Pepper Pot

Sgt. Pepper’s Pot Plants

One of the most irritating things I know of is when a complete error is repeated ad nauseum! If you think the flowerbed on the Pepper cover looks like an “open grave” I suppose that’s your choice. Having seen a good many open graves in my life, it looks like an odd flower border to me. (I do think the floral clock in Paul’s design would have looked a great deal better.) However, it’s the endless repitition about the “pot plants” shown on the album cover that makes me want to recommend that the writer change his focus to George W. Bush where mythology is a requirement.

Of course, I suppose city people may never have actually seen a marijuana plant and therefore be unable to recognize the leaves, but a very little research of T-shirts could quickly amend that ignorance! For one thing, cannabis is a rather tall, rangy plant; one as fully leafed-out as those on the album would be two or three feet tall. For a final thing, these plants in no way resemble pot.

The first photograph at the head of this entry is of a marijuana plant; the center graphic is an enlargement of one of the plants on the Pepper cover; the third photo is of Aluminum Plant, Pilea cadierei, a popular house plant originally from tropical Southeast Asia. There are a couple other common houseplants that might be the ones we see on the cover but they are far less common and a good deal less likely.

I’m sorry to disappoint all you heads out there but this is one of the stupidest Beatle myths going, possible even less rational then the Paul Is Dead hoorah. At least this one is so very easily shown to be mistaken while proving that someone is alive is difficult unless you can arrange to meet them face to face – and Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people actually have met Paul face to face since 1967 (or whenever) there seem to be a few people who still treasure the idea.

In the case of the pot plants on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, please remove it from your mind. No doubt the living adults in the room at the time the photograph was taken would have liked the idea of using cannabis plants, but they didn’t.

Give My Regards To Broad Street

Broad St. is quite a nice movie musical, particularly if you’re old enough to remember Danny Kaye as well as Gene Kelly and Fred Astair. Yes, the Eleanor Rigby picnic scene grown more then slightly odd but so does the ballet in American In Paris. I know perfectly well that if it had been John wandering around to variations on Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds all the critics would have swooned over it. Because for some reason John is the “rocker” and Paul only some slick pop singer, nothing he does can be right. So It’s a double dream sequence, what’s wrong with that?
It’s obvious, of course, that practically none of the reviewers was actually watching the movie – otherwise they could have subtracted 10 AM from Midnight and not come up with 24 hours. I haven’t actually tried to count the number of sight gags (as opposed to witty fun) in the movie but from the Scotland Yardman’s dropped pants when he hears how much the tapes were worth to the busker near the end, the movie is loaded with both “public” jokes and those accessible only to Beatle fans.
I consider it shameful that none of the critics caught that Paul was playing a joke with his highly orchestrated version of The Long And Winding Road. Use your ears, people, Paul’s not only out-Spectorized Phil Spector, he also did a great recording of the song without turning it into something drippy as Phil did. I’m quite sure Phil noticed.
I do wish I could figure out if there’s a joke connected to the brown document envelope that keeps turning up though. I’ve tried slo-mo, tilt and pause with no luck. And I can feel smugly that few people realized that the Victorian sequence began in around 1865 and ended up in 1890 with appropriate changes of clothing – and that Linda had borrowed George Sands’ outfit.

I have no problem with someone simply disliking this movie, it’s the obvious fact that they didn’t bother to actually WATCH the movie with any real attention and then criticize it for things that didn’t happen or for the lack of things that actually are in the movie that irritates the fool out of me! Of course, Broad St. makes the mistake of not really being a “rock movie” — perhaps because Paul didn’t set out to make a “rock movie” — he made a McCartney movie and one that isn’t anywhere near as bad as the reviewers make it sound.