Cover art by Neal Adams
It all started on October 12, 1969, when Detroit DJ Russ Gibb took a phone call from an anonymous listener and was told to play backwards the opening “number nine” sequence from the “Revolution 9” track on the Beatles’ White Album. Gibbs did as instructed and heard the words, “Turn me on, dead man.” A closer listen to the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” meanwhile, revealed the voice of John Lennon declaring, “I buried Paul.”
Two days later, the Michigan Daily reported that the album cover of Abbey Road, featuring the Fab Four walking across the famed street near the recording studio of the same name, depicted a funeral procession. John Lennon was in the lead, dressed in white as a preacher, followed by undertaker Ringo Star, while a gravedigger in the form of George Harrison brought up the rear. The left-handed Paul McCartney was third, barefoot and out-of-step with others while holding a cigarette in his right hand.
Taken together, these odd assortments of anomalies could only mean one thing – Paul McCartney, bass player for the Beatles, was dead and the group was both covering up the fact and dropping clues in their songs as a way of revealing the truth.
Rumors of McCartney’s demise had been circulating in England for at least two years but no one took them seriously until Detroit. Afterwards, the “Paul is Dead” myth spread like wildfire, with even more clues popping up and pieced together. “Paul died on November 9, 1966,” Rolling Stone magazine explained fifty years later. “He drove away from Abbey Road late the night before – a ‘stupid bloody Tuesday’ – then blew his mind out in a car. He was Officially Pronounced Dead (‘O.P.D.’) on Wednesday morning at 5 o’clock, which is why George points to that line on the Sgt. Pepper sleeve, while Paul wears an ‘O.P.D.’ patch. But the other Beatles decided to hush up the news, so Wednesday-morning papers didn’t come. Somehow, they kept Paul’s death a secret, replaced him with a look-alike, then dropped sly hints about the cover-up scam.”
Four months after Detroit DJ Russ Gibb received his anonymous tip, none other than the world’s greatest detective – Batman – decided to solve the mystery of whether Paul McCartney was dead or alive. Not the real McCartney, of course, but Saul Cartwright of the equally famous – as well as fictitious – band the Twists.
The cover of Batman #222 features the Cape Crusader and his sidekick Robin watching as the four members of the Twists walk by single file, much like the cover of Abbey Road but with John Lennon stand-in Glennan being shoeless. Robin is holding an album cover for Dead Till Proven Alive, which features all four band members but with only three of them facing forward. On the back cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles posed in a similar fashion, with McCartney turned backwards, yet another clue to his demise.
Like with Paul McCartney, there were other clues regarding the “Saul is Dead” rumor. “Yay, keeds, this is Ho-Ho-Ho, your jolly greed deejay at XJL, with the newest poop on ye great ‘Oliver Twists’ mystery,” a radio broadcast proclaims. “Dig the seventh groove on our boy’s Summer Knights! Spin at 78 R.P.M. instead of 33, take it off on tape, and playback at 1-7/8 I.P.S.” The result is Twists singer Glennan proclaiming, “Sure was a ball, Saul. Too bad it’s over.”
The clues unearthed by rabid fans regarding the “Paul is Dead” mystery were even more numerous, as were the theories, which ranged from the CIA murdering Paul McCartney to an actor named William Campbell having plastic surgery and replacing him as a Beatle. The short burst of gibberish between “I’m So Tired” and “Blackbird” on the White Album, meanwhile, turns into “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him” when played backwards.
The song “I Am the Walrus” likewise contained a plethora of clues, from “walrus” meaning “corpse” in Greek, the “goo goo goo joob” refrain duplicating Humpty Dumpty’s last words before he fell off the wall in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, to the inclusion of the line “O, untimely death!” from a BBC performance of William Shakespeare’s King Lear. With the exception of the Shakespeare reference, all of the other “clues” turned out to be false – the Greek word for “corpse” is “nekros,” for instance, and Humpty Dumpty never said “goo goo goo job.”
In the DC Universe, Batman and Robin are determined to solve the riddle of Saul Cartwright’s supposed “death.” When the band visits Gotham City for their first public appearance in over a year, Robin remarks that Cartwright looks genuine enough, but much like with “Paul is Dead,” Batman replies, “Plastic surgery and voice training can do wonders.” In order to get closer to the Twists, Batman alter-ego Bruce Wayne invites them to stay at Wayne Manor, and Cartwright quickly cuts to the chase once they arrive.
“This “death-role’ my nutty fans have dreamed up is getting to me,” he says. “And while you seem the regular sort, you might have doubts, too. So let’s clear the record, right now. When my three partners took off for the Himalayas a year ago, to do their thing, it wasn’t to go into mourning over my ‘death’ in a ‘cycle accident’ in London. Did they expect me to make solo appearances while the backbone of our group was away? I just dropped out of sight to dream up new arrangements and stuff, till they returned.”
In the real world, Paul McCartney was likewise laying low with his wife Linda and their six-week-old daughter at his Scotland farm, secluded from his fellow Beatles while secretly recording his first solo album. The remote location prevented McCartney from responding to the “Paul is Dead” rumor for ten days, but he finally consented to a photo of himself standing on his doorstep after a news reporter tracked him down.
“I’m alive and well and concerned about the rumors of my death,” he was quoted as saying. “But if I were dead, I’d be the last to know.”
Batman eventually solves the mystery of “Saul is Dead,” concluding that Saul Cartwright is indeed still alive. His fellow members of the Twists, however, are an entirely different matter. “These lads are the frauds, the put-ons,” Cartwright admits. “Because Glennan, Benji, Hal, my good old buddies – they’re dead! Killed last year in a crash of a private jet that was taking them to groove with the mysteries of the East. They’re lying buried somewhere in the trackless snows of the Himalayas. I thought I could keep them ‘alive’ to their devoted fans the world over by recruiting three unknown look-alikes to stand-in for them. But the big trick was to prevent any wild rumors of their death springing up and upsetting the apple cart. So I dreamed up my ‘death’ as a decoy to focus all the curiosity on me.”
While Batman was able to extinguish the “Saul is Dead” controversy, “Paul is Dead” was more difficult to deflate. Even McCartney’s reappearance in Scotland failed to squash the rumor, and a multitude of fans continued to believe he was dead afterwards. Still, there was an upside to the affair. When Bruce Wayne first read about the “Saul is Dead” rumor, he commented to himself, “As a major stockholder in Eden Records, this publicity has been boom for business.”
The same held true for the Beatles and “Paul is Dead” – record sales in the United States during October 1969 were their highest since February 1964, while the newly released Abby Road outsold the infamous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by over a million copies. All in all, not bad for a dead guy.
Anthony Letizia