Music Video Of the Week - January 16, 2026

"Show Me the Way" by Peter Frampton  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Gypsies, Tramps, Thieves and Rock and Roll

I stopped commenting on the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees after 2022 when Duran Duran - whom Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell in their book "The Worst Rock & Roll Records of All Time" said was the worst rock band ever (they're not, but they're pretty damn close) - got in.  But I just had to come back to comment on the latest big-name induction . . .

Cher?

Cher?  

Don't get me wrong.  I love Cher.  Really.  Just about everybody loves Cher.  She's a strong singer.  She's also a good actress.  She's had numerous hits, and many of her songs are underrated.  She herself is underrated.  Dave Marsh actually once dismissed her as someone more famous for being than for doing, a charge she dispelled when she won the 1988 Best Actress Oscar for her role in Moonstruck.  She's a woman of many accomplishments.  You can't take any of that away from her.  But - and you knew I was coming to a "but" - she isn't rock and roll.  She's pop!  Her only connections to rock and roll are her romantic associations with Gregg Allman and Gene Simmons, and the latter association is questionable not because of her but because of Simmons. 

The fact that Cher is being inducted 34 years after becoming eligible (she released her debut solo album in 1965, when she was only 19 years old) has led to many people charging the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with sexism for the long wait.  That's the sort of cudgel everyone uses when they charge prejudice for a judgment call instead of looking at more pertinent reasons, like quality or style.  And I've made similar arguments against inductions of male - white male - artists like the Bee Gees or James Taylor, because they're more pop than rock, as well as the aforementioned Duran Duran because, well, they suck.  Oh, Duran Duran are rock and roll all right, but they're bad rock and roll.  Musical ineptitude should never be honored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - but Kiss are in anyway.

I'm not going to say that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board members inducted Cher to own the rockists, because Peter Frampton - who was not a critic's favorite back in the day - finally got inducted this year as well.  I'm thinking there was a transactional compromise in which rockist members of the Rock Hall board agreed to let Cher get in as a price to pay to allow Frampton's induction.  But no transactional compromise, however carefully crafted, will ever allow Jethro Tull to be inducted.

Oh well, I'm still glad Foreigner got in, an induction I've always argued was necessary on the basis of Lou Gramm's voice alone, and I'm happy to celebrate the induction of Kool and the Gang (see what I did there?). 

'Sgt. Pepper' Movie: YouTube Video Reviews

A participant in a Beatles Facebook group I belong to announced that she had just seen the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, and that lit a fire in me to indulge myself once again in making comments on blog posts and videos about what Peter Frampton's mother called "that awful movie" all over the Internet.  It seems there are plenty of reviews of the Sgt. Pepper movie - negative, of course - on YouTube which are nasty, acerbic, trenchant, and as funny as hell . . . more so than anything I've ever written about this cinematic monstrosity, and I'm jealous of these folks for offering such wonderfully conceived reviews even as I tip my hat to them.

I post these video reviews with sole purpose of continuing to spread the word of this film's awfulness to prevent younger generations of Beatles fans from seeing it.

 

 

Over the years, the Sgt. Pepper movie has come to be appreciated among many people - even some Beatles fans, like this person I mentioned on this Beatles Facebook page - as pleasurable camp, a movie that's so bad it's good.  To be fair, the movie does have a few interesting scenes, such as the performances from Earth, Wind and Fire ("Got To Get You Into My Life") and Aerosmith ("Come Together"), as well as Steve Martin's manic "wild and crazy guy" shtick.  And to be fairer still, a couple of its stars have no regret for appearing in it.  Although the movie didn't make her a star, singer Dianne Steinberg - who has since married Steve Miller's bassist Kenny Lee Lewis and is now Dianne Steinberg Lewis - enjoyed her work in the movie and calls it the highlight of her career; she's also been active as a performer and as a music teacher in California.  (Some of her interviews are on YouTube.) 

But let's look at the big picture (and I don't mean the film's ugly logo).

The 2020 Bee Gees documentary How Can You Mend a Broken Heart ostensibly covers their musical achievements and also their involvement with theatrically released movies, but one such movie fails to get any mention.  Guess which movie.

 *  

"There is no such thing as the Beatles now. They don't exist as a band and never performed Sgt. Pepper live in any case. When ours comes out, it will be, in effect, as if theirs never existed." - Robin Gibb, 1978

Music Video Of the Week - April 24, 2020

"Show Me the Way" by Peter Frampton  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Twenty Rules For Making a Movie Based On 'Sgt. Pepper'

It was forty years ago this coming summer that the career-killing rock musical movie based on the Beatles' classic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, hit the theaters. I was reminded of it by the news that Alice Cooper, whose mustache played a villain in this movie with its wearer in a supporting role, will be involved in another rock musical - a live production of Jesus Christ Superstar, to be broadcast on NBC this Easter Sunday, April 1, with Alice as King Herod (and John Legend as Jesus).

