Dude, I’m seri­ous; you cue up The Wiz­ard of Oz, you cue up Dark Side of the Moon, and you start ’em up at the same time. It total­ly works. Too many syn­chronic­i­ties to explain away. Blow your mind, man.

Laugh though we may at those who con­sid­er it an intense evening to enter their pre­ferred state of mind, shall we say, and feel for res­o­nances between a 1939 MGM musi­cal and Pink Floy­d’s eighth album, we can’t deny that the mash-up Dark Side of the Rain­bow, as they call it (when they don’t call it Dark Side of Oz or The Wiz­ard of Floyd), has become a seri­ous, if mod­est, cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non.

In fact, since enthu­si­asm for play­ing Dark Side of the Moon while watch­ing The Wiz­ard of Oz goes back at least as far as Usenet dis­cus­sions in the mid-nineties, it may well count as the first inter­net mash-up ever. Word of the view­ing expe­ri­ence’s uncan­ni­ness has, since then, extend­ed far beyond the wood-pan­eled-base­ment set; even an insti­tu­tion as osten­si­bly square as the cable chan­nel Turn­er Clas­sic Movies once aired The Wiz­ard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon as its sound­track.

Clear­ly, peo­ple get some­thing out of the com­bi­na­tion no mat­ter their state of mind. At the very least, they get amuse­ment at the coin­ci­dences where the album’s sounds and lyri­cal themes meet and seem­ing­ly match the events of the pic­ture. Dark-side-of-the-rainbow.com offers a thor­ough­ly anno­tat­ed list of these inter­sec­tions, from the fad­ing-in heart­beat that opens the album align­ing with the appear­ance of the movie’s title:

In this con­cept album, we have [sym­bol­i­cal­ly] the begin­ning of human life. Many par­ents begin the process of nam­ing the child, as soon as they become aware of its exis­tence, often before they even know the sex of the child. Here, we have the name of a movie, which just hap­pens to be the name of one of the char­ac­ters in the movie, just as we are becom­ing aware of this new life.

To the lyric that accom­pa­nies Dorothy’s entry into Munchkin­land:

“Get a job with more pay and you’re OK”: Dorothy does­n’t know it yet, but she is about to be pro­mot­ed from farm girl to slay­er of wicked witch­es.

To the album-clos­ing heart­beat that plays as the Tin Man receives a heart of his own:

On the album, this heart­beat going dead rep­re­sents death. Tin Man’s new heart, which we can hear tick­ing, sym­bol­izes rebirth. Once again, this con­trast of what we see in the movie, and what we hear on the album is about pro­vid­ing bal­ance. And as this is how the sto­ry ends, this bal­ance speaks of how, in the end, the fairy­tale has indeed over­come the tragedy.

Pink Floyd them­selves have dis­avowed any com­po­si­tion­al intent in this mat­ter (Alan Par­sons, who engi­neered the record­ing, calls the very idea “a com­plete load of eye­wash”), and even Dark Side of the Rain­bow’s most ded­i­cat­ed enthu­si­asts sel­dom doubt them. Some may insist that the band, already adept at com­pos­ing film scores, did it all sub­con­scious­ly, but to me, the endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of this ear­ly mash-up stands as evi­dence of some­thing far more inter­est­ing: mankind’s unend­ing ten­den­cy — com­pul­sion, even — to find pat­terns where none may exist. “When coin­ci­dences pile up in this way, one can­not help being impressed by them—for the greater the num­ber of terms in such a series, or the more unusu­al its char­ac­ter, the more improb­a­ble it becomes.” Carl Jung wrote that about the psy­cho­log­i­cal con­cept of syn­chronic­i­ty. If only he’d lived to watch this.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

BBC Radio Play Based on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon Stream­ing Free For Lim­it­ed Time

Pink Floyd Pro­vides the Sound­track for the BBC’s Broad­cast of the 1969 Moon Land­ing

Watch Pink Floyd Plays Live in the Ruins of Pom­peii (1972)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Here at Open Cul­ture, we’ve often fea­tured the many sides of Tom Waits: actor, poet­ry read­er, favored David Let­ter­man guest. More rarely, we’ve post­ed mate­r­i­al ded­i­cat­ed to show­cas­ing him prac­tic­ing his pri­ma­ry craft, writ­ing songs and singing them. But when a full-fledged Tom Waits con­cert does sur­face here, pre­pare to set­tle in for an unre­lent­ing­ly (and enter­tain­ing­ly) askew musi­cal expe­ri­ence. In March, we post­ed Bur­ma Shave, an hour-long per­for­mance from the late sev­en­ties in which Waits took on “the per­sona of a down-and-out barfly with the soul of a Beat poet.” Today, we fast-for­ward a decade to Big Time, by which point Waits could express the essences of “avant-garde com­pos­er Har­ry Partch, Howl­in’ Wolf, Frank Sina­tra, Astor Piaz­zol­la, Irish tenor John McCor­ma­ck, Kurt Weill, Louis Pri­ma, Mex­i­can norteño bands and Vegas lounge singers.” That evoca­tive quote comes from Big Time’s own press notes, as excerpt­ed by Dan­ger­ous Minds, which calls the view­ing expe­ri­ence “like enter­ing a sideshow tent in Tom Waits’s brain.”

Watch the 90-minute con­cert film in its entire­ty, though, and you may not find it evoca­tive enough. In 1987, Waits had just put out the album Franks Wild Years, which explores the expe­ri­ence of his alter-ego Frank O’Brien, whom Waits called “a com­bi­na­tion of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, play­ing accor­dion — but with­out the wis­dom they pos­sessed.” The year before, the singer actu­al­ly wrote and pro­duced a stage play built around the char­ac­ter, and the Franks Wild Years tour through North Amer­i­ca and Europe made thor­ough use of Waits’ the­atri­cal bent in that era. Its final two shows, at San Fran­cis­co’s Warfield The­atre and Los Ange­les’ Wiltern The­atre, along with footage from gigs in Dublin, Stock­holm and Berlin, make up the bulk of Big Time’s mate­r­i­al. As for its sen­si­bil­i­ty, well, even Waits fans may feel inse­cure, and hap­pi­ly so, about quite what to expect. (Fans of The Wire, I should note, will find some­thing famil­iar indeed in this show’s ren­di­tion of “Way Down in the Hole.”)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tom Waits, Play­ing the Down-and-Out Barfly, Appears in Clas­sic 1978 TV Per­for­mance

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits and David Let­ter­man: An Amer­i­can Tele­vi­sion Tra­di­tion

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.