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Released March 1, 1973, to universal acclaim, Dark Side of the Moon was hailed by everyone who heard it as an instant classic. After Waters’s wife, Judy, first heard the album she burst into tears. “I thought, ‘That’s a very good sign,’” Waters said to Harris. “‘We’ve definitely got something here.’” The album has gone platinum more than 15 times since its release and has come to be regarded as one of the defining rock albums of the ’70s. It remained on the Billboard charts for 736 weeks from 1973 to 1988, placing it in the Guinness Book of World Records. The band, too, saw its fortunes changed by Dark Side’s success. “We were selling out 12,000-15,000 seater venues in America,” Gilmour told Q magazine in 1992, “but thereafter we could sell out vast football stadiums, and we had to change our way of doing shows.” For Waters, creating the definitive rock commentary on madness and isolation came at a steep price. “Dark Side of the Moon finished off Pink Floyd once and for all,” he told Chris Salewicz of Radio K.A.O.S. in 1987. “To be that successful is the aim of every group. And once you’ve cracked it, it’s all over.”