© 2003 Dan Sherman
Pink Floyd's Album, "Dark Side of the Moon" turned thirty this year. This means the album that formed the soundtrack to my high school years is older than all the Backstreet Boys combined.
To celebrate the event, EMI/Capitol has produced a new version in 5.1 channel surround sound, which, according to a news report on MSNBC, not only adds a three dimensional depth to the recording, but creates yet another reason to soak us for a $20 CD.
It's like laugh tracks: The entertainment business is always creating something for you that you once supplied yourself. My version of "Dark Side" was on a hissy old eight-track tape, and if it lacked three dimensions, my mind was happy to supply them.
Still, eight track players had an unusual quirk: the song would fade out as the machine got ready to switch to another track. So I'd be listening to the song "Time": a"Ticking away, the moments that make up the dull"... SILENCE. WHIRRING NOISE. I'd go to summer camp, come back and hear the rest of the song.
When it came out, "Dark Side" was unlike any Led Zep or Who album that anchored my eight-track collection. It magically combined a whole musicalâs worth of elements: gut-wrenching scat singing, gritty sax solos, bizarre sound effects and more goofy cockney accents than a Monty Python sketch.
The most amazing thing about "Dark Side" is that it was written and conceived in the studio in 1973, many moons BEFORE a kid in grade school could easily afford a fully equipped digital sound studio that fits in his lunchbox.
This was the age of dinosaur-sized reel-to-reel tape machines, and to create the cacophony of clocks in the song, "Time," or the coins and cash registers of "Money," the band had to splice together a mile of recording tape which looped around the studio. This explains the original name of the album, "I've Got Bloody Scotch Tape All Over My Body!"
The producer hired by EMI to do the surround sound remix, James Guthrie, admitted the difficulty of remaking history. "The record really lends itself to a three dimensional treatment," he said, "But everyone knows the original mix so well it's indelibly printed in our minds."
That's like saying New Yorkers 'put up' with the Yankees. "Dark Side" wasn't PRINTED on anything, it was actually ENCODED into the DNA of every teen living in Maplewood, N.J.
There were two worlds I lived in back in high school. One was the two-dimensional world of trying to pick up girls at the roller rink without crashing into the wall, making tie-dye shirts in the laundry room and turning everyone's clothes purple, raiding the liquor cabinet by taking a half-inch out of each bottle and wrecking the family car.
The other, more surreal world was upstairs in my third floor converted attic which was Maplewoodâ's equivalent of Rick's Bar in Casablanca, where a motley assortment of smugglers and con men in varsity jackets gathered to listen to "Dark Side" as it pulsed from speaker to speaker.
With our minds and lungs set on "in" and the attic exhaust fan firmly set on "out," we followed the pied pipers of Pink Floyd and floated out over the Suburban lawns like children floating away with Peter Pan.
And when Pink Floyd came to town for a concert in Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, we made the holy pilgrimage to watch them perform "Dark Side." We were mesmerized by the gigantic video screen behind them showing the clocks of "Time" melting like Dali's images·or maybe, our brains supplied the melting.
Pink Floyd's "Dark Side" provided the escape from everything that was Suburbia, back when I firmly believed that I could NEVER trust anyone over 30.
Now the album itself is over 30, a reminder as subtle as a kidney stone that time has a way of slipping by. As the song "Time" said, "And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."
Thirty years gone. But the memories of an eight-track player, a drink made with peppermint schnapps called a "snowshoe" and a gang of lunatics in the attic is as fresh as yesterday.
Dan Sherman is a Reno, NV-based writer. Email him at
dan@danshermanonline.com.
The anniversary album has its own website, Flash and all.
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