1969 PID News Reports

[JoJo]

New acquisition, this is a collection of some of the video reports from 1969. Note at the end, there is footage of the famous surprise visit to the farm in Scotland where he angrily tells them to leave. I always understood that in return for an interview, they gave him the film of him losing his temper.. Guess not..

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbJecKRnBUo

[JoJo]

Hmm, this is odd, I always thought the cover of that Life magazine was from that surprise visit:



And yet...unless he went in to shave, or this is some other incident, then no:







What IS going on here??

[fourthousandholes]

The Life magazine interview was arranged of necessity.
I don't think it was the same day.
Great little YouTube post, btw. Thanks for posting it!

[JoJo]

I solved the mystery, well sorta..

The news anchor at the beginning of the Youtube clip I posted mentions "Paul going in front of the cameras today to dispell the PID rumors". (this was Oct 24)

As you can see, getting in front of the cameras was not on the menu for the day! However, he did do an audio interview with Chris Drake, which was broadcast in part on the BBC two days later. (source: Bill Harry's "PM Encyclopedia")

So this was indeed different than the Life Magazine deal, and so I wonder if they even left with photos at all? I'm beginning to wonder if the Life photos were simply supplied to them, and the whole story about an interview was fiction.

The thread where that article is discussed. Nov 7 is when the article came out, must have been quite a while before that with that cleanshaven face...

The picture with baby Mary mentions that she is "two months old", which would put that picure in late October as she was born on August 28. (unless they meant at the time of the writing of the article) The beard was still in evidence (and thicker) at the time of the filming of Let It Be..

[beatlies]

Does "LIFE" say when that cover photo was allegedly taken?

[JoJo]

beatlies said:

Does "LIFE" say when that cover photo was allegedly taken?

Unfortunately, no. It credits a "Robert Graham", along with the one with Linda and the kids. The other photos are "with permission of ABKCO INDUSTRIES INC. on behalf of APPLE RECORDS INC." The exception to that being the voice prints which are used with the permission of the Miami Language and Linguistics Research Laboratory.

Oh btw, the video has Dr Truby for a few seconds, wish he wasn't cut so short.

[Jai Guru Deva]

I can see now, why people might have thought the "rumor" would have started in 1969. The way it's presented on the news leads one to believe the origin of the rumor was with a young, college kid and a free-spirited disc jockey. Ah, you know, "A few college kids believe Paul McCartney is dead because they played records backwards and told a guy on the radio about it..."

And we have the proverbial expert on the Beatles, Martin Smish, who says Paul was in Africa during the time of his alleged death (obviously referring to the Sgt. Pepper drumskin mistakingly taking the date for Nov. 9, but we here at NIR have since made the discovery it's actually Sept. 11). Also, I don't think I recall hearing that Strawberry Field had a cemetary, I always knew it was an orphanage. Smith might be thinking of St. Peter's Parish Church where Eleanor Rigby was laid to rest (by the way, the church has a little tower with a clock like the one in George Harrison's "Ding Dong Ding Dong" video)...

Of course, they go through usual assortment of "clues", but the way it's presented is more as a curiousity than actual evidence. Certainly, earlier accounts from 1969 (Tim Harper & John Summer), and back in 1966-67 were not cited.

The way the photos were presented was interesting, because they never showed Paul and Faul side by side, always one and then the other, and with similar expressions. The difference in appearance between the two men doesn't look obvious to the viewer.

I agree the Dr. Truby snipet was disappointing, because you really couldn't tell exactly what he was talking about? A viewer in 1969 probably wouldn't have been sure if he was talking about somebody claiming Paul sounded different on records? Or a technical aspect of recording in general, which might give the impression of a difference in voice (like speeding up or slowing down the recording)? From watching the snipet, it really wasn't understood Truby was talking about his own research (his studies really weren't made clear in the report).

[LOVELYRITA]

IMO the pic of Faul with Linda and kids is a posed shot sent in, rather than just taken at random unexpectedly. Being that Bill didn't sport a beard as the more candid ones below.

