There's a tendency within most societies
to try and force everybody into a particular regimen,
and to stop people walking on the grass.
There's something, I suppose, about that particular lyric.
There's something about the idea of producing grass
and then not letting anybody enjoy it, you know?
"Let's make a beautiful lawn,
"and then not let anybody walk on it, or play on it,
"or kick a ball about on it, or do anything on it."
And in a way, it's the idea of...
Of, actually, the desire to walk on the grass
being mad.
You know, there's something
wrong about that.
And the piece of grass that I had in my mind is...
There's a big square lump of grass
between King's College Chapel and the River Cam in Cambridge,
which, I don't know why,
but that's actually the bit of grass I was thinking about
when I was writing that thing.
Which is a very "keep off" bit.
The choruses of the song are about saying to the audience,
"Look, I know this all feels a bit wacky from time to time."
And it certainly does to me.
I have trouble making sense of all this.
We all make mistakes. We're all human, you know.
You can't expect to be perfect, or behave perfectly or whatever.
But if, you know...
If, through your efforts, if you like,
your own internal efforts, you can give
the empathetic side of your nature
a better chance
in its battle against the devil within you,
then so be it.
And that is a struggle that we can all engage in,
every day of our lives.
I made up the rhythm tape
in a shed at the bottom of the garden.
My wife, then, was a potter.
She had a pottery studio at the bottom of the garden,
and I had a little music studio next to it.
She had a big metal mixing bowl for mixing up clay.
And so I went "Oh! I know how to make the rhythm for this."
And I had a Revox A77.
I only had two-track machines, at the time, at home.
And so I got a microphone out and put it
by the mixing bowl and threw a handful of coins in.
"Right, that's one noise."
And then tore some paper up. "Right, that's another one."
Searched around for the sound of a cash register or something.
And thought "it's in 7/8, okay," so I cut up seven pieces of tape
of those sound effects, exactly the same length,
and spliced them together and stuck it in the Revox,
going around a mic-stand to hold it like that,
and pressed the button, and that was it.
We actually made the loop onto a four-track tape,
which meant that
the seven different sounds could walk around the room.
Although it's not perfect, because it's seven in a bar,
not eight, so it doesn't make it wrap quite round the room
on the eighth beat, which isn't there.
But you could probably say that this was one of the first times
that a band played to a loop.
I can't think of an earlier instance than this.
They were hearing that in their headphones.
They just counted off and played in sync with this.
And then, like on the record, I faded it out
once the band had started playing.
We start off with the bass guitar.
There it is. And then we double-track it
with this guitar,
which is like this. And then we bring in a tremolo guitar.
That one. We'll stick that one into the mix.
And then there's two more,
which are doing sort of offbeat things.
There, that's this one...
And this one.
And they sort of feature across with Rick's keyboards,
which are here.
And then let's bring all that stuff in.
So this is gonna be the vocal without any processing at all.
And then I can add in a delay,
which brings it to life a little bit more.
And then some reverb, which will give it some space.
Here comes the guitar solo.
Played there, then learnt and double-tracked
as precisely as one can do it on left and right
for the first of these three sort of guitar solos.
Two performances, double-tracked.
And all the effects, again, David was generating himself.
This sounds like me.
This is where I cut it, right now.
It goes absolutely to nothing.
It goes really small. There's no delays, no reverb,
just virgin sounds.
I mean, their idea of, like, coming down to where it's dry...
That was already there
on the rough mix that I had of this stuff.
But I just wanted to build it up and make stuff bigger.
In other words, by tracking it, and by using more echo.
This is where the echo comes back in again.
So this is the third one.
It goes into the double-tracked one,
which is this one on its own, and then it's...
By the means of trickery, ADT-ed, you get
two of them. It's the same one,
and they're sort of very slightly delayed.
This is because it's got
that note, and one or two others.
It's too high for my Stratocaster,
so that's why I used that Lewis guitar I showed you.
As we know, money is a real addiction for most of us.
That was one of the things, for me personally,
about Dark Side Of The Moon,
when it finally became successful.
At that point, I had to decide whether I really was,
you know, a socialist or not.
'Cause if you've suddenly got a few quid,
you've got to decide if you're going to hang onto it.
Whether you put it in the bank or whatever you do with it,
it will be invested by somebody,
so you have to decide whether to become a capitalist or not.
All that was basically the same as in Zabriskie Point.
Why I liked it was because it's all on a pedal D.
So all the chords actually...
'Cause it could have gone...
I mean, that is basically the same chords,
but instead of being... That was a D to a B minor.
And then an A, and...
But I just liked it just sort of rolling along
so that all these chords relate to the D.
I love that chord. I don't know why. lt just...
But it wouldn't work if I'd gone up to an A.
But that's what music is all about, you know?
So that was that, and then, I think...
That was the sequence that came to the studio,
and then we wanted a chorus,
and I just wrote the three chords.
That was written in the studio.
Of the songs that Roger and I have written together,
I would say that's, for me, my favourite.
My world view is very similar now.
We are the products, I think, of our early childhood.
My theory is that after you hit five or six years old,
not a lot changes,
fundamentally.
And the pain that we experience,
or the joy, or the love, or the whatever,
all the experiences that we have as young children, I think,
stay with us forever.
And they are... You know, they provide us
with the rationale that shapes our adult lives.
I certainly think that's true of me.
And I have the same feelings now.
And in a way, that's why I can still...
I've been listening to Dark Side Of The Moon recently,
simply because James Guthrie has been making a 5.1 mix of it,
and so I've had to go and listen to it,
you know, and say what I think.
