The Beatles Book

Over the past few weeks, (when your rotten chronicler was going through a crisis of epic proportions) two new installments of the Rotten Apple subscription series arrived. The reduction in quantity is more than made up by the quality of these latest efforts, which focus on the Beatles Book monthly. Imagine a trippy, yet coherent themed Rotten Apple production and you'll have an idea of "TheStudyCloud - Beatles Book (1963 - 1969)" and "TheStudyCloud - BeatleMonthlyTwo."

Like many U.S. fans, my first knowledge of the Beatles Monthly was when some issues were shown on the White Album Poster.



The original Beatles Monthly was published from August 1963 through December 1969. Seeing those 1967-era Beatles faces on the covers was pretty exciting for those of us who wanted nothing to do with those girlie fan magazines where you had to look at pictures of Bobby Sherman and Dino, Desi and Billy before you would find a Beatle. The Monthly was endorsed by Brian Epstein and featured numerous articles credited to Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans.

The first video explores, among other things, the magazine's curious practice of putting fake mustaches on pictures of the fabs presumably to make earlier pictures appear to be from 1967. This topic has been researched quite well in the "Nothing Is Real" discussion group.



Presumably this deception on the part of the Beatles Book was a practical matter due to the Beatles' recent change of appearance and the shortage of contemporary pictures. In fact it doesn't seem significant at all really. I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world when Rotten Apple 12 featured "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" backwards. Although the words "It was a fake mustache" were more understandable than most of the backwards "clues," it didn't seem to have anything to do with the Paul Is Dead rumors.

To my knowledge, no one before Iamaphoney ever implied any significance to the "fake mustache." But then it occurred to me that maybe there is more to this fake mustache thing than meets the mouth. There was the brief moment in the promo for "A Day In the Life" when Paul appeared to really have a fake mustache.



And why would the Sgt. Pepper album include bonus cut-outs that included a fake mustache? And wasn't it weird that all four Beatles decided to sport mustaches at the very same time? That always seemed a bit juvenile to me.



The second video release three weeks later, consisted of a minute and a half of disconnected items from the pages of the Beatles Monthly. Beginning with pictures of the Beatles skiing doubles from "Help!" chronicled on the pages of the magazine and then moving into a weird little blurb about, of all things, the Twin Peppers.



The Twin Peppers were two copies of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album which supposedly contained special clues when synced together. This was a rather difficult thing to test. As the story goes, the "Twin Peppers" were found in the Berlin Suitcase allegedly dropped by the key character in the Rotten Apple Series, generally referred to these days as The Phoney Figure (TPF). Recordings of two scratched up copies of Sgt. Pepper were available for download for a while and purported to be the copies found in the Iamaphoney suitcase. Yeah, this sounded like a valuable way for me to spend my time. But I have to admit, that I was impressed to see that The famous Beatles Monthly reported that prior to the release of the album, two copies of it were stolen. So, if we can believe that two copies of the Sgt. Pepper album were created with special clues, and those very two copies of the Sgt. Pepper album were stolen prior to its release, and those very two copies ended up in the hands of Iamaphoney several decades later, and those very two copies were placed in a suitcase and left in Berlin, and those very two copies were found in that suitcase by someone who was familiar enough with the Rotten Apple series to report it to someone who was well schooled in all things Iamaphoney-related, and those very two copies were placed on the web for download, then yes, we have something here.



Then the video goes on to some Thelema images with an attempt to connect them with Arthur Dooley’s curious "Four Lads Who Shook The World" sculpture in Liverpool. This is made even more confusing when one reads the description of "TheStudyCloud - BeatleMonthlyTwo" as presented unlisted on YouTube. It says, "doubles, twin peppers and wings." Is Iamaphoney implying that there is a connection between Thelema, the "Four Lads That Shook The World" sculpture and Wings? I think he is.



Now, what does it mean?