Although, at a glance, these pics resemble JPM more than others of Bill, like the Hey Jude video he looks less like him. Which I could see how someone gets the idea of the other Faux Paul...

There were times, I must admit, I believed there was a second fake Paul, but I think some of the pics were taken at different stages of Faul's plastic surgery recovery and perhaps some swelling hadn't gone away in some of the pics we see of Faul. Some pics from the LIB era look different from the time he gave the LSD interviews...but that was shortly after being "birthed" Paul Mc Cartney...

Just my extra 2 cents...

[lili]

Look how DARK Bill's eyes look in those film captures. Paul's eyes were never that dark.
Vintage photos of Paul:

[Jai Guru Deva]

Here's an interesting site to peruse, because someone named Brian Moriarty has written about PID and the news reports from his perspective.

When I read the transcripts from the "RKO Paul-is-Dead Special" with F. Lee Bailey, I must say that it comes across sounding more like an indictment against Russ Gibbs and Fred LeBour, than trying to prove or disprove PID. The biggest mistake LeBour made was embellishing the story, so as to try and fill unknown gaps and make sense of the entire story. Once it was shown LeBour did this, that was all it took for the whole thing to be declared a hoax.

On a side note, I thought Life magazine where the cover has the "Paul Is Still With Us" feature article and on the other side is the Lincoln Mercury car ad was rather interesting. Apparently when you hold the cover up to a light, the image of the car runs through Paul's body, and the top of his head gets cut off.

ludix.com/moriarty/paul.html

[Jai Guru Deva]

THE PAUL McCARTNEY DEATH RUMOR
BY LARRY MONROE
© 1999 by Larry Monroe
larrymonroe.com/archive/archive11.html

It was 30 years ago this coming October that a strange and unbelievable rumor swept across the world. 1969 had already seen Americans on the moon, Teddy Kennedy's Chappaquidick misadventure, and Woodstock. Tricky Dick Nixon was president. Implausible things had been happening all year, and no one knew what might be next. Then, from out of nowhere, people began believing that Paul McCartney was dead and had been replaced by a double. The rumor gained credence on the radio, and for several days there was speculation that Paul was dead. Published accounts of the rumor trace it to an article in the September 23 edition of Northern Star, the student paper at the University of Illinois, then to an anonymous caller to the Russ Gibb radio show on WKNR, Detroit on Sunday, October 12. Also noted is an article by Fred LaBour in the Michigan Daily, school paper of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

I can fill in the week before Gibb or LaBour heard about it. This is the first time I have revealed the story of my accidental participation in the propagation of the Paul McCartney Death Rumor.

I hit the Ann Arbor airwaves at midnight October 1, 1969. Abbey Road by the Beatles was released later that day. By the end of my first week I had been offered the all night show at WABX-FM in Detroit for $125 a week. Billboard magazine had named ABX the nation's best Underground Radio Station, and it was the station I had been listening to since moving to Michigan the previous month. I guess I hoped to work there eventually, though Ann Arbor was a garden and Detroit was a garbage pit similar to Indianapolis, from which I had just barely escaped. I was only making $75 a week at WOIA, but I turned ABX down because I thought my show needed the seasoning it could get only in the lower pressure, smaller market of Ann Arbor. I also felt some measure of loyalty to the WOIA manager, Rich Hill, with whom I had worked in Indianapolis. Rich had been Sales Manager and I was one of the Country Gentlemen at the Big G, WGEE-FM, playing country records from seven 'til midnight, then signing off the station. Rich had become General Manager of WOIA a few months back, and I had pestered him all summer to hire me for the station's all night show to do my own program, not a format. Finally, I broke down his resistance and he took the chance, giving Ann Arbor its first FM freeform program. That was my first real break in radio, and I appreciated it. The ABX offer did help boost my salary up $10 to $85 a week.

