The birth of a myth … the beginnings of “Paul Is Dead”

It was a day like any other day, only more so. On September 17, 1969, thirty years ago, a myth was born. Or as near as we can tell. The actual birth may have taken place a few weeks earlier, cloaked in the mists of time and pharmaceuticals, and it was probably engendered by an encounter with a British permutation of the rumor, which insisted for a short time in January 1967 that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car crash on a rainswept London highway. But September 1969 was the first date, as far as anyone knows, that the voluminous American legend first came to light in typography and newsprint, on the pages of the Drake University Times-Delphic. It was a feature article by Tim Harper, a professional journalist with several books to his credit, and it was titled “Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?”.

It’s probably one of the longest-running hoaxes involving a music group, and it excites comment even today. Figuring out where it originated has been a hobby of mine for years.

One thing’s for sure, it didn’t originate with Tim Harper, the first known reporter to write about it. Mr. Harper has become a journalist and writes for a major Canadian newspaper. In 1969, he was friends with his sports editor, Dartanyan Brown, who was a music student at Drake University. Dart has since become a technology and music professor at a Northern California college.

Dart didn’t invent the myth either, but he told me he remembered how he first heard about it. He said that he lived off-campus in a “band house”, a lodging that catered to music students and didn’t mind the odd jam with loud rock musicians who might be travelling through Des Moines, Iowa, where Drake University was located. One evening he remembers some “crashers” from the “West Coast” who claimed that they knew how to read the cover of “Sgt. Pepper” to prove that Paul was dead. Dart told the details to Harper, who fashioned the article for the Times-Delphic.

Outside of possible appearances in underground papers (none have yet come to light), this was the first known publication of the clues that have since become famous.

Because “Abbey Road” had not yet been released in the U.S., there were as yet no clues involving that particular LP. Harper’s article talks about “Sgt. Pepper”, “Magical Mystery Tour” and “The Beatles” (a.k.a. The White Album). Some of the more familiar ones involve the upraised hand as “an ancient death symbol of either the Greeks or the American Indians”; the appearance of a walrus, “supposedly the Viking symbol of death”; the mention of “Wednesday morning at five a.m.” a clue about the time of Paul’s death, and a backwards message that Harper said one can hear when the phrase “number nine” is reversed (”Turn me on, dead man” and “Cherish the dead”).

The Akron Beacon-Journal, during the height of the hoax, insisted that Harper had originated the hoax himself, and their article seems to have him claiming that he did, in fact, invent the clues himself. But Harper told me that he did not, that the Beacon-Journal article was in error, and all he did was collect and publish the clues in the hope that the real perpetrators would come forward. They never did.

Within weeks, other student newspapers published their own version of the clues, one article in particular (from the Northern Illinois University Northern Star) recognizably derived from Harper’s own prose. One of these articles (it’s unclear whether it was from a student newspaper or an underground tabloid) apparently made its way into the studio at Detroit FM radio station WKNR, where Russell Gibb, a part time teacher, deejay, and music compere, found it.

Gibb and an associate, Headly Westerfield (now a journalist himself), thought the article hilarious and read it on the air on October 12, 1969, a scant month after Harper’s article was published. In addition to reading it, Gibb and Westerfield also made up some of their own clues as they went along.

Westerfield said that he couldn’t remember precisely which clues he and Gibb made up made up, but he was pretty sure they explored some of the allegedly backwards messages because of the proximity ofthe turntable in-studio. “Then we started to play some of the ‘clues’,” Westerfield told me. “Soon we were making up more ‘clues,’ bizarre ‘clues.’ The entire radio shift, as I remember, was taken up with, what to us, was nothing more than a big joke”.

What surprised Westerfield and Gibb was what happened to their innocent jocularity over the next few weeks. It was in October 1969 that the legend of Paul’s death really grew…and with it came more theories from albums and artwork.

Fred LaBour was then a student at University of Michigan as well as a writer for the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper (he is now “Too Slim”, a member of the Western/Comedy music combo Riders in the Sky). His assignment was to write a review of the Beatles latest (and last, it turned out) LP, “Abbey Road”. But he was listening to WKNR-FM the night of Russ Gibb’s broadcast, and he thought it would be fun to submit a newspaper article based on the hoax he’d just heard.

