Rhino Factoids: Pink Floyd attempt The Dark Side of the Moon live
43 years ago today at the Brighton Dome in Brighton, England, Pink Floyd took their first shot at playing The Dark Side of The Moon live...and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids!
Oh, wait, sorry, we were thinking of something else. What we meant to say was that they would’ve gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for technical problems marring their performance, leading them to bail out somewhere in the middle of “Money.”
But what’s particularly interesting about the performance – and if you’ve done the math, you may have already realized it – is that it took place about 14 months before the album was actually released. Can you imagine a band of Pink Floyd’s stature pulling off something like that nowadays? No, you can’t, because it would’ve been bootlegged to kingdom come and back within a couple of hours of that performance, thereby negating most listeners’ interest in ever hearing the studio version of the album. At the time, though, it was something that was more or less as standard practice amongst musicians, where they worked through material live for ages before it ever made its way to record store shelves.
Looking back at the aborted January 20 performance, a few changes were destined to take place with the Dark Side material. For one, “On the Run” was originally called “The Travel Sequence” and was little more than a guitar and drum jam. “Time” was slower and originally featured Gilmour and Wright singing the first half of the verses together, and “The Great Gig in the Sky,” which at various times had been called both “Religion” and “The Mortality Sequence,” really wasn’t much more than recordings of preachers preaching over the sounds of an organ. We’re not sure just how far they got into “Money,” but we do know that it used to have a lengthier bass intro, and its familiar sax solo started out as a piano solo.
One can only imagine how infuriated the members of Pink Floyd were when something went wrong with the synchronization of their tape effects, leading them to stop the performance in its tracks, but thank heavens they had the sense to simply set aside the Dark Side material and move forward with other material. Otherwise, this would probably be the 43rd anniversary of that time a bunch of Pink Floyd fans angrily rushed the stage of the Brighton Dome to demand their money back. Thankfully, the band managed to solve their technical woes by the next night’s performance, at which point they really did premiere The Dark Side of the Moon...or at least a solid rough draft of it, anyway.
