After Syd Barrett departed Pink Floyd, the band that he had co-founded and fronted became a rudderless ship, releasing a series of nebulous (though highly inventive) jam albums and taking on touring expenses that nearly bankrupted them. Their eighth album was a make-it-or-break-it proposition, and its timing could not have been better. Released in March of 1973, The Dark Side of the Moon quickly topped the US Billboard charts and took up residence there for over 700 weeks, selling over forty-five million copies to date. In Lunacy, award-winning music biographer John Kruth ("A fantastic writer"—Jim Jarmusch) delves into the making of this iconic record and considers why it continues to speak to generation after generation of music lovers around the world.
Placing the album in its full cultural and musical context, Kruth provides an illuminating look at the ingredients of its great "sonic stew"—a mixture of musical styles from avant-garde electronic to jazz to classical, all of them contributing to its timeless originality. Lunacy features in-depth interviews with musicians, artists, DJs, and many others who have deeply personal relationships with the record, including a passionate astrophysicist, a leading brain surgeons nurse (who has performed surgery while "Brain Damage" plays), and a woman who gave birth while screaming along to the Floyds "Great Gig in the Sky."
Packed with behind-the-scenes details and unexpected insights, Lunacy is not just another rock history rehash, but a celebration of a unique time and the music that made it great.
A two-time ASCAP/Deems Taylor award winner, John Kruth is the author of such books as To Lives To Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt, Rhapsody in Black: The Life & Music of Ray Orbison, and Hold On World: The Lasting Impact of John Lennon and Yoko Onos Plastic Ono Band, Fifty Years On. As a music journalist, Kruths articles have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, American Songwriter, and many others. He is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, and as a sideman he has performed and collaborated with such musicians as Laurie Anderson, Violent Femmes, Patti Smith, and Ornette Coleman.
Singer/songwriter/music journalist Kruth (A Friend of the Devil) examines both Pink Floyd’s development as a band and their iconic 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon, which he analyzes track by track. He also takes interesting side trips into somewhat related territory, such as an interview with Delaware State University astrophysicist Matthew Bobrowsky about the moon itself. Kruth grounds Pink Floyd’s endeavors in the British blues explosion, the onset of widespread use of electronic sounds, psychedelic rock’s appearance, and the surprisingly long history of the concept album. Copious quotes from the band members, whose personalities come across clearly, as well as remarks from contemporary musicians set the narrative. Since Pink Floyd used the same Abbey Road studios as the Beatles, whom the musicians acknowledged as influential, readers will see two vastly different paths music took in the 1960s and 1970s. A playlist, bibliography, and index are useful addenda. For fans of The Dark Side of the Moon, this book is especially welcome. Those not familiar with Pink Floyd or this particular venture will still likely appreciate the well-researched and swiftly flowing tale that combines musical intricacies with cultural context.
— Library Journal
Takes you deeper inside the creation of this enigmatic work and its cultural reverberations that have echoed across the decades John Kruth sets the stage nicely, with a concise summary of the band’s story before digging into the album track by track.
— Grammy.com
Lunacy is a standard-bearing rock-album vivisection for anyone interested in how a work of art can capture the zeitgeist, deservedly or not. —Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
— Shelf Awareness
Kruth is a well-studied music historian whose writing skills are mellifluous.
— Al Kooper
Magical . . . John Kruth is a fantastic writer!
— Jim Jarmusch
Lunacy: The Curious Phenomenon of Pink Floyds Dark Side of the Moon, 50 Years On is John Kruths exuberant but shrewd homage to one of the bestselling albums of all time and the band, place and era that begat it. Recognizing that the "story of Dark Side of the Moon is inseparable from rocks transformation from the countercultures cherished soundtrack to mainstream medias played-to-death theme song," Kruth approaches Pink Floyds 1973 album from every angle: musical, lyrical, philosophical, metaphysical and more. (In a foray that is probably knowingly Spinal Tap-ish, Kruth interviews an astrophysicist and poses the musical question "Does the dark side of the moon exist?") Kruth interrupts his song-by-song breakdown of the album with sidebars devoted to, among other topics, Dark Side tributes and, of course, the albums uncanny-seeming (and unintentional) sonic synchronization with The Wizard of Oz.
Kruth, who has also written books toasting the semicentennials of the Beatles Rubber Soul(This Bird Has Flown) and Plastic Ono Band (Hold On World), enriches his inquiry with snippets from interviews he conducted with a range of music-world figures who have something to say about Dark Side, not all of it positive. Offers musician Victor Krummenacher: "Though I have a love of Pink Floyd, this for me, is where things started to go badly. But it is where they made money, and good for them." And good for Kruth: Lunacy is a standard-bearing rock-album vivisection for anyone interested in how a work of art can capture the zeitgeist, deservedly or not. —Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
— Shelf Awareness
