"The Great Gig in the Sky" is a song of the English band Pink Floyd that was published in March of year 1973 within the famous conceptual disc, and eighth plate in the race of this group, The Dark Side Of The Moon.
To speak of Pink Floyd is to speak of musical quality with capital letters, and it is also to speak of a band that did not allow itself to be embraced by fashions, nor to be blinded suddenly by success and that was always willing to go beyond what others were asking. The fact is that if they had remained stuck in the psychedelics, perhaps they would become the most capos of that genre or simply crush their fame at the cost of repetitive melodies and that would pass to immediate oblivion.
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But history made them always risky, and with "The Dark Side of the Moon" they decided to undertake another facet, that of conceptual rock, to leave aside the metaphorical lyrics, at times strange, and move on to speak clearly and openly about the world. It was also the right time to work hand in hand with the best recording studio technology of those years and start experimenting with new synthesizers.
"The Dark Side of the Moon" is a memorable album, which talks about the world of today, about competition, about consumerism, about living day by day in an eternal routine, and that must be why it was an immediate success all over the world. It reached the top of the Billboard charts and spent 803 weeks (almost 15 years) inside those boxes, making it the longest running album in history. Studies indicate that to this day, and approximately, the sales of the album amount to 60 million copies sold and that there is no doubt that is the most famous and recommended album of Pink Floyd.
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One of the epic moments of this great album is when Richard Wright's piano appears on stage to begin his masterpiece: "The Great Gig in the Sky".
The story of this song begins in June 1972 at the famous Abbey Road studios, when the band's keyboardist was rehearsing a delicate piano piece he had written in his spare time. The idea was to show it to the rest of the band with the purpose of looking for some idea together to take it to the disc that they were preparing.
The task was not easy, but little by little the band was taking some ideas and decorating that piano base. "I played it and they came to listen to the song. At that moment everybody liked the chord sequence. After that, we looked at each other's faces and asked 'What do we do with this?" Wright would remember in June 2003.
Image of Gerd Altmann in Pixabay
The band began to work on this song and before each new version they changed the title of the song "The Mortality Sequence", later they wanted to give a twist to the song and called it "The Religion Song" and even used sarcasm to baptize it for a few days as "Ecclesiastes".
Finally, Wright decided to rework some chords and gave some meaning to each passage. The keyboardist's idea was to make a song about life and its slow path to death by changing rhythms.
According to "Rick", the song gradually descends as if it were death. So in the middle part, where the song takes strength, it is to reflect that person who is struggling to live, who doesn't want death to take him away and shut down his dreams. The second half sounds slower, softer, and reflects the person's death, and how it fades away.
In an interview with Mojo, in 1988 Wright stated about the (curious) inspiration that led to composing this song: "For me, one of the pressures of being in the band was the constant fear of dying far from home, because of all those trips we made in planes and on the highways in the United States and throughout Europe".
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Once they had the song done in its entirety, Wright decided to put in a vocal part, but this had to be female, to give a special detail to his creation.
To do so, she asked producer Alan Parsons to make some arrangements for the song and to contact a female voice of her personal taste. For the producer, it was not a very easy task to reach and contact a singer without previously analyzing the position of the rest of the band. For that reason, before making a decision, he went to the recording studio and proposed the candidates for vocalists to the rest of the band.
The chosen one was an English singer named Clare Torry, who had already worked with Alan Parsons years ago, when he was the producer of one of his cover albums.
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Once contacted, Clare arrived at the studio and was greeted by the band and the producer. Once she knew the details of the recording, chatted with the musicians and listened to the melody, the singer asked for the lyrics of the song to rehearse it and there came her surprise: She had to improvise.
"We had forgotten to tell him that the song had no lyrics and that we simply had to improvise. When we started recording she just said "Oh baby" and stuff like that, so we had to stop and start again. The idea was for her to feel the music, to give a real touch to her performance," Parsons explained to Rolling Stone in March 2003:
"I was terrified. I didn't know what to do. We told her "just go and improvise. Which she did, and it was extraordinary, wonderful. I feel very excited when I listen to Clare. For me, that's the detail that makes the song not necessarily about death but a spiritual tear. You can hear the terror and the fear and the emotion, all of that in the way the voice blends with the band. That makes it very special," the author of this great piece in the Mojo would declare.
In 2005, Clare Torry had time to talk about this recording session, and it was in an interview with John Harris, author of the book "Dark Side Of The Moon". In those pages the singer, who would later work with other bands such as Culture Club, Alan Parsons Project and the great Meat Loaf, declared: "I went in, put on my headphones and started screaming 'Ooh-Aah, baby, baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah' They stopped and said, 'No, no. We don't want that. We want something Doris Troy-like. I tried to sing some longer notes, so I started to make that a style of my own. As we recorded and rehearsed it, I became familiar with the background track. That's when I thought, "Maybe I should pretend I'm just another instrument in the band." So I said to the producer, 'Let's start the track again. One of my most lasting memories is that Alan Parson had a very beautiful effect on my voice while singing. It had a lot of echo, although not in excess, and when I closed my eyes I found the necessary source of inspiration.
Image of Gordon Johnson in Pixabay
Another who was impressed with Clare's vocal performance was guitarist David Gilmour, who in 1998 stated in an interview: "We had been thinking about inviting Madeleine Bell or Doris Troy, but I was shocked when this little white woman walked to the microphone and started singing beautifully. Even though she had a hard time tuning in with the group, in all that process she managed to find that orgasmic sound that we know today and love forever".
But the friendship between Torry and the band came to an end with lawsuits, trials and courts. It was in 2004, when Torry sued Pink Floyd and EMI for copyright. According to her, in that recording process, she helped compose this piece of music and for that reason she wanted royalties. Almost a year went by when it became known that the singer had won the lawsuit and that led to her having to appear in the record credits as co-author of the "rola" and she also got a succulent check with several zeros behind it.
This is part of the story of a spectacular song, which is part of a historical album, an album that no rock fan can miss.
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