Boomer to Doomer: Rewriting 'Dark Side of the Moon'

Roger Waters went to hell in January of 1972.

Pink Floyd had been avatars of the Hippie Dream back in '67.  A lot of bad things had happened since then, both to Pink Floyd and to the world around them, but Waters and the rest of the band, who operated as a four-piece musical collective of relative equals, with grace and a sense of peace, the sort of band who could do songs about flying into the center of the sun and make it sound like a quest for inner peace rather than fiery self-immolation.  John Peel introduced a live broadcast of theirs in 1970 by saying "The nicest thing about the Pink Floyd's music it that it always makes me, at least, feel very hopeful.  It's optimistic music."

That quote has stuck with me, and not just as some sort of in-hindsight-ironic quote of the sort Peel was prone to (see, for instance, the radio show from '69 wherein he bemoaned Creedence Clearwater Revival's obvious lack of commercial potential).  Their music was, in fact, genuinely optimistic.  What the fuck happened?

Part of what happened, I feel... wasn't in the music itself.  Dark Side of the Moon is a dark record, a despairing record, but only in retrospect do we see it as a harbinger.  After completing the record, which Waters was justly proud of, his next idea was to do a record wherein instead of playing bass, he played rubber bands.  He'd done a collaboration record with the Scots eccentric Ron Geesin and was genuinely taken with his particular band of whimsy, which existed in a world so distant from doomer Floyd that upon the release of Dark Side of the Moon Geesin titled a track "To Roger Waters, Wherever You Are" (he might not have meant it like _that_, to be fair).

Roger Waters went to hell, and in the Spring of 1973 he announced to the world what he had found.  And the world responded... rapturously.  This was the unease they had felt but hadn't quite had the words for.  Here was fear and the worry and the sense of powerlessness in the face of the inevitable, and suddenly Roger Waters was not a big-nosed bass player but the Voice of a Generation, a generation who the moment he said it he was right, knew it instantly and surely as if a spell had been broken.  This was Hell.

And then they all, well, stayed there.  I guess Waters probably tried to get out, maybe is still trying now, in his own way, following his own path.  Probably some of them did leave, did find their own way out, but for Pink Floyd, despair became their brand, is their brand still despite Waters having moved on for browner pastures decades ago.  The band couldn't quite follow him, and they couldn't say anything that was more, uh, persuasive than what he had to say, so that's who Pink Floyd are, the doomer band of the boomer generation.

And that's what I grew up with, the voice I took for my own, what I'm trying to leave behind now.

So in that spirit, a reconstruction.  A do-over.  Dark Side of the Moon in songs by other musicians, other voices, that seem to me to relate to something of the spirit of each of the songs in Waters' little concept album, as determined by five minutes of free association in my head this afternoon.

Joe Raposo - Take A Breath (Breathe)

Dark Side of the Moon isn't exactly a "concept album" in the manner of "Tommy" or "The Wall" - it doesn't tell a coherent story, doesn't have characters or a plot or anything like that.  It's more like a student paper, where paragraphs of evidence are tied together to support a central thesis, which is stated at the end of the album.  You take all of these separate inputs and put them all together and there, at the end, is your output.

"Breathe" doesn't necessarily fit this pattern.  It's to the strength of the album, this flexibility, the strength of having just a few guiding principles which may be broken if the song or the album demands that they be.

The impression I get from Breathe is that of darkening clouds.  One of his turns, perhaps, is coming on.  In my head there it starts with a song like some of their older bucolic material.  I don't know that Waters has spoken about the process.  I know he has a song he did with Geesin called "Breathe" about the environment.  It's not really the same song at all, but it's not a happy song either.  Waters' "optimism" was always deceptive.  He would do songs like "Crumbling Land", and...

Look, here are the lyrics to the Waters/Geesin "Breathe":

Breathe in the air
Make for the meadow and savour the grass while it lasts
By and by
Spidery fingers of industry reach for the sky
Brick upon brick, stone upon stone they grow
Choking the atmosphere, oh, so incredibly slowly
Sulphur and carbon and hydrogen sulphide and lime
Fever, corrosion, and cover your cities with grime
Something is killing the land before your eyes
And the sunshine
Is not to blame
Could be the insane, inhumane games we play

That's... not exactly more upbeat than Dark Side of the Moon.

