Hidden messages on album covers and subliminal admissions of grief. Is it possible that Paul
McCartney, one of rock's most influential voices, has really been dead since the 1960s?
Rock and Roll conspiracy
theories are almost as old as the genre itself. There are music lovers out there
that believe rock icons who have long since passed are still out there today,
and others that believe certain popular musicians working today have actually died and been replaced
by imposters. The king of all these theories is that Beatles bassist, Paul McCartney, is dead.
While a vast majority of these theories are completely baseless,
there's often some small pebble of truth somewhere involved that continues to give the theory life.
It's for this reason that the theory surrounding Paul's untimely demise has persisted for so long.
Radio X reports that in January 1967, The Beatles' official fan magazine,
Beatles Monthly Book, reported a rumor about Paul McCartney dying in a car crash on wet
roads on the M1 motorway late in 1966. Of course that wasn't true — but as All That's
Interesting notes, McCartney had been in a motorbike accident. What's more,
someone who wasn't McCartney did borrow and then crash his car.
The Beatles Monthly Book took pains to explain that the rumors
of McCartney's death were unfounded.
"I am still that little kid that grew up in Liverpool.”
However, it's easy to see how this mess of facts could be swirled together into a
bizarre fan theory. For a long time, the story languished simply because
McCartney was very obviously and publicly alive — although that wound up actually
being a big part of the conspiracy theory once it got up and running.
According to Rolling Stone, in October 1969, just a week after The Beatles had officially broken up,
though no one knew it yet a radio DJ named Russ Gibb was on the air at WKNR in Detroit. It was a
perfectly normal show on a perfectly normal day — until Gibb received an anonymous call on the air.
The caller told Gibb that Paul McCartney had been dead for years and that an impersonator
had been making appearances under his name. And he claimed there was evidence in the band's music.
"Russ just lunges into this, like, 'How can that possibly be?' and starts investigating."
The caller instructed Gibb to play the Beatles' song "Revolution 9" backwards. Gibb agreed,
and listeners were stunned when they made out the words "Turn me on,
dead man" apparently hidden in the song.
As noted by Radio X, that set off a flurry of phone calls, and everyone seemed to be
discovering new clues every second or so. However, a lot of the work had already been
done. In September 1969 a college student named Tim Harper, who wasn't a Beatles fan, had written
a story about McCartney's death and the many clues supposedly found in the band's music.
While some of the clues seem ominous, they're not as concrete as you might think. Scientific
American explains that the human brain is a, quote, "pattern-recognition machine," making
it likely you'll hear comprehensible words from noise — especially if you've
already been primed with the exact phrase you're supposed to be hearing.
Once the fan theory spread, people began identifying "clues" in a long list of Beatles'
songs, supposedly left by the band because they felt guilty about covering up Paul McCartney's
death. Aside from the "Revolution 9" line, some fans pointed out that John Lennon appears to say,
"I buried Paul."
at the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever." However,
Time reports he's actually saying "cranberry sauce."
Other things fans deduced include a moment at
the end of "I'm So Tired" that, when played backwards, you hear,
"Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him."
In the song "Glass Onion," Lennon even sings the line,
However, that one in particular may have been a
cranky jab at the fans who kept flogging the theory.
In fact, fans constructed an entire timeline of events based solely on lyrics from Beatles' songs.
According to Rolling Stone, McCartney supposedly drove away from Abbey Road Studios on a, quote,
"stupid bloody Tuesday," which is a line from "I Am the Walrus". Others interpreted the phrase,
from "A Day in the Life" as confirmation of his death.
In the track "She's Leaving Home," some believed the line "Wednesday morning at
5 o'clock" to be a reference to when Paul was found. According to Time,
when an impersonator named William Shears Campbell was hired, the band "introduced" him in the first
song of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" as Billy Shears in a cheekily public admission.
