10.10
The first known printing of this urban legend was an article, “Is Paul McCartney Dead?” written by Tim Harper http://www.nvo.com/timharper/ispauldead/ in the Drake University paper, the Times-Delphic, on September 17, 1969. The rumours surrounding McCartney began in earnest on October 12, 1969, when someone telephoned Russ Gibb (a radio DJ on WKNR-FM in Dearborn, Michigan serving the Detroit market). Identifying himself as “Tom” (allegedly Tom Zarski of Eastern Michigan University), the caller announced that McCartney was dead. He also asked Gibb to play “Revolution 9″ backwards. Gibb thought he heard “Turn me on, dead man.” Gibb also produced (with John Small and Dan Carlisle) The Beatle Plot, an hour-long radio show on the rumour. The show aired on WKNR-FM in late 1969 and has been repeated in the years since on Detroit radio.
Fred Labour and John Gray, juniors at the University of Michigan, published a review of Abbey Road called “McCartney Dead; New Evidence Brought to Light”, itemising various “clues” of McCartney’s death on Beatles album covers, in the October 14, 1969 issue of the Michigan Daily. Terry Knight, a former Detroit DJ and then singer on Capitol Records, had visited the Beatles in London for the August 1968 White Album session during which Ringo Starr walked out. Although Terry’s song, “Saint Paul”, was written about the impending breakup of The Beatles, it was picked up by radio stations in autumn 1969 as a tribute to “the late” Paul McCartney. “[T]his very strange song actually came out in May 1969 – five months before the first article on the subject appeared in the campus paper at Iowa’s Drake University. More mysteriously, ‘Saint Paul’ is the only Knight composition administered by Maclen Music – McCartney and Lennon’s exclusive publishing company!”
The rumour gained momentum when Roby Yonge, an overnight disc jockey on the Top 40 station WABC in New York, discussed it “incoherently” on October 21, 1969. Yonge was immediately fired for making the broadcast. WABC, a 50,000-watt clear-channel station, could be heard clearly in 38 states, and as far as Africa’s Atlantic coast. Soon, national and international media picked up on the story and a new “Beatle craze” took off. Celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey hosted an hour-long television special in which he both prosecuted and defended the claims, leaving it to the viewer to decide. The tapes have since vanished.[citation needed]
The rumour is the subject of several books, including American journalist Andru J. Reeve’s 1994 book Turn Me On, Dead Man (ISBN 1-4184-8294-3) and English author Benjamin Fitzpatrick’s 1997 book, Rumours from John, George, Ringo and Me.
“Paul is dead” analyst Joel Glazier hypothesised in 1978 that John Lennon’s love of word play and studio editing may have been responsible for some clues in later albums, but that after cult-leader Charles Manson claimed The Beatles were hiding references to an upcoming racial war in their song “Helter Skelter”, the band members chose not to reveal the joke.
The advent of the Internet gave “Paul is dead” rumours new life.
In 2009, the Italian affiliate of Wired magazine published an article by Italians Francesco Gavazzeni (IT analyst) and Gabriella Carlesi (medico-legal)[clarification needed] in which they compared McCartney’s facial attributes (including skull and jaw shape) in photographs taken before and after his alleged demise, and concluded that it was possible that the photographs were not of the same person. They noted however, that they had not had direct access to McCartney, and that they were less certain of their conclusion than might have been the case had they been dealing with a corpse, where a more rigorous analysis would have been possible.