There’s the clank of a cash register. A jangle of coins. A tearing of till receipts. A loping bassline, built on just eight notes. And finally, David Gilmour’s opening gambit (‘Money! Get away…’). So begins Pink Floyd’s first true international signature tune and their ticket to the stadium league.
Nobody could have predicted those impending plaudits when Roger Waters arrived at Abbey Road in June 1972 with the bones of the song: an awkward 7/4 composition that tested both Nick Mason and guesting tenor saxophonist Dick Parry.
“It’s Roger’s riff,” noted Gilmour. “Roger came in with the verses and lyrics for Money more or less completed. We made up middle sections, guitar solos and all that stuff. We also invented some new riffs – we created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7/4.”
“Occasionally,” Waters reflected, “I would do things and Dave would say, ‘No, that’s wrong. There should be another beat. That’s only seven’. I’d say, ‘Well, that’s how it is’. A number of my songs have bars of odd length. When you play Money on an acoustic guitar, it’s very much a blues thing.”
For the studio take, Waters would re-record the sound effects that he had originally created in his garden shed by throwing coins into a bowl used by his wife for mixing clay, while Mason drilled holes into old British pennies and threaded them onto strings to create a distinctive metallic chink.
Yet the song’s most dazzling moment came from Gilmour. Though the guitarist would self-deprecatingly refer to Money as “nice white English architecture students getting funky”, there was searing soul in his solo, which adrenalises the song at the three-minute mark then drops its effects for the ‘dry’ section at 3:48.
While Floyd’s management quickly identified Money as a potential “monster hit”, the band members themselves were ambivalent, feeling that the tricky time signature would hold it back, and also envious of Led Zeppelin’s refusal to issue singles or pander to radio.
“We didn’t think anything would happen with Money,” noted Rick Wright. “And suddenly, it just did.”
And how. Released on May 7, 1973 – two months after parent album The Dark Side Of The Moon had topped the Billboard chart – Money climbed to No.13 in the US, announcing Floyd as rock heavyweights and making Waters’s wealth-baiting lyric ring a little hollow. With Money in their locker, the band found themselves harangued at shows across the planet.
“It was quite a shock,” Gilmour said, “to be confronted with people down the front all screaming for us to play Money – when previously our slightly more reverential audiences were sitting in absolute silence waiting to hear the next pin being dropped.
Unusually, Money was re-recorded by Gilmour in 1981 for the Pink Floyd compilation album, A Collection of Great Dance Songs. The band had recently signed to Columbia Records, but Capitol still held the US rights to the original 1973 studio version of The Dark Side of the Moon and flatly refused to license Money to their rival.
To bypass this roadblock, Columbia asked the band to re-record the track from scratch, but Gilmour and Waters weren’t talking, and Mason and Wright weren’t available, so the guitarist re-recorded the song from scratch, playing every part himself apart from the saxophone, which was reprised by Dick Parry.
Gilmour’s new version was as faithful a reproduction as he could manage, although his drums lacked Mason’s swing and the bass felt rather perfunctory compared to Waters’ more swaggering original.
Fifty years on from Money‘s emergence, Waters got his own back, releasing an unexpected new version as part of his Redux re-recording of The Dark Side Of The Moon.
Gone was the original’s lively rhythm, replaced by a slow, brooding acoustic arrangement. Gone was the original’s most iconic instrumentation – Gilmour’s guitar and Parry’s saxophone – replaced by spooky strings and a foreboding piano. Gone was Gilmour’s voice, replaced by a gravelly new vocal from Waters. And the midsection now contained an apocalyptic spoken-word poem.
“The original Dark Side of the Moon feels in some ways like the lament of an elder being on the human condition,” said Waters. “But Dave, Rick, Nick and I were so young when we made it, and when you look at the world around us, clearly the message hasn’t stuck. That’s why I started to consider what the wisdom of an 80-year-old could bring to a reimagined version.”
(LouderSound)
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