I had always been a Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, folk, blues, jazz, and 50s rock and roll fan, being 27 in 1969. My five year younger brother had been the Beatles fan in our family, so when listeners began calling me at the station asking about clues on Beatles album jackets and in Beatles songs that seemed to indicate that Paul McCartney was dead, I was in the dark. I didn't even have all the albums in question, and the station had only a couple, so I went to Discount Records on State Street to buy Abbey Road and some of the other LPs. I met John Petrie, the store manager, and was trying to work out a professional price on the records so I could buy a few new ones until I could secure record service for the station. During our conversation John mentioned that Beatles records were selling briskly, and that people were interested in the jackets, and had asked about the "Paul is dead" rumor that I had been hearing from listeners.

Every time I played a Beatles track on the air I would receive calls about the possibility that Paul was dead, and the callers would cite evidence in the songs and on the album jackets. I met another DJ, Jim Dulzo, who worked at WAAM-AM doing a freeform underground type of show. I purposely drove out to WAAM one night to talk with him about the rumor. He had heard it and conceded that his listeners had built pretty strong cases to support their theories. I don't think either of us had broadcast anything about it yet, but the rumor was running rampant around Ann Arbor. I made tapes of some of the parts of the songs that purportedly held clues to the mystery, played them backward and forward, faster and slower, and tried to figure out what was going on. Whatever it was, it was weird. I was stumped.

In addition to playing records, my program was to include on-air phone calls with listeners, and after a week or so behind the Spartan Sparta five pot control board I felt comfortable enough with the equipment to try a few on-air phone calls. So, at midnight, I announced that I was going to have an open line and would take calls from the listeners. There was plenty to talk about in Ann Arbor. Recently, students had occupied the University of Michigan Administration building, the UM ROTC Annex had been torched, a sadistic serial killer was murdering coeds in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area and the war was raging in Viet Nam, but everybody wanted to talk about the Beatles and the strange rumor that had swept Ann Arbor. The phone traffic was overwhelming and every call was about Paul McCartney. Theories abounded, and callers spilled over into the next night's program.

That next night, October 9, during my program, a whole dorm at Eastern Michigan University in neighboring Ypsilanti was tuned in and making phone calls to the show. At the peak of the program a power failure plunged the dorm into total darkness, spooking the inhabitants and unsettling me somewhat. The number 9 figured prominently in the rumor, and it was the 9th. Our midday DJ, 15 year old Jim Kerr (Jim Curtis on the air), had picked up on the rumor and had talked the station manager into letting him make a transatlantic call to Apple in London. Not figuring in the time difference, Kerr had gotten a night watchman who, in answering the question about whether Paul was dead, had declared it "a load of horseshit." All day long our newscasts carried the Apple night watchman's quote, and I was encouraged by the management to follow up on the rumor because WOIA had gone from zero to the hottest radio station in town in the space of a few days. Indeed, I had only been on the air about 9 days and already I had much of Ann Arbor tuning in at midnight.

On Friday night's show (10/10) I had a panel discussion in the studio with about half a dozen Ann Arbor musicians, including Steve Mackay who later played sax in Commander Cody's band. We talked about the possibility of the rumor being true and whether replacing Paul could really be accomplished. We covered the evidence, played the records that held the clues, and took calls from the audience. The response was really overwhelming. After the show I went home and slept until I was awakened by one of the DJs I knew from the station pounding on my door. Country Dan was one of the daytime DJs and he had introduced me to some of his friends. He told me that one of those friends had come to his apartment to listen to my show with him the previous night. That friend, Russ Updike, had called the show and talked on the air about Paul McCartney. After calling, he tried to get Dan to go out to the radio station with him to be part of the panel, but Dan was nursing a bad cold and had to be at work at the station at 6 A.M. and begged off. Russ left Dan's apartment and headed for the radio station. He never made it. As he was driving to the station, a drunk driver came over a hill on the wrong side of the road doing about 80 and hit him head-on. Russ died instantly, listening to my radio program.