The difference here is context.  Not just, you know, that this song is surrounded by fart noises and songs with titles like "Piddle in Perspex", but that from there we go to:

Close your eyes, lie still
You are a mountain stream and I am a hill
Far, far away
There is a field of blossom and bees and new mown hay
Breathe in the air

And that, OK, that is in fact textbook optimism.  Waters identifies as a "bleeding heart" - in 1970, a bruised but strong idealist, in 1972, and a fair amount of the time since, broken.

In this light maybe "Breathe" is the darkest song on the album, because it's the one where he's still genuinely trying to be positive and optimistic.  Ending it where he does, "Balanced on the biggest wave/you race towards an early grave", that tips it.  Even though there's another verse, even though the last verse is far more optimistic and even, you know, spiritual, he cuts it off, he puts it elsewhere, and what we're left with is creeping death.

But this is rumination.  This is a wander through dark gardens.  He loses, fairly early on, the breath, the core, the center of ourselves, of our being.  What else do I think about here with breath?  Radiohead's "Exit Music for a Film" with its cry of "Breathe, keep breathing", the breath as a source of strength, words sung by someone who is extremely familiar with panic disorder, what it feels like, how to survive it.

But also this song.  From the American children's TV show Sesame Street, a show a grew up with.  Raposo, who is maybe best known for "Sing", wrote a lot of songs for the show, most of them not commercially released.  And they are songs for children.  This is a lighthearted, silly song, sung in a funny voice, but it does also have a compassion at the center, a sincerity and honesty to it, and that approach I think is one that I do believe Roger Waters, at his best, shares.

Melvin Van Peebles - Come On Feet (On the Run):

A song of paranoia.  The film for this one, as shown on MTV's Pink Floyd Weekend in the late '80s, was one of those things that did scare me for a long time.  That sort of medical paranoia, the Bloodrock "DOA" thing, but I guess that's a later imposition, that's a palimpsest.  The original is more about running to escape from... something.  The sirens and dissonant keyboard on this song, from the soundtrack to Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song... it tracks extremely well with the mood of "On the Run" and its helicopter noises and synthesizer patterns.  This is probably a better song than "On the Run", honestly.

The Alan Parsons Project - Time (Time): I could _almost_ put together a whole hour's worth of separate songs I love called "Time".  It's a big idea, a big concept, and this was the one that popped up.

Mostly because, I'll be honest with you, because of Mr. Bungle.  There's a beautiful bootleg video of Mr. Bungle in the early '90s, and I'm recounting from memory so I might get some details wrong here... things would get pretty crazy at those shows, and at some point someone in the front of the audience gets hit pretty hard by accident.  Their lead singer Mike Patton, because things have gotten really crazy, he gets down and and he just sings this song to the guy.  That might sound, I don't know, disturbing, particularly since he's wearing his typical-for-the-time stage attire of a leather gimp mask, and that the environment is pretty crazy, but it doesn't come off that way.  It comes off as a moment of unexpected sweetness, unexpected compassion.  Which is what we get at the end of the Pink Floyd song, when after Waters plunges deeply into nihilism and despair ("The time is gone, the song is over/Thought I'd something more to say...") he goes back and pulls out that last, consoling verse of "Breathe".

What Parsons - whose engineering on "Dark Side of the Moon", his creation of that pristine and perfect sound world, has a lot to do with why I'm both fascinated by the record and kind of hate it - does on this 1980 song is capture that wistfulness, that melancholy, that underlies Waters' work before it takes that tip into complete despair.  It captures so well that sense of loss that's marked my life so strongly, a sense that flows through the work of Waters, even though it's on the surface another one of those boy-girl songs that as a teenage Pink Floyd fan I thought I was too "sophisticated" for.

The Pretty Things - Death (The Great Gig in the Sky): In its original form the song after "Time" in "Dark Side of the Moon" was a cynical piece about religion (hence the last verse of "Breathe" leading into it).  "The Great Gig in the Sky" isn't about that really.  I've heard people say it's about "death", but that's a pretty big subject.  There are many ways to talk about death.  I guess for me the thing it specifically strikes is the allure of death, death as a siren song, and that's what Torry's vocals evoke for me - not sex per se like some people hear it.  And the song that came to mind was this song from the Pretty Things' concept album "SF Sorrow".  I don't know why.  It's a memorable song.  It has that same kind of woozy allure as the Floyd song does.  It's seductive.

