How does one approach the second-best selling album of all time? For it's larger-than-life reputation, this album has never held the number one spot. That honor currently (as has for the past 30 years) rests with a whole other kind of crazy, Michael Jackson's Thriller (now talk about ironic listening!). Even before Jacko came along, Pink Floyd was kept out of the hallowed number one spot by Carole King and two soundtracks (The Sound of Music and Saturday Night Fever). To PF's credit, their album still resonates with today's listeners while the competition sounds positively trapped in time.
Dark Side of the Moon hits on two levels, the immediacy and the legacy. Obviously, to escape the label of "cult classic" (something I would award to a number of their prior albums), they needed to sell a lot of albums right out the gate. It's an album that succeeds at both the song and album levels. As previously explored, we have seen how concept albums usually end in financial failure (see Family and the Pretty Things) because the individual songs can't stand on their own, and certainly not against its contemporaries in the context of radio airplay. So while songs like "On the Run", "Any Colour You Like" and "Eclipse" need the context of the album to make sense, others like "Money", "Time" and "Us and Them" sound great either alone, in the context of the album, or in a classic rock playlist.
However, 40 years later, it's the legacy that keep the album going. Invariably, high school me wasn't satisfied to stop with Dark Side of the Moon, and went on to pick up everything from Piper at the Gates of Dawn through The Division Bell, paying the premium price for each CD. This gave me the perspective of what came before and what followed, and how unlikely a success Dark Side of the Moon really was and what a dividing line it turned out to be for the band. Analyzing the whole sweep of albums, it is clear that Syd Barrett had some kind of influence throughout their career arc. When the hit the scene back in the mid-1960's it was almost entirely powered by the electrifying charisma of their eccentric frontman. It was widely presumed that without him, the band was nothing. The immediate post-Barrett albums in hindsight do seem like a period of wandering for the band, with no hits and and an increasing tendency toward experimental arrangements. While this built their reputation as a progressive band, rather than a psychedelic band, it wasn't doing much to raise their profile. While their albums never left the top 10 in the UK (even Atom Heart Mother, with a half-hour mini-symphony managed to become their first #1 album), they were barely registering across the Atlantic. An increasing fascination with insanity, through the experiences of Syd Barrett, led to initial explorations in songs like "Fearless", and then Dark Side of Moon devoted an entire album to it, looking at the various types of madness in daily living, working, money and war. Thanks to skilled production work at the hands of engineer Alan Parsons, a shrewd marketing campaign and the aforementioned song/album dichotomy, it became their breakthrough and signature album. Syd's fate continued to influence the band on the following albums, which also wrestled with the sudden catapulting to transatlantic fame, and bassist Roger Waters was becoming increasingly concerned he would be next to lose his mind, as evidenced by the tortured lyrics of Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979). It is through this grand sweep of recordings that we continue to appreciate the keystone role of Dark Side of the Moon both in the career of the band as well as rock music in general.
Finally, it always seems like Pink Floyd attracts a lot of crackpot thinking, most notably the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" phenomenon. I think that just as with the Beatles and the "Paul Is Dead" business, people tend to read way too much into the goings-on in Dark Side of the Moon. For example, that little whisper on "The Great Gig in the Sky" is just saying "there's that whisper every time" - sort of a Brechtian bit of album self-awareness. Nevertheless, many are convinced she is saying "If you hear this whisper you will die." If that was true, it seems like album sales would have tanked shortly after the release of the album (along with civilization). In the same way, all those voices that populate the album are just words, people talking about this and that. When the band originally planned their followup album to Meddle (Obscured By Clouds was more of a side project in soundtrack work), they had thought of creating an album out of sound effects and "found" instruments, so the voices, the clocks, the cash registers, and other bits are simply legacies of that original thought. Don't over-think it!
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