Fifty years later, Paul McCartney is still alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rumor that he was dead actually started in 1966, when college kids heard that he’d been killed in a car crash and replaced by a look-alike. This led to conspiracy theorists poring over all the Beatles cover art and songs for clues, and they found lots of them: there are five suspicious messages on the front cover of Sgt. Peppers alone, and a big one on the back – Paul standing backwards. There are the “audio hints” in songs, whether you play Strawberry Fields forwards or Revolution #9 backwards. And here’s another clue for you all: the Walrus is Paul. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the most obvious evidence of Paul’s demise is found\nright on the cover of the very last album the Beatles recorded (though it was\nreleased before Let It Be.) When Beatles fans ran to the record store in\nSeptember 1969, they picked up an album with no front title, and featuring a\nfuneral procession. Can’t you see it? As the band crosses Abbey Road, John is\nthe Eastern-style spiritual leader in white, Ringo follows as the congregation\nin black, the Paul look-alike (holding a cigarette in his right hand, hmmm) is\nthe barefoot corpse, and gravedigger George brings up the rear dressed in\ndenim. And look! The VW on the left has the license plate LMW 28IF, which\nclearly means “Linda McCartney Weeps, Paul would be 28 IF he were still\nalive.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, the fact is, in September of 1969, Paul was 27 – so\nmuch for that. The working title of the album was “Everest,” and the\noriginal idea for the art was to shoot it in Nepal. But that was a long way to\ngo, so at the last minute Paul sketched an idea for the cover. The band went\noutside, and while a policeman held up traffic, photographer Ian McMillan\nhopped up on a stepladder, and took just six shots of the band crossing the\nstreet. Take number five made the cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paul claims his shoes didn’t fit, so he just took them off.\nGeorge was not partial to suits, so he wore denim instead of the Tommy Nutter\ndesigner threads the other three are wearing. The VW just happened to be\nsitting there, and the poor owner was later tormented by a series of thefts of\nthe license plate by Beatlemaniacs. And the other folks in the shot – the three\npedestrians at back-left are decorators returning to the studio from a lunch\nbreak; the man at right is an American tourist named Paul Cook – all attest\nthat the shoot took just a minute or two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What is true about the album is that it was a huge initial\nsuccess: it sat at the top of the charts for 17 weeks, and its single –\n“Something” backed by “Come Together” – is the band’s\nsecond-biggest hit, behind only “Hey Jude.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if fans looked closer, they may have detected trouble\nbrewing. The band reportedly enjoyed playing together on some of the sessions –\nat least to a greater degree than the misery of crafting the White Album – but\nproblems were festering. John wanted to have all of his songs on one side, Paul’s\non the other, but then what to do with George’s two compositions? Paul was also\nwriting like a fiend, so what to do with all his output? Out of this discord\ncame a tactical compromise: a flip-side mishmash medley that ironically\nresulted in some of the band’s most iconic musical moments, including Ringo’s\nonly recorded drum solo, and a ridiculous 18-bar, John\/Paul\/George 3-guitar\nattack extravaganza. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was sonic genius, but it also hid a secret that would be\nrevealed in less than a year: Paul was still alive, but the Beatles were dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fans who were really paying attention may have seen it\ncoming. Indeed, the lasting symbol of the Abbey Road album – released 50 years\nago – isn’t that front cover photograph. It’s hiding in plain sight, on the\nback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On a simple brick wall framed by the swipe of a blue\nmini-dress are two embedded street signs. The lower one, “Abbey Road”\nwent on to become a world-famous phrase that signifies an album, a street, a\nmoment in time, and even the studio where the music was recorded (“EMI\nStudios” was renamed in its honor).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the upper street sign says, simply, “Beatles.”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And running right through the last letter of that word,\nright through the S that makes a singular a plural, is a large crack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifty years later, Paul McCartney is still alive. The rumor that he was dead actually started in 1966, when college kids heard that he’d been killed in a car crash and replaced by a look-alike. This led to conspiracy theorists poring over all the Beatles cover art and songs for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1729,1728,482,1730,924,1731],"class_list":["post-1546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abbey-road","tag-beatles","tag-george-harrison","tag-john-lennon","tag-paul-mccartney","tag-ringo-starr"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/abbey-road.jpg?fit=1091%2C1056&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1546"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1549,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546\/revisions\/1549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}