I was devastated. I went to Michael Erlewine's house and sought his advice. He was an astrologer and advisor. He owned the Circle Books occult book store and he thought I should consult the I Ching. Michael counted out the yarrow stalks (I had previously only tossed the coins) and my chapter was Chapter One, The Creative. The first time I had ever done the I Ching, in '67 in San Francisco, I had gotten Chapter One. Michael's counsel comforted me somewhat, but I still couldn't shake the image of Russ topping the hill and meeting death head-on because of my radio program. My misery was compounded by the fact that Paul's rumored death had been in a car crash "...He blew his mind out in a car, He didn't notice that the light had changed."

When I got to work at midnight that Saturday there was a memo from the program director telling me to push the Paul McCartney thing hard. It was increasing our listening audience astronomically and would surely pay off in better commercial sales. I crumpled the memo and threw it across the studio. I started my show with Dylan's "Too Much of Nothing" from the Great White Wonder bootleg and despite numerous calls I didn't play a single Beatles tune and I didn't say a word about Paul McCartney all night. I went home and slept fitfully until late afternoon. My girlfriend, Bambi, and I went to some friends' house for dinner. I was greeted with, "Did you hear Russ Gibb today?" I hadn't. I had been sleeping. It seems that Gibb, who did a weekend rock and roll and call-in show on WKNR (known as Keener) in Detroit, had gotten some calls about the rumor and had run with them. The next day Russ Gibb was on the front page of the Detroit Free Press saying, "Send me to London." The rumor that had captivated Ann Arbor for the past week was front page news in Detroit. In days the rumor was worldwide. F. Lee Bailey hosted a TV show examining the evidence. Soon Paul was on the cover of Life magazine, declaring that he was still alive. Russ Gibb was famous and I had a dead man on my mind. Ironically, the dead man's name was Russ.

A few years ago Nashville songwriter David Olney told me that Fred LaBour (Too Slim of Riders In The Sky) had told him that he had started the Paul McCartney Death Rumor. I had already written the basic details of this story for my book Bar Trek (still in progress), and called Too Slim to ask if David Olney's information was true. Chet Flippo's biography of McCartney cites the LaBour article as an early source, and I was curious about whether it preceded my radio shows. It did not. The article appeared on Tuesday, October 14. LaBour heard the rumor on Russ Gibb's radio show and wrote a tongue in cheek review of Abbey Road, working in the death rumor and clues. I have never seen the September 23 article from the Illinois student paper. In follow up investigation, the rumor had apparently been circulating since '67, but only as word of mouth speculation. To the best of my recollection that is the sequence of events in the week leading up to one of the biggest hoaxes of the Rock & Roll era.

[Doc]

jaigurudeva said:

THE PAUL McCARTNEY DEATH RUMOR
BY LARRY MONROE
© 1999 by Larry Monroe
larrymonroe.com/archive/archive11.html

It was 30 years ago this coming October that a strange and unbelievable rumor swept across the world. 1969 had already seen Americans on the moon, Teddy Kennedy's Chappaquidick misadventure, and Woodstock. Tricky Dick Nixon was president. Implausible things had been happening all year, and no one knew what might be next. Then, from out of nowhere, people began believing that Paul McCartney was dead and had been replaced by a double. The rumor gained credence on the radio, and for several days there was speculation that Paul was dead. Published accounts of the rumor trace it to an article in the September 23 edition of Northern Star, the student paper at the University of Illinois, then to an anonymous caller to the Russ Gibb radio show on WKNR, Detroit on Sunday, October 12. Also noted is an article by Fred LaBour in the Michigan Daily, school paper of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

I can fill in the week before Gibb or LaBour heard about it. This is the first time I have revealed the story of my accidental participation in the propagation of the Paul McCartney Death Rumor.

