Today is an important day in rock history.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the death of one of the biggest icons popular music has ever known: Paul McCartney.
What's that you say? He's not dead? He got screwed by Michael Jackson (RIP) for the rights to his own songs but is still Britain's richest man? He divorced that unpleasant one-legged woman a couple of years ago? How could he POSSIBLY be dead?
Well... according to several books and sites, the man that we all know as Paul McCartney, that most of us grew up knowing as Paul McCartney, is an impostor.
Why?
Well, simply because the Beatles were the biggest band in the world at the time. And Paul was the "cute Beatle," the Templeton "Faceman" Peck of the group, if you will. And news of his death would have shattered the hearts of teenage girls (and some guys, to be sure) all over the world. When Rudolph Valentino died, some women committed suicide, they were so saddened by the news. The Beatles' management team saw fit to cover it up, although I think it was more in order to keep their gravy train a-rollin' than mass suicide prevention.
Anyhow, the story goes: Late in the evening on November 8, 1966, the Beatles were at a recording session for the album that would eventually become Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Paul got into a fight with the others and stormed out of the studio. He hopped into his car and drove off into the night. Later that night, he became distracted while driving, and - here's where the details get hazy - he either was so caught up in looking at a pretty girl on the sidewalk that he had to swerve out of the way of traffic, crashed his car into a light pole and died later at the hospital,
OR...
he was driving very fast on a dark road and crashed into a truck and lost the top of his head. The details are hazy here, because, well... not too many people were actually there. Hence, the reason that they could get away with such a huge lie. In either case, the time of McCartney's death was somewhere around 5:00 AM on Wednesday, November 9, 1966; curiously enough, the day that John Lennon reportedly met Yoko Ono.
Rather than announce to the world that Paul was dead, the Beatles' management team decided to hire a young man who recently won a Paul look-a-like contest, name of William Shears Campbell (better known to fans of Sgt. Pepper as "the one and only Billy Shears") to impersonate Paul full-time after a few bouts of plastic surgery to smooth out the rough edges (this explains their long absence from touring between 1966 and 1967). This story is arguably the inspiration for the film Dave, starring Kevin Kline in which he impersonates the President for reasons of national security.
However, the remaining Beatles, grieving over the loss of their friend and bandmate (particularly after such an angry and abrupt parting of ways) decided that the fans deserve to know the truth. But they were contractually bound from saying anything. What could they do?
The answer came to them: stick clues in the songs and artwork that, when analyzed correctly, pointed to the single greatest cover-up in rock history!
For almost 3 years, the lie was kept under wraps. Sgt. Pepper was released and it was received very well, marking a new era in the Beatles' careers and, some said, rock music in general.
However, on October 12, 1969, the lie was blown wide open when someone known as "Tom" called in to WKNR-FM in Dearborn, MI, to tell the world that Paul was, in fact, dead. There was no going back. Damage control swept in amidst the few publications and radio shows that gave credence to this seemingly preposterous theory and effectively dismissed them as drug-induced nonsense.
Shortly after that, the Beatles broke up. The jig was up. The word was out. Most people didn't believe it but that hardly mattered. It was no longer airtight. Sooner or later, the people would discover the truth.
Anyhow, 43 years later, the myth is all but dispelled, but nevertheless it still endures. Someday, perhaps, someone will uncover the entire mystery, completely rip the lid off of it, so that "Paul McCartney," as this charlatan calls himself, will be forced to come clean and admit the truth.
Until then, all we can do is remember.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_is_dead
http://www.paulisdead.co.uk
*In an unrelated story, Bob Dylan worships the devil:
