Everyone my age knows this album like the back of their hand. It was in the Billboard Top 200 for like 25 years, and that's really saying something. So there's a million stories I could tell about things that happened while this record was playing, but I'll try to keep this somewhat reasonable. Remember when I mentioned Alex Demkowicz in my personal Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame? You may remember I mentioned taking this record in to that History of Rock N' Roll class I had back in Jr. High. He had to audition any records we brought in for our Friday free for all listening, to make sure there was no searing and that the sex and drugs were very cleverly disguised, lest some stupid parent just sign the permission slip and find out later that we actually were listening to a wide variety of Rock N' Roll music, including music with adult themes.
Well, Mr. Demkowicz was really taken with this record and considered it to be very important, and by that time in 1976 or 1977 you could say that you'd be surprised that this guy didn't really know who Pink Floyd was. Cut him some slack, though. He wasn't really a rocker, he was a music teacher and I think his true love was Jazz, followed by Classical and then he thought kids should know about these things and so he came up with a History of Rock N' Roll class to try and introduce us to things we ordinarily may never have bothered with. So he was a good guy and when I did turn him on to this, he actually came back and asked me if he could borrow it again when we got to the point where he was discussing instruments other than guitars in Rock music. He loved the synthesizers on this album and more importantly, I think he liked the lyrics. So we actually spent some time talking about this and listening to it in detail.
So by the time I got to high school and broadened my group of friends to include a few people a grade or two ahead of me, I was getting kind of tired of Dark Side of the Moon, but there was no escaping it. Everyone had it. People that only had thirteen 8-Tracks from Columbia House had this. This was easily the most played tape in a car I ever heard, and half the time I'd get out of the car to go into a house and I'd get to listen to it in there, too. This thing was ubiquitous, I'm tellin' ya! I remember my friend's parents bought a new Ford Granada, and it had a factory stereo with a Power Boost button. Power boosters were dumb. They just didn't work. The problem was that they amplified the already amplified signal, so tape hiss and distortion got amplified, too. Well, my friend with the Granada would blast the ever lovin' hell out of the clocks at the beginning of Time, and you wouldn't believe how awful (but very loud) it was! Man, I used to beg him to press that button and make it stop, but that fell on deaf ears (nyuk, nyuk).
I remember going out and on the way home some tool in the middle of the night would request Us and Them, which is a pretty okay song, but you don't want everyone in the car falling asleep at 3 AM listening to echoey voices and meandering piano and sax solo's. I bet more people fell asleep with this on their turntable in the 70's than anything else. I used to hate that. Wake up to the locked groove at the end going, "click....click....click..." I always thought, "There's eight hours of needle life I wasted!" Then the next weekend I'd do it again.
I was just talking with a friend the other day about this and he was telling me how he's got the 5.1 SACD and it just can't be beat for sound quality. He's probably right, but who cares? If there's a record that should be played on vinyl, it's this one. It should have some clicks and pops, because this record had to work for a living. Money and its great opening of cash registers and bass guitar that open side two just need to come out of a pause in the action, which I think helps records. Getting up and flipping the record over gives you a minute to absorb what just happened and gives you a minute to get ready for something new. That's a good thing, if you ask me, and no SACD is going to give you that important break.
So I spent a lot of time talking about everything except the music on this record. And why would I talk about the music much? You know it. We all know it. I'm not a huge Pink Floyd fan, and I own this because if you like Rock music, you should own this and be familiar with it. It's an excellent album from an extremely influential band. It deserves all the accolades it gets because it earned those accolades. Listening to it just now reminded me of just how defining of the 70's that album is. It's definitely a product of that decade, but it also just seems like it just always existed. There's not that many records that are like that.
My record is not the same one I loaned Mr. Demkowicz way back when. I trashed that sucker and lost the posters and stickers (I think one of my stickers was on a Stop sign here in town for about fifteen years). I have a copy with a bar code that came with the posters and stickers, but it's definitely and 80's release. I'm not going to keep my eyes out for a primo early 70's pressing because I only play it once every ten years or so. I'll just keep the one I have and I'll remember all those old parties and aimless cruising from when I was a kid when I play it.
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