By Delaney Parks
While most of my middle school friends were going through emo phases, I had a hippie phase. Amid the chipped black nail polish, Panic! At the Disco and My Chemical Romance t-shirts, and generalized angst, I (insufferably) channeled my inner Janis Joplin in long skirts, earrings I beaded by hand, and the fervent belief that I, an old soul, had been born in the wrong decade.
Although I aged out of this particular individuality complex, that era of my life left some lasting impacts. Chief among them: a fascination with every aspect of The Beatles. I’d loved their music ever since my parents would play “Yellow Submarine” and “Octopus’s Garden” for me in the bathtub as a toddler. Later, I became obsessed with lyrical analysis—finding the connotations, context and allusions hidden in each word. This fixation on reading into everything has tied different eras of my life together—from engaging with Beatlemania-like fan culture on Tumblr to writing papers about how Matty Healy is just like John Lennon and Dracula was definitely gay.
Looking back, it was also distinctly American, as well as an early indicator of the English major I decided to pursue, which led me to the Penn English in London program this fall.
Floating among vast seas of Beatles history and media lies one fan culture phenomenon that always held my attention. What if, instead of slinging artistic insults back and forth with John Lennon, penning masterpieces like “Hey Jude,” “Let it Be,” and “Maybe I’m Amazed,” and becoming an animal rights advocate, a humanitarian, and a decades-long fixture of British culture, Paul McCartney actually died over 50 years ago?
Stranger-sounding Beatles things have certainly happened. After all, the band recently came together, half-posthumously, to release what was dubbed “the final Beatles song”—“Now and Then.” After John Lennon’s all-too-real death in 1980, he left behind an incomplete demo that the remaining three picked up and put down every once in a while over the years.
At last (with the now-deceased George Harrison’s guitar tracks from a ‘90s recording session for the song) Paul and Ringo released the track with Lennon’s original vocals, and contributions from all four members, living and dead. It’s brilliant but eerie to listen to, especially given the way Lennon’s and McCartney’s voices—separated by decades—harmonize to lyrics about missing someone, and wanting them there in the present and past.
The theory goes like this: on November 9, 1966, before The Beatles had even released the psychedelic boundary-crossing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul “blew his mind out in a car” (to quote that album’s final track, “A Day in the Life”) and was replaced by an impersonator. A “Faul,” if you will. To cope with this tragedy and channel all the grief they were feeling, the remaining three Beatles joined together with this doppelganger, grew matching mustaches, and began to pepper hints into their songs that Paul is dead.
Clues, if you know where to look, can be found everywhere. There are backwards lyrics like “turn me on, dead man” in “Revolution 9,” lyrics that mention “Wednesday morning at 5 o’ clock” (the alleged time of death), and suspicious album covers. On Abbey Road, some have theorized that the barefoot Paul is walking out of step with the others, who are dressed in accordance with various funerary roles (priest, undertaker, gravedigger).
If I’m losing you, rest assured I am not approaching this article with the intention of convincing you to believe in this theory. McCartney is, to all appearances, very much alive. As a journalist dedicated to fact-checking, it’s my duty to report that there are no records of this supposedly fatal car accident (although he emerged from a couple of minor and documented crashes with minor injuries) or of the lookalike contest that allegedly connected the surviving Beatles with the McCartney copy. But what would be the fun of ending this piece on that note?
The most compelling angles of the “Paul is Dead” theory aren’t takes on whether it’s true. Instead, it’s the staying-power of the theory, the way people have gripped onto it—and used it as a coping mechanism as they broke apart.
On an unseasonably sunny October Friday, I booked train tickets from my study-abroad home base of London to the city where the band began, Liverpool. In the process, I hoped to satisfy my 13-year-old self who daydreamed on her morning bus rides of visiting everything from the real-life Strawberry Fields to the Cavern Club where The Beatles first played.
I started at the lovely and quaint A Small Fish In A Big Pond cafe, where my barista’s tendency to call every customer “my love” soothed my solo travel nerves. After wandering the docks while listening to Sgt. Pepper’s for a bit, it was time for The Beatles Story museum visit—the first place I planned to dig for Paul is Dead clues and encounter fellow superfans.
