Bay-area Americana rockers Poor Man’s Whiskey are bringing their “Dark Side of the Moonshine” project, which I wrote about in this week’s paper, to the Domino Room Saturday night. The show – a psychedelically bluegrass interpretation of the seminal Pink Floyd record – has a strong focus on Wizard of Oz themes and costumes, playing on the well-known, widely experienced urban legend that Dark Side and Oz, if properly synchronized, create one fantastic piece of spaced-out art that has been dubbed “Dark Side of the Rainbow.”
These days, there are countless spots on the web where one can download a version of the film with Dark Side serving as the soundtrack. You can even watch it on YouTube (see below). But many of you reading this will remember sitting in a basement while one of your friends crouched by the stereo with an anxious finger on the play button, waiting for the MGM lion’s third roar (or the first roar, depending on which school of Rainbow thought you happened to follow) to start the album. I remember my first time. I was 14, sober and completely convinced that the members of Pink Floyd were not only musical geniuses, probably guilt of witchcraft. And who knows, maybe they were.
The topic has been the subject of countless newspaper articles and even infiltrated the halls of academia, but Floyd has always vehemently denied writing the album to fit with the film. David Gimour once said that the phenomenon was the result of, “Some guy with too much time on his hands…”
He may have a point. If you combine any piece of music with a film, you’ll probably be able to draw some conclusions. Shit, you could probably play Dark Side along to an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond and walk away with the belief that everyone at CBS spent the last decade spun out on drugs.
Then again, it would still be pretty damn cool if the Dark Side of the Rainbow turned out to be true, right? Well, what do you think?
But for now, you can get your Oz/Floyd fix by hitting up Poor Man’s Whiskey’s costumed extravaganza on Saturday night. Advance tickets are still available for $15 until 5:30pm today at Ranch Records or www.brownpapertickets.com.
