The history of the Beatles'
most mysterious unreleased track
by Steve Marinucci
The now famous Abbey Road studio tour in 1983 and the Anthology series that was finally realized in 1995 has allowed the public at large to hear unreleased Beatles studio material.
But there is an additional unreleased track that was given its world premiere during a two-day event -- when it could have been heard by anyone present -- and has not been heard since. It's the 1967 track, "Carnival of Light," perhaps the Beatles' most significant experiment in the avant-garde.
The track was created for "The Carnival of Light Rave," an event held at the Roundhouse Theater Jan. 28 and Feb. 4, 1967, and promoted by underground designers Binder, Edwards and Vaughan, who had been hired by Paul McCartney to decorate one of his pianos (similar to the decorated piano seen on Paul's '89 tour).
The trio invited Paul to create a track for the event. Although John's avant-garde's work with Yoko is well-known, McCartney had experimented with avant-garde music also, and it was McCartney who instigated the recording session for the track.
It was recorded on Jan. 5, 1967 during a five-hour session that also included vocal overdubs for the then-unreleased "Penny Lane."
According to descriptions of the session from Record Collector magazine and by Mark Lewisohn, the four-track recording begins with track one as basic drums and organ rhythm backing and track two as sound effects and distorted guitar.
Track three consisted of John and Paul screaming like "demented old women", according to one account, with John crying "Barcelona!" while Paul screams, "Are you alright?," with added whistling and water gargling. Track four had more sound effects, tambourine shaking and tape echo. The track ended with Paul shouting, "Can we hear it back now?"
The 13-minute, 48-second track was mixed down to mono and a copy was given to Binder, Edwards and Vaughan. It was used for this one event and hasn't been heard in public since. Those attending reportedly thought it was an excellent piece of '60s avant-garde music, but Beatles producer George Martin felt it was a waste of time. "This is ridiculous. We've got to get our teeth into something a little more constructive," Martin told Geoff Emerick during the recording session.
They did, and in very short order. The next day, they went back to work on "Penny Lane."
Exclusive! Lost Beatle Track Unearthed!
By Mark Ellen
Deep-end Beatles obsessives like myself have lost a fair amount of sleep over the years fantasing about the possible existence of Carnival Of Light, the highly legendary "lost" Fabs outtake. Although no-one has ever heard it - it remains intruigingly unbootlegged - the song merits a fairly substantial footnote in Ian Macdonald's stupendous "Revolution In The Head" and was even logged in the Abbey Road session notes as having been taped in Studio 2 on January 5 1967, smack in the middle of several attempts to nail down Penny Lane. But no Beatle, to my knowledge, has ever gone on record to offer any official insight. Until now!
I was interviewing McCartney this week in his London office - where the album collection, incidentally, includes "The Vocal Selections Of Fats Domino" and the musical "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" - and was at that point of the encounter where you're almost being physically dragged out of the door as there's another interviewer waiting in the wings, and I decided to pop the all-important question. And managed to solicit the following for Rocking Vicar who, I rather suspect, are the sole community of individuals on God's earth who might be genuinely interested. Here follows what may well be the first parish world exclusive!
RockingVicar: Just one last question - "Carnival Of Light," does it actually exist?
Paul McCartney: It does exist, yeah. We recorded it in about fifteen minutes. It's very avant garde - as George would say 'avant garde a clue' - and George did not like it 'cos he doesn't like avant garde music .
RV: Who wrote it?
PM: It's officially me. I instigated it. No there's no lyrics, it's avant garde music. You would class it as ... well you wouldn't class it actually, but it would come in the Stockhausen/John Cage bracket ... John Cage would be the nearest . It's very free-form. Yeah man, it's the coolest piece of music since sliced bread!
RV: This is early '67?
PM: I was asked about '67 to do it by Barry Miles - you know, who did my book Many Years From Now - and he asked me to do it for this event at The Roundhouse called Carnival Of Light, so that's how it got its title. And he asked me to write a fifteen to twenty minute piece, and I was into that kind of thing, not on record with The Beatles, but just for that. I went into the studio and said to the guys, Look we've got half an hour before the session officially starts, would you mind terribly if I did this thing?
RV: So this is with the other Beatles?