And one thing I thought the first time I sat there
in the chair, and all this stuff was going on around me, was
how those fundamental issues
of whether or not
the human race is capable of being humane
are still right in our faces 30 years later. Now, that...
Within the perspective of history, one would say
"What a fucking stupid thing to say. Of course they are."
It's only 30 years. It's like... It's a nanosecond.
It's a nothing. It's irrelevant. You know?
This little bit of history that we live in, we tend to...
We make a lot of it, because we're here and we're watching it
and it means a lot to us because we're alive at the moment.
But we won't be in a few years' time,
and things will continue.
But the fundamental question that's facing us all
is whether or not we're capable of dealing with
the whole question of "us and them".
I think. That's my... That's something I always had.
I had that bit when I was a teenager, and when I was...
When I was the chairman of the YCND in Cambridge
when I was 15 years old, or whatever, things basically...
if you've been given,
I think, the gift of having that perspective,
you don't lose it. And I suspect it's quite hard,
you know, if you're fundamentally inclined
to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan,
to shrug that off in later years, as well.
I think it's likely that you go on, you know,
wanting to lynch people forever.
Maybe not. Maybe I shouldn't say that.
There is an optimistic side of me that thinks,
that feels that not just individuals,
but hierarchies, authorities, are capable of rehabilitation.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to think that G. W. Bush
was capable of transcending his background
and becoming a person who could understand
broader and more fundamental issues of human contact
than that kind of sheriff thing that he's got going for him?
Which is all that Dark Side Of The Moon is about.
When I went back and listened to it a few years ago,
when I was going on the road and I was trying to decide
what songs to play off it,
things like the introduction of Time...
My brain kept saying "Now it's gonna...
"Oh, it goes round again? Okay, now it's gonna change.
"Oh, no." And it's interminable. You know, it just seems...
The Rototom bit seems to go on forever and ever and ever.
And it's great. I like it, you know, but it's...
There was what would have seemed,
20 years later, like a bravery
in allowing stuff just to sit there
and sort of vamp for what seems like hour after hour.
And just to allow it to, you know, have its own pace
and not to feel that you've got to change,
or keep people's interest, or suddenly have
some different kind of information going on.
And that's good.
Everybody who goes into rock 'n' roll,
you know, wants to make a mark of some kind.
As a demonstration of rebellion,
or because they can't think
of any other way to make a lot of money,
or because they want to pull girls, or whatever.
You know, there's no purity
in the motivation for rock 'n' roll.
However, those people that are successful in it
normally have...
And that last a bit, normally have
some other axe to grind,
which is, in some way, fundamentally connected
to the experience of many others,
otherwise we wouldn't buy their records.
I wouldn't go and buy Neil Young's records
unless I felt a fundamental attachment
to his preoccupations with love
and life and liberty and so on and so forth.
And the same way with any of my other heroes.
Lennon, or Dylan, or, you know, whoever.
However, I don't think any of us in rock 'n' roll
are solely motivated by the noble
desire to share our wisdom
with, you know, with the rest of mankind.
I think we'd do something else
if that was the primary motivation.
Chris Thomas, obviously a well-known producer even then,
even in the early '70s.
The band felt they needed a fresh pair of ears,
which was probably a justifiable thought.
And Chris and I, I think, worked pretty well together.
Suddenly, somebody who wasn't an engineer was coming in
and saying "Can we compress the guitar on this?"
"Can we compress that? More echo on that?" and all the rest.
And I think, to this day, Alan...
if you actually say, "ls there any one thing,
"is there anything you're not happy about on the record?",
it's always like "I don't like the compression on it."
We occasionally disagreed on... On compression,
and a number of issues like that,
but essentially, I think, he helped the process along,
helped make it into a better record.
A lot of work had gone into it up to that point.
It was a question of finishing the record off.
It wasn't one of these ones where "We'll fix it in the mix,"
and there's loads and loads of stuff to sort out.
Wasn't like that at all. It had been carefully planned.
Chris was an inspired choice, because having made the album,
we really did get bogged down into the mixing.
Maybe Dave and I were beginning to argue about things.
I'm not sure. That may not be true.
He came in for just the mix sessions,
and helped to find a compromise
between the way Roger saw it and the way I saw it.
Dave, Roger, me and Nick
all had different ideas about how to mix.
Whether it's how loud the voice-overs are,
how much reverb to put on the drums,
levels of vocals...
There weren't violent disagreements,
but we couldn't agree.
That's a perfectly valid thing to argue about.
That's got nothing to do with any acrimony, if one person
wants it one way and one wants it another way.
I mean, obviously, again, I'd imagine
that's the reason they wanted somebody else to come in.
To sort of shine a light on what's gonna be the best way.
I think we'd just run out of energy, you know?
And I remember going to listen to the mix,
after he'd done a mix, and it was a huge relief.
It was kind of unlike how I would have mixed it,
much softer and more kind of homogeneous,
but I think he did a great job.
For me, I mean, several guitar parts
layered on top of each other.
Basic rhythm part, and then some stuff on the pedal steel.
That would have been the sort of basic guitar part,
done with the whole band playing,
and then layering-on of other instruments.
At least two tracks on the pedal steel, I think.
Yeah, the first part's basically just that one.
Then afterwards, there was one I added on like this.
There's basically the same part, at the beginning, anyway,
on Great Gig In The Sky.
There is no dark side in the moon, really.
Matter of fact, it's all dark.
The only thing that makes it look light is the sun.
There is no dark side in the moon, really.
Matter of fact, it's all dark.
The only thing that makes it look light is the sun.