Much like they did with the music, Beatles fans began analyzing the eccentric Beatles
album covers for hints about Paul's death. Unsurprisingly,
they found tons of hints that Paul McCartney was long dead and being impersonated by a lookalike.
First, there's the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the first album recorded by
the group after McCartney's theoretical death. Fans were struck by the funeral-like imagery,
and on the back cover, McCartney is photographed with his back to
the camera, differentiating him from his living bandmates. In promotional photos for the album,
Paul is also shown wearing a patch that reads "O.P.D.," which fans interpreted as
"Officially Pronounced Dead." In reality, this is actually an Ontario Police Department patch.
Then there's "Abbey Road," one of the last albums The Beatles recorded. As Rolling Stone notes,
the album's famous photo of the band crossing the street can be interpreted as a symbolic funeral:
John Lennon is the preacher dressed in white, Ringo Starr is the undertaker in black,
McCartney is in a suit and has bare feet because that's how dead bodies are buried,
and George Harrison is the gravedigger in denim.
"Paul was, of course, the corpse. Dressed in a shabby,
outdated suit with eyes closed and barefoot."
Additionally, McCartney has a cigarette in his right hand, but he's left-handed,
the license plate on the car parked nearby reads "28IF," and McCartney
would have been 28 if he hadn't died. There's more — and other
album covers were similarly believed to contain tons of cryptic clues.
Today "Paul is Dead" is a charming rabbit hole of a story to be taken about as seriously as
a modern-day CreepyPasta. However, back in November 1969, the theory
that Paul McCartney had died was serious business, as well as a national sensation.
As noted by author Devin McKinney in his book The Beatles in Dream and History,
the fan theory was so serious that famous lawyer F. Lee Bailey actually hosted a
TV special investigating the rumors, complete with cross-examined witnesses.
Those witnesses included Tim Harper, the college student who'd written the story
earlier in the year, The Beatles' new manager Allen Klein, and Paul Cannon,
program director at the radio station that had popularized the theory a few weeks before.
Bailey also gamely examined album covers and analyzed songs as they were played backwards,
lending an air of gravitas to the whole absurd situation.
As Rolling Stone notes, not everyone took the situation seriously. Klein,
known for his flamboyant persona, answered a lot of Bailey's questions with jokes. For example,
when asked about the "I buried Paul" line in "Strawberry Fields Forever,"
The "Paul is Dead" theory has been
around for so long that it seems like settled history, but in 1969 when it first emerged it
was a legitimate fad for a while. As reported by Rolling Stone, like all fads, it prompted many to
attempt to cash in, inspiring several novelty songs written and recorded incredibly quickly.
Most were thrown together by music industry professionals who were skilled in writing
and recording songs quickly. For example, author Michael J. Hockinson notes that a radio station
hired Lenny Capello and Rocky Saxon to write the song "Brother Paul" under the name Billy
Shears and the All-Americans as the theme music for its coverage of the rumor. Additionally,
Zack Van Arsdale, released the song "We're All Paul Bearers" as Zacherias & The Tree People.
One of these novelty songs was actually recorded by a legitimate music star. "So Long,
Paul" was released under the name Werbley Finster, but recorded by "Feliz Navidad"
songwriter José Feliciano, who had the good sense to hide behind a pseudonym. Conversely,
Terry Knight, a well-known musician and DJ in the 60s who never quite broke through to true fame,
threw caution to the wind and released the track "Saint Paul" under his own name.
When the original rumors of
Paul McCartney's death circulated in 1967, they withered quickly because McCartney was
very publicly alive. When the fan theory of his death began making waves in late 1969, however,
they mushroomed in part because McCartney was nowhere to be seen.
As noted by Rolling Stone, McCartney had just had his first child with his new wife,
Linda Eastman. As Radio X notes, the Beatles had already secretly broken up at the time,
but no announcement could be made due to contractual obligations. So McCartney had
gone off-grid, escaping secretly to his farm in Scotland in order to spend time with his
newborn daughter and wait out a media storm he assumed would be about the end of the band.
