On the basis of its time spent topping the chart, Pink Floyd’s 1973 The Dark Side of the Moon is my favorite album of all time, the kind of high water mark for stoner art I’ve always aspired to, and to which Pink Floyd really didn’t: speaking of the band’s reputation as a “very drug-oriented group,” guitarist David Gilmour said “it’s an image we’d like to dispel;” more in the style of the album’s blunt lyrics, lyricist Roger Waters would put it like this: “Space—what the fuck are they talking about? Inner space, maybe.” The band’s eighth album was not the work of the 60’s Pink Floyd, a constellation of talented but somewhat amateur acid freaks, generally freaking, but the work of professional and focused musicians, those who, when working in the studio — the English singer-songwriter Lesley Duncan, who provided some of the backup vocals on the album, would later recall — “were cold; rather clinical . . . very serious . . . very quiet.” The album is neither cold nor quiet, an oft funky, usually loud “piece for assorted lunatics,” as the original title would have it, though the name was abandoned after a pre-release performance in Austin, Texas.
Austin, Texas is the city where I grew up and listened to a lot of Pink Floyd; The Dark Side of the Moon, specifically, I must’ve listened to more than 200 times. Most of these took place during the longest period of sobriety I’ve had since I began experimenting with recreational drug use at 12; I was 17, and having already had five long episodes of suicidal depression, it was around then that I first accepted the clinical interpretation, a bipolar diagnosis I had tried to tell a sporadically seen therapist that I thought I needed, although it was only four years and 600-some miles away that, on account of the undeniable truth that actions speak louder than words, I would finally get it. I had tried shrooms twice when I was 13, but it wasn’t until I was 19, back home for Thanksgiving break, that I would try psychedelics again, this time acid, a drug that I — a big fan of the form of The Novel — found deliriously fun in part for its narrative qualities: doing psychedelics is an easy and fairly cheap way to make any day into a self-contained narrative, a trip that has a clear beginning, a usually notable peak or climax, and a variable-length denouement, sometimes hours long, many of which are spent, in my experience, laying awake in bed, wondering when the book will let you finish it. I never understand what musicheads actually mean when they say a work of rock is “progressive,” but, based on its association with the work of Pink Floyd and co., I assume it has something to do with restoring the sense of development and narrative progression commonly found in the bourgeois European musical tradition — sometimes called classical — to the pop music of the 20th century. At any rate, that’s what Pink Floyd does, here, and also elsewhere.
On its first track, “Speak to Me,” the album literally comes alive: a heart beats; there are some teases of the ambient noises you’ll hear throughout the rest of the album — clocks ticking; cash registers cash registering; random studio people saying random things about being “mad,” which is British for insane; laughing; screaming — and then, 1 minute and 4 seconds in, when we’re onto the next track, we “Breathe:” the album opens up: an expansive-feeling instrumental leads up to a Roger-Waters-written but David-Gilmore-sung lyric of “Breathe, breathe in the air / Don’t be afraid to care.” Caring is a good way to be open to the world, but sometimes, you find that caring can hurt you, as you might infer on the next track, “On the Run,” remarkable mostly for the fact of it being a single track of connective tissue, taking us, via what sounds like a plane crash, into what one can only imagine is a field somewhere in the British countryside, inexplicably full of clocks, which, a plane having just crashed into them, have now started to ring, something they will continue to do for the next 45-some seconds of track 4, “Time” — actually, maybe it’s more like we’re waking up from a dream? Who knows? It does sound like the morning to me, but that’s probably just because of the hundreds of times I’ve listened to this album, it was usually then, driving myself to a magnet high school roughly half of The Dark Side of the Moon away from my house, myself being mentally ill enough to drive and study, but not very much else. I think one thing I like about Pink Floyd is that the music’s often screaming. There are some feelings only guitars can wail, and also, there is sometimes actual screaming.
