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.

A Sidelight On The Paul Is Dead Rumors

Once upon a time quite a while before Paul watched John sing Come And Go With me at the Woolton church fete, one of the things that some teens, primarily the boys who would now be the computer geeks, the skinny ones with glasses, the round ones that didn’t play sports and the intelligent girls that weren’t pretty enough to excuse their brains, read Weird and Amazing, science fiction magazines full of short stories and novelettes (for which the authors were paid 1-cent a word). These magazines had a Letter to the Editor column every issue and a lot of readers did write letters discussing the stories, the science in them, or lack of it, and so on. In the course of time these fans cut the magazine out of the loop and started writing directly to each other. This was all pen and paper, occasionally typewriter but not often because in those days it was the rare boy who would be seen typing) and the U.S. Post Office and 3-cent stamps. These fans became more then simply people who read all the 25-cent SciFi books they could afford, like me; they got really involved in the stories, in the ‘universes’ created by the authors and more then anything else, in the communication with other fans.

One bright lad had access to both a typewriter, he hid in the basement so nobody would catch him using it, and a mimeograph machine (a primitive attempt to invent a photocopier) and it occurred to him that it would be a lot easier to write to all his friends at once instead of having to write the same things over and over to each of them and he invented the APAZine (Amateur Press Association Magazine, though the organization, if there actually was one, came later) or a “Fanzine”. Think of them as something between a maillist and a cooperative blog. They carried stories as well as discussions, arguments and a certain amount of personal stuff. They even began to distribute, if to very small audiences, the sort of shared universe stories we see so much of today like the many Star Trek and Star Wars novels.

Out of the fanzines grew the SciFi conventions (Yes, there really is a point to this, stay with me); gatherings of people who read SciFi of course but particularly a chance for all these people who knew each other by mail but had never met. Every convention, of course, features at least one real author of a published book or if that was too expensive, perhaps an illustrator. However, the fans themselves in many ways became the “stars” of these conventions including those who wore wonderful costumes, those who wrote particularly good stories (some of these graduated to authors), or excelled in punning or baiting or downright attacking the other fans. These people became something really wonderful; they were Big Name Fans. Some BNFs got big enough to be invited to conventions as celebrity guests even.

Was with many things that involve people and a lack of oversight, there was a certain amount of plagiarism, character assassination and what we now know as flaming as well as an occasional hoax or joke. One day one of these brilliant but irritating people invented “pseuicide”; a simple hoax perpetrated by sending a letter to a fanzine conveying the sad news that dear old Fan XYZ, whom we all know and love, has sadly passed away (or tragically killed or whatever happened to come to mind). The rumor spread fast since every subscriber got more then one fanzine and editors of fanzines often traded issues with each other. In the way of human communication, Fan XYZ’s letter advising all his friends and enemies that the news of his death was highly exaggerated never got to all of the people who read the news of his supposed death.

Is all this sounding just a bit familiar?

Paul Is Dead Clue

I don’t for a moment think that Paul really is dead although I do derive a good bit of amusement reading about the whole episode and the clues. I love how someone you know nothing about can say that “the walrus is a (fill in the blank) symbol of death” a lot of people simply assume that it is accurate. There is one point in all the clues that for me doesn’t have a satisfactory answer. That is Paul’s wearing of a black carnation for the “Your Mother Should Know” portion of Magical Mystery Tour. Paul’s explanation: that they had run out of red ones, isn’t unlikely on it’s face. It’s just the sort of thing that does happen. However, if a florist runs out of red carnations, is he likely to throw in a black one instead? My experience is that there would be a pink one or just possibly a white put in to make up the numbers — or in the US, in March, possibly one dyed green.

Yesterday I had occasion to visit the oldest, best and most experienced florist shop in my small town and spoke to the owner, whose connection with this particular shop began at least 4 years before Magical Mystery Tour was filmed. When I asked him about black carnations he replied that there was no such thing as a natural black flower. There were a few species, roses, peonies and orchids primarily, that had been bred to very dark shades of blue, purple, red or brown but not black. To provide a black carnation the florist must have dyed, spray-painted or otherwise transformed a carnation of ordinary color — or the black carnation must have been artificial. (Remember, this was well before the general availability of silk flowers.) In other words, no florist would have thrown in a black carnation (even should he (or she) have such on hand,) for the same price as the red ones.

Since the majority of the other “clues” that Paul is dead are far from convincing when examined, we’re left with the question “Why on earth did Paul (or someone connected with the movie) decide that Paul, or one of the four, should wear a black flower? At this point, we’re probably going to be left with the same answer given for all the strange references in Glass Onion: they did it just for fun.