6. It's not the only Floyd album acid freaks sync up with movies.
Ever since the mid-'90s, stoners, trippers and the extraordinarily bored have been blowing their own minds by syncing up Dark Side with MGM's classic The Wizard of Oz film and watching a few coincidental synchronicities occur, including the Scarecrow's brainless dance during "Brain Damage."
While it's cool to think about the band orchestrating a bizarre soundtrack to a golden Hollywood oldie, Waters, Gilmour and the others have bristled at the very suggestion that their opus had anything to do with the Emerald City.
The real mindfuck, of course, is that Floyd fans have actually tried syncing up other albums and films, including The Wall with Disney's Alice in Wonderland and Meddle with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Is it a stretch? Um, yeah. Lots of luck getting high enough for this sort of experimentation to be enjoyable in the slightest.
5. It was almost named Eclipse (A Piece for Assorted Lunatics). Despite Floyd's space-rock reputation at the time, the title Dark Side of the Moon was intended to be an allusion to a journey into madness, not outer space. The name was very nearly changed altogether, however, when the band discovered they'd been beaten to the punch.
British blues-rock duo Medicine Head release their own album titled Dark Side of the Moon in 1972 on John Peel's Dandelion label. Worried about being labeled as biters, the chagrined Floyds considered changing the name of their record to Eclipse (A Piece for Assorted Lunatics) for a time. But when Medicine Head flopped, they decided to move forward with the original name and hope no one noticed. (No one did.)
4. That insane laughter belongs to Naomi Watts' dad. The repeating, demented laughter heard on "Speak to Me" and "Brain Damage" belongs to Peter Watts, Pink Floyd's road manager at the time. He was also responsible for snippets of dialogue such as "I never said I was frightened of dying" from the beginning of "The Great Gig in the Sky." All of these bits were taken from the cue-card interview sessions orchestrated by Roger Waters.
Watts left Floyd in 1974 and sadly passed away only a couple of years later. Not before siring a daughter, however -- Naomi Watts, who go on to star in Hollywood films like King Kong and Mulholland Drive.