PM: With the other Beatles. This is a Beatle record. And they all just fell in with the spirit of it and I just said, Would you go on that and would you stay on that and would you be on that and we'll just take twenty minutes to do it in real time? And they all just got into it.
RV: Why don't you release it?
PM: I actually have a project I would like ... I'm involved ... One of the many things I did, I did a thing called The Grateful Dead Photo Film, using Linda's snapshots and making them move, dissolving between them and making them into a film, a short art film, which I showed at festivals and things. And I'm actually in the process - although everything else and its uncle is holding it up - but I've got a Beatles photo film on the go and I would love to use it as part of the soundtrack of that.
RV: There was a rumour it was going to come out on Anthology. What happened with that?
PM: It was up for consideration on The Anthology and George vetoed it. He didn't like it. Maybe its time hadn't come.
Update (3/16/04) Here's a very interesting email we received out of the blue. Just call it "another clue for you all." It was sent by Dudley Edwards:
To put the record straight...
I am the 'Edwards' of Binder Edwards & Vaughan who were responsible for staging 'The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave' otherwise known as the 'Carnival of Light' that you refer to.
The avant-garde track you refer to did not contain a version of 'Penny Lane' but Paul singing 'Fixing a Hole' on the piano. The tape was taken to America by one Ray Anderson (who was brought over from the States to assist us with the light show). I have no knowledge of what happened to it after that.
Paul's electronic experiments were played along with tapes from 'Unit Delta Plus' an offshoot of the BBCs Radiophonic workshop. Regards,
Dudley.
Update (11/16/2008) A story by Vanessa Thorpe in Sunday's edition of the UK Guardian reports that Paul McCartney is eager to release the much-rumored "Carnival of Light," an avant-garde track that he and the other Beatles recorded in 1967.
On a BBC 4 radio show, Front Row, to air this week, McCartney told host John Wilson, "It does exist," he still has a master tape of the song and says "the time has come for it to get its moment."
"I like it because it's the Beatles free, going off piste," he says.
The track was created for "The Carnival of Light Rave," an event held at the Roundhouse Theater Jan. 28 and Feb. 4, 1967, and promoted by underground designers Binder, Edwards and Vaughan, who had been hired by Paul McCartney to decorate one of his pianos (similar to the decorated piano seen on Paul's '89 tour).
McCartney described how "Carnival" was developed in the recording studio. "We were set up in the studio and would just go in every day and record. I said to the guys, 'This is a bit indulgent but would you mind giving me 10 minutes? I've been asked to do this thing. All I want you to do is just wander round all of the stuff and bang it, shout, play it. It doesn't need to make any sense. Hit a drum, wander to the piano, hit a few notes ... and then we put a bit of echo on it. It's very free.' "
McCartney said it was inspired by the works of composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Track three consisted of John and Paul screaming like "demented old women", according to one account, with John crying "Barcelona!" while Paul screams, "Are you alright?," with added whistling and water gargling. Track four had more sound effects, tambourine shaking and tape echo. The track ended with Paul shouting, "Can we hear it back now?"
The 13-minute, 48-second track was mixed down to mono and a copy was given to Binder, Edwards and Vaughan. It was used for this one event and hasn't been heard in public since.
"Carnival" was considered and rejected for release on "The Beatles Anthology," he says. 'We were listening to everything we'd ever recorded. I said it would be great to put this on because it would show we were working with really avant-garde stuff ... But it was vetoed. The guys didn't like the idea, like 'this is rubbish'." George Harrison, he said, dismissed this type of experimentation with his typical humor by saying "avant-garde a clue".
Update (11/18/2008)
Geoff Emerick discussed "Carnival of Light" in his book "Here, There and Everywhere":
Midway through the recording of "Penny Lane," we spent the better part of an evening creating a tape of sound effects, under Paul's direction, for a live "happening" called the Carnival of Light. It was a bit of nonsense, really, but everyone had fun doing it. Whenever The Beatles tried something really outrageous, George Martin would roll his eyes and mutter a clipped "Oh my God" under his breath. Looking back, I guess that everyone was tripping his brains out that night, but we didn't know it then. When John started shouting "Barcelona" repeatedly in one of his Goon-like voices, Phil and I were doubled over in laughter. That line, and other bits and pieces from that night's sessions, were later used in the sound pastiche "Revolution 9" on the White Album.
