There aren't that many experimental artists that truly break through to receive mass appeal. A band who skilfully manoeuvred their ever-widening sonic universe into the ears and hearts of the general public is Pink Floyd.
Despite Floyd’s lack of interest with the singles market (at least when compared to their multi-million-selling albums), Money supplied them with that rarest of things - a popular chart hit.
It would be one of their most notable stabs at the single market - until Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2 came along several years later. Its writer, Roger Waters, would later tell Q Magazine that, “The only other significant single in my career was Money from Dark Side Of The Moon. That was the only one that made any impact at all.”
Written during the making of the band’s legendary The Dark Side of the Moon, Money lyrically found Waters wrestling with his own socialist principles in the face of being, by this point, quite a well-paid pop star. Perhaps this thematic tension is the reason why Waters chose to craft such a musically constricted, and precarious song.
Two key elements of which hit you from the outset…
The first thing we hear is the sound of a cash register - or at least that's what we tend to assume, but the reality is somewhat different.
Roger Waters had a demo studio in a converted garden shed, located at the bottom of the garden at his house in Islington, North London. Many of his songs and ideas during this period were formed here and notably this is where Waters created the demo and the original tape loop for the track’s intro.
The process of creating loops from analogue tape was nothing new; the concept, originally known as Musique concrète, required the recording of acoustic sounds to tape, then subsequent editing and splicing, in order to turn these sounds into new musical forms, often with avant-garde or experimental consequences. It was a practice made famous in the UK by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Waters ran with the idea of creating a lengthy tape loop to accompany a new song, a riff-based piece which adopted a wonky-feeling 7/4 time signature.
Developing the idea with legendary engineer Alan Parsons at Abbey Road Studios, Waters built out the loop sound by recording the sound of coins dropping into a mixing bowl, and then tearing a piece of paper. Only then did he move on to recording a cash register. As he wanted each sound to punctuate each of the seven beats per bar, he chopped the tape in the old-fashioned way, using a splicing block and razor blade, and then delicately sticking them together with editing tape.
To ensure note duration consistency, each small piece of tape would have been the exact same length, totalling a loop with seven individual pieces - all joined together.
"The only way to keep it in time was to take a piece of tape with the sound on it and measure it with a ruler. You would take the exact length of tape and then splice the next exact length of tape to it.,” Parsons told Goldmine. “We would make a circular loop that was supported with microphone stands around the machine, and we would roll the tape, and that was what the band played to."
Waters and Parsons then ran the loop through a Revox tape machine, with a microphone stand acting as a support for the tape. It’s the sort of thing we take for granted in today’s drag-and-drop DAW-based word, but back then was a laborious and time-consuming process.
It's worth noting that this would've been a relatively short tape loop, at least by tape loop standards (a mere 20 feet it has been reported…). Longer loops often employed additional machines, with the extra tape-machine-horsepower used to keep the loop running. There are many tales from the Radiophonic Workshop’s history, of loops being run along the entire length of corridors…
Without wishing to take anything away from the concept behind this tape loop, and indeed the track itself, we have to pay homage to Ronnie Hazlehurst - a prolific TV composer who was active during the 70s and 80s.
Ronnie was commissioned to write the music for a new BBC sitcom, called Are You Being Served? Having written the theme, he didn't have enough in the budget to hire a percussionist, so with the help of a BBC engineer called Larry Goodson, constructed a tape loop of a cash register in operation, to act as the percussion track.
Why do we mention this? Well, Are You Being Served? first aired in September 1972, while Money (and its parent album The Dark Side of the Moon), wasn't heard until its release on the 1st of March 1973. Was Roger subconsciously (or consciously?) influenced by this quirky sitcom soundtrack? The jury's out.
Moving away from the tape loops and to the structure of the song proper, Money certainly keeps us on our toes in terms of number of beats per bar.
To begin with, the song is planted in 7/4; this makes it a beat short of the more common 4-to-a-bar concept, that would occupy the space of 2 bars.
The 7/4 signature ties in beautifully with the main riff, which is rooted in the key of B minor, and doubled in octaves by a picked guitar and bass.
There are embellishments to this construct, notably from a Wurlitzer electric piano, which plays an octave higher than the riff, with a relatively funky placement of the chords Bm7 and E. It’s important to note that this acts as tantamount to the ‘icing on the cake’ - essentially an aside to the main harmony. A heavily tremolo-ed guitar also ‘twangs’ the note B at the beginning of every couple of bars.
Money has an incredibly bluesy feel, and isn’t built around what we typically regard as a more usual verse/chorus structure - we could easily regard verses as choruses, as if playing blues or jazz.
Even so - and despite this blues feel - Money doesn't quite conform to the 12-bar stereotype, but it’s certainly close!
Sticking to our blues-leaning idea of the song’s A-section as its ‘chorus’, the harmony remains relatively static. We stay with the implied chord of Bm for a full 8 bars of 7/4; given that we are only one beat adrift from a two-bar construct, it feels more like 16 bars, so the welcome shift up to F#m at the end of the the chorus is very welcome.
Just when we thought we had got our head around the 7/4 concept, the shift at the end of each chorus presents an interesting timing conundrum (dependent upon how pedantic you want to be.)
We stay on an implied chord of F#m for 8 beats, before dropping to a chord of Em7 for 6 beats. Now we could easily argue that these 14 beats add up to 2x bars of 7/4, but the placement of the harmony supplies the shift to the chord Em7, on the 2nd beat of a bar of 7/4 - that feels so wrong!
It either is wrong - or it’s total genius. Whichever way you choose to count it, the beats will add up to the same, it's just whether or not your head can play ball.
To be fair, if you are just playing the guitar/bass riff, then it slots seamlessly within this off-kilter timing and implied chord structure.
After two choruses - with lead vocals supplied by David Gilmour - we are treated to a tenor saxophone solo supplied by long time artistic collaborator, Dick Parry.
This is where the blues vibe really does rear its head, as the extended sequence adopts a double-length blues form. This means that we hear all of the usual blues chords, but as we remain in 7/4, it feels like each chord is twice as long, which of course it is… nearly (It’s one beat less than 2 bars of 4/4, of course!)
As if improvising in 7/4 isn't difficult enough, Money shifts to a 4/4 time signature for the searing guitar solo that forms the long middle section of the song. Supplied by David Gilmour (who else?), the section feels like a blues shuffle. Although there’s a change in the riff and a subtle deviation to the chords, this section still keeps a consistent feel with the rest of the song.
“Roger came in with the verses and lyrics for Money more or less completed,” Gilmour told Guitar World. “And we just 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. It was my idea to break down and become dry and empty for the second chorus of the solo.”
We close out with another vocal chorus, before the song fades into the next track on the album…
Despite being regarded as one of the most meticulously crafted studio albums of all time, there is a spontaneous, freeform quality to Money. The tempo ebbs and flows, right from the outset - perhaps this is a consequence of the difficulty of playing completely in time with the cash register tape loop.
By our reckoning, the song picks up by about 8bpm from its intro to just the beginning of the first chorus, with the rip-roaring guitar solo motivating the tempo still further. These kinds of tempo fluctuations were fairly usual for live recording at this time, when playing to a click track was not the norm. But Pink Floyd certainly had fun with the shifting rhythmic sands here.
When released as a single, 10 days after its parent album on May 7th 1973, Money became an unlikely hit for the group, peaking at number 13 on the US Billboard Chart.
“We were by no means rich at that time” Gilmour told Uncut magazine in 2003. “Money was the single that helped to really break us in America. It was the track that made us guilty of what it propounds, funnily enough.”
