Hard and Haight-ful

Going through one of the various Tumblr archives I’ve downloaded, I spotted this:

…and I thought it looked weirdly familiar despite never having seen it before that I could remember. It wasn’t the book that was familiar, it was the pose of the character with the guitar, and the haircut and the shades and the face. I thought I’d seen that before somewhere. And I had:

That’s George Harrison, guitarist for some band or other, making a visit to the Haight-Ashbury district with Pattie Boyd who also made it into the book cover. When I saw the cover I was curious as to when the book was published, cos it would’ve been an impossible coincidence for it to predate that photo of George (unless it was a reprint and the publisher did new art for it, which I doubt would’ve been the case somehow), and lo, a quick bit of research indicates it did indeed first appear in May 1968. So it made sense. I’m actually kind of impressed by the sheer nerve involved in taking what I presume was already a well-known and widely published photo (at least known enough by the artist to rip it off) of an international celebrity and turn it into… well, a fairly shitty cover illustration for an evidently fairly shitty piece of pornography. Presumably the publisher was confident that their target audience weren’t Beatles fans and that they were small enough that the Fabs themselves wouldn’t notice…

Author: James R.

The idiot who owns and runs this site. He does not actually look like Jon Pertwee. View all posts by James R.