POP MUSIC : Which ‘Moon’ Is Bigger? : Twenty years ago, Pink Floyd’s spacey odyssey arrived and a generation of stoners got carried away. It spent 591 straight weeks in the Top 200 and ex-band leader Roger Waters is still proud of its lyric and sonic design

Johnny Rotten had it all wrong, defacing that Pink Floyd T-shirt he spitefully wore, as if the Floyd itself represented the pathetic apotheosis of all the bloated bourgeoisie pigs on the wing he had it in for. Didn’t he know enough to see that “The Dark Side of the Moon” was, in fact, the very first punk album?

Well, actually, not to stretch an analogy too far, it wasn’t. Not even close, really. Still, as mega-mega-platinum bestsellers go, 1973’s “Dark Side” was really the end of the innocence--the ideal bridge of sighs between psychedelia’s recessive rambling and punk’s roaring cynicism, the timely stopgap between altered states of consciousness and social conscience, the missing link between the private madness of sidelined Floyd founder Syd Barrett and the public insanities of the Watergate era.

But then, as now, among the assorted critics, Rottens and other appointed change agents of intelligentsia, the misunderstood “Dark Side” had a bad rap.

Of course, underrated may sound like an odd way to characterize the most enduringly commercially popular rock album of all time: “Dark Side” broke the Billboard chart longevity records by staying on for 12 straight years, has sold about 25 million copies worldwide--a figure likely to increase substantially with a special repackaging of a digital remastering of the album that has just been released to Capitol-ize on the album’s 20th anniversary.

It’s a youth culture rite of passage, revered or reviled--for some of the wrong reasons in both instances.

Among fans as well as detractors, “Dark Side” tends to be seen as standing for outmoded progressive-rock pomp and circumstance, instead of the polite howl that it is--full of rage, ennui, preachily raw political chastening and lots of other things the new wave would hold painfully dear a few years later.

Certain prior pensive rock albums--from “The Doors” to Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung” to John Lennon’s “Plastic Ono Band”--had already abandoned the youthful vigor of rock ‘n’ roll to send manned missions to the dark side of the cranium. But not too often before had someone written a whole song about what a drag it is getting old instead of just a line or two, and never had there been quite such poetry and maturity in top-of-the-pops morbidity before Pink Floyd’s aurally perfect magnum opus of an existential crisis.

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Never mind the bollocks, here’s Roger Waters:

“If you read the interviews with my ex-colleagues,” the former chief songwriter of the group says, reminiscing over a transatlantic wire, “you’ll find that they all say, ‘We weren’t really very interested in the words or what the record was about.’

“And through the intervening years, I’ve very much picked up a feeling that ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ is easy-listening, wafting sort of music: You turn the lights down low and smoke a joint and drift away into some sort of New Age blissful state. And that’s always confused me, because I at the time had thought the songs were actually about something more than that.”

Part of the perception problem may lie in guilt by association. Think of what Floyd was associated with in the early ‘70s, and one generally thinks of, well . . .

“Drugs,” says Waters, finishing the sentence with a resigned snicker.

Waters isn’t exactly pleased about the connection, himself having been more the moralist and armchair political theoretician than pothead even then. But in the popular mind-set, the association between Pink Floyd and the stoner subculture is inescapable.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the Floyd was known for the sonic splendor--read: spacey-ness--of its expansive instrumental numbers, not to mention the bizarre mixture of the corporeal and cosmic in the cover art. Before Waters got around to venting bile on Margaret Thatcher and John Major as a full-time occupation, he was writing songs with titles such as “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” And to some, “Dark Side,” the group’s best-selling album, represents not much more than part of the setup for a kitschy period joke.

To arrive at the proper punch line, set the controls for the heart of the ‘70s with a cushy green-vinyl pilot seat strategically positioned at the point of convergence of the quad speakers, the moonlit-pyramid poster on the bedroom wall, a nearby bong or tab at the ready and the stylus settling on the outer groove that leads to that unnerving opening heartbeat.

Never have so many gotten so high to an album so low.

“Dark Side” was the ultimate trip, post-”Space Odyssey,” for a generation of beanbag-chair potatoes. But it’s hardly the dated camp classic that such a characterization would suggest.

Even in a clearer-minded era--and for all of the unhip, outmoded associations it carries as cultural baggage--”Dark Side” remains one of the most artistically significant achievements in rock, and certainly one of the least “New Age blissful,” its seductive sonics aside.

For those with ears to hear, the album’s thematic world weariness was closer to the gloomy biblical aphorisms of Ecclesiastes than anything in the musical oeuvre of, say, Genesis.

A kind of Solomon-like aged resignation is evident in the first two vocal numbers (“Breathe” and “Time”), which present Waters’ vision of a meaningless rat race ending only as the mortal coil runs out:

You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today

And then one day you find 10 years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

Not bad for a 29-year-old.

The idea that the increasingly depressed listener is “shorter of breath and one day closer to death” culminates at the end of what was Side 1 in “The Great Gig in the Sky,” featuring guest singer Clare Torry in a magnificent wordless soul wail that’s half gospel, half extended orgasm.