Defunkt - For the Love of Money (Money): Money, and criticism of greed, is a bit of a trite subject in music, and arguably "Money" the song is a bit of a trite song.  Or perhaps it's just cliched.  The O'Jays' "For the Love of Money" is a cliche in its own way.  Recorded as a criticism of rampant greed, its "Money money money money money" chorus came, in one of those reinterpretations that songs have to grapple with, to represent that greed.  It was most memorably used as the theme song to what was supposed to be a lighthearted "reality show" hosted by a man who, because this is Hell, we are all living in Hell now, is a deranged hateful racist who rules what is nominally the most powerful country in the world.

(Sorry.)

So that's why I didn't go with the O'Jays' version.  Defunkt's version has that jittery "New York's OK if you like saxophones" darkness and intensity to it.

I should note that one area where the O'Jays' song excels over Pink Floyd's is in the bassline, the work of a brilliant, fascinating, and undersung musician by the name of Anthony Jackson, a funk bassist whose chief influences were Jack Casady of the Jefferson Airplane and Olivier Messiaen.  In contrast the bassline for "Money" is the work of a somewhat clumsy and inelegant architecture school dropout who had difficulty playing in 7/4.

Black Flag - Police Story (Us and Them): When I was younger, the song on Dark Side of the Moon that hit me the hardest was "Time".  Since 2016, it's "Us and Them".  It speaks to me hard of that sense of helplessness in the face of violence.  Stupid, absurd, apparently unavoidable.  They think I want to kill them (I don't, for the record), so the only way can think of to protect themselves is to kill me first.  Which in turn means that the only way I can think of to protect myself...

Stupid.  Stupid and absurd, like I said.  And Black Flag encapsulate that in about 90 seconds (mostly by not including a sax solo, probably) with "Police Story".

They're the same fucking song, though.  Maybe Black Flag says it a little better; Waters had deep compassion and occasionally deep insight and could be a bit of a British public school poet at times.

The Rolling Stones - She's a Rainbow (Any Colour You Like): I'll level with you, I don't really think Any Colour You Like is _about_ anything.  I think it's a filler song, and I think it's a fun song to listen to and serves an important purpose in the larger flow of the album, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the song has a larger meaning in and of itself.

So I just put in "She's a Rainbow" by the Rolling Stones, because "colour", because it's the song that came to mind, because it's a good fucking song.

David Bowie - All the Madmen (Brain Damage): And here we have the famous conclusion.  Both Bowie and Waters had close, harrowing experiences with insanity.  With Waters, it was Syd, and with Bowie it was his brother.  They both navigate this territory with compassion and honesty, in my estimation.

There's an old bootleg tape of an interview some awful, clueless student interviewer in America did with the band.  He asks them why Syd isn't in the band, to which Waters, already a little fed up with the young man's utter idiocy, bluntly says that Syd went mad.  The interviewer's jaw-dropping follow-up question: "Is anybody else in the band going to go mad?"

For the past few years I've gotten used to trying to find accidental deeper meaning in statements of mind-boggling idiocy.  We all have to survive in our own ways.  In this case, there's a deeper fear that this stupid asshole sort of glancingly touched on.  The fear that madness is contagious.  That it could spread.  That we could be next.

And at some point the most healthy response is to throw up one's hands and accept the possibility.  Worrying about it changes nothing.  Fine, you know, if that's the way it has to be, that's the way it has to be.  I'll fucking be crazy.  Maybe there's more embrace in Bowie, more horror of the malevolent Other in Waters.  Maybe that's why I like Bowie's song more.

Neutral Milk Hotel - Everything Is (Eclipse): I think this is the bit where Mr. Waters and I have to part ways.  Having considered it for a very long time, I think what he's saying here is wrong.  He overreaches.  He engages in literally all-or-nothing thinking and comes up on the side of "nothing".  Everything he's said up to this point has been true and honest.

These were the last lyrics he wrote for the record.  Initial performances, in January of 1972, didn't have this piece, with "Brain Damage" instead kind of falling apart into chaos and noise at the end.  I guess it was less artistically satisfying, I acknowledge that we like a good solid conclusive ending, but the chaos was warranted, and the conclusion isn't.  You're going to do a song about "everything"?  What comes to mind is the first Neutral Milk Hotel single (which, coincidentally, opens with a street interview of the sort that pepper "Dark Side of the Moon").  You want me to tell you about everything, and this is all I can tell you - nonsense lyrics and this chorus:

"Everything is beautiful here
It's spinning circles round my ears
I'm finally breaking free from fear
And it's fading..."

Fade out.