Did Paul McCartney Really Pass Away?
A few crazy possibilities never appear to want to fade away. This is the case with the celebrated Paul McCartney’s death rumor that started at the time when the Beatles were recording the “Sgt. Pepper’s” record album.
The rumor appears to have originated when in 1969 a listener to a Detroit radio station telephoned into the station, claiming to be someone called Tom, and told the disk jockey, Russ Gibb, that some of the Beatles records incorporated clues that were evidence to the fact that Paul had died in a car accident, supposedly mutilating the singer/bassist so badly that dental records had to be used to identify the body. Additional theories said that he was actually beheaded, so it depends on whom you believe.
Here’s where it gets really neat. According to the myth, after McCartney’s death, the band held a contest to find a Paul McCartney double to replace the singer so that fans wouldn’t know that he had died and the band could carry on without missing a beat.
The winner of this contest was alleged to have been a guy named William Campbell, an actor who looked sufficiently like Paul McCartney that the band would be able to get away with the whole charade.
As luck would have it for the remaining members of the band, Campbell happened to be an orphan from Edinburgh so he would never be missed, and actually had the similar voice and played bass surprisingly just like Paul.
According to many, there were numerous hints to Paul’s death found on various albums and album covers to prove this possibility. A few worth mentioning just for kicks were on the Abbey Road cover.
This is the famous cover (probably made much more famous from this radical theory actually) where the four Beatles members are walking across the street in the sidewalk on Abbey Road itself.
One of the trigger giveaways was the fact that they were lined up in a row, which appeared to comprise a funeral procession. Another hint was the clothing that the four members wore in the picture.
Lennon was leading in all white, which represented the church, and in the back was George Harrison who wore what looked to be work clothes, representing the gravedigger of the bunch.
Paul McCartney surprisingly enough was in the photograph – how he pulled that off nobody knows – but his big giveaways were that he was barefoot suggesting that like other cultures he would be buried barefoot, as well as the fact that he was holding a cigarette in his right hand when everyone knew that the real Paul McCartney was left handed.
Many other clues were found, of course, within song lyrics and in other places on album covers. The public debate really grew to be pretty huge, and finally the band, and McCartney himself had to do an interview himself to disband the rumors.
Some suspect that the band was probably subsequently feeding into the absurdness of it all adding tidbits of their own clues here and there, but no member has yet to ever admit to doing so.