After that bitter suite, Side 2 is relatively light, moving away from death toward such comparatively cheery subjects as materialism (“Money”), the illusory polarity bred by war (“Us and Them”), the more literal insanity of ex-member Barrett (“Brain Damage”) and, finally, love and death and the whole damn thing rolled up into one ill-fated ball of celestial wax (“Eclipse”).

All in all, more the stuff of a panic attack than of an album historically renowned for its, uh, meditative qualities.

But the songwriter resists the suggestion that the album was a high-water mark in early-’70s rock cynicism.

“I don’t think it’s politically cynical,” Waters insists. “You could call it politically naive, if you wanted to, but it’s committed in its attitudes. ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ is very anti the idea that what makes for a happy life is to fill the cave with dead animals and beat your chest--not that I’m vegetarian, I don’t mean in that sense, but in terms of a grabber-oriented society.”

Though perhaps more focused on the album’s philosophies than his ex-partners (who have carried on the Pink Floyd banner without him since their acrimonious split a decade ago), Waters--an early and continuing proponent of ambient sound in music--also remains quite proud of the recording itself, which was self-produced by the band and engineered by Alan Parsons.

“I listened to it about five years ago, because I was just about to go out on tour and I was gonna see if I was gonna do any of the tunes from it. I was pleasantly surprised; there’s some good playing on it, and you can sort of hear everything.

“I think people who feel it was brilliantly made, what they’re noticing is the fact that when there’s something important happening, whether it’s a cash register or a lead vocal or a guitar solo or footsteps in a tunnel, you can hear it. There is space around it. And I think that that’s partially at least a function of the quiet drums, which is a nice thing about it, and partially a function of Chris Thomas, who mixed it and gave the lead stuff space to exist in.

“When I played the album back that last time, I was very struck by the length of the introduction to the song ‘Time.’ As I was listening to it--after it goes from the clocks and things to that clicking sound of the bass and then the Roto-toms--I was thinking, ‘Hmm, that’s quite nice, here comes the song.’

“But it didn’t. And then I thought, ‘Well, it must come this time round,’ but it didn’t. And then I thought, ‘Well, it must come this time around.’ It made me realize how concerned we’ve become--we people who make records--with not losing the attention of the audience, that we feel we have to get into the song within a few seconds of the first sounds. I couldn’t believe the length of that introduction. I like it. I’m glad it’s allowed that space to do very little.”

Waters says he has “made more sense of the way politics works” and acknowledges a decided turn toward the topical in the 20 years since the album was made. And he considers his later opus, 1979’s “The Wall,” “a much more important work” than “Dark Side” because it deals with child abuse, a subject dear to his heart that he feels is the root cause of all geopolitical evil.

“And if we have a future that isn’t as bleak as you might think, that the person who wrote ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ thinks it is,” he adds with a chuckle, “it’s through the way we treat our children and educate them.”

The album spent a record 591 consecutive weeks on the Billboard Top 200 chart between 1976 and 1988; counting time it spent there before and since, it totaled out at 741 weeks, beating the former record-holder, “Johnny’s Greatest Hits” by Johnny Mathis, by several years.

It would be on that chart again even now if Billboard hadn’t instituted a rule making albums more than 10 years old ineligible. Waters reckons that the rule was instituted because “Dark Side” and other best-selling classics like it kept newer acts off the charts, and the disparity “became inconvenient to the business--i.e., the chart is to sell product, and if the product is selling anyway, why have it in the chart?”

But Billboard did institute a “catalogue” chart for older albums a few years ago. Not surprisingly, “Dark Side” reigns supreme there now--its usual sales flurry turning into a blizzard of late because of the special anniversary repackaging.

Over in England, there are no such newfangled laws separating the old and new, and “Dark Side” has been comfortably, numbly nestled in the overall Top 5 of the album charts of late. The anniversary fuss has been more pronounced in Europe, thanks to constant publicity, such as the sight of guitarist David Gilmour on the cover of Melody Maker chatting with the leader of the Orb, the young band that pays constant homage to Pink Floyd and takes progressive rock into postmodern climes.

Capitol’s senior director of catalogue development, Clark Duval, says the album still sells enough in the United States to go “gold” on an annual basis. “I think this record is as relevant as it was 20 years ago,” he maintains. “I think it’s reaching a whole new audience of kids in their 20s and 30s fascinated by the sound and by how the lyrics describe the pressures of life. You can’t sell 500,000 copies a year on just nostalgia.”

Waters says he’s “thrilled” to have made an album in his 20s that is still considered important now that he’s about to hit 50. But he’s curmudgeonly enough to be skeptical about how many of the plaudits come for the right reasons:

“Because there are lots of other very interesting and very good records that were made 20 years ago that haven’t survived in a commercial sense. And it’s, I think, symptomatic of the culture that we live in that we devote our attention to it simply because it’s successful. In the same way that the only interesting thing about Madonna is that she makes a lot of money, and we’re captivated by that.”

Welcome to the machine. But that’s another record.