Classic Albums Live embraces Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side’

Since forming in 2003, Classic Albums Live has been transporting audiences to the musical past with a repertoire of more than two dozen seminal releases such as Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” “L.A. Woman” by the Doors and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ “Damn the Torpedoes.”

However, few of the Toronto-based group’s concerts are as popular as Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” which it’s presenting at Victoria Theatre in Dayton on Friday, Feb. 28.

“The top three for us have been the Beatles, Zeppelin and Floyd,” said founder Craig Martin, who oversees a team of about 100 musicians. “Crassly, the ones that sold the most originally are the ones that get attended the best, and ‘Dark Side’ is definitely one people want to see us do.”

After six albums with middling success in the United States, Pink Floyd’s fortunes changed dramatically with “Dark Side of the Moon.” The 1973 release, one of the most iconic albums of the decade, was the group’s first to top the Billboard album charts and included “Money,” its first U.S. Top 20 single. “Dark Side” went on sell more than 45 million copies worldwide and spend more than 930 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart.

“Our Floyd band is great,” Martin said. “There’s no light show that accompanies the concert. There’s no trickery, we’re just playing the songs, and all the little nooks and crannies of that album are represented. We’ve got the sound of David Gilmour’s guitar. We bring out our alarm clocks for the song ‘Time’ so we can organically recreate these sounds. Anybody can hit a sample, that’s easy — but we bring out clocks and things that clang.

“It’s really hard to get the sound of the clocks going off but we think it’s worth it,” he said. “I shouldn’t say this but the only thing we sample is Big Ben. Sorry, we can’t travel with a 150,000-pound bell. We sampled Big Ben but we actually have the clocks orchestrated, and it just speaks to the detail we go to try to get musical perfection.”

For Classic Albums Live, that attention to detail includes live fade-outs when necessary rather than ending a song cold.

“We always do the fadeouts live and people always laugh because we do that ourselves on stage,” Martin said. “We do that because we’re nerds. We’re just freaky like that — but ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ doesn’t have any fadeouts, which is kind of cool. It travels one song into the next seamlessly with defined starts and finishes so there’s no room for artistic interpretation or something like that.”


HOW TO GO

Who: Universal 1 Credit Union's VIC150 Music Series presents Classic Albums Live with Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon"

Where: Victoria Theatre, 138 N. Main St., Dayton

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 28

Cost: Tickets start at $25

More info: 937-228-3630 or www.ticketcenterstage.com

Artist info: www.classicalbumslive.com

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