"Carnival of Light" samples in "Revolution 9"

[Kwai Chang]

Some magicians get a whole career to wave that wand!
Some even get to say 'betwixt and between' Hades and the River Styx...
Hocus Pocus, Abra ca Dabra, Shazam, Kazoo! Foxy asssistant PLEASE, reappear!
And, will anyone near care to volunteer? Because where you are going is the place
of glowing and at night they say it's even brighter by day a carnival of bright festival
step right this way!!! Step right up!
But, if the Carnival Of Light reel is really Ringo Learns To Castle...The Chess Tape...where he had no function. Sir Joseph Lockwood recalls how Ringo accidently switched on the Studer with his turquoise bolo tie and Emerick chased Ringo around the BTR shouting 'Leningrad Window Washer No Kibitzing"! and this tape was suddenly bestowed with a consecrated reputation that made Paul McCartney start retell the one about the French Koala Bear On Vaseline At the last Ed Sullivan with the string quartet pre-recorded strings tape behind the curtain before it went up...
And now, the C.O.L. reel AND, the Chess Tape have both been found...Which would you want to hear first?
Neither!
I'd rather play Chess!
Your move!
Your Queen is in jeopardy!
KC

[harrylime]

But yes, the details on the event's name are pretty much the two artsy posters and an advert from Melody Maker and another source. The term "Carnival of Light" doesn't appear in any of them.

Indeed, but think about how you would, for cool events, often not print the clarifying "Dance festival" or "Rock festival" on a flyer, you just print the actual name. The Million Volt etc Rave was a carnival of light rave, just like Woodstock Music and Art Fair was a rock festival. In other words, (event) name vs concept. That explains why the newspaper clipping we do have discusses it as a concept and writes it in lower case.

So that then leaves the question why they used that name for the music piece rather than the Million-Volt-etc-Rave-thingy. Which I guess would be a good question for a historian like Lewisohn, as from the studio documentation there doesn't seem to be a source (Barrett notes it as 'untitled'). It might as well be that Lewisohn was the first writer to pursue the story back in the 80s, asked Paul and he just remembered the kind-of-event name and not the Million Volt etc.

The only thing I couldn't pick was the organ grinder music, which is probably a "Mr. Kite" sample played at regular speed.

Or the start of Sgt Pepper (song and album). But what do you make then of the hahaha's and the comical/cartoonish sound effects? Those were the ones I couldn't pinpoint, except it reminds me of Jessie's Dream where you hear them too next to the jangling piano and the men's choir humming.

From an educated assumption based on the time they spent on the track (one take with overdubs in an evening) and "effects" would have been created by the mellotron. It was around the time of "Strawberry Fields" so the instrument wouldn't have been too far away. It can do a "church organ" and other trippy sounds. The pub piano with a few bars of "Fixing A Hole" could have been the Mrs Mills piano at Abbey Road that was already in Studio 2. As described by Lewishon, it sounds more like they created sounds live in the studio and added delay and reverb.

I agree, that sounds more plausible. But in regard to Jessie's Dream I'm not sure how Lewisohn would be able to know anything about it using COL as a source (or anywhere else in the MMT film or in Rev 9)? But alas I just also found out there are two reels in Barrett's notes detailing the 'Wild' recordings for MMT, so it might as well all have come from there.

[Lord Reith]

It'd be so easy now to fake Carnival OL with that revoicing software. Just spend half an hour shouting "Barcelona!" and other random words and then turn it all into Johna nd paul's voices. Add some sound effects and voila.

I suspect someone is working on this right now, and since we've never heard so much as a second of the real mcoy, how would we evewr know?

[alphabeatles]

It'd be so easy now to fake Carnival OL with that revoicing software. Just spend half an hour shouting "Barcelona!" and other random words and then turn it all into Johna nd paul's voices. Add some sound effects and voila.

I suspect someone is working on this right now, and since we've never heard so much as a second of the real mcoy, how would we evewr know?

That might force their hand to release the real one!

[Steve J]

, and since we've never heard so much as a second of the real mcoy, how would we evewr know?

