The story of the Dark Side of the Rainbow, or the synchronicity between Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and MGM’s The Wizard of Oz has been around for many years now. I had assumed that most people had already seen it by now, but lunch with some colleagues at work today was enough to show me otherwise.
My favorite overlap–the one that nobody will ever be able to explain away to me–is the introduction of Elmira Gulch, the woman on the bicycle who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy arrives in Oz. It happens exactly eight minutes in, and if you don’t see the similarity between these two moments, there isn’t much I can say to you.
But the reason I’m writing about this today is what happened to me on the way home from work. It’s a long commute, and sometimes I have CDs to pass the time, and sometimes I put the radio on instead. Today I was listening to the Loop in Chicago, which has been a constant in my life since the mid 1980s. It’s not always a given that I have it on the radio, though. Sometimes there’s sports on, and sometimes I check out NPR, or just play a CD instead. But today the Loop was playing on my radio.
And what did the Loop play, today on what they call “Two-fer Tuesday”? Please don’t say anything other than the Dark Side of the Moon, either. Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about this today.
The first song, Money, wasn’t enough to bring about any recognition that I had been talking about the album just a few hours ago. The DJ then came on, said something I wasn’t listening to, and played a second song from Dark Side. Not something from the Wall, or Wish You Were Here, or any of their other great works. He played Us and Them, and this second song was what jarred it loose for me.
I realize that this was just a dumb coincidence. I talk about an album over lunch, and it gets played on the radio a few hours later while I’m listening to it. But the odds against it happening on the very same day have to be overwhelmingly large. And it’s this kind of thing that I write this blog for. I enjoy pointing out the random things that happen in life from time to time, and remembering places and people and things that have come and gone from my life. To paraphrase a quote from Jimi Hendrix, nobody is going to do it if I don’t.
UPDATE: I had originally presented a link that shows the movie and the music synched up together, but it has been removed for a copyright claim. You can probably find it somewhere on line if you search for “Dark Side of the Rainbow.”
Blue Batting Helmet 