#61-T - Careful With That Axe, Eugene from B Side (1968)
Appeared On: 4 ballots (out of 33 . . . 6.1%)
Total Points: 20 points (out of 825 possible points . . . 2.4%)
Top Rankers: @Pip's Invitation @Mt. Man @ericttspikes @BassNBrew
Highest Ranking: 16
Live Performances:
PF: 343 (9th most performed song by PF)
Release history:
Original B Side linked up top
The Murderotic Woman - BBC (1968)
BBC Radio Session (1969)
Ummagumma (1969)
Belgium (1969)
Live At The Pardiso (1969)
Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up - Zabriskie Point (1970)
Explosion - Zabriskie Point Remix (1970)
BBC Radio Session (1970)
San Francisco (1970)
St. Tropez (1970)
Sheffield (1970)
Pompeii (1971)
Brighton Dome (1972)
West Germany (1972)
NYC (1973)
Oakland (1977) (Final Performance)
Covers:
Nik Turner,
Electric Family,
Vespero,
Fungus,
Camper Van Chadbourne,
Cat & Owl,
JMJ Band (reggae),
Australian Pik Floyd
A true PF classic . . . if others hadn't voted for it, it would have been pretty high on my list. I could listen to this song all day (and don't think I haven't. Talk about mood music. At one point, it was entitled Beset by Creatures of the Deep.
There are so many versions and recordings of this one, I can't keep them straight. The band went into the studio at the beginning of November 1968 to record this piece, which they had been working on since the spring. The single version was the fourth version of the song, but the first one to be officially released. It was one of the first extended instrumentals early on with Dave in the group.
Including the versions that had come before, the total would come to eight different versions, four released and four unreleased. In chronological order:
Untitled (The Committee soundtrack)
Keep Smiling People
Murderistic Woman
Careful . . . (single)
Beset by Creatures of the Deep (The Journey)
Careful . . . (Ummagumma)
Come In Number 51, Your Time is Up (Zabriskie Point)
Careful. . . (Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii).
More versions have been released in recent years.
The piece is incredibly effective in creating a dense mood of paranoia and anxiety, a subtle hypnosis of feeling; Roger's quiet whispering and screams provide just the right touch.
Dave Gilmour: "Careful with that Axe, Eugene is basically one chord. We were just creating textures and moods over the top of it, taking it up and down; not very subtle stuff. There was a sort of rule book of our own that we were trying to play to — and it was largely about dynamics."
In live performance, Roger's screams would show off the quadraphonic sound system by spinning around the concert hall, completely enclosing the enraptured audience. Careful with that Axe, Eugene would be released twice more under that name, once more under an alternate title. In addition, another version would be created for The Journey Suite. The live versions are markedly different from the single version, being significantly longer and noticeably more intense. Roger's screams became even more harrowing and central to the piece. The aftermath section is the most drawn out compared to earlier versions.
Nick Mason: "We enjoy playing it, and people do like hearing things they're familiar with, but it's important to do some new things. We made Ummagumma in the belief that we wouldn't have to perform those numbers anymore. It's just like The Who's Tommy. For our own good as well as for everyone else's we must start on new things."
The song slowly started to fade out of their live shows . . . it showed up for 4 shows in France in 1974 and then one last time on the 1977 tour before getting tucked away for good.
Vulture Ranking (out of 165 songs): 40
Ultimate Classic Rock Ranking (out of 167 songs): 48
Louder Ranking (out of 50 songs): 38
WMGK Ranking (out of 40 songs): 27
Ranker Ranking (out of 132 songs): 56
Billboard Ranking (out of 50 songs): 15
Vulture Ranking (40 out of 165 songs): Again, we can see the band take a somewhat flaccid studio track and turn it into something that, if you squint your ears a bit and forget about the dumb title, you could imagine passably blowing a few minds among sufficiently impressionable and adequately chemicalized London youth at the time. Nice to hear Gilmour working it on out. This track is one of the more enjoyable extended Floyd offerings on record.
UCR Ranking (48 out of 167 songs): Between the hint of violence in the song title (whispered as a wild-eyed warning during the otherwise instrumental track) and the slowly encroaching tangle of Pink Floyd’s post-psych free-for-all, Careful with that Axe, Eugene is a sinister bit of sludge coughed up from the underworld. This little demon creeps along, builds in volume, makes its menacing stand and, finally, slinks away into the darkness to find new prey.
Louder Ranking (38 out of 50 songs): The seeds of Careful With That Axe, Eugene can be traced back to a couple of instrumental variants in the 12 months before it was officially released, namely Keep Smiling, People and Murderistic Woman. It would go through 2 more modifications later, firstly as Beset The Creatures Of The Deep and then, with a choir, as Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up, for the soundtrack of 1970’s counterculture film Zabriskie Point. The original studio version is a sublime improv jam, anchored by Waters’s bass. Wright’s organ lines meander freely, while Gilmour adds tasteful guitar. The song’s innate trippiness is further accentuated by the use of its title as a whispered motif, followed by Waters’s bedlam scream. This feels like a model of restraint, however, compared to the more voluble nine-minute live take on Ummagumma.
WMGK Ranking (27 out of 40 songs): Co-written by Roger Waters, Richard Wright, David Gilmour and Nick Mason, it was originally released as the b-side to Point Me At The Sky and later included on the Relics collection. But this live version, which adds three minutes of jamming, is more fearsome.
Billboard Ranking (15 out of 50 songs): A textbook acid-rock freakout, and much more effective with the live build on the Ummagumma version than in the more abbreviated form as the B-side to the largely forgettable Point Me at the Sky. You need those first three minutes of eerie falsetto, menacing organ and lightly plodding bass, before Waters offers the bad omen of the whisper title phrase, and the song absolutely explodes with his screaming — a hurricane howl that that would become a signature sonic element of the band in the decade to come. Somewhere, a young Alan Vega was taking careful notes.
That's it for today. Don't have the energy for any more writeups. Next up, another instrumental . . . just from many years later.