In this 2006 interview with Ear Candy, Emerick goes into a little detail about how "Carnival of Light" and "Revolution #9" may have been related:
E.C.: You also mention "Carnival of Light" in your book. Was any of this used in Paul’s “Liverpool Sound Collage”? You also mention that parts of it were used in “Revolution 9”? Do you remember which parts? Do you think it was a good choice to leave it off of the Anthology? I mean, if you have John’s “What’s the New Mary Jane” dribble, why not some experimental Beatles?
Geoff: I’m not familiar with the “Liverpool Sound Collage,” so I don’t know if any of it was used there. The bits from the Carnival of Light session that were used in Revolution 9, as I recall, were of John saying the word “Barcelona,” and some other random sound effects. It was really just noise and cacophony, not a proper song.
In the interview in the front of "The Beatles Recording Sessions," Mark Lewisohn asked Paul McCartney about "Carnival of Light":
ML: In very early 1967, when you were doing "Penny Lane, you made a 14-minute, very bizarre recording of effects and noises for a "Carnival of Light" at the Roundhouse. Like "Revolution #9," but in 1966 rather than in 1968. You seemed to be the leader of that. Do you remember it?
PM: Yes, I was interested in that. I'm now becoming re-interested, in fact. There were millions of threads that we put down in the '60s that I never picked up again. George's Indian stuff and all of that. It was really just pushing frontiers, that's all we were doing. Everyone else was pushing frontiers, too, but perhaps we didn't necessarily like what, say, Berio was doing. There was only one Stockhausen song I liked actually! We used to get it in all interviews "Love Stockhausen!" There was only one "Gesang der junglinge (The Song of the Young)" - that was the only one I ever liked! I thought most of his other stuff was too fruity.
"The way I see it, I lived a very urbane life in London, I eventually got my own house there. So I had the metropolis at my fingertips with all this incredible stuff going on, the '60s, and John used to come in from Weybridge in his coloured outfits and we'd meet up. And I'd tell him what I'd been doing. "Last night I saw a Bertolucci film and I went down thet Open Space, they're doing a new play there" or "I had dinner with Jagger last night" and it was "My God! I'm jealous, man." Because I was doing a lot of avant-garde stuff -- it turned out later to be avant-garde. I though it was just "being different." Making little home movies, showing them to people like Antonini. It was very exciting, very creative. I do remember John coming in with his big chauffeur and Rolls-Royce and saying, "God, man, I really envy you." He was starting to feel like he was getting middle-aged and that he was out of it."
Later, in the book, Lewisohn discussed it in more detail:
"The Beatles had never made a recording quite like this before, although they were certainly to repeat the exercise again, culminating in 'Revolution 9' on the 1968 double-album The Beatles. This day's attempt lasted 13' 48", the longest uninterrupted Beatles recording to date, and it was the combination of a basic track and numerous overdubs. Track one of the tape was full of distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds; track two had a distorted lead guitar; track three had the sounds of a church organ, various effects the gargling with water was one) and voices; track four featured various indescribable sound effects with heaps of tape echo and manic tambourine.
But of all the frightening sounds it was the voices on track three which really set the scene, John and Paul screaming dementedly and bawling aloud random phrases like "Are you alright?" and "Barcelona!"
Paul terminated the proceedings after almost 14 minutes with one final shout up to the control room: "Can we hear it back now?" They did just that, a rough mono remix was made and Paul took away the tape to hand over to the 'Carnival of Light' organisers, doubtless pleased that the Beatles had produced for them such an avant garde recording. Geoff Emerick recalls this most unusual session. "When they had finished George Martin said to me 'This is ridiculous, we've got to get our teeth into something a little more constructive'." Twenty years on, George had obviously driven the session entirely from his mind, for when reminded of the sounds on the tape and asked whether he could recall it, he replied "No, and it sounds like I don't want to either!"
Carnival Of Light
You can take a black guy to Nashville from right out of the cotton fields with bib overalls, and they will call him R&B. You can take a white guy in a pin-stripe suit who’s never seen a cotton field, and they will call him country. ~ O. B. McClinton
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