Paul McCartney: “There was some truth in the rumors about Paul’s death”

Paul McCartney in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian he spoke, among other things, about that theory which had circulated at the end of the Sixties, when the Beatles they were breaking up, over the fact that Paul was dead. Macca explained how the conspiracy theory took hold in the autumn of 1969, fueled by an American DJ capturing the imagination of millions of fans around the world.

This is McCartney’s thoughts on the matter: “The strange rumor that I was dead began to circulate just as the Beatles were breaking up. We had heard it long before, but suddenly, in that autumn of 1969, fueled by an American DJ, it took on a force of its own. Millions of fans around the world believed that I was really dead.”

Now, fifty years later, the former Beatle, with the benefit of hindsight, contextualizes those rumors and interprets them in a different way: “Now that more than half a century has passed since those truly crazy times, I’m starting to think that the rumors were more well-founded than one might have thought at the time. In many ways, I was dead. I was a twenty-seven-year-old on the verge of becoming an ex-Beatle, drowned in a sea of legal and personal arguments that were draining my energy. I needed to a whole new life. I wondered, would I ever get through what had been a great decade? Would I get through the crises that seemed to explode every day?”

But how did people come to believe that McCartney was dead? At one point it was argued that Paul McCartney had died in a car accident on November 9, 1966 and had been secretly replaced by a lookalike named William Campbell. The alleged purpose was to spare fans the pain of the tragedy and keep the band together. Supporters of this theory pointed to alleged clues hidden in his songs and album covers Beatleslike the lyrics of “A Day in the Life” and the cryptic images on the album cover “Sgt. Pepper’s” (read the review here).

The theory attracted attention between September and October 1969. A student at the University of Michigan published an article detailing the conspiracy and the alleged clues. The Columbia Journalism Review notes that radio DJs, as
Russ Gibb
of WKNR-FM in Detroit, played a significant role in popularizing the theory. They discussed it live and encouraged listeners to look for clues in the music of
Beatles
. This media amplification transformed what could have remained a curious rumor into a phenomenon.

Paul McCartney
reacted quickly to the rumors, which died down after Life magazine published an interview in November 1969 in which Paul confirmed that he was alive and well. Years later, in 1993, he would parodied the story of
‘Paul is dead’
releasing a live album titled
“Paul is live”
.