‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’: the greatest B-side Pink Floyd ever made
Most songs relegated to B-sides are put there for a reason. Even if an artist has a plethora of fantastic material in their arsenal, the songs that make the flipside of every single are usually reserved for the tracks that never had that much commercial potential. By the time Pink Floyd had started to spread their wings after the loss of Syd Barrett, what could have been an odd detour became one of the most important B-sides any band had ever created.
For the first half of the group’s career, though, they were more inclined to make the same psychedelic music that most of England indulged in circa 1967. When listening to an album like The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, it’s easy to see where Barrett was looking to take the band, moving beyond the pop single to create fanciful takes on rock and roll, all while playing the most ramshackle music possible.
As soon as Barrett started to slowly lose his sanity thanks to different experiments with psychedelics, the band would eventually venture on their own with Roger Waters at the helm. Even though albums like A Saucerful of Secrets saw the band still in their infancy, the single ‘Point Me At the Sky’ was a reminder of the band’s psychedelic roots, playing the same type of lighthearted psychedelic rock that Barrett was known for.
Once fans turned over the vinyl, ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ quickly threw any type of whimsy out the window. Part rock and roll scorcher, part avant-garde experiment, the song was one of the most daring pieces of sound design the band had ever made, featuring Waters screaming for his life as the band unleashed hell behind him.
Compared to the other heavy songs coming out around this time, like The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ or The Doors’ ‘The End’, Waters one-ups all of his competition by creating sheer terror with his voice, predicting the sounds of heavy metal years before it had even started. While Waters may have been looking to create the sound of chaos in the studio, the song would take on a completely different character live.
Recorded for the live/studio album Ummagumma, the band would stretch the song out to over eight minutes, letting the rest of the band jam a little more and conjuring up images of violence as Waters wails in the background. While the band might have left many of their psychedelic rock fanbase shell-shocked when hearing this track for the first time, it would be far from their last time working with heavier material.
To introduce David Gilmour to the group on the soundtrack album More, ‘The Nile Song’ saw them getting in touch with their heavier side even deeper, creating a backing track that sounds like something Black Sabbath would have made years before they had become famous. While ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ may have been celebrated among the Floyd fanbase for years, it would ultimately serve to predict where they would be going next.
Since most of the performances of the song involved the band improvising various pieces of their sound, it would only be a few years later that they began channelling that improvisational spirit into the song ‘Echoes’. Taking up the entire second side of the album Meddle, every band member would cite the track as the moment where their new sound congealed, ultimately leading up to work on other bold experiments on Dark Side of the Moon and Animals.
While ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ may have started as part of the band’s experimental phase when they were fumbling around the right sound, its legacy is that of a band making baby steps into finding out who they really were. There was no chance that a song like this would be a hit on the charts, but it’s not always about making the hits. It’s about making something that reflects one’s state of mind, and given Floyd’s position, ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ is their own personal descent into insanity.
