WONDERWALL (1968) – “LOST” PSYCHEDELIC CLASSIC WITH MUSIC BY GEORGE HARRISON, RINGO STAR, PETER TORK, ERIC CLAPTON, AND MORE
Tonight, I watched the epically wonky 1968 Wonderwall movie DVD, with music by George Harrison and psychedelic visual design by The Fool, that group of acidhead techno artists who painted the Apple office building in the '60s and had much to do with the latterday Beatles imagery (I wonder if Magic Alex ever perfected his magic box?).
The movie is so freakish, it's almost impossible to absorb - as an artifact of the 60s and hippiedom, and an example of some of the first Beatles "solo" music, it was well worth watching, and probably worth the high price that the limited edition U.S. region DVD sells for (I got a "bargain" on eBay at $30 - I've seen it sell for $75 and up).
It's hardly a "movie," at least by the normal definition. Worth noting is that the director is the same guy who later did the fantasy sequences in the Led Zep concert movie The Song Remains the Same. If you liked that movie's werewolves with tommy guns spurting psychedelic blood, you'd dig Wonderwall.
The first thing that comes to mind, a few minutes after finishing the film, is "This must be what it's like to do peyote, throw up, and then spend two hours staring at your vomit and marveling at how wondrous and beautiful your former lunch now looks...."
The music is by George Harrison, whose Wonderwall solo album has some but not all of the music heard in the movie (it was the first Beatles solo album, AND the first Apple album). For the rock songs, Harrison hired
The Indian sitar music heard in the film was recorded in January 1968, during the same Beatles sessions - and using the same musicians – that resulted in the Beatles’ song “The Inner Light,” originally issued as the B-side of "Lady Madonna."
Wonderwall the movie was only shown a few times in the late ‘60s, and was considered a “lost” film until a good print was found and restored, along with an unreleased Harrison song intended for the original 1968 soundtrack, “In The First Place,” one of the only Wonderwall songs with lyrics (proceeds from a single of the song helped pay for cancer treatments for one of the musicians from the Remo Four).
As near as I can figure it, here’s what the movie is about:
An aging nutty professor and OCD paper hoarder finds a peephole in his cluttered apartment that glows like starlight (set within a wall mural painting of a crowned goddess in the sky) -
When he looks thru the hole, he sees an otherworldly beautiful oft-nekkid young woman named Penny Lane (played by lovely blank-faced cipher Jane Birkin, who was equally blank in Antonioni's equally obtuse movie Blow-Up).
One one side of the wall, the Old Prof's side, it’s just another day, the barber shaves another customer, the banker looking in --- On the OTHER side of the peephole, it's the 24-hour freakout channel, with freakout music kicking in every time the old man peeps at the fetishistic nylon leg shows and Hefner-fueled/acid-soaked visions of a Wild and Wonky World According To Playboy. Within Without You. Opening more peepholes seems to open more worlds – or are these just the Old Prof’s daydreams? In one trippy vision, the old Prof improbably sees himself, outdoors, battling a teenage Superman with "weapons" like giant ciggies and lipstick tubes. Or at an effeminate cowboy riding a plastic rocking horse and talking on the phone, or a hippie mermaid chick floating on a sea of polyester fabric while brushing her hair, or a Perplexing Planet of Preposterous Sunglasses. He peeps most often at an ongoing idyllic Dionysian hippie party jam, with flute-playing flower children and beautiful dancing gypsies (with almost EVERYone smoking something, either ciggies or ??). The smoking in various other wonderworlds ranges from small glass pipes to Chong-sized roaches and giant octopus hookahs – Amusingly, the Old Prof himself, in his world, is proudly a non-smoker --- tho one wonders about how lab-customized his beloved sugar cubes may be, given his increasingly bizarre visions thru the Wonderwall. The Old Prof becomes so obsessed that, for awhile, he seems to stop shaving or sleeping or doing anything else aside from peeping. Sorta presaging the advent of 500-channel TV feeds, it could be said --- So as the Old Prof is peeping at the dreamy hippie otherworlds, he starts dressing up in what an unschooled old man might approximate as "psychedelic" circa 1968, ie a pointy New Year's party hat, or a funky outsized tuxedo, and decorating his apartment - especially the "wonderwall" itself - with streamers and party favors. When he strays too far from the wall - like when he goes to work at the lab one day, if only to study up on alternate realities and gaze lovingly at Penny Lane thru his microscope (?!)