PAUL IS DEAD
I am alive and well and unconcerned about the rumours of my death. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know.
– Paul McCartney
There were always strange rumours circulating about The Beatles in the press, and normally they didn’t cause too much of a fuss. But in the latter half of 1969, one such rumour caused many Beatles fans to lose their minds.
On 17 September, an article was published in the Northern Star, the newspaper for the Northern Illinois University. It declared that Paul McCartney was dead, and had been dead since a car crash in 1966, whereupon it had been decided to replace him with a lookalike and soundalike, William Shears Campbell (shortened to Billy Shears, who was introduced to us on the Sgt. Pepper album), so that The Beatles could carry on and the fans didn’t have to grieve. Not only that, but The Beatles had been laying out clues to this truth in their singles and albums since his death.
The rumour spread to the Detroit radio station WKNR when a DJ held a phone-in to lay out the evidence. Their new album, Abbey Road, was a key text in the conspiracy, offering the following clues:
• The band were walking across the road as if in a funeral procession: John as the clergyman, Ringo as the undertaker, Paul as the corpse (he was barefoot after all) and George as the gravedigger.
• Paul, who was known to be left-handed, held his cigarette in his right hand. Imposter!
• The Volkswagen Beetle car had a number plate that ended 28IF, the age he would be if he was still alive. (He was actually twenty-seven on the release of Abbey Road.)
And the fans didn’t stop at Abbey Road searching for clues. Other ‘evidence’ mounted:
• If you play ‘Revolution 9’ backwards, you can hear the words ‘turn me on, dead man’.
• On the White Album, in between ‘Blackbird’ and ‘I’m So Tired’, John mumbles, ‘Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him.’
• If you listen closely to the fadeout of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, you can hear John intoning ‘I buried Paul’. (He actually says ‘cranberry sauce’.)
• If you look at the picture of The Beatles on the back of the Sgt. Pepper album, Paul is the only band member turning his back on us, the audience.
• In the centrefold picture in the Sgt. Pepper album, Paul is wearing a black armband with the initials ‘OPD’, the acronym Canada uses for ‘Officially Pronounced Dead’.
• During the ‘Your Mother Should Know’ scene in Magical Mystery Tour, Paul is wearing a black rose while the others wear red ones.
Sales of Beatles albums soared in the US, and both Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour re-entered the US Billboard charts as fans pored over them trying to find clues.
Of course, Paul was not dead; he had only retreated to his farm in Scotland with Linda and the kids and Martha the Old English Sheepdog to take a break from his Beatle stresses. Life magazine finally tracked him down to his home on the Mull of Kintyre, though Paul’s first reaction to their intrusion was to throw a bucket of water over the journalist and photographer. Realising that the angry images would damage his reputation, he agreed to speak to them in return for the photographs that had been taken. The McCartney family returned to London in December 1969, still alive and well.