©1973, Capitol Records
After showing a bunch of photo-based covers, 
here is one of the most recognizable graphic covers of all time. Floyd’s eighth album was a true game-changer. It is one of the 3 or 4 best-selling albums of all time, selling more than 44 million copies since it’s release, and was on the Billboard Album chart for 741 consecutive weeks. Heck, it still pops onto the Catalog Album chart from time to time, 47 years later! And the album cover is truly iconic.
The album cover was designed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell at Hipgnosis, and actually created by George Hardie. There are no words on the cover at all, which couldn’t have gone over too well initially at the record company – at least until the record started selling as well as it did. Curiously, there is no indigo in the spectrum being put out by the prism – only six colors appear. I wonder why?
The band recorded at Abbey Road studios, and their engineer was Alan Parsons who had worked on the last two Beatles records and, despite Dr. Evil’s claims to the contrary, later went on the form the Alan Parsons Project band. Other interesting facts revolve around the voices heard between and even during the various songs. People were brought in to be interviewed and snippets of those interviews were used throughout the recordings. Naomi Watts’ father Peter was Floyd’s road manager at the time, and can be heard laughing through “Brain Damage” and “Speak To Me.” Wings guitarist Henry McCullough said the line “I don’t know; I was really drunk at the time” at the end of “Money.“ According to John Harris’ book, The Dark Side of the Moon, the Abbey Road studio’s doorman, Gerry O’Driscoll, got in the last word at the end of “Eclipse,” noting that “There is no dark side in the moon, really. As a matter of fact it’s all dark.”
But the most interesting thing about this album, besides the music and the cover themselves, is the persistent theory called “The Dark Side of the Rainbow” – that this album was written as a soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz. The idea is that if you start the movie with the sound off, and then start the CD at a certain time (just as the MGM lion roars for the third time), the music and the lyrics synch up with what’s happening on screen an unusual number of times. This is a theory that the band has repeatedly and vigorously denied . Go read the Wikipedia entry linked above to learn more.