I hit the Ann Arbor airwaves at midnight October 1, 1969. Abbey Road by the Beatles was released later that day. By the end of my first week I had been offered the all night show at WABX-FM in Detroit for $125 a week. Billboard magazine had named ABX the nation's best Underground Radio Station, and it was the station I had been listening to since moving to Michigan the previous month. I guess I hoped to work there eventually, though Ann Arbor was a garden and Detroit was a garbage pit similar to Indianapolis, from which I had just barely escaped. I was only making $75 a week at WOIA, but I turned ABX down because I thought my show needed the seasoning it could get only in the lower pressure, smaller market of Ann Arbor. I also felt some measure of loyalty to the WOIA manager, Rich Hill, with whom I had worked in Indianapolis. Rich had been Sales Manager and I was one of the Country Gentlemen at the Big G, WGEE-FM, playing country records from seven 'til midnight, then signing off the station. Rich had become General Manager of WOIA a few months back, and I had pestered him all summer to hire me for the station's all night show to do my own program, not a format. Finally, I broke down his resistance and he took the chance, giving Ann Arbor its first FM freeform program. That was my first real break in radio, and I appreciated it. The ABX offer did help boost my salary up $10 to $85 a week.

I had always been a Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, folk, blues, jazz, and 50s rock and roll fan, being 27 in 1969. My five year younger brother had been the Beatles fan in our family, so when listeners began calling me at the station asking about clues on Beatles album jackets and in Beatles songs that seemed to indicate that Paul McCartney was dead, I was in the dark. I didn't even have all the albums in question, and the station had only a couple, so I went to Discount Records on State Street to buy Abbey Road and some of the other LPs. I met John Petrie, the store manager, and was trying to work out a professional price on the records so I could buy a few new ones until I could secure record service for the station. During our conversation John mentioned that Beatles records were selling briskly, and that people were interested in the jackets, and had asked about the "Paul is dead" rumor that I had been hearing from listeners.

Every time I played a Beatles track on the air I would receive calls about the possibility that Paul was dead, and the callers would cite evidence in the songs and on the album jackets. I met another DJ, Jim Dulzo, who worked at WAAM-AM doing a freeform underground type of show. I purposely drove out to WAAM one night to talk with him about the rumor. He had heard it and conceded that his listeners had built pretty strong cases to support their theories. I don't think either of us had broadcast anything about it yet, but the rumor was running rampant around Ann Arbor. I made tapes of some of the parts of the songs that purportedly held clues to the mystery, played them backward and forward, faster and slower, and tried to figure out what was going on. Whatever it was, it was weird. I was stumped.

In addition to playing records, my program was to include on-air phone calls with listeners, and after a week or so behind the Spartan Sparta five pot control board I felt comfortable enough with the equipment to try a few on-air phone calls. So, at midnight, I announced that I was going to have an open line and would take calls from the listeners. There was plenty to talk about in Ann Arbor. Recently, students had occupied the University of Michigan Administration building, the UM ROTC Annex had been torched, a sadistic serial killer was murdering coeds in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area and the war was raging in Viet Nam, but everybody wanted to talk about the Beatles and the strange rumor that had swept Ann Arbor. The phone traffic was overwhelming and every call was about Paul McCartney. Theories abounded, and callers spilled over into the next night's program.

That next night, October 9, during my program, a whole dorm at Eastern Michigan University in neighboring Ypsilanti was tuned in and making phone calls to the show. At the peak of the program a power failure plunged the dorm into total darkness, spooking the inhabitants and unsettling me somewhat. The number 9 figured prominently in the rumor, and it was the 9th. Our midday DJ, 15 year old Jim Kerr (Jim Curtis on the air), had picked up on the rumor and had talked the station manager into letting him make a transatlantic call to Apple in London. Not figuring in the time difference, Kerr had gotten a night watchman who, in answering the question about whether Paul was dead, had declared it "a load of horseshit." All day long our newscasts carried the Apple night watchman's quote, and I was encouraged by the management to follow up on the rumor because WOIA had gone from zero to the hottest radio station in town in the space of a few days. Indeed, I had only been on the air about 9 days and already I had much of Ann Arbor tuning in at midnight.

