Dark Side of the Men by Heather Flescher
1973. Halfway between a piper and a wall.
About the pivot point stretches a remarkable career.
Before this came a ragtag jam band, a strange group that strange people listened to.
Afterwards came a streamlined, high-powered ensemble, a darling of radio,
a staple of stadiums, a massive musical force breaking records for selling records.
That unique, momentous album sits astride the flow of history.
The convergence of talent and opportunity,
recorded at Abbey Road studios, where legends walk in lines,
with meticulous production defining new levels of state-of-the-art technical precision,
laying down a gleaming path of sonic Teflon for this mental journey up the river of pain.
Set the controls for the heart of darkness.
About the pivot point stands this landmark LP that embodied the concept of a concept album,
that plowed through the status quo like a cultural tornado.
We’re off to see the wizard who had everyone spellbound.
The start, heartbeat, breathing and time, on the run and the tolling of the iron bell.
The ending, greed, war and death, any color, insanity and eclipse.
Held together by collages of shifting samples and disembodied dialogue.
And in the center, the emotional apex, the greatest song of a set in the sky.
About the pivot point above a subdued piano line revolves the core, the essence,
emerging fully formed from a singer named Clare Torry.
The transcendent melody, the nucleus of molten soul that anchors the creation
like a silver spindle holding black vinyl in orbit,
the crux is an improvised wordless vocal explosion out of nowhere,
reaching unknown depths and unimaginable heights.
Clare Torry brings forth the flawless pinnacle
at the heart of the song at the heart of the album at the heart of the band’s career.
Triple concentric pivot points, nested like Matryoshka dolls.
A cosmic hub. The axis of everything.
When the album ends, we’re back in Kansas.
A vivid spread of rainbow pulled backwards through a prismatic pyramid
and welded into a featureless shaft of bright white light.
As iconic as an alien monolith that shines on like a hazy diamond.
Making its home on the Billboard charts as if it was a permanent resident,
selling and selling and selling and selling,
making these four men rich beyond reason,
and worshipped by fans who purchase records and tapes and 8-tracks and CDs
and videocassettes and concert tickets and posters and T-shirts and tapestries
and magazines and coffee mugs and lunchboxes…
yet if those fans bumped into Clare Torry on the street, they wouldn’t even stop walking.
Clare Torry, who was given a salary of thirty British pounds
to write and perform a song that sold fifty-one million copies.
That’s one twenty-thousandth of a penny per unit.
The delicate sound of plunder.
Don’t give me that do-goody-good bullshit.
Clare Torry exchanged her labor for thirty pounds and went back to paying her rent
by singing commercial jingles for tea and booze and deodorant,
back into the shadows, into the bleak grey lunar wasteland of freezing vacuum,
and a sky full of stars, so distant.
Oh, by the way. Which one’s Pink?
Heather Flescher is a disabled trans woman from the East Coast of the U.S. who has been writing poetry, prose, essays, plays, reviews and journal entries since she was a child. She has always loved performing her work in front of audiences, and is most comfortable when on a stage.
Posted on October 24th 2023