LaBour’s October 14, 1969 article went quite over the top. In addition to inventing clues of his own on top of those already fabricated by Gibb and crew, LaBour invented a conspiracy involving a look-alike called William Campbell (originally called Glen Campbell “but I decided that would be a little too obvious”, Fred told a reporter in 1970), and had Campbell replace Paul. LaBour was also the originator of the mistaken notion that “walrus was Greek for corpse” (Big Fat Magazine, February 1970), among other clues that have now been ascribed to the Beatles themselves.

LaBour thought his article would be obviously recognizable as a lampoon. It was not. In fact, it fueled the flames of the hoax and added even more “clues” to the mix.

Then the mainstream press awoke. Articles appeared in rapid succession in the Times of London, 21 October 1969; New York Times, 22 October 1969; the Los Angeles Times, 22 October 1969. The L.A. Times, whose story came to them via the Washington Post, adds some new details, attributing the start of this hoax to a student at Ohio Wesleyan University, one John Sumner, who was supposed to have written a thesis on the subject (Sumner, by the way, became a broadcast journalist).

An unnamed spokesman for the Beatles, speaking to the N.Y. Times, did say that the hoax was “a load of old rubbish”, and that they were “mystified by the rash of calls which started last Friday”—October 17 1969, five days after Russ Gibbs’ Detroit broadcast and three days after Fred LaBour’s fanciful article of fabricated “clues” appeared in the U. of Michigan paper. “They say that if you play some of the songs at a slower speed or in reverse, you can actually hear Paul say, ‘I am dead’…I don’t know, I’ve never tried it”, said a spokesman from Apple (N.Y. Times, p. 8).

Most intriguing of all the contemporary press coverage from late 1969 is an article written by J. Marks for the New York Times on November 2, 1969. Marks had apparently been a collaborator of Linda Eastman, as she was known then. Marks and Eastman, working on a book, went “star-hopping”, has he termed it, in London during Fall 1967, and he quotes Ms. Eastman as complaining that she’d likely never get close to McCartney “because of Jane Asher”. At a party given by Beatles’ designers The Fool (who designed the Apple Boutique), an unnamed “friend of the Beatles” brought up the curious topic that “Paul was killed last year” (1966), and continued to lampoon what seemed to have been a rumor of Paul’s untimely demise—assuring Ms. Eastman that Jane would eventually tire of Paul’s “double” and Linda could have a go.

At the time, though offered jocularly, it seems clear that no “clues” were suggested—no entreaties to play records backwards, look for badges or graves made of flowers or Scandinavian (or Greek or Eskimo) symbols of death. It was, in 1967, just an odd bit of party hearsay, and no more developed than that (and was, in fact, debunked earlier that year in The Beatles Monthly by fan club secretary Freda Kelly). But it was obviously a joke—its origins clouded in mystery but not, by any account, attributable to the Beatles themselves.

No other details emerge—no concordances other than this. If American mythmakers were conversant with the British rumor of January 1967, they gave no sign. Perhaps it acted as the catalyst for later embellishment. Perhaps it was merely an accident of mythologizing.

Author Marks was inspired to wax rhapsodic over the new American permutation of the hoax because of its complexity and its symbolic fascination for someone interested in death and resurrection myths. If you don’t think this has validity within the genre of pop music, consider Elvis sightings, or the fascination with pop stars whose early deaths propel them into musical stratospheres.

Another DJ friend of Marks suggested, in fact, that an ardent desire among fans to perpetuate the hoax was due to a need for more “feedback” than mere “impersonal recorded material”—especially from a monumental group who no longer toured and could not be easily reached: “…kids are inclined to create a response so that it seems as if the stars are sending them messages which, of course, they are not actually sending” (Marks, NY Times, November 2, 1969, p. 36). Ultimately, it mattered little whether the “clues” were real; the wish for connectivity overode reality. The fact that “clues” were entirely coincidental or unverifiable no longer registered; it was their sheer multitude that really seemed to matter.

