Conspiracy Encyclopedia

By members of the Beatles

Lennon joked about the rumour in the years following its initial growth[citation needed] and referred to it in the song “How Do You Sleep?” on his 1971 solo album Imagine, commenting “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead.”

• McCartney responded to the rumours with the tongue-in-cheek cover of his 1993 live album Paul Is Live, sending up both the Abbey Road cover and its “hidden clues”.
• On a segment of Saturday Night Live in which Paul McCartney was a guest, Chris Farley asked him of the rumour: “That was a hoax, right?” McCartney assured him that he is not really dead.

By others

• The Rutles, a parody of The Beatles, included a couple of “Paul is dead” parodies.
• In the June 1970 comic book Batman #222, Batman investigates a rumour that Saul Cartwright of the rock band The Oliver Twists is an impostor and that the real Saul had died a year ago; it turned out that Saul was real but the rest of the band were fakes.
• The 1972 National Lampoon Album, Radio Dinner featured several mock numbered clues, including a short backwards track saying, “I’m dead!” in a Liverpudlian accent.
• The Simpsons television show has included many references to the story.
• The Onion’s Our Dumb Century collection includes a fake headline from January 21, 1981, that reads, “Secret Album-Cover Clues Reveal John Lennon Is Dead.”
• In the film Sleepless in Seattle, Tom Hanks’s character, Sam Baldwin, comes home to find his son, Jonah, listening to an album and declaring “Dad, this is incredible. If you play it backward it says ‘Paul is dead.’”
• In a 1987 edition of American Top 40, host Casey Kasem revisited the “Paul Is Dead” era as a related story to the Bananarama song “I Heard a Rumour”. The following year, Dick Clark featured a similar story on Rock, Roll and Remember.
• Many bands have referenced the rumour in their music, including:
  • Swell Maps’ early repertoire included songs titled “Paul’s Dead” and “Turn Me on Dead Man”.
  • SR-71 released a song called “Paul McCartney” on their debut album Now You See Inside which references that Paul is dead.
  • The Union Underground wrote a song called “Turn Me On, Mr. Dead Man”, a reference to the “Revolution 9″ clue “Turn me on, dead man”.
• John Safran’s Music Jamboree contains a segment about the conspiracy with a mock George Harrison-is-dead conspiracy, following Harrison’s death in 2001.
• In early 2009 on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert made reference in a skit to a news article about an excess of caffeine causing delusions of ghosts. As part of his reaction, he said, “But how could I have been interviewing Paul McCartney, when he’s dead?”