While the solitary nature of the headphone-clad audio tour made it harder than expected to approach strangers, I ultimately struck up a conversation with one of the staff members, John. He’s got a strong Liverpudlian (or rather, “scouse”) accent, and he’s multitasking with ease—organizing the tangled lanyards attached to the audio headsets visitors have used for the tour.
When I inquire about whether he encounters museum attendants talking about the Paul is Dead theory, he laughs and admits it has definitely been a topic of discussion. Then he narrows his eyes at me a bit: “You don’t believe that stuff, do you? The thing is, it would mean everyone’s in on it! He’s been with his brother…it would mean even his family knows, and that’d be mad.”
I reassure him that this is a research mission and not one driven by a desire to prove the theory.
“Well that’s it, it’s the Americans!” John responds. “You know, people in the U.K. didn’t hear about that conspiracy until the ‘80s.”
I’m disappointed I didn’t think of this point myself. Beatlemania was, of course, a U.S.-driven phenomenon that began the second they touched American soil and played the Ed Sullivan Show.
In fact, both sources that ignited the original mass hysteria surrounding the Paul is Dead theory in 1969—a piece from Drake University’s student newspaper titled ‘Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?’ and an Eastern Michigan University student calling into Detroit radio station WKNR-FM about the theory—were from the U.S.
The main way the theory circulated in its early days was through student radio and media, which Dr. Peter Doggett—a scholar and music journalist whose book You Never Give Me Your Money details the Beatles breakup—informed me (when I sat down with him at a Waterstones about a week later) were barely existent in the U.K. at the time. Doggett compares the excitement and the “madness” that caused the rumors to circulate to social media today. It was “the underground feeling of it all, the counterculture,” that catalyzed the spread of the theory, according to Doggett.
Doggett also had further insight into why the theory was so uniquely primed to take off in America—he points to the historical context of the moment. After John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the sociopolitical turmoil of the Vietnam War, Americans didn’t trust official narratives, and found it easier to believe that mysterious forces might be conspiring than to accept that something truly horrific had happened for no hidden reason.
According to him, the Paul McCartney theory is “negative wish fulfillment” with the aim of taking abstract paranoia and attaching it to a solid theory, for which you could dig for clues endlessly. “What was the worst thing that youth culture could imagine at that point? It would be that one of The Beatles died,” he says.
For an American academic perspective, I turn to Utica University president and Paul is Dead expert Todd Pfannestiel, who has given several lectures on the topic. Pfannenstiel, who first encountered the theory when he was growing up in the 1980s, has always viewed it as a brilliant marketing maneuver on the band’s part, one that they played into for the sake of record sales and maintaining buzz. At the same time, he acknowledges that there are still fringe believers with the firm conviction that Paul is actually dead—some of whom he’s met at lectures he has given about the theory, which is always a bit awkward.
“People would rush back to the record stores and buy all these old albums up, thinking, ‘What else? What else is there? And their record sales that had started to kind of level off, all of sudden skyrocketed because everybody said, ‘Wow! I wanna go buy the records again and see what I could find!” said Pfannestiel.
To back up a bit, I ask him to clarify—he thinks that The Beatles engineered the theory and hid clues back when Paul supposedly died in 1966, three years before it became mainstream?
He confirms that this is his belief, pointing in particular to one backwards part of a White Album song, “I’m So Tired.” If you rewind, it sounds like “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him.” I listen later online and can confirm that’s certainly what it sounds like. As Pfannestiel says, “How much of that can really be an accident? Especially given how much they were messing around with backwards recording and stuff.”
He adds that it also operated as a coping mechanism for the Beatles themselves. During the darker days leading to the breakup of the band, the concept of their unity was dying as well.
“This joke, this hoax, this commercial marketing effort, became symbolic, for the idea of, well, we really are dead. The Beatles are dead,” said Pfannestiel.
He points to John Lennon’s bitter solo diss track, “How Do You Sleep?” as an example. The lyrics go “Those freaks were right when they said you was dead” and continue with pointed jabs against his songs and what John deems to be “muzak.” Before John himself was killed, the songwriting duo were perhaps, at least for a time, dead to each other.
“It is an intentional hoax,” he says. “And if you accept that, then it becomes really fun to be on the inside.”
Meanwhile in Liverpool, I have a night of Fab Four-themed pub-hopping ahead of me.
