Having just skimmed through the Beatles Anthology I was reminded that the video set never mentioned the whole “Paul Is Dead” craze. It rates a page in the book, and doesn’t say much. Does anyone know a site that lists all the “clues”? The following clue is a remarkable coincidence.
On Sgt Pepper’s, on the drum, draw an imaginary line through Lonely Hearts. Place a mirror on the line so that it is perpendicular to the album. Look at the 90 degree angle at hearts. It says he^die. Guess who the arrow points to.
Yeah, and if you go to Dallas, TX and draw an imaginary line from the grassy knol to Gus’ House of Chicken, and then place a gigantic prism on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, facing the direction of Graceland, and draw a second imaginary line from the Houston St. 1 and 9 line subway stop in NYC to the studio where the porn star Houston had her famous 600 person gang-bang, (Houston is also a city in Texas, you see. The difference in pronounciation does not apply to profound coincidences.) then take a picture of all the lines from a spy satellite in geosynchronous orbit, and then develop the film with a special developer only available by special order from Kodak, then burn the picture and little bit, extinguish the fire, then turn the picture upside down and take a shit on it, it says…
“Dubya in 2000.”
With the best intentions in the world, I put “Paul is dead clues” into Google–and got 30,000 hits. Thirty thousand.
I’m going to go do something else now. I had to listen to this the first time around and it wasn’t that amusing then. Mr. Hooligan, I give you-- http://www.google.com! Happy hunting!
Just to clarify: the Stg. Pepper’s trick really does work. Friedo can try it if s/he has acsess to the album and a small mirror. It seems pretty obvious (to me at least) that the Beatles deliberately fed the “Paul is Dead” rumors by planting false clues for people to find. People bought millions more albums just to check out the “clues,” so I guess the gimmick worked.
Uh, except as has been discussed a million bloody times, the “Paul is Dead” rumors didn’t first surface until late 1969, when the Beatles had effectively broken up except for the release of Abbey Road, and all those albums had long since been recorded and printed. So, if it seems obvious to you, it’s because you don’t understand the timeline. Unless you want to posit that the band heard the rumors in October-November 1969 then went back in time to plant clues to feed their already spectactular album sales. See The Beatles Anthology, pp. 341-42.
The Beatles were far and away the single most popular recording artists in the world from 1964-1970. They hardly needed to resort to gimmicks to sell albums. Sgt. Pepper was so highly anticipated that several radio stations played it in its entirety many times in a row the day it went on sale; the day after it was out, Jimi Hendrix was covering the title song at a live performance in London. Disabuse yourself of the notion that they needed to pump up their album sales with tricks.
Thanks, all. When Paul was on Saturday Night Live, Chris Farley interviewed him. Chris said, Ah, that Paul Is Dead thing…that was a hoax, right? Paul, said, yah, I’m not really dead.
This here thread covers a lot of the same ground, and it also has a few interesting links.
Plus, it is an excellent opportunity for me to shamelessly remind everyone about my startling discovery that the Four Freshmen are in actuality the minions of Satan.
“The first documented written source for the hoax was in the Drake University (Iowa) Times-Delphic article written by Tim Harper, published on 17 September 1969; second was Barb Ulvilden’s virtual borrowing of Harper’s article in the Northern Star, the newspaper of Northern Illinois University, on 23 September 1969.”
Both far too late for anyone to be planting anything on the “Sgt. Pepper” album cover, obviously. It goes on to discuss the origins of the “clues,” most of which appear to have been made up by Harper, Michigan Daily journalist Fred LaBour, and Detroit disc jockey Russell Gibb. It also notes (bolding mine):
"A British permutation of the rumor existed prior to the American hoax, but in very rudimentary form. Nevertheless, it’s worth examining; it may have provided a basis for the American version of the hoax.
The British version seems to have involved a rumor (untraced as to source) that Paul McCartney died in an auto crash around January 1967 and was replaced by a double. This rumor was a source of distress to the Beatles themselves, who apparently countered the rumor at least once (May 1967) in a press conference. By late fall of 1967 it was a subject of hilarity at a party attended by various Fabs and their entourage; one of the latter, quoted by New York Times journalist J Marks, made light of it one evening.
Unlike the later American permutation, the British rumor seems not to have been built upon clues, but to have involved only the story that Paul had died and had been replaced by someone else. Perhaps the story had its origin in a real accident McCartney suffered on 26 December 1965, while riding a moped around Cheshire near his father’s house outside Liverpool; Paul’s moped skidded and Paul was sent flying, cutting his lip and chipping a tooth."
Thanks again for the fantastic links. It’s pretty mind-boggling. So far, I really like this one page: http://www.getback.org/bpidnew.html
Shows what the Sgt Pepper album looks like with the mirror trick and has some fun with backwards lyrics.
We’ll probably never know, the Beatle’s aren’t fessing up and there are too many odd things that fuel the rumor. Even if you discount the things which can be accounted for by coincidence, like the backwards sounds, there are still some instances where Paul is singled out:
Paul wearing a black carnation in one scene in Magical Mystery Tour. Everyone else is wearing a white carnation.
Paul barefoot on the Abbey Road album
“Here’s another clue for you all / The walrus was Paul”
My WAG - after the accident and the British rumor, it became an in joke with the band to say Paul was dead. The joke got thrown into what the band was doing occasionally. The Beatles were smart enough and mischevious enough to do something like this and have fun with it.
