The classic Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon, was released almost 50 years ago this week. I was a big Pink Floyd fan at the time, having seen them twice while I was in university, and got the album immediately. It took a while to grow on me as I preferred their earlier progressive material, but there was no denying its brilliance. It was also one of the best-sounding albums ever.
It was also a great live experience, as I found out when I saw them at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. A reasonably decent audience recording of that concert can be found on the internet if you know where to look.
Rolling Stone has a list of ten things you probably didn't know about DSOTM. You could probably have won a rock trivia quiz with some of this information. Here's one bit I did know about.
10. Proceeds from the album helped fund Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
As if Dark Side of the Moon wasn’t enough of a pop cultural landmark in itself, the album’s success was also partly responsible for the existence of the brilliantly absurd 1975 film comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The members of Pink Floyd often spent their downtime during the Dark Side sessions watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus on BBC2, so when the British comedy troupe ran into difficulty raising money for their first full-length feature film, the Floyd — now flush with cash from the sales of Dark Side — were more than happy to pony up 10 percent of the film’s initial £200,000 budget.
“There was no studio interference because there was no studio; none of them would give us any money,” Holy Grail director Terry Gilliam recalled in a 2002 interview with The Guardian. “This was at the time [British] income tax was running as high as 90 percent, so we turned to rock stars for finance. Elton John, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, they all had money, they knew our work and we seemed a good tax write-off. Except, of course, we weren’t. It was like The Producers.”
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