“The Great Gig in the Sky” is my favorite song on the album, and it’s the only one that reminds me of somewhere that isn’t Austin: it takes me to a dorm room in California, where I was screaming, as this was a month or so after realizing something a number of psychedelic experiences failed to reveal, but a chanced upon webpage did: that you could actually become a woman, if that was something you wanted to do, which I very much did, and having finally realized this, I felt happy and generally brave enough to try listening to The Dark Side of the Moon on acid for the first time, an experience so notoriously canonical that, as with any such canonical experience, I feared intense disappointment; the real experience I had, I’m happy to report, was fucking sublime, and screaming as I rode the first of the many subsequent waves of self-actualization transition seems to entail, sailing atop Clare Torry’s sublime vocals, was very insane, which in my slang is contextually positive, the kind of thing the subsequent and grooveful victory lap of “Money,” the next track, did total justice.
After “Money,” there’s “Us and Them,” a 7 minute 52 second track, which many consider the best on the album, and everyone considers the longest, although, by the standard of any other Pink Floyd album, sort of medium length. It’s a good song, and what follows is an unfortunately spelled, but nicely instrumental track called “Any Colour You Like,” where, a little after a minute in — the precise timestamp of which, thinking about this essay a few weeks ago, I discovered I still remembered — is the musical version of a canonical psychedelic experience: the epiphany: 1 minute and 18 seconds of directionless, fried psychedelia having been sent, by a few of Nick Mason’s drum hits, stratospheric, turning into a one note accent that, for the briefest of seconds, allows you to both experience and externally comprehend The Complete and Total Whole — it is the feeling of seeing The Blue Marble, a 1972 photo of Earth taken by Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt, which has the rare distinction of being one of the few images likely found on more walls than the one on the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon.
We then come down, of course, since you do always come down. After a few more accents, and a lot of reverb-y stuff that makes it feel like a bunch of sound waves are crashing around inside your head, there’s two more songs: “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse.” These are two of the most obvious places on the album haunted by the ghost of Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, who, we have to imagine for a number of reasons, no small one being the sustained use of acid and other drugs, “succumbed to schizophrenia,” as Waters put it, and left the band some five years and five albums prior. I should say that I am terrible at processing lyrics when I listen to music, even ones as direct as Waters’. The one I always remember from “Brain Damage,” however, is “there’s someone in my head, but it’s not me,” which I imagine is a fairly relatable sentiment for anyone who’s spent a lot of time having thoughts they didn’t want to have.
Pink Floyd’s next album, Wish You Were Here, is the one that is more obviously about Barrett. I don’t like it as much as the one after, Animals, but it’s a very good album, and one I had a hard time listening to for many years, fearing that I, like Barrett, was a “crazy diamond,” the kind that would shine very bright, until it didn’t. The poet Audre Lorde, in her essay about visiting the Soviet Union, remarks that “[i]f you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others,” something I have found to be true, although she does not mention the complications of trying to conquer the bread problem when you don’t want to eat. Almost everything I wrote in my 20s — contained in a three book trilogy made up of two novels and one essay collection, and named for Bartleby, a Herman Melville character who commits suicide by refusing to do anything — was about learning to live with the threat of suicide. I spent most of my 20s trying to do this, and for many of those years, until a few months before the end, I was simply proud of the abstract fact that I had a life. It wasn’t until very recently that, the novelty of that pride having faded, I could learn to take pride in what my life actually was, its particular and concrete shape.
I am fairly bored of thinking about thinking about suicide, although I’m grateful every day that bored is the word I get to say now. In some sense, though certainly not careerwise, I feel much closer to the quiet, serious, and focused musicians found in the studio recording The Dark Side of the Moon, the same ones who went on to record Wish You Were Here, a recording experience — I learned recently, in a documentary about the people who made Pink Floyd’s covers, Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis — interrupted by the appearance of a man no one recognized but everyone knew: Barrett had come back, confused, bald, fat in the way antipsychotics can make you, unrecognizable, even to those canonizing him. The privilege of my having been a crazy diamond, however, is that I can appreciate that there are many ways to shine: it is one thing to be in Pink Floyd, a very famous band that very famously tore itself apart; it is another to have the life Barrett would go on to live, one I do not know very much about, but would certainly never presume to.