Show: Life Out of Tunes
Host: Joe “Joey Books” Accardi
Show Date: Friday, March 3, 2023
The radio show fell on the eve of the 50th anniversary of my attendance at the North American concert tour debut of Pink Floyd’s landmark album “The Dark Side of the Moon,” which was released days earlier on March 1, 1973.
The show represents my personal account of attending the concert in Madison WI on March 4, 1973, among an audience of approximately 9,000. While there is no live recording of that concert, I used setlist.fm to recreate the tracks and present them in the order in which they were performed. I used the original TDSOTM album tracks and additional tracks from Pink Floyd as well as covers by some others, interspersed with my commentary and some canned audience noise.
The concert’s overwhelming quadraphonic sound and laser light show were both quite innovative for that time. I touch on the laser light displays developed by Pink Floyd and their rarely mentioned lighting designer Richard Borders, who the band entrusted with their finished, as yet unreleased recording, to coordinate the lights with the music in advance of the concert tour. I also mention the source of the quadraphonic sound, a device called an “Azimuth Coordinator” used by Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright to swirl the audio around the arena.