! Was Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon Written As a Secret Soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz?

Urban myths are a uniquely American phenomenon. They are the modern folk tales that migrate back and forth across our landscape like freakish birds. They contain enough specificity in terms of brand names, places, famous people, or cultural detritus to assume a certain amount of higher knowledge from both speaker and listener. Yet they are always so outlandish and improbable that they require protestations of "True story! True story!" on the part of the teller--even though he or she invariably can't back up the story with a reputable source.

At their heart they are a fusion of the inbred human desire to tell an engrossing tale and our cultural distrust of fiction as irrelevant or somehow ethically inferior to nonfiction. We are a nation filled with storytellers who are trapped in a culture of journalists. Urban myths are the primordial national mud from whence sprang the Drudge Report.

The rise of the Internet has enhanced the intersection of hearsay, anonymity, and gullibility that lies at the heart of urban mythology. Thanks to the 'net, we can now add the stories of the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe, the Utah homosexuals who unwittingly invented the gerbil-propelling anal bazooka, and the midnight hotel-room kidney stealers to the ancient legend of the fleeing New York City thief who shattered Bob Beamon's long jump record while leaping from rooftop to rooftop and the one about the odious contents of Rod Stewart's stomach that produced his onstage fainting spell.

One of the all-star urban myths is the one about Pink Floyd's 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon being secretly composed as a synchronized soundtrack to the immortal 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz. What made this urban myth so useful was that you could immediately tell that the person passing on this story was a stoner. It was more certain than checking their wallet for a NORML card or their car bumper for a Deadhead sticker. Pink Floyd stands high in the rock-n-roll pantheon of the cannabis-enabled, and The Wizard of Oz is so ubiquitous and yet so phantasmagorical that it functions as cultural stock footage for hallucinatory images.

Imagine my journalistic glee when I was given the chance to put the Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz urban myth to the test--and in an objective, non-doper context, yet. Lee, the dispenser of beverages at the local gin mill, offered to screen Dorothy and pals traveling to the Emerald City to the accompaniment of Pink Floyd on the bar's big-screen TV and sound system. Lee had heard about this secret soundtrack from some guy in a video store--the tapehead claimed to have seen it outlined on Sixty Minutes, which itself smacked of urban myth--and tried it out himself. He swore up and down that it worked, and vowed to convince me as well.

So, limiting myself to a couple pints of ale during the viewing, I saw firsthand whether this was some sort of eerie conspiracy of progressive-rock gnosticism, sheer coincidence, or a mere demonstration of better living through botany.

Lee started the Dark Side of the Moon CD on the second roar of the MGM lion--for some reason Pink Floyd bassist/mastermind Roger Waters supposedly synchronized the album to the second and not the first roar--and muted the video's sound. And here is what I saw:

A long series of really weird parallels. The album/film pairing doesn't really make sense at first, the album moving through the instrumental sections of "Speak To Me", "Breathe In The Air", and "On The Run" and the film moving through the expository scenes of Dorothy, Auntie Em, Uncle Henry, and the hired hands on their Kansas farm. This was frustrating, both because Lee had done an effective job of building up my excitement and because Pink Floyd instrumentals are ponderous and sterile to begin with.

I was ready to chalk the whole thing up to narcotic tomfoolery as "Time", one of the best-known Floyd songs, began during the Dorothy/Elvira Gulch confrontation. The first clue came as Toto escapes from the basket on the back of Miss Gulch's bike and scurries away as Floyd guitarist David Gilmour sings the word "run". In the next line, he sings, "You missed the starting gun" just as Dorothy sets foot outside the house to track down her dog.

This sort of transitional motif continues as the song ends with Dorothy leaving Professor Marvel's wagon. The next song, "The Great Gig In The Sky", is essentially an instrumental of loud/soft dynamics with the wordless melismatic wailings of Pink Floyd's backing trio of black female vocalists, The Blackberries, accompanying. The song grew in intensity as the tornado approached Dorothy's house--and then, as the window struck Dorothy on the head and knocked her unconscious, the instrumental and the wailing suddenly went quiet. As if on cue, it began to build back up again as the house ascended up the tornado's funnel. At this point, it occurred to me that calling the song "The Great Gig In the Sky" was a very strange coincidence.

It got even better. The song ends precisely as the house crashes to the ground in Oz. Seemingly cued to Dorothy opening the door to the Technicolor world of Munchkinland, the cash registers that signal the beginning of "Money" sound. A commentary on the big-budget opulence of Hollywood, perhaps?

"Money", explained Lee the helpful dispenser of beverages and urban myths, "is represented by the ruby slippers." While that seemed to be an excessive exercise in parsing lyrics, "Money" did have its share of delicious Munchkinland moments. As the line, "Don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit" is sung, the pink bubble containing the Good Witch of the North floats into town. Better yet, the Munchkins (who in the movie are dancing to "Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead") dance perfectly in time to "Money". This refutes the age-old canard that the problem with progressive rock is that you can't dance to it. Sure you can...if you're a Munchkin.

