My project over the last few days of listening through Pink Floyd’s entire catalog has brought me to Dark Side Of the Moon this evening.
I bought this album on cassette the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. I also bought myself my first real Walkman (following a series of crummy Sanyo and Realistic knock-offs) that summer. My main memory of this album is sitting on the Quad at Case Western between classes, listening to it on headphones. Along with Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, it was the last gasp of my high school classic rock obsession before diving full-on into late-80s/early-90s alternative and industrial.
What is there to be said about Dark Side Of the Moon at this point? It would be easy to harsh on it, but I have reached a point in my life where I am comfortable admitting that I think it is a pretty great album. It is not my favorite Pink Floyd album, or even my second-favorite—those honors go to The Wall and Atom Heart Mother—but it is still one I can listen to and generally find something new to appreciate each time.
This time around, it is that I no longe find “The Great Gig In the Sky” to be nearly so annoying as I once did, and also that I have enough distance from my days of listening to Indiana classic rock radio (thanks for nothing, Q95…) that I don’t even mind listening to “Money” anymore.
More broadly, I think what I appreciate most about this album is that it functions as a whole in a way that I don’t think any of their previous efforts do. Maybe “Money” is the exception, but all the tracks on this album hang together quite well and none feels out of place.