The Dark Side of The Moon album cover (Fair Use)
Pink Floyd played one of its first shows in the Southeastern United States at Township Auditorium in 1972. The April 16 concert was one of many major rock shows held at the historic Taylor Street venue during the era. Floyd’s appearance is perhaps the most legendary. Nearly a year before the release of the band’s Dark Side of the Moon album, one of the most significant and bestselling records in the history of rock, the roughly 1,000 attendees in Columbia heard the album played in full. Pink Floyd would not even begin recording Dark Side for another six weeks. The earliest Dark Side of the Moon sessions took place at the end of May 1972 after the band’s North American tour.
“Columbia had two main venues at the time — Township and the Carolina Coliseum. And Pink Floyd wasn’t going to be filling the coliseum yet,” says concertgoer Doug Jenkins, now 68, of Aiken, South Carolina. Despite Township’s great acoustics and striking Georgian Revival architecture, its primary appeal as a venue was its cost. Renting out Township was much cheaper than the brand new 12,400-seat arena. Moreover, if your band was only going to draw 800 or 1,000 fans, setting up shop in Township looked much better than putting that same assemblage in a massive venue. The likes of Uriah Heep, Edgar Winter, and Frank Zappa would also perform at the auditorium that year.
At the time of the Township show, Pink Floyd was hardly comprised of rock stars on this side of the Atlantic. In Great Britain, the band had been among the poster boys of psychedelia before evolving into a sound that came to be described as “art rock.” The group had previewed Dark Side for a fawning British rock press at a January 1972 concert in London before taking the yet to be recorded concept album on the road. Its European and American concerts in the first half of 1972 were like paid practice sessions to prepare for recording the album.
Pink Floyd’s American audience in 1972 consisted of a clique of contemporary rock connoisseurs and FM and college radio diehards. None of Pink Floyd’s recordings before Dark Side of the Moon charted higher than number 46 on the Billboard Top 200 album charts.
The show was not advertised widely in the region’s major print media outlets. A search of area newspapers from April 1972 turns up a one-line reference in the Columbia Record to Pink Floyd performing on Sunday night at Township and professional wrestling making its weekly appearance at the venue the following Tuesday. On the day of the show, The State previewed the performance by “an innovative rock band out of Great Britain” that evening at Township.
Doug was among those tuned into the latest sounds in rock music. He saw shows by the James Gang, Alice Cooper, and ZZ Top that year, all before they became major national touring acts. He’d heard of Pink Floyd by word of mouth and procured some of their earlier releases.
“It was the day I got my driver’s license,” Doug says of April 16. “I told my mom I was going to the drive-in movies, but I went down 100 miles to see a rock concert with a couple of guys whose names I don’t even remember.” Doug later attended the University of South Carolina, where the show took on a legendary status once Dark Side of the Moon became a major cultural phenomenon. Doug recalls the show as just one of many performances he saw in the area during the era. Its significance didn’t stand out to him until the release of Dark Side and the band’s emergence as one of the top acts of the 1970s.
He remembers the performance of Hour Sin, the opening act that evening, as much as he does Pink Floyd. Hour Sin, which opened for several major acts in the region, was best known for having a one-armed bass player.
None of the visual razzmatazz later associated with Pink Floyd appeared at Township, nor did Pink Floyd’s performance include the instrumental or vocal accompaniment featured at their later stadium shows. It was simply a rock band working through its new material. The band wasn’t even calling the new music it was performing Dark Side of the Moon at the time. A British group called Medicine Head released an album called Dark Side of the Moon just as Pink Floyd was putting together its album of the same name. Pink Floyd’s proto album was known as Eclipse (A Piece for Assorted Lunatics), named after the 10-song cycle’s closing number. When Medicine Head’s album failed to generate much buzz, Pink Floyd decided to go back to Dark Side of the Moon as the name of its new LP.
“They prefaced the songs by explaining they were from a new album,” Doug says. “I hadn’t even thought about them recording a new album. I went because I wanted to hear Pink Floyd. Then they started playing all of these great songs I’d never heard. It turned out they were on Dark Side of the Moon. They played a couple of songs from Meddle and Obscured by Clouds.” Doug purchased Dark Side as soon as it came out in March 1973. He recognized some of the tunes he’d heard at Township but notes that they sounded much better with the benefit of studio production and analog sound quality.
An aspect of Pink Floyd’s performance that evening that impressed Doug was the band’s use of four-channel surround sound, which at that time was unusual at rock concerts. “The biggest thing that stood out to me was that they had four channel sound, which I’d never seen or heard before. They had speakers on the side and in behind in the auditorium,” Doug says.
“Quad sound was very new and they were freaking amazing. People were looking to the ceiling, watching what sounded like an airplane flying around the room,” Jim Bailey from Rock Hill, South Carolina, said in a recent online comment about the show. The State implored readers to check out the concert because of the band’s use of “360-degree sound.”
Pink Floyd fans in subsequent years have gotten some sense of what the attendees at Township Auditorium experienced that evening. A low fidelity bootleg of the Township show circulated on various audio formats for many years. It is now available on YouTube.
Pink Floyd would not play another show in South Carolina for 22 years. Its next Palmetto State performance, on the 1994 Division Bell Tour, drew more than 50,000 fans to Clemson’s Memorial Stadium and generated nearly $1.75 million in ticket sales. Long before Pink Floyd filled stadiums and sold tens of millions of records worldwide, an audience at Township witnessed a band in the process of making one of rock music’s defining albums.
Editor’s note: Readers interested in a taste of the Pink Floyd experience at Township will get the chance when Brit Floyd, one of the best Pink Floyd tribute acts, performs there on April 13, 2024.