- he suddenly becomes black and white. As does the world around him. Only the wonderwall can color his world.... At some point, one of the wonderwall visions appears to actually be the adjoining room of a young hippie couple - or is it? Everything on the Other Side is just a colorful and halucinogenic as his other visions. When he realizes he's fallen in love with the young girl - or at least with her magical hippie wonderland - he manages to find a magic (Alex) doorway and dramatically leap into her world, apparently by dressing as a top-hat magician and fondling his magic wand (don't ask....) – However, when he gets to Her World, the hippie girl's psychedelic-flavored life isn't idyllic as it seemed. She is unmarried and has just discovered she's pregnant, and her hippie boyfriend is being a big hippie dick about it. So - while the Old Prof hides in her psychedelic closet - the hippie girl (real or fantasy?) chokes down a bunch of pills, cries, and is carried out on a stretcher. Flash to a newspaper headline: "Scientist Saves Fashion Model - Top Hat Riddle in The next time he sees WTF? The DVD also includes footage cut to Eric Clapton’s playing, stills of artwork by the various Fool’s who designed the psychedelia, footage cut to a Remo Four track, and other ephemeral perks. So, in summation – glad I watched it. Glad it was restored, especially the sonically engaging soundtrack, and glad it came out on DVD. Also glad the hippies – and I’ll probably never have occasion to spin this inexplicable tripfest again, unless under the influence of the Old Prof’s suspect sugercubes, but I’m glad I finally got to checkout this funky flashback, 40 years after it first came and went ------ (Wonderwall in Wikipedia - animated gifs courtesy the fantastic blog of Martin Klasch )
YOKO COMIX: WHEN JOHNNY MET YOKO (caption dialogue paraphrased from various Lennon interview transcripts)
WEIRD BEATLES MEMORABILIA
(No, not cocaine – it’s Lux Soap!)
JOHN LENNON: A LIFE IN THE DAY
THE RETURN OF ROCK 'N' ROLL COMICS!
The Beatles are bigger than ever, now available online for the first time digitally, on the Vegas stage in “Love,” and in the new Beatles: Rock Band video game. Now comes the most comprehensive and encyclopedic illustrated Beatles story ever, the Beatles Experience! Over 200 pages, dramatizing one of the most compelling tales in pop culture history, drawn from thousands of photos and interviews, meticulously researched and featuring stunning art by Mike Sagara (Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics) and Stuart Immonen (Legion of Super Heroes, Ultimate X-Men).
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Covering the Beatles’ lives from birth and beyond their breakup, dramatized in dialogue and scene recreations more akin to a film bio than a mere documentary, the Beatles Experience also includes a Chronolog timeline going down each page, with encyclopedia background and footnotes detailing related events happening at the same time in the world, in music, and in the Beatles’ own tumultuous and extraordinary lives.
Hard Rock Heroes: What goes together better than comics and rock music? With almost 300 pages of Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics, Hard Rock Heroes goes WAY beyond Behind the Music, to tell the real life, behind-the-scenes stories of rock’s most heavy hitters. Creators include Stuart Immonen (Superman: End of the Century), Ken Landgraf (Wolverine), Jay Allen Sanford (Overheard in San Diego..), Todd Loren (Beatles Experience), Scott Pentzer (Razor), Mike Sagara (Ninja High School), and many others.
Hard Rock Heroes is a book-length pictorial history, covering bands like Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen, Motley Crue, Poison, Megadeth, Pantera, Anthrax, Motorhead, Sammy Hagar, and more. The cinematic stories are realistically drawn, researched from countless photo and video archives, with an encyclopedic eye toward visual accuracy, dramatic flair, and journalistic depth.
Also includes the never-before published “missing” Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics #8 from 1990, on Skid Row. The lack of an eighth issue has vexed collectors and catalogers for years – exactly 20 years later, the story can finally be told, and collectors can finally own ALL the Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics!
As a bonus treat, Hard Rock Heroes also features the Motley Crue comic story from their official box CD set Music To Crash Your Car To II, released in 2004 and written and drawn by original Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics creators Lyndal Ferguson and Larry Nadolsky. Shipping February 2010.
"Great ideas, like the marriage of rock 'n' roll and comics, have the half-life of Uranium and will always be popular," says series co-creator Jay Allen Sanford, who has worked on over 200 reality-based comic books and thousands of similar cartoon strips for the San Diego Reader, as well as for magazines like Rip, Spin, and Oui. "The folks at Bluewater clearly have their fingers on the same pop culture pulse that enabled the original Rock 'N' Roll Comics to become one of the top-selling indie comics of the '90s. Truth is often stranger than fiction...and certainly much more interesting!"
