Why George Harrison hated the “coolest” song Paul McCartney ever made
Is it worse to start on a pedantic note or to let an idiom as misused as “the coolest piece of music since sliced bread” go unpunished? While I gather Paul McCartney is heaping praise on the song, what his language literally says is that the song is as bland as a piece of slice bread, unless, of course, there is an incredibly cool song called ‘Sliced Bread’ that is hitherto unheard of. Pedantic digressions aside, unheard-of songs are a rather pertinent place to start.
The soundbite narrative of The Beatles is now well-established: pop culture exploded in a whirlwind of Beatlemania following a string of teeny-bopper hits, then they met Bob Dylan, smoked weed with the thoughtful troubadour and began getting all experimental. However, what is lost among these is just how quickly they transitioned towards the mystical.
They went from smart young lads to moptops quicker than university students after freshers, and their music likewise became radically different almost overnight. This made for a more expansive back catalogue and, in turn, more space for mystic nuggets to go missing.
‘Revolution 9’ is emblematic of that avant-garde edge, but there is another song that McCartney thinks far surpasses it. ‘Carnival of Light’ is an unreleased recording that was commissioned for the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave. This event welcomed The Beatles to London’s famed Roundhouse venue on January 28th and February 4th of 1967. During a recording session for ‘Penny Lane’, McCartney got experimental with his orchestration of the band, and the result is the 14-minute mania of ‘Carnival of Light’.
“I said, ‘All I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it; it doesn’t need to make any sense. Hit a drum, then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around.’ So that’s what we did, and then put a bit of an echo on it. It’s very free,” McCartney told the BBC. “I like it because it’s The Beatles free, going off-piste.”
According to George Harrison and Ringo Starr, it was perhaps a little too far off-piste as they vetoed its release. As Macca has commented: “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”.
He continued to tell Mark Ellen, “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!”
Despite the band standing against it, McCartney was insistent that the song should see an official release, and he has continued to hint at that. “The time has come for it to get its moment,” he said back in 2008. Whether it does get an official release sometime soon remains to be seen, but you can certainly guarantee it will be far more florid than bread.
Were there issues between Harrison and McCartney?
The truth is, the band had grown up so rapidly under such immense pressure that fractures were bound to form as the stress increased. Diamond or otherwise, a group can easily break apart under such extremes and the quarett certainly found themselves struggling to stay together y the end of their time as a unit. For the most part, every member struggled, but there seemed to be more issues between Harrison and McCartney than others.
This is largely because they operated in different circles of creativity. Harrison was a spiritual and, generally, much heavier counterpart to McCartney. Preferring his music to really say something, Harrison’s work was introspective and personal, while much of McCartney’s songs were written deliberately to perform as songs alone. You don’t come up with the concept of Sgt Pepper while trying to speak to your truth as a band.
McCartney was the group’s de facto leader, and as Harrison grew into his own songwriting role, the two men fell out more often than the others. Whether this song was a sign of things to come is uncertain, but it certainly laid the groundwork for what would become an icy relationship. Thankfully, before Harrison passed in 2001, McCartney and he would reconcile their differences and revel in the fact they had shared such wonderful times together.
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