Turn me on, dead man

On The Beatles' eponymous 1968 album (the one commonly called "The White Album") there is a track called "Revolution 9." It's not a song by any traditional description; perhaps "sound collage" comes closest to accurately describing it. At various points throughout, you hear British man repeatedly saying, "Number nine." If you play the "number nine" piece backwards, you might think it sounds like, "Turn me on, dead man." It's been kind of hard to play a sound recording backwards at regular speed since vinyl records went away, but I used to have this album on vinyl, and I did listen to that piece of "Revolution 9" backwards. I have to admit that it did sound like, "Turn me on, dead man," to me. The thing is, the reason I tried it was because I was told it would sound like that, so I was listening for it. No small detail, that, if you ask me.

So what's this all about? Why are people finding... or even looking for... such unusual statements backwards on a Beatles album? In late 1969, coinciding with the release of their Abbey Road album, a rumor started circulating that Paul McCartney had died, and that the other Beatles and their management had decided to keep it secret and replace him with the winner of Paul McCartney lookalike contest (a Mr. William Campbell of Canada, so the story went). Part of the legend was that the boys had decided to put some clues as to what had happened into the artwork, and within the lyrics of the songs, on their subsequent albums. "Turn me on, dead man," was alleged to be one such clue.

I don't imagine that there is anyone who believes this story these days. What amazes me is that anyone ever did. The most common version of the story was that Paul died in a car wreck. "He blew his mind out in a car," as John Lennon sang in "A Day in the Life." (John actually wrote that about Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness brewery fortune.) Obviously, a death by car accident is sudden and unexpected. The 3 remaining Beatles would have had to have met, with their management, proposed and agreed to the plan, communicated it to the police and media (they... all of them... were bought off to keep silent, don't you know), and gotten their acceptance --- all before word got out to anyone. Since then, of course, no one involved in the subterfuge ever broke with the plan. And, by sheer luck, the guy they found to be the replacement just happened to be every bit as talented as was Paul, given the success of his contributions to The Beatles remaining albums - "Penny Lane," "Back in the USSR," and "Let It Be," to name just a few - and his post-Beatles solo career.

Clearly, the holes in the story are big enough for Paul to have safely driven his car through that morning --- that morning being Wednesday, November 9, 1966, according to "evidence" presented in and on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album*, which makes the clues people found on singles and albums released before that date quite interesting, if you ask me.

I said before that it surprised me that anyone believed this story. After a little consideration, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I've long been interested in urban legends - interested that people will believe fantastical claims that, when you get right down to it, are based on little more than "Some guy told me." I'm a frequent visitor to snopes.com and enjoy reading some of the patently ridiculous stories that some people apparently believe.

What strikes me the most, I think, about so may of these legends (and the "Paul is dead" one in particular) is that many of them involve large, not realistically possible, conspiracies and pacts of silence. "Paul is dead" is an extreme... maybe the extreme... example. But it's a common theme. You've likely gotten an email, once or a thousand times, warning you that an attacker has injured/raped/killed one or more people in your local mall's parking lot, and that the mall authorities paid off the police and local media to make sure you didn't hear about it. Were there such an attacker, perhaps a mall's management would be interested in keeping the story quiet. But, that's not how the police work, and that sure as hell ain't how the media work. There are, as I see it, 3 basic principles the media live by (it'll be another blog post... eventually [I know]). One of them is, Being First Is More Important Than Being Right. There is no way you could get multiple news outlets to all agree to sit on a story. Somebody would run it, just to be the first to do so... just to be the one that scooped everyone else. I doubt it was much, if at all, different in 1966.

It shouldn't take more than about 5 seconds of consideration to come to the conclusion that both of these stories are not only untrue, but literally impossible. It's theoretically possible that either cover up could have been tried (save for the inconvenient** business of Mr. James Paul McCartney's continuing to live), but there is simply no way either conspiracy could have ever been put in place and agreed to, let alone last for anything more than 10 or 15 minutes before somebody blabbed. And yet, you'll find someone to believe any ridiculous piece of garbage that comes across their inbox. Why? That's the part I've never been able to understand. Why do so many people believe these stories that are so obviously made up? Somebody please explain it to me.

*The date comes from an alleged clue on the album's cover art. If you place a mirror horizontally across the words "LONELY HEARTS" so that you see the top halves of those letters, and the reflections of those top halves (who found these clues?!?), it looks like "1 ONE 1 X HE (a diamond) DIE" - or 11 IX... 11 9... November 9. Except that, to the British Beatles, that date is 9 November, not November 9. 11/9 would be September 11. I once posted a facetious post in an online forum claiming that The Beatles had in fact been predicting the 9/11 attacks. Makes about as much sense as the "Paul is dead" story.

** My suspicion is that Paul himself does not consider this inconvenient.