The Led Zeppelin Experience:
The Led Zeppelin saga is one of the wildest in rock history, and this graphic novel pulls no punches in dramatizing the backstage, behind-the-scenes story. From their early days as the New Yardbirds on through their rise to superstardom (and controversy), all five issues of the original Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics series are collected in one rockin’ volume, with art by Scott Pentzer (Razor), Marshall Ross (Deepest Dimension), David Neer (Sports Superstars), Francois Escalmel (Frank Zappa: Viva La Bizarre), and others. The collection also includes update material, bringing the saga up to 2010.
www.rocknrollcomics.com --- www.myspace.com/rocknrollcomics
THE BEATLES IN
UNEXPECTED BEATLES ART - The Fab Four turn up in the oddest places... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2009/jan/29/the-return-of-black-heart-procession-plus-anya-mar
MAHARISH COMIX AND STORIES, OR "YOGI MAKES A BOO-BOO"
MY BRUNCH WITH YOKO - Brunch with a Beatle bride... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2008/feb/06/my-brunch-with-yoko-plus-weird-beatles
LENNON OR McCARTNEY?? --We asked 25 local performers about their fave Beatle (and why), and got some surprising (and frequently revealing) answers...
CELEBRITY HOUSE HUNTING IN SAN DIEGO - Real estate broker Jeff Paiste has squired several famous musicians around San Diego in their search for decent digs to lease or rent, including Bread frontman David Gates and the late George Harrison.... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2007/sep/13/celebrity-house-hunting-in-san-diego
*
JOEY MOLLAND/BADFINGER INTERVIEW - Badfinger's last man standing, Joey Molland, reveals more about the tragic story of Badfinger, as well as meeting and working with John Lennon, George Harrison, and Todd Rundgren, plus the Concert for Bangladesh, and more. http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2008/aug/21/x-jam-cancellation-controversy-plus-how-i-snuck-in/
THE DAY JOHN LENNON WAS SHOT - Local celebs share their recollections of December 8, 1980, plus guest essays from Al Kooper (who was recording with George Harrison that day) and others.... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2009/jan/25/john-lennon-12-8-1980-we-ask-local-celebs-where-we/
LEGO ALBUM COVER RECREATIONS! Those wacky kidsters at toyzone.com put together this great tribute to OCD Legoholics everywhere... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2009/jan/29/the-return-of-black-heart-procession-plus-anya-mar
WONDERWALL (1968) – “LOST” PSYCHEDELIC CLASSIC WITH MUSIC BY GEORGE HARRISON, RINGO STAR, PETER TORK, ERIC CLAPTON, AND MORE
Tonight, I watched the epically wonky 1968 Wonderwall movie DVD, with music by George Harrison and psychedelic visual design by The Fool, that group of acidhead techno artists who painted the Apple office building in the '60s and had much to do with the latterday Beatles imagery (I wonder if Magic Alex ever perfected his magic box?).
The movie is so freakish, it's almost impossible to absorb - as an artifact of the 60s and hippiedom, and an example of some of the first Beatles "solo" music, it was well worth watching, and probably worth the high price that the limited edition U.S. region DVD sells for (I got a "bargain" on eBay at $30 - I've seen it sell for $75 and up).
It's hardly a "movie," at least by the normal definition. Worth noting is that the director is the same guy who later did the fantasy sequences in the Led Zep concert movie The Song Remains the Same. If you liked that movie's werewolves with tommy guns spurting psychedelic blood, you'd dig Wonderwall.
The first thing that comes to mind, a few minutes after finishing the film, is "This must be what it's like to do peyote, throw up, and then spend two hours staring at your vomit and marveling at how wondrous and beautiful your former lunch now looks...."
The music is by George Harrison, whose Wonderwall solo album has some but not all of the music heard in the movie (it was the first Beatles solo album, AND the first Apple album). For the rock songs, Harrison hired
The Indian sitar music heard in the film was recorded in January 1968, during the same Beatles sessions - and using the same musicians – that resulted in the Beatles’ song “The Inner Light,” originally issued as the B-side of "Lady Madonna."
Wonderwall the movie was only shown a few times in the late ‘60s, and was considered a “lost” film until a good print was found and restored, along with an unreleased Harrison song intended for the original 1968 soundtrack, “In The First Place,” one of the only Wonderwall songs with lyrics (proceeds from a single of the song helped pay for cancer treatments for one of the musicians from the Remo Four).
As near as I can figure it, here’s what the movie is about:
An aging nutty professor and OCD paper hoarder finds a peephole in his cluttered apartment that glows like starlight (set within a wall mural painting of a crowned goddess in the sky) -
When he looks thru the hole, he sees an otherworldly beautiful oft-nekkid young woman named Penny Lane (played by lovely blank-faced cipher Jane Birkin, who was equally blank in Antonioni's equally obtuse movie Blow-Up).
