The lunatic, for Syd, on the college grass
Roger Waters wrote and sang Brain Damage, and the line about the dark side of the moon became the title of the 1973 album. David Gilmour sings the harmony, not the lead. While the band was still working on Meddle, Waters brought the song in under the title The Dark Side of the Moon. The live suite that grew out of it was billed, early in 1972, as A Piece for Assorted Lunatics, before the album took the shorter name. The recording is from the Abbey Road sessions of June 1972 to January 1973. Pink Floyd produced it. Alan Parsons engineered it.
The first line is about a real lawn. Behind King’s College, Cambridge, a sign told people to keep off the grass. Waters has said the lunatic is the person who steps on it, and that the real insanity was the sign. He named that patch in the 2003 film Classic Albums: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon. The verse is not a drug code. It is the college grass, and the path you were supposed to stay on.
The chorus is about Syd Barrett. Waters has tied “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon” to the sense that he was close to Barrett, not only writing about him from outside. The line about the band starting to play different tunes is Barrett on stage near the end of his time in the group, playing a song the others were not playing. On the record the track follows Any Colour You Like and runs straight into Eclipse. Waters sings the verses. Gilmour answers in harmony. Harvest released the album in the United States on 1 March 1973 and in Britain on 16 March.
I always thought the insanity was the fact that you weren’t allowed to walk on the grass.
(Roger Waters, Classic Albums, 2003)
It was not a single in 1973. A digital single issued on 19 January 2023 used the same 1973 recording as promotion. It is not a new performance and not the thing to write about. The work is the album track: Waters’ vocal, Gilmour’s harmony, the lawn behind the college, and the segue into Eclipse, where the list of everything under the sun starts on the same chord. The suite was first played in full on 20 January 1972 at the Brighton Dome, with this song already carrying the lyric about Barrett and the lawn. Gilmour wanted Waters to sing the lead himself, and that is the vocal that stayed.
After Waters left the band, Gilmour sang Brain Damage in the Pink Floyd shows. Waters has sung it in his own. On the record the lead is Waters, the man who wrote the keep-off-the-grass line and the line about Barrett. The 2011 remaster does not change the vocal. The song you hear is the Abbey Road take from the winter of 1972-73.