I set off to the historic nightlife hotspot of Mathew Street to see if I could feel the presence of a young Paul McCartney—or really, any of the Beatles—in their old stomping grounds. Even at 7 p.m. or so, the block was buzzing with energy. Based on the pleasant blend of scouse voices I heard while wandering around, locals didn’t consider themselves too cool to spend their Friday nights at venues called SGT Pepper’s or Rubber Soul.
For people-watching and spirit-summoning purposes, I step into The Grapes, a pub that The Beatles used to frequent for a quick drink before their shows. It was definitely an older crowd, but an endearing one. A boyish friend group composed of 30-or-40-something men in button-downs form a circle with their arms around each other, shouting the lyrics to “Hey Jude.”
In a corner, I meet a group of architects, and strike up a conversation with Pip, the youngest and the life of the party. She shouts one theory regarding ‘Paul is Dead’ in my ear that I was not anticipating. “There’s a third,” Pip says, laughing. “And I will die on that hill.” Her rationale? There was one original Paul, one replacement Paul after the car accident, and a final one. Any version of Paul who was in the Beatles, she insists, would not be caught dead eating vegan sausage rolls. She clarifies: “I just love obvious lies that I pretend are true.”
I wander a few doors down to the iconic Cavern Club reconstruction. The old bricks join with new bricks to form the hall’s arched walls, and though it’s dimly lit, I can see layers upon layers of fans who have left their mark in the form of signatures and light graffiti. Taken together with the memorabilia on glass cases on the wall, and the euphoria in the crowd, as the not-quite-a-tribute band plays the first chords of “I Saw Her Standing There,” the memory of the band’s harmony haunts the space—a very wholesome haunting, to be clear.
Swaying along to the beat and clutching my half-pint of cider, I catch the glimmering eye of a white-haired woman who looks around 70. I can’t quite place her far-off expression, so I ask if she’s alright. “Yes yes,” she says. “I was just missing it, a bit.” I take “it” to mean youth itself.
Every inspirational poster I’ve seen up to this point, preaching that we must treasure each moment, has nowhere near the immediate impact of this comment from Linda (“Like McCartney!” I say when she introduces herself). As I suspected, she’s selling herself short—we start dancing together and she’s got more youthful vibrance, and higher quality dance moves, than I have. The club can’t keep up with her—she complains after a couple of slower tunes that she needs something more animated, and when “Come Together” comes on, we finally hit our stride.
Hours later, I’m lying in my hostel bed, I can’t stop thinking about the encounter—she was like a movie character in a crucial scene, reminding me when I most needed it to live my life to the fullest. Paul might not be dead, but existence in general is fleeting—when I reach Linda’s age, I can only hope to have that much zeal for life.
The next day, I found myself at Liverpool Cycle Tours—what I had determined to be the best way to hit all the essential Beatles spots. The clubs and pubs were near the city center, but most of the sites of hallowed Beatles history: Paul, John, and Ringo’s childhood homes, the church stage of the first Lennon-McCartney meeting, and the lyric inspirations for “Eleanor Rigby,” “Penny Lane,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” were a bit out of the way.
I arrive at the meeting point to discover that I’m the only person who’s booked this particular early morning slot, so I’ll have essentially a private tour. My guide, Alex O’Connor, has bright blue eyes and channels the wry scouse charisma of a young Paul McCartney, which must serve him well not only in his line of work but also in his forays into singer-songwriter-dom—he mentions that he recently performed at an open mic night at The Cavern Club.
As we set out on our electric bikes, we start swapping stories about, of all things, boating: I recount the tale of how I lost and recovered my phone and wallet while punting in Oxford, he tells me about his decision about a year ago to buy a boat and live on it. It becomes abundantly clear that this was my best option for seeing everything—from Paul’s childhood home to the art school John dropped out of, to the tombstone inscriptions of Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie.
According to Alex, Paul has never forgotten where he came from, paying public visits back to his childhood home, and always investing back into Liverpool through schools and other charity ventures. If he was replaced by a lookalike, then, it must have been a lookalike with the same fervent hometown pride—something Alex alleges even Ringo lacks, leading some scousers to harbor a tongue-in-cheek grudge against the drummer.
