Edition №9
The Dark Side of the Moon spent 736 weeks on the Billboard 200 between March 1973 and July 1988. Until this spring I had never owned a copy.
I was a big fan of The Wall as a kid. My childhood best friend and I would call our local radio station begging them to play "Another Brick in the Wall," the long version that runs "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" into Part 2, and wait for hours with our tape recorders to grab a clean recording. I never dug into the back catalog until the Wizard of Oz play-along business. A college intern named Charlie Savage wrote it up in The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, having picked it up from a Pink Floyd newsgroup: start the album as the MGM lion roars and the album and the film run together. Savage's piece said the first roar. The third roar is what everyone settled on later. I was in college, and everyone had a version of it.
Gilmour, Waters and Mason have all denied it. Alan Parsons, who engineered the record, gave the denial that explains it clearly, because his is about equipment. “There simply wasn’t mechanics to do it,” he told MTV in 1997. “We had no means of playing videotapes in the room at all. I don’t think VHS had come along by ‘72, had it?”
That is the sentence that got me listening properly. Parsons was engineering at Abbey Road on a Studer A80 16-track, and the limit he is describing is the condition the whole record was made under. I have a much better appreciation now for the musicianship, and for what they got done at a point when the technology was moving far slower than it does today. I am still not going to a laser light show at a planetarium. I have spent time with the record and it holds.
There is an expensive audiophile market around this record and I have no stake in any of it. You can spend upward of $750 on a sealed audiophile pressing. Both of the objects that win start near $35 before shipping.
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