“I can kill you with my brain.” - River Tam, Firefly

By Brian Thompson
I. The Setup

By 1966, the Beatles had hit their creative peak with the recording of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the little-known album upon which the mega blockbuster Peter Frampton film was based. But try as they might to arrange all those paper cutouts just so and find the most ridiculous marching band outfits imaginable to dance around in, production wasn’t going smoothly. John Lennon, who was bigger than Jesus, just couldn’t seem to understand that his comically long mustache got in the way of his guitar playing, and Yoko Ono couldn’t understand that the arrhythmic string-beating that ensued wasn’t really music. A sock full of mushrooms mysteriously emerged from Ringo Starr’s, and when George Harrison ate them, he became momentarily invisible.

Paul just couldn’t take the pressure of living up to the Beach Boys’ magnum opus, Pet Sounds, so he decided to clear his mental cobwebs by taking to the bed for a few years. On Wednesday, November 9^th, McCartney walked out of a recording session in the middle of recording John and Yoko’s seven-minute Warble in E Minor and sped away in his Austin-Healey. These were the last moments of his life. His eyes cloudy with smoke and stray facial hairs, Paul McCartney crashed his car into a light pole and died.

Or not.

II. The Findings

Like any piece of actual news, the story of Paul McCartney’s secret death first reached public attention through a semi-anonymous phone call to a Detroit radio station. Just like that time a guy named Steve phoned into the P.J. and the Zipper morning drive time show on Dallas’ KFRT to tell us all about J.F.K.’s assassination, the world sat up and took notice on October 12^th, 1969, when someone named Tom called WKNR’s Russ Gibb and told him Paul hadn’t just been killed, but that he’d also been replaced with the winner of a Paul McCartney look alike contest. Tom asked Gibb to play a cut from the Beatles’ Revolution 9 backward, revealing the phrase “Turn me on, dead man.”

Case closed.

Except that the case isn’t closed at all. Let’s assume for a second that we might learn of the death of the most famous musician in the world through an anonymous phone call three years after it happened. The whole backwards record thing doesn’t hold water. Play any recording backward, and you’re likely to hear all kinds of weird warbles. They don’t make any objective sense, but your brain has a hard time handling that. Because of the phenomenon known as pareidolia (discussed previously in this column), we humans naturally try to make sense out of chaos. We see monsters in the shadowy corners of our bedrooms, and sometimes we see Jesus in a ham sandwich. People who don’t have sex and are scared of rock music find Satanic messages hidden in records played backward. While it’s true that some bands have included these messages on purpose (my bestselling hip-hop album AmatUR Sciencin’ Up in Dem Lumps features a backward version of my famous cheese grits recipe), there’s no reason to think the Beatles would try and coyly hint at the death of the cute one if they’re otherwise trying to keep it a secret. And have you noticed how all these backward messages are so weirdly poetic? Supposedly, playing Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven backward reveals Robert Plant singing “Here’s to my sweet Satan.” Why say that instead of something more straightforward like “Worshiping Satan is fun. Care to try it?” And why say “Turn me on, dead man” instead of “Remember Paul McCartney? He’s dead now. No, seriously. I heard it on Detroit radio.”?

Paul’s death is also supposedly hinted at in several Beatles album covers, most famously the crosswalk photo from Abbey Road. In it, Paul is walking out of step with the rest of the Beatles, and he’s barefoot. Just like dead people! And a license plate in the background reads “LMW 281F”. Don’t see it? Look closely, you fool! “LMW” equals “Linda McCartney Weeps”. (Hold on. Maybe she’s dead too! Oh, wait…) And “281F”? How about “Paul would be 28 years old… ‘IF’ he’d lived!” Of course, “LMW” could stand for “lightning means warning”, an important safety tip. And “281F” could indicate all of Paul McCartney’s sexual conquests. 281 (female).

Believers also claim you can piece together the story of Paul’s demise from various Beatles lyrics. “He didn’t notice that the light had changed” and a car crash sound from A Day in the Life. He was pronounced dead on a “Wednesday morning at five o’clock”, from She’s Leaving Home. From Lady Madonna: “Wednesday morning papers didn’t come” because the death was covered up. At the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, it sounds vaguely like John is saying “I buried Paul” in a slow, deep voice. Lennon himself claimed he was only saying “cranberry sauce”, but of course he was a notorious liar. Earlier in the same song, he said “Living is easy with eyes closed”. Not for Paul, it isn’t!

III. The Conclusion

With the rise of the Internet, the “Paul is Dead” myth has taken on a new life. I’m no statistician, but it seems that at least 78% of the online public in the mid ‘90s built Geocities pages about everything from Bill Clinton’s heritage as a shape-shifting lizard alien to Josh Hartnett’s acting talent (fun fact: it doesn’t exist). The Paul is Deadites were no different, offering up page after animated .GIF-loading page of comparison pictures between pre-1966 Paul and the supposed look alike.

Here’s the thing, though. Even if Paul died and was replaced by a double, does it really matter? After all, they look enough alike to fool most of the world’s population, and that signature pop sensibility never left those tunes a litter heavier on the McCartney side of Lennon/McCartney. In fact, the double, who some say is actually William Shears, the mysterious band leader from Sgt. Pepper, would have been responsible for some of Paul’s greatest work. Hey Jude and Let it Be were both recorded after the supposed crash.

Of course, Paul’s death and replacement could also go a long way toward explaining the existence of Wings.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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