Paul is Dead

I was intrigued to watch VH-1 last night and see the retrospect they did on Paul McCartney’s supposed death and the Beatles willingness to go along with the hoax by placing clues on the album? I must have been under a rock the day this rumor was spread and I have most Beatles albums but was pretty ignorant to the clues they put out during the piece.

2 questions…Is there any article…either here or elsewhere which comprehensively deals with this subject and all of the clues. What is the full story…Or does anyone have a list of clues they can post. This whole thing blew me away.

…and…how can a normal person play something via tape or record backwards that will not sound like gibberish. Do you have to spin the album at 33 1/3 RPM backwards to get the effect?

Hi, jodydafish–looks like you’re new around here, welcome!

“Paul is Dead” sites actually have their own Yahoo category, being such a popular topic. You can find a list of sites at

http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=Paul+Is+Dead

One of the best can be found http://come.to/thewalrus . He has lots of visual clues, audio clues, debunkings de-debunkings, and links. There is also good material to be found at the Internet Beatles Album at

http://www.getback.org/breflib/pidhist.html .

As far as playing your albums backwards, you have several options. (Most of these sites have done the work for you, so you’re lucky in that respect.) If the only format you have them on is vinyl, you can indeed drop the needle in the correct spot and spin the record backwards. I recommend against doing this, since most consumer turntables aren’t designed for being manually spun in reverse, nor is your needle.

If you have any musician friends who have 4-track cassette recorders, you can record your vinyl onto a cassette, then put it in the four-track flipped over, and hear it backwards on channels 3 and 4.

If you have them on CD, and your computer has a CD drive, there are several downloadable sound recorders that allow you to record snippets of music and invert them so you can hear them backwards. One of the best is CoolEdit, which can be downloaded at http://www.syntrillium.com . (I used it for listening to the backwards portions of “Rain” and “I’m Only Sleeping.”)

Hope this helped!

Also, check out this This FAQ that snopes links to. Lots of good info on how the rumors got started, as well as debunking the various claims.

> If you have them on CD, and your computer has a CD drive, there are several downloadable sound recorders that allow you to record snippets of music and invert them so you can hear them backwards.

The one that comes with Windows will do that, too.

This is cool. I’m too young to be a Beatles fan, but I can see how this rumor might have developed. Looking at the album covers on the come.to/thewalrus website, I’m noticing that Paul McCartney is always looking in a different direction than everyone else, or sitting inside a trunk, or doing some other non-conformist action. I can see how people might see hidden clues in these actions, especially after the rumor started that he had died. And the cover of Stg. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band really does look like a funeral. I’m sure that the Beatles probably went along with the gag to boost album sales. And who’s this Campbell guy? Where does he live, and what does he do today?

First of all, you’re never to young to be a Beatles fan. Secondly, I’m going to repost my position on all this from a similar thread ( http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=32262 )

–John

If you can find it, there’s a book called “Turn Me On, Dead Man” and it is an indepth look at the Paul Is Dead hoax, complete with all the “clues”, articles and aftermath. Well worth a read if you can find it. I got my copy at a cottage country yard sale a couple of years ago.

…And another book called THE WALRUS WAS PAUL. The one drollman cites is a better-written, more thoughtful book, though. Both are available on Amazon, or though your friendly local independent bookseller.

Hate to say it, but you can get just as much info, or more, by cruising all the “Paul is Dead” websites.

This Paul is Dead stuff is fun, but it is an absolute certainty that the Beatles never intentionally contributed to it in any way, and that they never “went along with it”.

The Paul is Dead hoax was created by some DJs in the Midwest in late 1969, after music and album covers were already created. The DJs admit that they were making it up, and were amazed that people believed them. All of this stuff is detailed in the http://www.snopes.com site.

The Beatles despised that kind of weirdo publicity, and had total contempt for the Paul is Dead rumours. The Beatles are one of the best researched phenomenas in modern history. All of their recording sessions still exist on tape, and have been meticulously examined by researchers. No credible researcher has ever found even the slightest bit of evidence that the Beatles planted any clues or had any interest or knowledge of any death hoaxes.

Why exactly would the Beatles plant clues anyway? For increased sales? They were the best selling band in the world anyway. For publicity? They didn’t need it, in fact, they quit touring and took a much lower public profile as a group because they wanted less publicity and more privacy. This Paul is Dead stuff would have taken a great deal of effort, in fact, it would have been their primary activity. "John, do ya think you could write a song were you could say
“I buried Paul at the end?”. All for a totally idiotic stunt that would have destroyed their credibility and reputation if it was ever exposed, and why would they have a hoax if not to be exposed?

Besides, all of the clues are really pretty silly and fall apart under any scrutiny.

Never underestimate the imaginative power of a Baby-Boom-sized group of college sophomores with lots of time on their hands and plenty of inexpensive Mexican marijuana.

The alleged Abbey Road cover symbology strikes me as the funniest, since it’s pretty clear to me this was a “We don’t have an album cover yet–fuck it, we’ll walk across the street and you snap a photo” kind of event.

Well, I can’t just let this thread continue without citing the thread I started on the very same topic. So here it is:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=31370