Our town has a theater, the Regent, where a lot of tribute bands come to play. They do covers of Elvis, Sinatra, and the Eagles, which are unsurprising. They were all massive stars with the usual songs about falling in and out of love.

Yet they also have Pink Floyd cover bands regularly, and I saw one last weekend – Floydian Trip:

None of these musicians were even born when “Dark Side of the Moon” came out in 1973, yet they could perform it precisely. Their female singer (and band lead) Stephanie Jones could even do the extraordinary wordless wail from “Great Gig in the Sky”. I happened to be sitting next to her father, who had driven down from Maine to see them. She got a music degree from Yale, but now works in Manhattan doing HR at a finance firm. The band does dozens of these gigs a year. So she’s a typical Millennial who happens to be completely taken by Boomer prog-rock.

I am a Boomer, and I do remember hearing Dark Side when it was released. I was driving home late one night with my dad when a radio station played the whole second side. We got home in the middle of the side and I found the station just to hear the end. It caught my ear even over a car radio. A while later in college I had a housemate who would get stoned and listen to it every single night. Floyd and Springsteen were the soundtrack of my college years.

The early Floyd is unlistenable (at least to me!) and they disintegrated after “The Wall” (1979). Their main material was only four albums (“Dark Side”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals” and “The Wall”) over 6 years. That’s fewer albums and less time than even the short-lived Beatles.

So this is music from 50 years ago. There isn’t a single love song. It doesn’t even have the rage of punk or the violent impulses of metal. Yet Dark Side is still in the top-selling album lists. Small cover bands like this play it all the time, and large ones like Australian Pink Floyd fill big venues. What’s going on?

I think it resonates because it’s talking about cracks in the world. Their founding genius, Syd Barrett, fell into those cracks via schizophrenia. Something broke inside him, and they see similar breaks all over. In “Brain Damage” on Dark Side, they sing that The lunatic is in my head, but the lunatics are also in the hall, where The paper holds their folded faces to the floor. In “Comfortably Numb” on The Wall, they sing:

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone,
I cannot put my finger on it now,
The child is grown, the dream is gone.

That same theme of loss permeates Wish You Were Here, where success made them trade A green field for a cold steel rail, A smile for a veil. It’s in “Time” on Dark Side, where Every year is getting shorter, Never seem to find the time, even though the Voice of God in the form of David Gilmour’s guitar riffs is telling them to wake up and get on with it.

Then there’s the ending of Dark Side, “Eclipse”, the biggest climax in pop music, beating even “A Day in the Life” on Sgt Pepper. Roger Waters sings about how All that is now and All that is gone and All that’s to come and Everything under the Sun is in tune, But the Sun is eclipsed by the Moon. Everything seems to be going along fine, and then the shadow falls. Who hasn’t had such an experience? That’s almost as universal as falling in and out of love. No other band captured it in quite the same way. No wonder they’re still getting covered.