Hollinden to perform Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ at festival

Professor Andy Hollinden has been playing concerts he calls his “end of the semester blowouts” at the Bluebird Nightclub for the past three years.

Hollinden said these Bluebird shows don’t allow many of his students who are not 21 years of age to see him perform. However, Hollinden will perform an all-ages concert similar to his end-of the-semester show with his band Atom Heart Mother at 8:30 p.m. Friday at the Monroe County Fall Festival in Ellettsville.

“I wanted to see him at the Bluebird when he did ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ last semester because he mentioned it in class, but I couldn’t go because I wasn’t 21. It’d be kind of cool to see a professor put on a show,” said sophomore Zach Trozenski who took Hollinden’s ’70s and ’80s rock class.

Atom Heart Mother will perform Pink Floyd’s 1973 “Dark Side of the Moon” in its entirety as well as other Pink Floyd covers, ranging from the albums “Wish You Were Here”, “The Wall” and “Animals”.

Hollinden said he and his band mates decided to cover “Dark Side of the Moon” on a whim for the 2010 spring semester Bluebird concert.

“We knew we wanted to do an album, and we chose ‘Dark Side of the Moon,’” Hollinden said. “The point being that the response was so overwhelming that we’ve been asked to do this on a much larger and more sophisticated scale.”

Ellettsville resident Chuck Gillespie, who did video and lighting for Atom Heart Mother’s Pink Floyd tribute at the Bluebird last spring, helped book the band for the Fall Festival.

“Chuck and the other people who also decide what bands play at the festival came to see us at the Bluebird,” Hollinden said. “That concert was so successful — people went so crazy for it — that they said, ‘This is the band that we need to get.’” 

Hollinden said the Ellettsville concert will be an elaborate reproduction of the Bluebird concert with all the technology made available to the band at the Fall Festival.

“Atom Heart Mother exists to perform Pink Floyd. It has a Pink Floyd tribute name. It’s the name of a Pink Floyd album,” Hollinden said. “If a person shows up to this concert who is a hardcore Pink Floyd fan, they will come to the concert with those albums kind of in their ear. We want that to match up to what people are hearing live.”

Hollinden, who teaches a class about the history of rock in the ’70s and ’80s, said Pink Floyd is one of the big iconic bands of the ’60s and ’70s. He said he is not surprised that Pink Floyd is one of the more popular bands among kids today.

Graduate student and longtime Hollinden fan Allison Hendricks said she encourages students to see Hollinden if they get the chance.

“He really cares about what his students think of him, not like having to keep up his reputation,” Hendricks said. “I’ve never seen anyone walk out of the ’Bird without a smile on their face.”