One one side of the wall, the Old Prof's side, it’s just another day, the barber shaves another customer, the banker looking in --- On the OTHER side of the peephole, it's the 24-hour freakout channel, with freakout music kicking in every time the old man peeps at the fetishistic nylon leg shows and Hefner-fueled/acid-soaked visions of a Wild and Wonky World According To Playboy. Within Without You. Opening more peepholes seems to open more worlds – or are these just the Old Prof’s daydreams? In one trippy vision, the old Prof improbably sees himself, outdoors, battling a teenage Superman with "weapons" like giant ciggies and lipstick tubes. Or at an effeminate cowboy riding a plastic rocking horse and talking on the phone, or a hippie mermaid chick floating on a sea of polyester fabric while brushing her hair, or a Perplexing Planet of Preposterous Sunglasses. He peeps most often at an ongoing idyllic Dionysian hippie party jam, with flute-playing flower children and beautiful dancing gypsies (with almost EVERYone smoking something, either ciggies or ??). The smoking in various other wonderworlds ranges from small glass pipes to Chong-sized roaches and giant octopus hookahs – Amusingly, the Old Prof himself, in his world, is proudly a non-smoker --- tho one wonders about how lab-customized his beloved sugar cubes may be, given his increasingly bizarre visions thru the Wonderwall. The Old Prof becomes so obsessed that, for awhile, he seems to stop shaving or sleeping or doing anything else aside from peeping. Sorta presaging the advent of 500-channel TV feeds, it could be said --- So as the Old Prof is peeping at the dreamy hippie otherworlds, he starts dressing up in what an unschooled old man might approximate as "psychedelic" circa 1968, ie a pointy New Year's party hat, or a funky outsized tuxedo, and decorating his apartment - especially the "wonderwall" itself - with streamers and party favors. When he strays too far from the wall - like when he goes to work at the lab one day, if only to study up on alternate realities and gaze lovingly at Penny Lane thru his microscope (?!)- he suddenly becomes black and white. As does the world around him. Only the wonderwall can color his world.... At some point, one of the wonderwall visions appears to actually be the adjoining room of a young hippie couple - or is it? Everything on the Other Side is just a colorful and halucinogenic as his other visions. When he realizes he's fallen in love with the young girl - or at least with her magical hippie wonderland - he manages to find a magic (Alex) doorway and dramatically leap into her world, apparently by dressing as a top-hat magician and fondling his magic wand (don't ask....) – However, when he gets to Her World, the hippie girl's psychedelic-flavored life isn't idyllic as it seemed. She is unmarried and has just discovered she's pregnant, and her hippie boyfriend is being a big hippie dick about it. So - while the Old Prof hides in her psychedelic closet - the hippie girl (real or fantasy?) chokes down a bunch of pills, cries, and is carried out on a stretcher. Flash to a newspaper headline: "Scientist Saves Fashion Model - Top Hat Riddle in The next time he sees WTF? The DVD also includes footage cut to Eric Clapton’s playing, stills of artwork by the various Fool’s who designed the psychedelia, footage cut to a Remo Four track, and other ephemeral perks. So, in summation – glad I watched it. Glad it was restored, especially the sonically engaging soundtrack, and glad it came out on DVD. Also glad the hippies – and I’ll probably never have occasion to spin this inexplicable tripfest again, unless under the influence of the Old Prof’s suspect sugercubes, but I’m glad I finally got to checkout this funky flashback, 40 years after it first came and went ------ (Wonderwall in Wikipedia - animated gifs courtesy the fantastic blog of Martin Klasch )
YOKO COMIX: WHEN JOHNNY MET YOKO (caption dialogue paraphrased from various Lennon interview transcripts)
WEIRD BEATLES MEMORABILIA
(No, not cocaine – it’s Lux Soap!)
JOHN LENNON: A LIFE IN THE DAY
THE RETURN OF ROCK 'N' ROLL COMICS!
The Beatles are bigger than ever, now available online for the first time digitally, on the Vegas stage in “Love,” and in the new Beatles: Rock Band video game. Now comes the most comprehensive and encyclopedic illustrated Beatles story ever, the Beatles Experience! Over 200 pages, dramatizing one of the most compelling tales in pop culture history, drawn from thousands of photos and interviews, meticulously researched and featuring stunning art by Mike Sagara (Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics) and Stuart Immonen (Legion of Super Heroes, Ultimate X-Men).
