Turning on NPR as I drove back home from Lancaster today brought a breath of fresh air into the car. I immediately heard the familiar strains of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon flowing through my speakers. NPR had a whole segment on the album. 30 years ago this week, Dark Side of the Moon reached Number One on the BillBoard charts. In fact, the album stayed on the BillBoard top 200 for 741 weeks. The runner-up in second place is a Johnny Mathis album from 1962 with about 400 weeks on the charts.

You can find the NPR story here. The sound samples on this page are great, including the Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz connection (I had forgotten about that until today–it’s kind of a sideways urban legend, or a–ahem–meme, if you will). By the way, for the guys in the office: the engineer on Dark Side of the Moon was none other than Alan Parsons.