Regular readers of this blog will know that I saw the Sgt. Pepper movie when it first came out in July 1978, when I was twelve years old and didn't know much about the Beatles beyond their greatest hits, and I actually liked it without having a clue of what the Beatles were all about . . . like the people who made this movie.  Having long since come to realize what an awful movie it is, and knowing how sacrilegious it was for its producer - music mogul Robert Stigwood, then the Bee Gees' manager (and also the producer of the original production of Jesus Christ Superstar) - to trash the Beatles' greatest work not called Revolver, I have made it my life's mission to discourage people from ever seeing this movie, which has since become an inexplicable cult favorite (and - danger, Will Robinson! - was released on Blu-Ray disc a few months ago).

But today, I want to take a kinder, gentler approach to the Sgt. Pepper movie, even if it is what film critic Janet Maslin called "a business deal set to music," and concede that, while the Sgt. Pepper movie was bad, maybe the idea of making a movie based on Sgt. Pepper isn't.  If I may quote the late Roger Ebert . . . "It's not the idea, it's what you do with the idea."  

Back in the early nineties, in their book "The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time," Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell made a list of the fifty worst albums ever and placed the Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack LP at number 43 (only 43?), explaining how to make such a bad movie in the form of a "recipe for disaster" ("Ask Frampton and the Brothers Gibb to act . . ..  Expect them to act.").  I'm not going to tell you how to make the worst possible movie based on Sgt. Pepper, but I am going to tell you what to do and what not to do if you want to make a movie based on Sgt. Pepper and want to have any chance of making it work - in the form of twenty rules.

My list:

Don't kick off your movie and soundtrack album with a third-tier pop star.  The first singer you hear in the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie and on the soundtrack record is that of Paul Nicholas.  Who?  Nicholas is a British singer and actor who, as a singer, is one hell of an actor.  He's best known in America for his role as Cousin Kevin in the Robert Stigwood-produced film version of the Who's Tommy and for the lame disco hit "Heaven On the 7th Floor," released on Robert Stigwood's record label. Guess who his manager was.  Uhh, Robert Stigwood?  Come on, if you're already managing the Bee Gees and you have Peter Frampton co-starring with them in your movie, why do you need one of your flunkies to start off your show?  Why do you even need him in the show?

A movie based on the Sgt. Pepper album should only feature the songs from Sgt. Pepper.  Stigwood could have had his production crew concoct a screenplay with a plausible storyline based on just the songs on Sgt. Pepper, with dialogue to drive the plot in between, but as he had the movie rights to even more Beatles songs from other albums, he insisted on using all of them - 28 songs in  total, to be exact - for a rock opera with no dialogue, killing any chance the screenwriter had to come up with a coherent story.  Proof that less is more.

Don't invent characters that already aren't in the Beatles songs from Sgt. Pepper.  Billy Shears did not have a stepbrother named Dougie, a character completely made up for the movie and played by . . . Paul Nicholas.  This was the entertainment version of making up a patronage job at City Hall.

Don't name your characters after places in Beatles songs.  The heroine in the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie, the wholesome girlfriend of Frampton's Billy Shears, is named Strawberry Fields.  Please - what self-respecting couple would name their daughter after a fruit? This was just an excuse to feature "Strawberry Fields Forever," originally recorded by the Beatles for Sgt. Pepper but released separately, in the movie.  And when Strawberry the character, played by singer-songwriter Sandy Farina, sang the song in the movie, it made no sense - she sang about  . . . visiting herself?  What was next?  A pretty nurse named Penny Lane?  And her Uncle Albert Hall?

If your heroine is white, your anti-heroine vamp should not be a woman of color.  The Sgt. Pepper movie featured a sexy disco singer named Lucy (no prizes for guessing her featured number in the film) who tempts Billy Shears when he signs a record contract and becomes her label mate.  Lucy was played by Dianne Steinberg, whose mother was Martha Jean the Queen, a pioneering black female radio DJ; she was to R&B radio what Allison Steele was to rock radio.  It is blatantly racist to have a woman of color play the slutty, vampish female character when her rival for a man's affections is a lily-white good girl.  This was not fair to Dianne Steinberg, and it was an insult to her mother's legacy as a pop-music trailblazer.

