Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know

9. Dark Side of the Moon was the first Pink Floyd album to break into the US Top 40.
Given Dark Side‘s multi-platinum sales figures, and the impressive Stateside success of Pink Floyd’s subsequent studio albums, it’s easy to forget that the band’s first seven LPs all fared pretty poorly in the United States; before Dark Side, the band’s biggest U.S. hit had been Obscured by Clouds, their soundtrack for the French film La Vallée, which peaked at Number 46 on the Billboard 200 in the summer of 1972. But thanks to a massive promotional push by Capitol Records, and regular spins of “Money” by American radio DJs, Dark Side of the Moon rose all the way to the top of the Billboard 200 within two months of its release.

“It went up the American charts quite quickly,” Waters recalled to Rolling Stone in 2003. “We were on tour in the States while that was happening. It was obviously going to be a big record – particularly after AM as well as FM radio embraced ‘Money.'”

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