On Friday night's show (10/10) I had a panel discussion in the studio with about half a dozen Ann Arbor musicians, including Steve Mackay who later played sax in Commander Cody's band. We talked about the possibility of the rumor being true and whether replacing Paul could really be accomplished. We covered the evidence, played the records that held the clues, and took calls from the audience. The response was really overwhelming. After the show I went home and slept until I was awakened by one of the DJs I knew from the station pounding on my door. Country Dan was one of the daytime DJs and he had introduced me to some of his friends. He told me that one of those friends had come to his apartment to listen to my show with him the previous night. That friend, Russ Updike, had called the show and talked on the air about Paul McCartney. After calling, he tried to get Dan to go out to the radio station with him to be part of the panel, but Dan was nursing a bad cold and had to be at work at the station at 6 A.M. and begged off. Russ left Dan's apartment and headed for the radio station. He never made it. As he was driving to the station, a drunk driver came over a hill on the wrong side of the road doing about 80 and hit him head-on. Russ died instantly, listening to my radio program.

I was devastated. I went to Michael Erlewine's house and sought his advice. He was an astrologer and advisor. He owned the Circle Books occult book store and he thought I should consult the I Ching. Michael counted out the yarrow stalks (I had previously only tossed the coins) and my chapter was Chapter One, The Creative. The first time I had ever done the I Ching, in '67 in San Francisco, I had gotten Chapter One. Michael's counsel comforted me somewhat, but I still couldn't shake the image of Russ topping the hill and meeting death head-on because of my radio program. My misery was compounded by the fact that Paul's rumored death had been in a car crash "...He blew his mind out in a car, He didn't notice that the light had changed."

When I got to work at midnight that Saturday there was a memo from the program director telling me to push the Paul McCartney thing hard. It was increasing our listening audience astronomically and would surely pay off in better commercial sales. I crumpled the memo and threw it across the studio. I started my show with Dylan's "Too Much of Nothing" from the Great White Wonder bootleg and despite numerous calls I didn't play a single Beatles tune and I didn't say a word about Paul McCartney all night. I went home and slept fitfully until late afternoon. My girlfriend, Bambi, and I went to some friends' house for dinner. I was greeted with, "Did you hear Russ Gibb today?" I hadn't. I had been sleeping. It seems that Gibb, who did a weekend rock and roll and call-in show on WKNR (known as Keener) in Detroit, had gotten some calls about the rumor and had run with them. The next day Russ Gibb was on the front page of the Detroit Free Press saying, "Send me to London." The rumor that had captivated Ann Arbor for the past week was front page news in Detroit. In days the rumor was worldwide. F. Lee Bailey hosted a TV show examining the evidence. Soon Paul was on the cover of Life magazine, declaring that he was still alive. Russ Gibb was famous and I had a dead man on my mind. Ironically, the dead man's name was Russ.

A few years ago Nashville songwriter David Olney told me that Fred LaBour (Too Slim of Riders In The Sky) had told him that he had started the Paul McCartney Death Rumor. I had already written the basic details of this story for my book Bar Trek (still in progress), and called Too Slim to ask if David Olney's information was true. Chet Flippo's biography of McCartney cites the LaBour article as an early source, and I was curious about whether it preceded my radio shows. It did not. The article appeared on Tuesday, October 14. LaBour heard the rumor on Russ Gibb's radio show and wrote a tongue in cheek review of Abbey Road, working in the death rumor and clues. I have never seen the September 23 article from the Illinois student paper. In follow up investigation, the rumor had apparently been circulating since '67, but only as word of mouth speculation. To the best of my recollection that is the sequence of events in the week leading up to one of the biggest hoaxes of the Rock & Roll era.

Thanks for posting that. His account goes a long way in cogently linking the progression to LaBour and beyond in that window of time when the rumor was in full swing. That account makes good sense.

[jerriwillmore]

I think he probably ran into the bathroom got a quick shave nothing more than that. :0)

[il ras]

One thing I don't understand (may be cause it's 5.32 am here...).

When the guy called the radio saying that Paul was dead, the Deejay asked him something like: "how can you say that?", the answer was, more or less: "play 'number nine' backwards and you'll hear 'turn me on dead man' ", right?
Now, how could he suppose it was about Paul, if that was the only clue?

Am I missing something?

[fourthousandholes]

Well it wasn't the only clue, just the first one that the DJ heard,
and the other (visual) clues all were
seeming to point to Paul, so....

[il ras]

So, did the guy that called the radio know the other clues also?