Several alternative press accounts poked fun at the growing American hoax. The Los Angeles Free Press (October 31, 1969) reviewed LaBour’s Michigan Daily article at great length, revealing some of his more absurdist touches (thanking “George Martin’s illegitimate daughter, Marian” for her help, or suggesting that Paul was really homosexual, a fact that was revealed, laBour insisted, in “Yellow Submarine”).

As for other “underground” papers in the U.S.:

John Wolfe, of Philadelphia’s Distant Drummer Magazine, decided to explore hidden meanings in another Beatles song: he plumbs the depths of “Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite” and proves, with tongue firmly in cheek, that “they’ve fixed their hole in the ocean and some are there already and we must not make any more false moves. The prophets are coming and so too the deep revolutions of the soul. Or something like that.” (Distant Drummer, November 20, 1969, p. 7).

And an author whose byline is merely “Poppy” writes about the Fabs experience a “bummer in Apple Land”, not the least of which is the Paul-Is-Dead hoax: “…it becomes a complete mind blower, when you stop to think how many things they are involved in, and how extensive their trip is. They are like super electric octpii [sic], that becomes involved with everything that exists—closed fragments of many souls held together by being together” (Daily Planet/Miami Free Press, November 24, 1969).

Where the Beatles were going—and what they’d been—had been on the minds of fans for several years already. A music industry source, quoted in an American pop-music paper in 1966, mentions mail received from fans “…and all have been asking the same questions–’what is happening to the Beatles?’ ‘Why are they becoming so weird?’ Personally, I think the Beatles are now so far from their public that they don’t even know what their public wants anymore” (KRLA Beat, July 2, 1966, p. 3).

Ultimately, then, the rumors of Paul’s “death” had nothing at all to do with Paul’s motorbike crash in December 1965 or Tara Browne’s own auto crash and death in late 1966 in London. And by this time it goes virtually without saying that the Fabs themselves can’t be tied to its genesis, not by direct or indirect admission, evidence circumstantial or otherwise, testimony from friends, associates, wives, lovers, or other notables. There simply is no evidence of the Beatles’ deliberate involvement in the hoax about Paul’s alleged death.

First in its British and then American embodiment, it was less a prank than a vain attempt to mythologize the ungovernable, the incomprehensible; to explain (as ancient societies used to do with myth) the mysteries of the cosmos. Only here the cosmos was represented by the world the Beatles had given us in their music, up to that moment. Henceforward, the Beatles were no longer boys, no longer moptops. Their universe was changing, and their music reflected it, often eerily (when it was released in summer 1966, “Tomorrow Never Knows” baffled most radio program directors, and it fit into no category of Beatles music that existed before that time).

Everything about the Beatles seemed to be changing. Press reports in early 1966 commented that the Beatles wanted an LP with songs that ran into each other, with no boundaries, but their label was uncomfortable with the idea. John revealed that their next album would be “very different” (and “Revolver” certainly was). John said curiously intemperate things about religion and war, or so it seemed. Solo projects were mentioned. Plans for touring in ‘66 remained up in the air until nearly spring, and then no mention was made of what dates they’d play the next year. Fans had to wait overlong for single and LP releases.

The finely-tuned pop machine was changing its rhythm, and the implicit transformation of its components sent a foreshock through those who thought they knew all the Beatles had to offer…and who could not find comfort (or even clues) to this new direction.

Musically, one could argue, there was even *more* artistic substance in the mix…but the shrill inner scream of mania was muffled by the artists’ burgeoning maturity. And for some, that was a loss. What could fans do but create some artificial bond between themselves and their idols—men who now eschewed the very idea of even *being* idols? How best to grasp that loosening lifeline, to imitate that gentle sheltering structure of erstwhile innocence? It’s all in the game, of course—the furtive labyrinth of hidden messages and intimations, whose discovery and divination would prove how adept its player was at winning.

J. Marks noted rather helplessly the inevitable attraction of such a game, the “funk death which symbolizes the peak of the hallucinogenic voyage”. The death-hoax becomes its own drug, so much safer than what was out there on the streets…and arguably it’s as great a high, as heady an intoxicant.

Truth is the victim—-or whatever passes for truth these days, hard as it is to pin down after so many years and so much distance. But “nothing is real”, as the Beatles sang to us, all those years ago…not even the death of Paul McCartney.

Article by Saki