As the final word of the song--"away...away...away..."--is sung, Dorothy rides in the Munchkin carriage to the front door of the Mayor's house. Harmless enough. But then "Us and Them" begins (just as the line of Munchkin soldiers parts to let the Lullaby League ballerinas tiptoe by as if on cue), and the word synchs start coming fast and furious. On the word "black", the Wicked Witch of the West appears in a ball of flame.

On "blue" we see her face. "But her face is green, not blue!" I protested. Lee threw me the "how sad for you" look of the true believer confronted by a skeptic.

But the next line of the song, "...and who knows which is which and who is who?" was truly surreal, as it coincided with the confrontation of the two witches, Good and Bad. I know a good counterargument when one is thrown at me.

On it went. On the word "out", the Good Witch exits. On the word "within", Dorothy sets her ruby-shod foot inside the Yellow Brick Road to begin her Wizard-seeking quest. The song ends and segues into the synths of "Any Colour You Like" as the film cuts from Dorothy departing Munchkinland to her arrival at the fork in the Yellow Brick Road where the Scarecrow stands in a nearby cornfield. The Scarecrow cavorts and sings "If I Only Had a Brain" as the Pink Floyd song "Brain Damage" is heard, which is an unsettling combination of events. On the line, "see you on the dark side of the moon...", Dorothy and the Scarecrow march off.

The album ends with "Eclipse", which coincides with the apple-tossing battle of the Talking Trees and the discovery of the Tin Man. The Tin Man begins speaking (other than the murmured "Oil can...oil can...") to the Pink Floyd line, "all that you say...". The heartbeats which close the album are heard just as Dorothy is beating on the Tin Man's chest to hear its hollow, heart-deprived, echoes.

Lee paused the film and immediately cued up Wish You Were Here, the 1975 Pink Floyd successor album to Dark Side of the Moon. He admitted that there would be fewer synchs and more of a general mood of trippiness, but insisted that there were still parallels to be found.

The "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" instrumental passages which occupy half the album--which I find excruciating to listen to--were completely uninteresting in the context of the movie. The only relevant reference seemed to be the song "Welcome To the Machine" (which Lee insists is about cocaine fueling the music industry, and who am I to doubt him?) opening as snow falls on the slumbering heroes asleep in the poppy field in front of the gates of the Emerald City. I was far more interested in Lee's conspiratorial commentary that the combination of poppies and snow was an insider's clue to the prevalence of speedballs among Tinseltown hipsters even as far back as 1939. Belushi and Farley fans, take note.

My conclusion? It's still too farfetched to think that Messrs. Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason deliberately recorded Dark Side of the Moon (much less Wish You Were Here) as a synchronized Floydian soundtrack to an old movie. But it is amazing and amusing enough to share with your friends, not in an urban myth vein, but simply as a sort of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" string of odd coincidences.

What I would really like to do is shake the hand of the diligent scholar who first discovered the parallels. Not only did he or she link a lengthy series of clues from one medium to the other, he or she probably did it in the throes of a debilitating mental fog of marijuana. This sort of exercise demanded concentration and acuity, not an expanded consciousness.

And it inevitably makes you wonder just how many doper albums of yore were conceived by stoned artists who used classic movies as their blueprints. Was Blue Cheer's Vincebus Eruptum set to the flickering gun battles of The Sands of Iwo Jima? Do the boogie jams of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Second Helping synch up with Gone With The Wind? How about Rush's Hemispheres and They Saved Hitler's Brain? Yes's Tales From Topographic Oceans and It Happened One Night?

This could open up whole new avenues of idle entertainment for the disciples of bonghood. "Hey, man, didja ever try watching Ben-Hur while listening to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida?" "Dude! What a tasty concept!"

Frito-Lay could sponsor a contest wherein the first person to successfully demonstrate a linkage between a rock-n-roll album and a hitherto-unrelated movie gets a free year's worth of munchies.

But, all kidding aside, I learned my lesson. Urban myths are not to be laughed at any longer. From now on, it might be a good idea to check the toilet bowl for albino alligators before you sit down.

Captain Spaulding

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Previous Mountaintop Experiences with Captain Spaulding:

Hooray For Me #1-- One Margarita Too Many?

Hooray For Me #2-- Spitting at the Generations

Hooray For Me #3-- The One-Eyed Spokesmodel

Hooray For Me #4-- Semisardonic Over Semisonic

Hooray For Me #5-- Bury My Brain at Wounded Knee

Hooray For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup

Hooray For Me #7-- Princess Diana

Hooray For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat

Hooray For Me #9-- Mother Teresa