George Harrison and Wonderwall: 40 Years Later, plus My Brunch With
Yoko, Weird Beatles Merchandise, Maharishi Comix, When Johnny Met Yoko, more
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2009/dec/04/george-harrison-and-wonderwall-40-years-later-plus/
By Jay Allen Sanford
December 4, 2009
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 Liverpool band the Remo Four, as well as bringing in Ringo
Star, Eric Clapton, and Peter Tork (playing one of Paul McCartney's banjos).
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).
Penny Lane seems to be perpetually posing for 60s softcore porn mags,
cigarette commercials, and stewardess ads, alone and/or with equally
underdressed ladyfriends.
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 Penny Lane's Gas-Filled Flat."
The next time he sees Penny Lane is under his microscope, in his lab,
with the girl dressed like an angel and blowing him kisses while
floating - and shrinking - into a churning field of stars and nebulas.
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 Hollywood's brief trippy obsession
with them pretty much died with the Beatles.
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 ------
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