apparently alcoholic wife. It is the first mention of war in a Floyd song, something that would become a common theme later. All these songs were part of the album A Saucerful of secrets . An instrumental piece of the same name was also included in the album.
All in all, a very spacey album. The next album, Ummagumma, was a combination of experimental sounds and live recordings. The experimentation techniques continued in Atom Heart Mother, and the lyrical content wasn't much richer either. Fat old Sun is a beautiful song from the album, but then, it's about the sun, if not about outer space. The focus was shifting indeed, but the sun is still a long way off, and so were Floyd.
Waters admits to "having no access to the crazed insights of Syd, infact for the first few years having no insights at all" .It was with the next album, Meddle, that Floyd came into their own for the first time and sort of outlined the path that they were going to tread during most of the next decade.
The first side was "only songs". A pillow of winds is probably the only romantic number Floyd has ever recorded, Seamus was the height of experimentation with an Afghan wolfhound doing the lead vocals! Fearless was nothing to write home about and San Tropez was a very simple waltz. One of these days was probably the pick on this side. Instrumental but extremely catchy, it has just the one line menacing vocal by Nick Mason, "One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces". It still is a concert favourite. But the flip side was truly the beginning of Floyd.
If you want to know my real feelings about Echoes, you should read one of the earlier posts in this blog, http://drinkfloyd.blogspot.com/2005/05/no-one-sings-me-lullabies.html
As of now, all I can do is quote Waters,

"Echoes" was the beginning of writing about "other people", if you please......it was the beginning of empathy.

He obviously knows what he’s saying. It’s his song after all. But what’s more important, I seem to know what he’s saying too. The lyrics convey the same,

Strangers passing in the street, by chance two separate glances meet,

I am you and what I see is me

And do I take you by the hand, and lead you through the land,

And help me understand the best I can

I hope now you also know what he was saying.

The lyrics, as Waters himself admits, are not very complex. But they touch a chord. Which is probably the hardest thing to do, I mean to accomplish it with simple words.

Musically, too, Echoes was in many ways an indication of the shape of the things to follow. Experimental, yet basically melodious, it was probably one of the first times all the band members had written a song together, and the result was there for all to see.

Back to the Dark Side. How appropriate the name is. When compared to other stuff at that point of time. David Bowie’s The rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, another concept album, and one of the greatest of all time at that! Musically very catchy and innovative at the same time. It is probably one of the most influential albums in rock history. But, as someone has very wisely written on Wikipedia, The album is considered archetypal glam rock, full of hard rock guitar riffs, catchy choruses and confusing, opiate lyrics. The depth in lyrics simply wasn’t there. In that sense, Dark Side really did bring forward the dark side.

Anyway, enough about the lyrics. I’m making it sound as if it was poetry sung below par!

Far from that, mate! I do seriously believe, and so do millions of others, I’m sure, that it is the most optimum combination of words and music that Floyd ever achieved. It was probably again the result of all of them working together. Gilmour and Waters wrote most of the music, but Richard Wright too contributed with two amazing songs, The Great gig in the sky and Us and Them. Whether it’s Time’s soaring guitar solo, or Money’s unusual time signature, or the brooding rhythm of Brain Damage, this album had it all to ensure that nobody, but nobody would be able to match it ever. It does not belong to any genre, probably which is why people cutting across all genres love it equally. Critically speaking, the music was sort of a bridge between the then immensely popular blues-rock and the then relatively new electronic music. That bridge is probably exemplified by Gilmour's guitaring, which was bluesy, but at the same time retained that spacey, ethereal feel from the previous Floyd sound. Call it progressive rock, underground music, whatever, but the fact is that avant-garde music had never been so popular, and probably would never be again.Wright has very accurately said,

There are a lot of things in the album, which are kind of magical…and it just happened.

Another magical touch was provided by the voices of various people, mostly the studio and road crew, which were inserted in the spaces between the songs. Magical is indeed the most appropriate word for the way it turned out eventually. When you listen to the songs more than a couple of times, you start expecting the dialogues, as if they were part of the music. Many of the words have become legendary themselves, and the Irish doorman of Abbey road studio has earned more fame than he ever would have imagined with his now memorable line,

There is no dark side of the moon really, matter of fact it's all dark

But my personal favourites are from Speak to me,

I’ve been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks, been working me buns off for bands.

I’ve always been mad, I know I’ve been mad. Very hard to say why you’re mad, even when you’re not mad

Who came up with the idea is not completely known, but it was Waters in all probability. Such crazy ideas were usually his forte. What he did was, he wrote different questions on placards like, “When was the last time you thumped someone?”, “Why are you afraid of dying?”, “What do you think of madness?”. He then flashed these placards randomly before different people and included the most spontaneous answers in the songs. Paul McCartney was interviewed too, but expectedly, his answers were considered too made up and hence were not included.

A song wise analysis (read tribute) seems too enticing to avoid at this point. But this post is getting rather long, and I’m getting rather tired of typing. So that’ll have to wait till the next post. Till then, maybe you should listen to the album, if you already haven’t. And yea, the entire album should be preferably listened to at a go, uninterrupted. The songs segue into each other, which means it is basically one long song. The effort is conscious but never forced. Happy listening!