How I was seduced by the ​‘Dark Side of the Rain­bow’ phenomenon

With inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas every­where still host­ing screen­ings today, the the­o­ry that Pink Floyd’s sem­i­nal 1973 album ​‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ syncs almost seam­less­ly with the 1939 MGM musi­cal The Wiz­ard of Oz is one leg­end that just won’t go away.

Hav­ing entered into the pub­lic con­scious­ness a lit­tle over 20 years ago, the ​‘Dark Side of the Rain­bow’ phe­nom­e­non is close­ly linked to an ear­ly inter­net fan forum, alt.music.pink-floyd, and a pop­u­lar 1995 arti­cle by New York Times reporter Char­lie Sav­age, who was then writ­ing for his local news­pa­per the Fort Wayne Jour­nal Gazette.

The the­o­ry has been wide­ly ref­er­enced and ridiculed in pop­u­lar cul­ture ever since, name­ly in shows such as Fam­i­ly Guy, How I Met Your Moth­er and Trail­er Park Boys, which essen­tial­ly paint it as the byprod­uct of a bunch of super fans tak­ing too many drugs. How­ev­er, hav­ing sober­ly watched Dark Side of the Rain­bow for the first time (track­ing down a Blu-ray copy which ful­ly adheres to the rules is sur­pris­ing­ly easy), it’s strik­ing just how well the the­o­ry holds up.

The first eye­brow-rais­ing moment arrives when Dorothy (Judy Gar­land) bal­ances on a fence at her fam­i­ly farm just as David Gilmour begins to sing the line ​“bal­anced on the biggest wave” in the song ​‘Breathe’. In fact, from around four min­utes into the film, the syn­chronic­i­ty is uncan­ny for a full 45 min­utes, with piv­otal scenes eeri­ly appear­ing to coin­cide with the end of one track and the begin­ning of the next.

This is best encap­su­lat­ed when the haunt­ing piano on ​‘Great Gig in the Sky’ kicks in just before a tor­na­do hits Dorothy’s home­town, cre­at­ing a pow­er­ful sense of fore­bod­ing. When Dorothy wakes up in her now float­ing house, Clare Torry’s pow­er­ful vocals begin to build, almost seem­ing like the fuel pow­er­ing the Wicked Witch of the West as she men­ac­ing­ly encir­cles the tor­na­do on her broom­stick. And, rather odd­ly, the cash reg­is­ter open­ing of ​‘Mon­ey’ starts, almost sar­cas­ti­cal­ly, just as Dorothy starts to take in the won­der­ful Tech­ni­col­or sur­round­ings of Oz.

There also appears to be play­ful lyri­cal cues for par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ters. The line ​“the lunatic is on the grass” cor­re­sponds to the Scare­crow danc­ing on the grass, while the song ​‘Brain Dam­age’ kicks in at the pre­cise moment ​‘If I Only Had a Brain’ starts up in the film. Lat­er, when Dorothy checks to see if the Tin Man is as heart­less as he claims, you can faint­ly hear the heart­beat sound that’s sam­pled in the album’s outro.

And while there are undoubt­ed­ly long sequences that have, at best, extreme­ly abstract audio­vi­su­al sim­i­lar­i­ties, the fact ​‘Dark Side of the Rain­bow’ clos­es with Dorothy final­ly awak­ing back on her farm as the lyric ​“Home, home again” rings out, starts to make you visu­alise David Gilmour and Roger Wal­ters man­i­cal­ly tak­ing notes while watch­ing the film at Abbey Road Studios.

Speak­ing in 2010, Pink Floyd drum­mer Nick Mason moved to debunk the the­o­ry: ​“It’s unthink­able that we would have felt that it was real­ly impor­tant to work with Judy Gar­land, and devise an album based on that par­tic­u­lar sto­ry. So I have to say that sad­ly, both the Tin Man, and the Scare­crow, and all the rest of it, had absolute­ly zero to do with that par­tic­u­lar record.” In fact, audio engi­neer Alan Par­sons has said the band were actu­al­ly watch­ing Mary Pop­pins dur­ing the ​‘Dark Side of the Moon’ sessions.

Yet while it’s clear the band want absolute­ly noth­ing to do with the fan the­o­ry, it hasn’t stopped the spec­u­la­tion from mount­ing, with devo­tees con­vinced that even if the Floyd didn’t plan ​‘Dark Side of the Rain­bow’, the album and the film were some­how cos­mi­cal­ly des­tined to work side-by-side.

