Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The Mysterious Mohammed Chtaibi

One of the most mysterious characters in the Paul Is Dead phenomenon is the Moroccan born Mohammed Chtaibi. His story appeared in Gadfly in 2000.



The article, "The Man Who Killed Paul McCartney" (available online) was written by Jim Yoakum, who is actually the executor of the estate of the late member of Monty Python, Graham Chapman.

The article was reprinted in issue #150 of Beatlefan in 2004.



According to Yoakum, Chtaibi (formerly Mohammed Hadjij) was taken under the wing of McCartney friend and Gallery owner Robert Fraser in the early 1960s. It was Fraser who exposed McCartney and members of the Rolling Stones to artistic influences from various far reaches of the underground. For example, he hung out with William S. Burroughs, who apparently watched Paul composing Eleanor Rigby. Most of McCartney's Crowley connections are through Fraser. In "Many Years From Now" Paul writes:

It was a showbizzy thing which came from more the Hampstead crowd. You'd rent a movie from a movie house and you'd have an evening for your children, 'We're showing Jason and the Argonauts tonight.' Ringo used to do it a lot, every night he'd just hire a movie. Robert rather liked that and turned it more into an art thing. So he would hire Bruce Conner's A Movie, Kenneth Anger, he'd pull in the harder West Coast stuff. I liked it, it was very liberating.

Kenneth Anger is one of the most well known disciples of Aleister Crowley. Around the same time Fraser probably accompanied McCartney on visits to the home of Jimmy Page, another Crowley disciple.

It was Fraser who commissioned Peter Blake to paint a copy of Sir Edwin Landseer’s 1851 painting "The Monarch of the Glen" to hang above McCartney's fireplace in 1966. Blake, of course went on to design the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I couldn't find a picture of Blake's version of Landseer’s painting, but I did find another Blake piece that I thought was interesting. It is called "Love."

Mohammed Chtaibi became Robert Fraser's personal assistant and according to the article, his primary duties were to "cook, drive and carry dope." He was probably doing all three activities on a day in January of 1967 when he became a key component in the debunking of the Paul Is Dead theory. On that day, Fraser and Chtaibi pulled up at Paul McCartney's residence at 7 Canendish Avenue in a taxi. Fans camped outside the gate mistook Chtaibi for Paul McCartney. Once the two got inside McCartney's house it was party time with a variety of drugs pulled a secret stash from the inside of a hollowed out book. With the party in progress, three members of the Rolling Stones arrived. That is a picture of Mohammed Chtaibi with Keith Richards below.



Around nightfall, they decided to move the party to Keith Richards' place. Everyone except Chtaibi piled into Mick Jagger's car. Chtaibi followed in McCartney's custom made Mini Cooper. Supposedly it was a dangling seatbelt that was run over by a passing vehicle that caused Chtaibi to lose control of the car and crash it into a pole, leaving the driver seriously injured and unconscious. Chtaibi was taken to a nearby hospital as rumors spread for the second time in a month or two about a Paul McCartney car crash. A short time later, the Official Beatles News Machine reported that this car crash started a false rumor about McCartney being dead. You have seen the quick shot of the Beatles Monthly article in several Rotten Apple videos.



Okay, so here is Paul Is Dead Crackpot Theory #587:

The Beatles brain trust has a meeting in early January of 1967 in an office at Savile Row within the building they would eventually use for Apple headquarters. A month or two have passed since Paul McCartney's fatal accident and the members are trying to figure out how to dispel the rumors that have been working their way around London. One of the members, probably John says, "I have an idea of how to throw them off the track." Everybody waits for John to reveal the plan. With his mind churning with creativity he says, "Let's have a car accident." The others groan and roll their eyes, but John sticks to his guns.

"No, wait, hear me out," said John. "We get Mohammed over there to take Paul's car out and wreck it. Make sure there are some witnesses around. Then after a few days, bring out that Mohammed was driving Paul's car. He's injured, but he'll be all right. Then Bill here, uh I mean Paul, comes out and tells everybody that it was his car, but not him in the accident. We're completely above board about it. We even put a little blurb in the Beatles Monthly about the accident and the rumors of Paul's death. Years from now the line will blur between what happened in November of 1966 and January of 1967 and everyone will think that the rumors of Paul's real death were based upon Mohammed's accident."

The Beatles follow through with John's plan and invite "insider" Mohammed Chtaibi to various activities related to Sgt. Pepper. That's him pictured to the left of the Ringo, George and John at the photo shoot for the Pepper cover.



Mohammed Chtaibi, now in his mid 60s, has outlived his compensation for his role in the cover up. He spots Iamaphoney's Rotten Apple videos on YouTube. He emails him and tells him, "You don't know what you're doing, but I can tell you the whole truth." Then he agrees to film an interview that is shown in part at the beginning of Rotten Apple 101



Did I have you going there? I can dream, can't I?

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

sound very reasoneble

MikeNL said...

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

interesting thoughts

Unknown said...

But... is there any evidence that IS him in those interviews?