I am always surprised that nothing from "Carnival of Light" has ever turned up. On the one hand, all those people who attended the event will have heard it, and got close to the actual tape. Maybe in those days people were less keen on bootlegging things than they are today.

On the other hand, I well remember that there was a short article about it on the BBC News, the day the Carnival opened. In that news item (which was probably less than a minute) extracts from the tape were played. I cannot recollect what it sounded like, other than that it was a noise, but there must surely be others who remember the event.

[zappaf78]

I'm surprised that no news agency filmed the event or recorded interviews. Just seeing it being advertised showing that Paul was involved you would think something was filmed. The "14-Hour Technicolour Dream" event that was held months later was partially filmed and showed John in the event.

[ntwined88]

In his Zapple spoken word documentaty "Z if for Zapple", Barry Miles included a snippet of Paul acting out and talking about a "Carousel of light" which always made me wonder up to now if this wasn't the actual original name and it was subsequently misremembered as being called "Carnival of light"

[Bumblebee]

I heard Dudley Edwards’s give a talk a few years ago. During that he said that unbeknownst to him the tape Paul gave him for the Roundhouse also included a demo of a track for Pepper - I think that it was Fixing A Hole - and that the demo ended up getting broadcast at the event. He went on to say that Paul was none too happy at this. This does beg the question as to whether the tape broadcast was the master RM1 Paul took home from Abbey Road and that the master inadvertently had the demo on it. Or, alternately, that Paul made a dub of RM1 onto a tape he’d previously used to record demos on.

As for whether John used the track in Revolution 9, I agree with an earlier post that the existence of the full length Revolution 1 indicates that it was that John used as the bed for the track. John wasn’t beyond purloining existing recordings for his own ends - You Know My Name, Mary Jane, I Remember Jeep and George’s sitar exercise John used on Greenfield Morning - but in this case he looks to be innocent of the charges.

[harrylime]

It'd be so easy now to fake Carnival OL with that revoicing software. Just spend half an hour shouting "Barcelona!" and other random words and then turn it all into Johna nd paul's voices. Add some sound effects and voila.

I suspect someone is working on this right now, and since we've never heard so much as a second of the real mcoy, how would we evewr know?

Then at least Lewisohn would need to be coerced to keep it a secret that the recording he heard doesn't match the released one. I can imagine it being edited in ways that he wouldn't notice, but why would they even bother if it's a hodge-podge of sound effects and spoken word anyway?

In his Zapple spoken word documentaty "Z if for Zapple", Barry Miles included a snippet of Paul acting out and talking about a "Carousel of light" which always made me wonder up to now if this wasn't the actual original name and it was subsequently misremembered as being called "Carnival of light"

Please check the posts by me and therowdyman on the previous page, I mentioned 'carnival of light' was an archaic term for a light show and there's a contemporary newspaper article discussing the event as such. Also David Vaughan, the main organizer of the event never corrected the term when asked about it in later interviews.

[therowdyman]

But in regard to Jessie's Dream I'm not sure how Lewisohn would be able to know anything about it using COL as a source (or anywhere else in the MMT film or in Rev 9)? But alas I just also found out there are two reels in Barrett's notes detailing the 'Wild' recordings for MMT, so it might as well all have come from there.

It's always good to explore every possibility, from my understanding (and depending on the source) - "Jessie's Dream" was (supposedly) recorded on 12th October 1967 at De Lane Lea Studios during the mixing sessions for "It's All Too Much". The "It's All Too Much" sessions took place between 2:30 and 8 pm, I couldn't find any information on which Beatles attended.

Most recording studios in the 1960s had some kind of piano in the studio (pre-dating keyboards), so it would have been easy enough for one of the lads to plonk away at. The other "far-out" sounds are recorders and pennywhistles, an electric guitar plunking a note and a snare drum each with a fair amount of delay and reverb. No tape loops here, everything sounds as if it was tracked in-studio to 4-track tape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_CkfHnLfHc

From what we do know about "Carnival of Light", "Jessie's Dream" sounds very much in the spirit of that recording. Creating a soundscape from whatever instruments were in the studio at the time, multi-track recording, delays, echo chambers and vocals.