Accord­ing to cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist and musi­cian Daniel Lev­itin, there is a hint of truth to this idea: ​“We are a sto­ry­telling species,” he tells LWLies. ​“Our entire left hemi­sphere is a great con­fab­u­la­tor – it makes up evi­dence before the facts are in. So yes, we have an inher­ent need to match things up.” Lev­itin is refer­ring to the phe­nom­e­non know as ​‘Apophe­nia’, the human ten­den­cy to per­ceive mean­ing­ful pat­terns with­in ran­dom data. And with fans already claim­ing that Star Wars: A Force Wak­ens – a film released 42 years after Pink Floyd record­ed their mas­ter­piece – syncs with ​‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, it’s hard to refute his theory.

Psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Pamela Heaton from Gold­smiths Uni­ver­si­ty believes there are par­al­lels among such the­o­ries, which might explain why a Bea­t­les fan hears ​“Paul is dead” when a song is played back­wards. She explains: ​“One of our psy­chol­o­gy lec­tur­ers did an exper­i­ment where every­one lis­tened to a record back­wards and it made absolute­ly no sense. Then he put words on the screen, that the peo­ple in the States were claim­ing you could here. We read the words and lis­tened and it all matched per­fect­ly. The real­i­ty is once the Brain has a word, it push­es to match it to the acoustic stimuli.”

But why is it that Pink Floyd’s music lends itself so well to movies? Besides Star Wars and The Wiz­ard of Oz, there’s also the rumour that Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey per­fect­ly match­es the band’s 24-minute com­po­si­tion ​‘Echoes’. (See for your­self.) That Kubrick was at one time con­sid­er­ing ask­ing the band to write the film’s sound­track only adds an extra lay­er to the theory.

Heaton says the answers prob­a­bly lies in the exper­i­men­tal nature of Pink Floyd’s music: ​“If you lis­ten to a Beethoven piece, it’s very strict­ly struc­tured, so it’s very obvi­ous why it would strug­gle to sync with a film. By com­par­i­son, ​‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ is psy­che­del­ic and exper­i­men­tal, it has ran­dom sam­ples of peo­ple talk­ing. Nei­ther the The Wiz­ard of Oz or the Pink Floyd album have a tight, cohe­sive struc­ture and both have a dream-like qual­i­ty, so it’s eas­i­er for the brain to find coher­ence between the two.”

Lev­itin has a slight­ly dif­fer­ent take: ​“Beethoven’s VI fits Fan­tas­tia while a whole bunch of clas­si­cal music fits with Bugs Bun­ny Car­toons.” He believes the human brain can suc­cess­ful­ly match up just about any piece of music with any film, and that the ​‘Dark Side of the Rain­bow’ the­o­ry is prin­ci­pal­ly dri­ven by fan­dom: ​“It might just be that Pink Floyd fans, for what­ev­er rea­son, are more inclined to look for these con­nec­tions.” In effect, Lev­itin is say­ing that Floyd fans are sim­ply look­ing for new ways to enhance a work they are already infat­u­at­ed by.

“The ​‘deep­er mean­ing’,” he concludes,“is that the brain is a giant pat­tern detec­tor – it seeks to find order in chaos and to match things up even if there is no appar­ent rela­tion­ship, as part of a grand-scale pre­dic­tion sys­tem. If this goes with this, they must be relat­ed, and maybe I can pre­dict the behav­iour of x by observ­ing the behav­iour of y.”

Heaton adds: ​“It’s not just Pink Floyd – because of how the human brain nat­u­ral­ly looks for coher­ence, I’m sure you could find dozens of oth­er film and music com­bi­na­tions too.” Tak­ing that sug­ges­tion rather lit­er­al­ly, I decid­ed to put on the debut album by The Doors, a record large­ly writ­ten while Jim Mor­ri­son was trip­ping balls on LA’s Venice Beach, over The Trip, an apt­ly psy­che­del­ic counter-cul­ture film from 1967 about the side effects of LSD.

Very quick­ly, char­ac­ters appear to move their knees in per­fect har­mo­ny with the song ​‘Soul Kitchen’, while a group of hip­pies share a joint and pre­pare to take acid as the lyric ​“before I slip into uncon­scious­ness” kicks in. Here we go again…