<?xml:namespace prefix = o />
Covering the Beatles’ lives from birth and beyond their breakup, dramatized in dialogue and scene recreations more akin to a film bio than a mere documentary, the Beatles Experience also includes a Chronolog timeline going down each page, with encyclopedia background and footnotes detailing related events happening at the same time in the world, in music, and in the Beatles’ own tumultuous and extraordinary lives.
Hard Rock Heroes: What goes together better than comics and rock music? With almost 300 pages of Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics, Hard Rock Heroes goes WAY beyond Behind the Music, to tell the real life, behind-the-scenes stories of rock’s most heavy hitters. Creators include Stuart Immonen (Superman: End of the Century), Ken Landgraf (Wolverine), Jay Allen Sanford (Overheard in San Diego..), Todd Loren (Beatles Experience), Scott Pentzer (Razor), Mike Sagara (Ninja High School), and many others.
Hard Rock Heroes is a book-length pictorial history, covering bands like Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen, Motley Crue, Poison, Megadeth, Pantera, Anthrax, Motorhead, Sammy Hagar, and more. The cinematic stories are realistically drawn, researched from countless photo and video archives, with an encyclopedic eye toward visual accuracy, dramatic flair, and journalistic depth.
Also includes the never-before published “missing” Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics #8 from 1990, on Skid Row. The lack of an eighth issue has vexed collectors and catalogers for years – exactly 20 years later, the story can finally be told, and collectors can finally own ALL the Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics!
As a bonus treat, Hard Rock Heroes also features the Motley Crue comic story from their official box CD set Music To Crash Your Car To II, released in 2004 and written and drawn by original Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics creators Lyndal Ferguson and Larry Nadolsky. Shipping February 2010.
"Great ideas, like the marriage of rock 'n' roll and comics, have the half-life of Uranium and will always be popular," says series co-creator Jay Allen Sanford, who has worked on over 200 reality-based comic books and thousands of similar cartoon strips for the San Diego Reader, as well as for magazines like Rip, Spin, and Oui. "The folks at Bluewater clearly have their fingers on the same pop culture pulse that enabled the original Rock 'N' Roll Comics to become one of the top-selling indie comics of the '90s. Truth is often stranger than fiction...and certainly much more interesting!"
The Led Zeppelin Experience:
The Led Zeppelin saga is one of the wildest in rock history, and this graphic novel pulls no punches in dramatizing the backstage, behind-the-scenes story. From their early days as the New Yardbirds on through their rise to superstardom (and controversy), all five issues of the original Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics series are collected in one rockin’ volume, with art by Scott Pentzer (Razor), Marshall Ross (Deepest Dimension), David Neer (Sports Superstars), Francois Escalmel (Frank Zappa: Viva La Bizarre), and others. The collection also includes update material, bringing the saga up to 2010.
www.rocknrollcomics.com --- www.myspace.com/rocknrollcomics
THE BEATLES IN
UNEXPECTED BEATLES ART - The Fab Four turn up in the oddest places... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2009/jan/29/the-return-of-black-heart-procession-plus-anya-mar
MAHARISH COMIX AND STORIES, OR "YOGI MAKES A BOO-BOO"
MY BRUNCH WITH YOKO - Brunch with a Beatle bride... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2008/feb/06/my-brunch-with-yoko-plus-weird-beatles
LENNON OR McCARTNEY?? --We asked 25 local performers about their fave Beatle (and why), and got some surprising (and frequently revealing) answers...
CELEBRITY HOUSE HUNTING IN SAN DIEGO - Real estate broker Jeff Paiste has squired several famous musicians around San Diego in their search for decent digs to lease or rent, including Bread frontman David Gates and the late George Harrison.... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2007/sep/13/celebrity-house-hunting-in-san-diego
*
JOEY MOLLAND/BADFINGER INTERVIEW - Badfinger's last man standing, Joey Molland, reveals more about the tragic story of Badfinger, as well as meeting and working with John Lennon, George Harrison, and Todd Rundgren, plus the Concert for Bangladesh, and more. http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2008/aug/21/x-jam-cancellation-controversy-plus-how-i-snuck-in/
THE DAY JOHN LENNON WAS SHOT - Local celebs share their recollections of December 8, 1980, plus guest essays from Al Kooper (who was recording with George Harrison that day) and others.... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2009/jan/25/john-lennon-12-8-1980-we-ask-local-celebs-where-we/
LEGO ALBUM COVER RECREATIONS! Those wacky kidsters at toyzone.com put together this great tribute to OCD Legoholics everywhere... http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2009/jan/29/the-return-of-black-heart-procession-plus-anya-mar