And Then One Day You Find Ten Years Have Got Behind You

Actually, it’s 40 years (!) since the release of Dark Side of the Moon.

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The Telegraph has a nice photo retrospective of Pink Floyd here.

March 3, 2013 UPDATE: IN CASE YOU WERE NOT FEELING OLD ENOUGH ALREADY, THE BEATLES RELEASED THEIR FIRST ALBUM ONE HALF CENTURY AGO TODAY.

Author: Keith Humphreys

Keith Humphreys is the Esther Ting Memorial Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University and an Honorary Professor of Psychiatry at Kings College London. His research, teaching and writing have focused on addictive disorders, self-help organizations (e.g., breast cancer support groups, Alcoholics Anonymous), evaluation research methods, and public policy related to health care, mental illness, veterans, drugs, crime and correctional systems. Professor Humphreys' over 300 scholarly articles, monographs and books have been cited over thirteen thousand times by scientific colleagues. He is a regular contributor to Washington Post and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Times Higher Education (UK), Crossbow (UK) and other media outlets.

12 thoughts on “And Then One Day You Find Ten Years Have Got Behind You”

  1. I often think, “Wow. Forty years before 1973 was 1933. How did I feel in 1973 looking back at 42nd Street or other songs from the early 1930s…That was old!”

    Saw the “Dark Side of the Moon” tour in Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, NJ in the summer of 1973.

    Hard to believe…forty years.

    I guess the reason the Pink Floyd album seems far more fresh is that the only real demarcation is “Everything before Elvis and Chuck Berry and everything after.” The electricfying of music. The guitar replacing the saxophone or other wind instrument as the lead sound. Rock beats, not swing beats.

    Otherwise, man…forty years.

  2. Mitchell’s observation contains a very sad kernel.

    When us geezers were young, there were two kinds of music: our music and old folks’ music. And boy, did we ignore old folks’ music. It was all the same and all boring: Sinatra, classical, Dixieland, Broadway, bebop.

    Kids today are far more mature. They tend to appreciate everything that has gone on before, including the music of our youth, as well as the music we so stupidly despised. In a way, this is sad. They deny themselves the great privilege of the young: living a hopeful new world of one’s own making.

    1. I . . . Do not find this to be the case. Nearly 100% of the under-20s I know, including my niece and nephew, are almost painfully ignorant of music made before they were 9 or 10 years old.

      1. There are two points here.

        (a) Youngsters today have the possibility to encounter a vastly wider range of music than has been the case before. I mean, god, I think Gangnam Style sucks as song, but it’s something new that a Korean pop singer can take the US by storm; and I think what’s going on there is a little deeper and richer than Ravi Shankar touring the hippie dens of the US in the early 70s.

        (b) The accumulated stash of music in the world is VAST, far larger than anyone will ever be able to listen to. To moan about how other people are ignorant because they choose to listen to a particular subset that doesn’t include elements of your particular subset is just stupid. What do you propose as an alternative? Have you listened to the entire Chinese classical opera oeuvre to see if there’s anything there you like? How much 1950’s Congolese dance music have you listened to? etc etc etc
        Music (and ESPECIALLY. apparently, for the people who go on the most about it) is as much as anything else, a social marker — a way to bond with your friends, and mark outsiders. For those purposes, pretty much anything will do.

        These kids will do what kids have done for at least the past 50 years — they will notice some recurrent themes in what they hear around them (in ads, movies, etc) and maybe decide to investigate. They will meet friends who tell them they should listen to X, and they like it or they don’t. And yes, they will miss out on 99% of the music in the world, just like they will miss out on 99% of the literature and 99% of the movies — that’s what living in an age of abundance means.
        There is nothing anyone can do about this, and railing that they are “ignorant” is just going to devolve into a totally pointless fight over whether, if they were given two hours to be shown the wonders of pre 1975 music, that should be spent on Beatles, or Rolling Stones, or Beach Boys, or Leonard Cohen, or Joan Baez, or, yes, Pink Floyd.

    2. My folks raised me to love the pre-Elvis era and to appreciate classical music. I have done the same with my children. It has not stuck much with my early teen aged daughter, but she knows who Vaughan Williams and Mendelssohn are, and she can name all three Andrews Sisters. My son is deep into Sinatra, classical and jazz in general, as much as neo-prog and post-rock, and some other genres I can’t remember at my now late middle age…:-)

      Still, the ignorance I see among the American populace about anything not within the purview of “mainstream” corporate pop is breathtaking.

    3. Kids today are far more mature. They tend to appreciate everything that has gone on before, including the music of our youth, as well as the music we so stupidly despised. In a way, this is sad. They deny themselves the great privilege of the young: living a hopeful new world of one’s own making.

      Not really the mechanism — you had the hugest generation ever whose youth was constantly marketed to them over and over long after they were young, through a much more sprawling media network than had ever existed before. Their kids got saturated with their parents’ music far more than any generation in history. Some of them were bound to like it out of familiarity if nothing else.

  3. I’m having a stoner flashback just seeing that image. About 18 months of my life involved substance ingestion followed by both sides of “Wish You Were Here” on headphones, at least once daily.

  4. I went through a big Pink Floyd phase in high school. Mom has always loved Time. I caught my Dad singing along to Young Lust in The Wall without really knowing or understanding the words - I wish I could remember what he was singing - something zany and kind of innocent. I do feel terrible that I ruined the album for him forever when I revealed that the lyrics were “I need a dirty woman I need a dirty girl” or whatever. Anyway, I’ve long since graduated to punk music and eventually blues, zydeco, country, hip hop and whatever. Maybe I’ll pull the old wax out when I get home tonight.

  7. (For those of you who don’t click on youtube links, that’s the start of a Petaluma CA concert by the bluegrass band Poor Man’s Whiskey in which they play the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon. Bluegrass style. In Wizard of Oz costumes.)

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