Advertisement
The rumor started here, swept the Midwest, gathered steam on the East Coast, and is now nation-wide. The rumor is that Paul McCartney is dead, has been since 1966, since before Sgt. Pepper, and the rumor, despite having reached epidemic proportions, is absolutely untrue.
Still, Rolling Stone and radio stations and publications across the nation have been flooded with letters and phone calls asking whether it is true (or breaking the news) that Paul is dead. Most are dead serious. Only a few, like Bob Gavin, of Kansas City, suggest that it might be a "huge joke," a great way of "showing people what asses they are."
Evidently it got its start when somebody first noticed that there's a voice saying "Turn me on, dead man," on "Revolution No. 9" when played backward.
This called for some "research" into earlier and later Beatles. On Sgt. Pepper it was noted that there is a hand over Paul's head on the cover, a Greek or American Indian sign of death), and on the back cover his back is turned. The guitar on the grave on the cover is left-handed, just like you know who.
On Magical Mystery Tour, there's another hand over Paul's head. He's wearing a black carnation, though the others wear red ones. At the end of "I Am she Walrus" someone says, "I buried Paull." 'The walrus on the cover is the only personage there in black, and, as everyone knows, "the Walrus is Paul" (source: "Glass Onion," The Beatles).
On Abbey Road, Paul is out of step with the other three on the cover, and are his eyes closed or not? The rumor is that they are and this is his funeral procession. Fred LaBour, writing in the Michigan Daily, University of Michigan paper, says John looks like an "anthropomorphic God, followed by Ringo the undertaker, followed by Paul the resurrected, barefoot with a cigaret in his right hand (the original was left-handed), followed by George, the grave digger," He points out that they are leaving a cemetery.
Such is the fodder for the pseudo-authenticated bullshit that makes a good rumor. LaBour of the Michigan Daily has turned out the most baroque explication of Paul's supposed death (though he was not the first so get it in print: the Northern Star student paper at Illinois University carried an article headlined "Clues Hint At Possible Beatle Death" on September 23rd , almost a month earlier). LaBour has Paul having died in a car crash, the top of his head sheared off, prior to Sgt. Pepper, and says he is, in fact, the cat who died in the "A Day In the Life" car crash. Which means he'd have been dead some three years by now.
The details go on and on and on (Why is it "one and one and one is three" on "Come Together" when their are four Beatles?) and even includes a certain phone number where, if you answer all the riddles right, you'll be whisked away to a magic Beatles Island where there will be a party, or Paul will appear to commit suicide, or Brian Jones is waiting, or Brian Jones and Brian Epstein and Paul, or . . .
Some people will do anything, and that includes E. Alvin Davis, a KLEO, Wichita, disk jockey, who bragged to Rolling Stone that he's been done his damnedest to spread the rumor on the air. He doesn't necessarily believe it, he says, "but it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, it's still entertaining. We've really got a lot of people talking about it. We've really got a lot of people talking about it."
That seems to be she story throughout the Mid-West, with cynical rumormongers spreading what they know to be bullshit.
The canard has spread all the way to the East Coast, where in New York City a WABC disc jockey named Roby Yonge was yanked off the air by his station manager for perpetrating the nasty rumor.
The gullible are, as ever, gullible. The New York office of Allen Klein, the Beatles' manager, has received dozens of calls asking whether it was true or not. Even the Los Angeles Times carried reports of the story -- though it took care to run a story quoting Beatles publicist Derek Taylor as saying the rumor was a "lie" and noting that this rumor circulates periodically, concerning one or another Beatle has passed in the Great Beyond. The current one is the biggest yet, Taylor says. There have been letters and phone calls all day and night non-stop since mid-October.
As for Paul himself, the singer broke his dead silence last Tuesday in London, where he and wife Linda Eastman are house-hunting.
"I'm alive and well," said Paul. "But if I were dead I would be the last to know."
U.S. State Department officials, who do not generally grant entry visas to dead men, have okayed one for Paul, for a Thanksgiving reunion of his wife's family in New York.