oincidence? Alien intervention? Who knows. It happened at the same time, like a handover, in December 1972. Two separate events, but strangely linked. On December 19 of that month, the capsule carrying the three astronauts of the Apollo 17 mission splashed! in the Pacific, near the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga. We didn’t know it yet, but there would be no Apollo 18. Despite the hopping rides of a Lunar Rover that looked like a bodyless Dune Buggy, the world and its media had gotten used to it, weary. Walk on the moon ? Routine. Might as well reread Tintin.
The adventure was elsewhere. In the dark. During the same month of December, at the Abbey Road studio in London, so celebrated by seven fabulous years of Beatles recording sessions, sound engineer Alan Parsons unveiled in-house a fairly advanced mix of the album on which the group Pink Floyd had been working since the last day of May 1972: The Dark Side of the Moon. It still lacked sound effects, including the heartbeat that gives Breathe its breath, the thousand bells that wake Time. But, above all, there weren’t yet the extreme vocalizations of Clare Torry: instead, there were snippets of communications between Houston and the Apollo astronauts. Did we sense that it was already an old idea? In January 1973, it is erased: an almost extraterrestrial human voice, at the very least superhuman, imposes itself.
The album is finished. Things were done quickly at that time: on March 10 in America, on March 27 in the United Kingdom, record stores received the first copies of this album with a black cover like interstellar space, where all the light seemed to explode in a prism of the universe : The Dark Side of the Moon. Why here before there? The moon rotates, that’s why. After break-in shows at the Palais des sports in Paris, at the Rainbow in London, a North American tour is underway. As of March 4, the entire album is being played in Madison, Wisconsin. Every evening his city. On the 11th, Pink Floyd is in Toronto.
I was arm’s length from David “God” Gilmour. It’s mind-blowing in the first-level sense of the word, as in the verb to hallucinate.
And on Monday March 12, 1973, two short days after the release of the album, almost out of stock so much we tear it up at Phantasmagoria, Sam The Record Man, Sherman and other less obvious places (we bought records at Zeller’s and Eaton’s at that time), now Pink Floyd comes to play The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety at the old Montreal Forum. Who among the thousands of ecstatic viewers had time to absorb the new material, who lived the experience dark side ? At CHOM-FM, the record is on repeat, and everyone listens to the Montreal rock station, but the fact remains that it’s brand new. The beautiful long-haired people of our country expect first of all Echoesthe epic track of the album Meddle, a journey to the far reaches of the galaxy that lasts an entire side of the disc. That and the song that opens the record: One of these Days. In a way, The Dark Side of the Moon is a bonus, a fantastic bonus.
Deafened and smoky witnesses
Richard Z. Sirois, future RBO member and radio host, is in attendance. The ticket cost him five dollars. It is very well placed. “My elbows were propped up on the stage, in front of mountains of loudspeakers the size of tent trailers”, he says in his moving and fascinating book The insomniac’s vinyl (St-Jean, 2022). “I was arm’s length from David ‘God’ Gilmour. It’s mind-blowing in the first-level sense of the word, as in the verb to hallucinate. ” He will lose a good part of the hearing in the right ear in very significant payment for his proximity, but he “had the happiness of hearing live the album The Dark Side of the Moon full “. And One of these Days on recall.
It started with Echoesit was already perfect. Obscured by Clouds (the very mysterious theme of the film The valley, by Barbet Schroeder), When You’re In, Childhood’s End and the very menacing Careful with that Axe, Eugene followed, setting the stage for the journey ahead. The smoke bombs gradually filled the place. The producer André Ménard spoke about it in the paper 20e 1993 anniversary in The duty : “The couple of friends I was with had been sick throughout the show, the hash was so good. Also, the smoke Pink Floyd used was poisonous, and people were falling unconscious. It passed over Richard Z., too close, lucky to have only left the Forum dumbfounded and deaf.
May 7 released a 45 rpm, strangeness for Pink Floyd: Money/Us and Them. A chart success that propelled the band beyond cult status to the middle of mainstream popularity around the world. The album remained in the Top 100 charts for 971 weeks (most consecutively), released, purchased and repurchased some 45 million copies. The rest of the story of Pink Floyd is well known, you can still see at L’Arsenal until March 5 the sketches of Storm Thorgerson for the famous cover, among other artifacts, in the extraordinary exhibition Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains. Richard Z. Sirois is on his fourth visit.