Make up your mind about the vamp.  One thing I could never figure out after seeing this movie - was Lucy supposed to be a villain, like the evil characters trying to take over the world, or was she just a bad girl with a heart of gold who simply liked making lots of money as a singer?  Either she's a villain or not.  Make it clear one way or the other. But then, as long as Dianne Steinberg was in this movie to provide sex appeal, it didn't matter what her character was supposed to be.

Though I have to admit, she did have sex appeal.

The characters in your movie should resemble the characters in the Beatles songs that they're named for.  In the Sgt. Pepper song "Being For the Benefit For Mr. Kite!", the title character was a circus performer.  How, as played by George Burns in the movie, did he become the mayor of a small town in the American Midwest?

Sgt. Pepper is British.  Why was this movie set in America, even though half the cast was British?  If you must make your characters in a Sgt. Pepper movie American, at least get Americans to play them. Or, if you get British actors to play Americans, at least make sure they're trained to do American accents. 

Show, don't tell.  The story in Sgt. Pepper was so convoluted, it being based on two-dozen-odd Beatles songs and all, that George Burns narrated the tale to keep it moving along.  As I said in an article about this movie that was published several years ago in a Beatles-fan magazine, if a movie needs a narrator to tell you what's happening, it usually means that nothing is happening.

Comedians are not rock stars.   

Rock stars are not comedians.

You saw that coming, didn't you?

No robots, and no electronic vocals.  The Sgt. Pepper movie gave Mean Mr. Mustard a pair of female robot assistants who "sang" the song of that name.  The electronic voices, supplied by the Bee Gees (what, you had Peter Frampton and his voice-box guitar and you didn't ask him to do it?), were so distorted you couldn't make out the words.  But then, if you could, you would have wondered why Mr. Mustard's sister Pam wasn't in the movie to take him to see the Queen so he could shout obscenities at Her Majesty. (See how it's impossible to turn 28 Beatles songs into a rock opera?)

Don't get Giles Martin to produce the music.  Beatles producer George Martin produced the soundtrack record for the Sgt. Pepper movie because his wife suggested that another producer would give the Beatles' songs less respect.  Martin's work was respectful, all right, but unless he worked with recording artists who brought some originality to their Beatles covers - mostly, he didn't - it wasn't much else.  Don't bother Martin's son Giles, now the caretaker of his father's work with the Beatles, and ask him to reproduce Beatles music for a new Sgt. Pepper movie.  He just remastered the original Beatles album.

Get an experienced screenplay writer.   The guy who wrote the screenplay for the Sgt. Pepper movie had never written a screenplay before.  So, you think, we've all got to start somewhere?  Not at the top!  

No outrageous props.  In a key scene set in Hollywood, the Sgt. Pepper movie used a six-wheel topless limousine and had brandy snifters the size of potpourri bowls to symbolize the decadence of the music industry circa 1978.  Dudes, you had Donald Pleasence play an unintentional parody of Robert Stigwood while sporting a bad toupee - that wasn't enough?     

No spoken-vocal recitations of Beatles songs in your movie.  Unless it stars William Shatner.

Your leading lady should not be upstaged by the extras.  It's sort of embarrassing when your heroine is less interesting than a pair of overweight clowns acting as her outriders in a circus-parade sequence.

But the sexy ballerina mimes were a nice touch. 

I want you - I want you so badly! :-D

Don't make your storyline about a good-guy rock band saving the world from the forces of evil.  Because that's what Yellow Submarine was all about.  What made Robert Stigwood think he could remake Yellow Submarine as a live-action movie with Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees and George Burns singing the Beatles' songs?  Please come up with something more original.

Don't use a deus ex machina to end your "story."  The Sgt. Pepper movie ends with Sgt. Pepper himself, played by fifth Beatle Billy Preston, setting everything straight with magic powers to allow the movie to have a happy ending.  This was just a way of admitting that no one knew how to bring the movie to a proper end. 

And finally . . . no glass coffins.

Definitely no glass coffins.  If you must have a funeral scene, we don't need a glass coffin to see who's dead.  It not only looks vulgar, it's rather creepy.  Especially if you have someone singing "Golden Slumbers" to the person inside the coffin.

And no pallbearers singing "Carry That Weight."   

Now, if you follow these rules, I can't guarantee that you'll make a good movie.  But if you break these rules, you could end up making a worse Sgt. Pepper movie than this one.  Please don't give into temptation and ignore my advice.  Life is too short to waste it on making another movie like this.  As Paul McCartney found out when he made Give My Regards To Broad Street.

Though if you have a circus-parade scene and use sexy ballerina mimes, I won't complain. ;-)

Especially if they're blonde.

Love is all, love is you, sweetie! ;-) :-D 

Show Me The Way

Peter Frampton turns sixty today. :-D