As a result, just as everyone began wondering if Paul was really dead,
McCartney appeared to have vanished. Finally, author Howard Sounes reports that Life Magazine
sent reporters uninvited to McCartney's farm. McCartney was livid at what he saw
as an invasion of his privacy, so he cursed at them, threw a bucket of water on them,
and was photographed taking a swing at them. Realizing this wouldn't look good, he calmed down
and agreed to an interview and to pose for some photos, making the cover of the November 7 issue.
One of the darker and more bizarre aspects of the "Paul is Dead" theory
involves one of the most notorious figures of the 1960s — Charles Manson.
As noted by author R. Gary Patterson, one of the lingering mysteries for people who
believe the "Paul is Dead" theory is the fact that The Beatles never owned up to the scheme,
and that they never admitted that they'd left clues about McCartney's death. Well,
the Paul Is Dead believers had an explanation for that as well:
Some hypothesized that the Beatles were probably afraid to admit they'd planted hidden messages in
their songs because, as Live Science reports, Charles Manson claimed to have received secret
instructions involving a coming race war and apocalypse from hidden messages in Beatles songs.
The theory goes that the three surviving members worried that if they admitted to their game,
they would be tightly linked to the murders and horror perpetuated by Manson and his followers.
Of course, there's a much simpler alternative explanation, aside from the fact that McCartney
never actually died: Once the band had committed to covering up McCartney's death,
admitting the scheme would be a publicity and legal disaster.
You might think that Paul McCartney's continued existence and the enormous
catalog of music he's released in his lifetime would have killed this theory by now. However,
it continues to stumble along and remains very much alive. In 2010, a documentary
called Paul McCartney Really is Dead: The Last Testament Of George Harrison was released.
"'Is this Paul McCartney?' Maxwell asks humbly. 'Yes,' we confirmed, now all crying."
And in 2020, Image Comics released "Paul is Dead," a comic book based on the theory. And
filmmaker George Moore released a short comedy film based on the bizarre fan theory in 2018.
While there's no evidence the other Beatles were involved in spreading the rumors,
there has always been speculation as to why none of them outright quashed the theory. Ear
Candy Magazine proposed that one potential reason for this is that the rumor boosted album sales.
As noted by author R. Gary Patterson, "Abbey Road" had been out for a while when the rumor
broke into the mainstream — but sales surged as people ran out to buy a copy to scour for clues,
and radio stations began playing wall-to-wall Beatles songs in a nod to how the rumor was
dominating the public imagination. By 1980, "Abbey Road" had sold about 10 million copies worldwide.
And according to author Bob Spitz, the phenomenon boosted the sales of the entire Beatles catalog.
Older albums like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Magical Mystery
Tour" jumped back onto the charts, in part due to interest in the rumor and the clues.
By 1977 the whole "Paul is Dead" rumor had
faded into the background noise of the universe. But there was one last gasp.
As Louder reports, in August of 1976 the band Klaatu released an album called,
mysteriously enough, 3:47 EST. What made the release interesting was a complete
lack of information about the band. No one knew who was in it, where they'd come from,
or really anything about the group. The album received some very good reviews,
but it didn't make much of a splash, due in part to its lack of promotion or information about it.
As reported by The Washington Post the story takes a swerve almost a year later,
when a rumor started that Klaatu was actually The Beatles, secretly reformed but trying to
avoid the media firestorm such an announcement would make. Sales surged, and people began
analyzing the music, which did in fact sound like something The Beatles would have made.
Then, as Vulture notes, things got even more ridiculous when that theory tied back into the
Paul is Dead theory as people speculated that instead of The Beatles getting back together,
the Klaatu album was actually an album the band had recorded
in 1966. The master tapes had been lost, and when they were finally rediscovered
the band decided to release the album as a tribute to their dead bandmate.