Daniel Crystal, 19, a first-year music student at Western, plays his David Gilmour-style Fender Stratocaster and is co-ordinating a Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon concert at Alumni Hall to raise funds for the undergraduate pop music studies program. (Mike Hensen, Sun Media)

LONDON, Ont. - You might not think a balding, bulging 50-year-old guy who's about as hip as an eight-track cassette recording of Tea For Two would have much in common with a trim, cool 19-year-old guitarist.

You might even think the balding, bulging guy (that's me) and the hip dude (that's Daniel Crystal) would have nothing to talk about. And that if forced to chat, our conversation would be as awkward as somebody with hiccups trying to tap dance on ice skates.

But throw the words "Pink Floyd" and "Dark Side of the Moon" into the mix, and suddenly we've got a bond between a young man's enthusiasm and a boomer's nostalgia. Like when I tell Crystal I saw Pink Floyd perform at Hamilton's Ivor Wynne Stadium in June 1975.

"Wow, you're lucky!" says Crystal, who was born 13 years after that chaotic concert. "I wasn't around to see Pink Floyd. Well, I was. The last time they toured was in 1994, right? But I was six, so I don't think I was interested."

He wasn't interested then, but these days the young musician seems downright obsessed with the British band and its 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon.

"It's the one CD I don't ever take out of my car," says Crystal, a second-year student at UWO's Don Wright Faculty of Music. "I have a six-CD changer and I always switch around five CDs and leave the Dark Side in. It's the one constant -- it's been in there for two years."

Crystal is co-ordinating a special fundraising concert Thursday that will pay tribute to Pink Floyd and its album, which has sold more than 40 million copies and is ranked the sixth-highest-selling album of all time.

The UWO concert -- which features two guitarists, two lead vocalists, three backup singers, two keyboardists, a drummer, bassist and sax player -- is designed to raise money for the faculty's pop music studies program, which started in 2006 and is North American's only undergraduate-degree program in pop music.

As any prog-rock fan can tell you, Dark Side of the Moon was a ground-breaking classic. Filled with bizarre sound effects (including ringing cash registers, clinking coins, chiming clocks, ominous heartbeats and disjointed voices), the album is still regarded as notable for its superior sound engineering and fidelity.

Called a "kitsch masterpiece" by noted critic Robert Christgau, Dark Side of the Moon deals with themes of madness, materialism and mortality.

"A whole mythology has developed around that album," says Jay Hodgson, an assistant professor of pop music and culture at UWO. "The recording itself is just so well done, and they were so meticulous about it."

In addition to its technological achievements, Hodgson praises the album's complex musicianship.

"These were great musicians," he says. "And (David) Gilmour's solos may not be the quickest or most harmonically innovative in the world, but there's a lot to be said for taste and his choice of notes.

"And I think it's very meaningful for a particular age group," he adds. "It certainly speaks to the late adolescent experience, when you're coming to terms with growing up and getting a job and (realizing) nobody cares how you feel."

Crystal agrees.

"I can really relate to a lot of stuff Roger Waters writes about in his lyrics," he says.

I ask him if he recalls the first time he heard the album, and he does: While at summer camp at age 14, he asked a counsellor to buy Dark Side of the Moon for him because it was his father's favourite album and his father had lost his copy.

"The first time I heard it I was like, wow, that was strange," recalls Crystal.

Me? It was at my friend Randy's house: I remember being physically stunned and emotionally rattled by the sounds emanating from the basement speakers.

Now 35 years later, I still marvel -- only now it's at how a single album can so easily bridge the complex gaps of age and experience.