TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Thursday, September 25, 2008

UPDATE:

September 24, 2008 -- Reuters
Paul McCartney arrived in Israel on Wednesday for an historic concert, flashing a V-sign for peace and making a surprise West Bank visit to the delight of Palestinian fans.

"It is me," McCartney told photographers at a Tel Aviv hotel hours after touching down for one of the biggest rock concerts in the Jewish state that shunned the Beatles 43 years ago as a "corruptive influence."

"It is the real me, I tell you," McCartney said. "Shalom."
[...]

Now that the world's most famous doppelganger is about to perform in Israel amidst terror threats from MI6-stooge shiekhs, Israeli media is suddenly asking new questions about the MI6 BEATLES intelligence operation. From THE JERUSALEM POST Sep. 24, 2008:

"Some 40,000 fans are expected to pack Yarkon Park Thursday night to see Paul McCartney perform his classic songs. But will it really be the former Beatle?...

Some 40 years after first surfacing, the legend that the former Beatle died in a fiery 1966 car accident and was subsequently replaced by [an] imposter still attracts considerable attention and scrutiny. Books, research articles, Web sites, university lectures and presentations have all focused on the plethora of clues that weave together one of the more outlandish but mystifying conspiracy theories that evolved from the 1960s.

"At the time, people took it very seriously," recalled the "dean" of "Paul-is-dead" theorists, retired Delaware high school teacher Joel Glazier.

"It was the end of the '60s. You have to remember this was against the backdrop of the assassinations of Martin Luther King [Jr.] and Bobby Kennedy, as well as the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers. So this sounded like the perfect conspiracy cover-up. People stayed up all night talking about it, and some were actually quite scared."

Glazier spoke to The Jerusalem Post from Toronto, where he was a featured speaker at a Beatles convention, along with former John Lennon girlfriend May Pang . . .

Glazier initially rose to prominence in the Beatles scholarly world in 1979 by publishing a 30-page comprehensive research article on the issue for the premier Beatles fan magazine, Strawberry Fields Forever, which attracted the attention of Beatles convention organizers.

Since then, Glazier has been a mainstay on the convention and college campus circuit, both in the US and Europe. But he's not just a conspiracy theorist - he's also a bona fide Beatles expert, and has been hired by the Delaware school system to present lectures to students on the importance of The Fab Four in popular culture.

For those too young - or too old - to remember the "Paul is dead" theory, it goes something like this: McCartney perished in a 1966 London car crash, but The Beatles, not wanting to make it public, used their clout to keep the tragedy secret. They hired the winner of a McCartney look-alike contest to take his place in the band, a lucky guy with the name of either William Shears Campbell, Billy Shears (the name of the fictitious leader of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) or William Sheppard.

What gave fuel to the fire were a slew of supposed hints to the switcheroo that fans gleaned from Beatles' lyrics, photos and album covers, first exposed in a college newspaper article and then picked up by a Detroit radio station, before breaking worldwide with extensive coverage on all major TV and print media.

"I think you have to pay tribute to the cover of Abbey Road for starting it all," said Glazier. "The four Beatles are walking across the street, in what looks like could be a funeral procession. John's in white, the religious leader, Ringo's in a tux - the funeral director, George is in work jeans, the grave digger. And Paul, he's barefoot and out of the step with the others. People interpreted that as alluding to the practice of burying people barefoot.

"In addition, he's holding a cigarette in his right hand, and he was famous for being a left-handed bass player, a sign that this Paul is an imposter. . ."

From there, fans went backwards to albums like 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which they claim houses a dozen more clues within the photo imagery on the front and back covers - including the back cover photo of the group with three of the Beatles facing forward and McCartney turned backward, with the words "Without you" printed next to his head from the song title "Within You Without You."

The cover of 1968's The Magical Tour shows three Beatles sporting red roses on their lapels, while McCartney's is black; and of course, Lennon supposedly sings "I buried Paul" at the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever."

And the list goes on - seemingly random details that, when combined together, might result in something more meaningful, according to Glazier.

"It certainly wasn't serendipity. Even if somebody could explain away one or two of the clues, how can you explain 70 of them? There were no coincidences when it came to The Beatles - everything was a precise, conscious decision, from the music to the album art," said Glazier, who discusses the phenomenon with a coyness of someone who loves keeping the legend alive.

He pointed to other chronological occurrences which he says provide additional ammunition of an upheaval in the Beatles world, as caused by McCartney's death.

"During 1967, when Sgt. Pepper's came out, The Beatles stopped performing live because the new Paul wasn't up to playing in public. And by 1970, the band had conveniently broken up and no longer had to deal with the questions. And some would say that since The Beatles years, the quality of Paul's songwriting is not what it once was. But that's a judgment call," said Glazier.

[...]

He won't profess whether he thinks McCartney is really dead. "I don't really know if Paul is dead or not. I'm too busy looking for clues."

But in addition to the popular conclusions that the clues were a hoax instigated by The Beatles either as a elaborate joke or to boost album sales, both of which have been denied by all four Beatles in the past, Glazier does offer some additional reasons as to why The Beatles may have initiated an intricate trail of "Paul is dead" clues. . .

Another theory says that Lennon's love of wordplay and studio editing led to some clues in later albums, but that after cult leader Charles Manson attributed his killing spree in part to "hidden messages" in the song "Helter Skelter," the band members chose not to reveal . . .

Instrumental in the establishment of the John Lennon Peace Forest in the Galilee, Glazier is overjoyed that a Beatle is finally appearing in Israel. "Finally, the people of Israel will get to see the person who is allegedly Paul. . .

"Whoever this person is, he can certainly play well. But I still think there's something missing. Is that voice singing 'Yesterday' the same voice that sang it in 1965? You decide."
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Labels: beatles, doppelgangers, israel, mi6

| Posted at 02:12 | PERMA-LINK |

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