At the Paul-centric stops—his childhood house, Penny Lane, and the Eleanor Rigby gravestone, I try to imagine him around my age, strumming a guitar or smoking a cigarette. There’s a subtle atmosphere of timelessness and as Alex’s accent blends into the cobblestones and blue skies that surround me, the moment feels like it must be almost the same as countless other moments Paul experienced here 60 years ago.
It’s a curious thing, nostalgia for the past life of another person. I never lived Paul McCartney’s adolescence, but he can’t go back and be that person any more than I can. Perhaps it’s an obvious truth, but even if we haven’t died in car crashes and been replaced by impersonators, none of us are really the same people we were when we were young.
As we cycle back along the River Mersey, which is glittering in the unusual sunlight, I reveal my interest in the theory to Alex, who looks at me as though he’s not sure if I’ve lost my mind. After clarifying (as I keep seeming to) that it’s all just a research mission, he mentions that Phil Ware, his boss, is the one I really have to interview.
Phil starts out by pointing out that all the coincidences—finding someone with Paul’s facial features, height, voice, and ability to play the bass left-handed—make the theory “utterly impossible.”
But he says that the band members “loved playing with people’s perceptions of what The Beatles were,” especially as they made the shift to recording artists. Messing around with experimental recording methods contributed to their genius production, but it also fueled fans to dig around deeper and try to uncover the secrets that must be hidden in the albums.
To continue my investigation, Phil and Alex suggest that we pay a quick visit to HOBO Kiosk, a quirky spot where we might find people who’d buy into conspiracy. When we arrive, Delia, one of the bar’s founders, assures me she has a friend in Texas who is a Beatles expert and can certify without a doubt that it’s not true. She speaks with so much gravity and authority that I feel like a fool for even asking, but she kindly shows me around the bar anyway. Sadly, I don’t meet any Paul is Dead truthers, but I do fall in love with the eclectic decor—vaguely haunted baby dolls, disco balls, board games, and a poster advertising a secret society which seems to miss the point a little.
If there’s one thing that I gather from my conversations with the Liverpool locals, it’s that they have a certain type of person in mind when it comes to believers in this theory. It’s someone who, yes, is probably American and more susceptible to nonsense, but also someone who feels the need to have a personal connection with the most famous band in the world.
I pick back up on this point in my conversation with Doggett, who cements my conviction that this is true. He describes the urge of fans who feel compelled to know everything about the subjects of their fixations—things that bring them closer to almost becoming that subject. Conspiracy theories, he says, can develop an imagined bond based on shared secrets.
“If you can master that subject, and control it almost, you can build roots around that as a sort of cultural identity around that,” Doggett says.
It’s important to note that Paul did end up publically dispelling the rumors at the time, releasing first a statement that said, “If I were dead, I would be the last to know,” and later a cover story for, ironically, Life Magazine. Reporter Dorothy Bacon tracked McCartney and his wife, Linda, down at a farm in Scotland, where he confirmed wearily that he was alive and well.
“Can you spread it around that I am just an ordinary person and want to live in peace?” McCartney asked in the piece.
It makes sense that perhaps the momentum behind Paul is Dead says more about the conspirators than the subject himself. The final form of the Paul is Dead conspiracy theory does involve positioning yourself within the saga, envisioning that you alone hold the keys to the truth about your favorite singer.
There’s nothing wrong with adoring a musician, or with immersing yourself in fan culture—I have fond memories of the make believe scenarios I envisioned of meeting The Beatles and hanging out with them in 1960s New York City back during my hippie phase. I’d even go as far as to say that my obsession informed who I am today, and the way I consume music with a detective’s ears always eager to learn the stories behind the lyrics.
I propose that the line between unhealthy fixation and obsession when it comes to Paul is Dead is the role the theory fulfills in a fan’s life.
It’s the same when you consider any other relationship that fans can have to “stan culture”—whether we’re talking about Pink Floyd listeners from the ‘70s discovering the band’s tongue-in-cheek hidden message response to moral panic, or modern-day Marvel fans waiting to decode the end-of-credits scene.
Do you view it as an intellectual puzzle, a potential tactic to be admired and studied, a fun game that gives you greater insight into the art you love? Or does it take hold of you completely, not relenting until every Twitter take on the topic is burned into your brain, or your beloved records are scratched and broken from playing them backwards too many times?
The question isn’t “Is Paul Dead?” It might just be, “How are we living?”
The Woodlands 