On a diffrent note, I recently started the Rotten Apple over, watching it change and evolve as the videos went on. I even thought about making a little time line showing when stuff started to get deep. The Love code volume is around the time we start to hear new music, images of "IAAP" wandering around and so on...

Anonymous said...

its like phoney died and was replaced
are they doing the same thing again?
and why?
When is Mccartney going to talk?
Is the Fireman a fine ram?
what is ghostly tunes
and pepperland?
scrabble?

Anonymous said...

It's a shame that people WANT Paul to be dead just so they can be right.

MikeNL said...

i don't WANT paul to be dead, i just want a satisfying answer from the man himself, with DNA comparison.

Tafultong said...

Anonymous wrote: It's a shame that people WANT Paul to be dead just so they can be right.

I hope I didn't imply that in my post. I am a huge fan of Paul McCartney before 1966 and after 1966. I have no investment in being right. I just really love the Rotten Apple videos and I want to have a place like this to talk about them, to analyze them and to provide some background to better understand them.

But I think I have said this before: If the original Paul McCartney actually died, it happened 42 years ago and his loved ones took it amazingly well. So, I guess I'm not emotionally caught up in that aspect of it.

Thanks for the comment.

Unknown said...

I dont think any of us want him to be dead... but we do want answers to the un-explained "longest running gag" as to why all the albums and such point to the same joke...

john said...

I was friends with mohammed also known as antoine in the hairdressing world. I knew him from the late 70's to the late 90's when he was in north carolina,then he followed me to florida and began his adventures with sailboats.I have a copy of that picture of him with keith that he gave me. he was quick to point out that there are two smokes in his hand I lost touch with him when he moved away in the late 90's. If any one knows what happened to him I would love to talk to you, boy do i have some stories

john said...

e-mail me if you have info on muhammed chtaibi. johnwootenhair@msn.com

Dr.Tomoculus said...

Problems with the story:
Paul McCartney's Black Mini Cooper.
He owned a Green Mini Cooper. Not a black one. John & George owned black mini coopers.
Where did Mick Jagger live in Hertsfordshire? If it's off the M1 it can be one of a few places, The crash has to happen on the M1 somewhere, en route back down to West Wittering, Sussex. From Herts to Sussex is almost a 2 hour drive, depending on where you're coming from in Herts. Where is Mick Jagger's house? And what colour Mini Cooper S did he own.
6 men all piled into one mini cooper, and Mohammed was the sole occupant of McCartney's black mini cooper. Which he did not possess, as he had a green mini cooper. Does that make sense? 6 men in one car, 1 in the other. Both Mini Coopers. They're not called Mini for kicks.

MIck Jagger's Mini Cooper is the first car in the lot OGO 668E http://www.eurods.eu/wp/history/1960s/1960s.html
6 men in that car. Fraser, McCartney, Jones, Richards, Gibbs, Jagger. OK.

Dr.Tomoculus said...

"Paul McCartney had a 1965 Radford Mini Cooper 'S'. It was an early Radford, not a GT version like Lennon and Harrison's. The car was finished in Aston Martin California Sage Green Metallic. It also featured rear lights from the Aston Martin factory. It also got non-stock features like a new black leather interior, inside map lighting, a sunroof, very rare halogen headlamps and built-in fog lamps recessed into the grille."

http://www.minispace.co.uk/beatles/paul/index.htm

Anonymous said...

So the car in the Florida museum is a replacement too.

Problem with the "Paul Is Dead" is that the replacement not only had to be a lookalike, soundalike but be a worldcalss songwriter too

Anonymous said...

When people say....how could Faul write so well....please note a man at Tavistock...wrote All Beatles music as well as Rolling Stones music....noone wishes poor Paul to be dead....The Big picture isnt the Beatles...its that if the Illuminati fooled us with this....What else is Bogus.......Or actually....what is really Real?

Clare Kuehn said...

I think you're roughly right, or Hadjij is coming out now only for disinfo about it all.

However, it would be good to get something other than Faul/ Bill/ Sir Paul's word for it that Paul himself was so involved with Fraser; and if he was, and was into Crowley dabbling a bit or into some avant-garde friends. Ringo I think could have thought it was cool to be into alternative religion more, but that they all remained fairly innocent *compared to Bill's own adoration of Crowley*.

And also: that's Emilio Lari photographer on Help! film (who seems not to have specific inside information too much but many suspicions and heard the rumour in late 1966 in London, per his other interview clips, but it's not Hadjij (Chaitibi) in the interview, then it's Victor Spinetti on Mal's murder in LA, plus a voice-over of an unknown friend (supposedly) of Mal, then Lari again.

Anonymous said...

Mohammed is still alive and well and at 70+ years having a son soon. I know him to be very cosmopolitan and as a very cool, kind man.

Anonymous said...

I personally know Mohammed and that does not look or sound like him at all in the video.

Anonymous said...

However, one time in the 80's Mohammed did tell me the story of crashing Paul MCcartney's car. That part is true. Still does not seem like him in the video. He told me his stories and I did not believe him until he pulled out his photo album with the very same picture of him with Keith and many others with beatles and stones. He was indeed a very cool and kind man who would do anything to help his friends. We all loved him.