‘Pink Floyd: The Making Of The Dark Side Of The Moon’ Explores Creation Of Canonical Classic Rock Album 

My man Scotty Hard is a noted producer and engineer. One time he was working with the legendary Prince Paul, sonic architect of De La Soul’s groundbreaking 3 Feet High And Rising, an album which truly changed the sound of all hip hop to come after it. Scotty was incredulous to learn that he had never heard Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. “They weren’t playing that on my radio station,” was Prince Paul’s matter of fact explanation. Besides being a funny story, it illustrates how massive the record looms in classic rock culture. How could you not have heard that album? From its 1973 release to 1988, it never left the Billboard Top 200 album charts and has sold over 45 million copies worldwide. 

With any piece of art so ubiquitous to mainstream culture, the question is also what else can you say about it? Pink Floyd: The Making Of The Dark Side of the Moon concerns itself less with analysis than genesis, its creation and how it transformed the band from underground post-psychedelic weirdos to beloved brainy arena rockers. Released in 2003, the 49 minute documentary is part of the British Classic Albums series and is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime. 

“Dark Side of the Moon was an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out,” former Pink Floyd bassist and primary lyricist Roger Waters says as a means of introducing the album. The band hadn’t previously concerned itself much with such Earthly matters. Emerging at the height of 1967’s so-called “Summer of Love,” the band were initially centered around the psychedelic  pop songs of singer and guitarist Syd Barrett. After his departure due to drug induced mental health issues, they largely jettisoned conventional songwriting in favor of blissed out aural soundscapes and space rock.

Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle was their first attempt at reconciling songcraft with their dreamier musical impulses. Side one featured five relatively straight forward songs while side two was taken up with the 23 and a half minute epic “Echoes,” which vacillated between dynamic and often beautiful instrumental passages and plaintive verses with lyrics which spoke of introspection and commonality. For Waters, it was the first step in a new direction, “It was the beginning of empathy.”    

As Pink Floyd began preparing their next album, Waters expressed the desire for it to have an overarching theme from song to song; in other words, a concept album. The band began jamming over simple chord structures while Waters used simple language to explore bid ideas about life and death, anger, isolation, greed, madness and the passage in time. The album would start and end with a human heartbeat. In between was a continuous flow of sound effects, incidental spoken word segments, synthesizer explorations and the best songs the band had written since their inception. 

As with all Classic Albums episodes, every track on the album is broken down, as band members discuss its composition and studio engineers discuss its recording. The Dark Side of the Moon was groundbreaking both artistically and technically. Particularly interesting is  how the instrumental “On The Run,” which started out as a guitar jam, mutated into a cutting edge synthesizer freak. A simple melody plucked out on a rudimentary keyboard was sped up beyond human ability, then treated with filters and overdubbed with backwards guitars, percussion and assorted noises. While it sounds deliciously dated in 2020, like a cheesy ’70s science fiction soundtrack, at the time it must have sounded like a glimpse through a broken mirror into a horrific and bizarre future.

At the heart of The Dark Side of the Moon are a core of songs that continue to be fixtures of classic rock radio. Waters talks about leaving “holes” in them, which besides the guitar solo section of the album’s sole hit single “Money,” rarely achieve a speed faster than a gurney being pushed down a hospital corridor. Keyboardist Richard Wright’s borrowed chordal ideas from jazz, drummer Nick Mason kept the tempos steady but never distracted from them with unnecessary athleticism and David Gilmour’s slow, bluesy guitar solos became shorthand for feel over flash. 

While Pink Floyd: The Making Of The Dark Side Of The Moon covers the basics of the album’s creation, its short run time means lots of details are left out. Still, like all Classic Albums episodes it’s well done and enjoyable and wisely emphasizes the work itself over pontification. Though the album was the result of the whole band working together, its success would create fractures which would within ten years split the band into warring factions, but that’s a story for another documentary. 

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter: @BHSmithNYC. 

Watch Pink Floyd - The Making Of The Dark Side Of The Moon (Classic Albums) on Amazon Prime