Dates kinda fail me, on this one, but it must have been back in the summer of 1979 when my grammar-school pal Brad roped me into his preoccupation, at the time, with this astonishing (to us) conspiracy theory that had made the rounds in our classroom that previous spring. Apparently, some unfathomable amount of years earlier (really only about ten, but when you’ve only been alive for twelve or thirteen years, that seems like a crazy amount of time), Beatle Paul McCartney was rumored to have been killed in a car crash and covertly replaced by a lookalike, and the Beatles had peppered (pardon the pun) clues all over their albums about it. To underscore this remarkable (again, to us … it was already ancient history to the rest of the cognizant world) assertion, Brad dropped the needle on the already kinda spooky “I Am the Walrus” from Magical Mystery Tour, pumping up the volume towards the end to amplify entirely discernable utterances of “BURY ME!”
Suffice to say, this creepy revelation immediately put the hook in me, and Brad and I were off to the races, spending the rest of our summer scrupulously cataloging perceived clues, ruining the styluses on our respective families’ sound systems from spinning records backwards and basically freaking ourselves right the fuck out. Sure, it all sounds (and, frankly, is) patently ridiculous, but parts of what we “uncovered” were genuinely disquieting. Regardless of your stance on the whole “Paul is Dead” story, you cannot tell me you haven’t found parts of The White Album just a little quietly sinister.
There were, of course, several “clues” that were simply bananas. My favorite was the theory that if you held the cover of Magical Mystery Tour in one hand and a mirror in another, and then stood in front of another mirror just so, the starry letters that spell out “Beatles” would re-arrange, in the mirror you were holding, into a phone number (albeit, of course, without enough digits), and if you called that enigmatic number at -- FUCKING WAIT FOR IT -- Wednesday Morning at 5 o’clock (…as the day begins), you’d get, y’know,….. the whole story! I also enjoyed the theory that the cover of The White Album could be “scrubbed” to reveal some kind of ominous image underneath. Like I said, …. bananas.
But there were several instances when something was being intentionally expressed. Then as now, I never genuinely believed that Paul was ever actually dead so much as that the Beatles had been just fuckin’ with people, but that didn’t make the whole thing any less intriguing, for Brad and I, at least. Maybe it was all just a goof, but we still wanted to get to the bottom of it.
Here’s the thing: When you indeed spin “Revolution #9” backwards, it actually does seem to repeat “Turn Me On, Dead Man!” And when you play the mumbling bit right after “I’m So Tired” backwards, it actually does sound like “Paul is dead, man, miss him, Miss Him, MISS HIM!” I’m still on the fence about whether it’s “John Buried Paul” or “Cranberry Sauce” in the odd, flutey coda of “Strawberry Fields,” but either way, it’s fuckin’ creepy.
The only reason I’m mentioning any of this now, however, is that in the latest episode of The Dana Gould Hour podcast, the comedian devotes his “True Tales from Weirdsville” segment to the “Paul is Dead” story. Gould, who is fucking hilarious, delves into the surrounding circumstances and ephemera, but stops quite short of conceding that parts of the theory are legitimately weird.
Actually, there is one completely bonkers element that Dana fails to cite in his rumination. He mentions the anecdote about some journalists from LIFE Magazine (an alma mater of mine) confronting McCartney on his Scottish farm in the wake of the hysteria and how an exclusive cover story resulted from the incident. You can see that cover to the right.
The crazy thing about it, however, was that while the cover story was specifically designed to dispel the persistent rumor Paul had been killed in a car crash, it actually added further fuel to the fire (pardon another pun). How so? Well, on the flip side of the actual cover of that issue of the magazine was a full-page advertisement .... for a car. The image, if memory serves, is the front end of a car pointing towards the viewer. And, if you didn't see this coming, the smoking gun to this was that if you held the cover up to a light, the image of the front of the car appeared to bisect the image of Paul, which some perceived as irrefutable evidence that, y'know, it was all true.
The image of same below was taken from this magisterial website.
Regardless, Dana ain’t buyin’ it, but it makes for an interesting listen, and brought me right back to that very silly summer. Check it out here.
To this day, I still can’t listen to the end of “Long, Long, Long” on The White Album without being creeped out.
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