Quiz Question: Who is this character?

1966_BillyArrives (1)

Answer: He’s not Paul McCartney. This new fella is arriving at the EMI studio on 24th November 1966, to record Strawberry Fields Forever – an ambitious new move, to record with the world-famous Beatles. Their new bass guitarist!

If you feel unsure about this, I suggest perusing one or two videos –  eg Here, or Here. The world has greatly forgotten what the real Paul McCartney looked like, – that cute, round-faced cherubic look, the heart and soul of the original Beatles, adored by his fans around the world – so successful has been the ‘morphing’ of the new lad.

Words of ‘Paul McCartney’

The replacement feels the old being of Paul in him somehow, feels as if he is two people. Let’s look at some of his sayings.

“‘I joined the Beatles, an already set-up affair’         –   The real Paul joined the Quarrymen in 1957 – then he co-founded the Beatles in 1960 – NO WAY could he have dreamed that he joined a ‘set-up affair.’

‘In a way, I think of Paul McCartney as ‘Him’… I do wake up some mornings and think, Jesus Christ, am I really that guy that is in the same body as I’m inhabiting?’

‘I’ve learnt to compartmentalise’ … ‘There’s me and there’s famous Him. I don’t want to sound schizophrenic, but probably I’m two people.‘ (Sir Paul confronts the ghosts of his past, Sunday Times – no longer online) That’s honest!”

‘I Look in the mirror and just think, I in this shell, am the guy I’ve read so much about .. I dunno whether it’s a schitzo thing, ….. “I’m very proud of [him], but you know, I don’t imagine I am him ’cause otherwise it would just blow my head off”

So I thought, being Paul McCartney the whole bit is really, you know, too much to live up to: the advantages, I like to think they outweigh the disadvantages.

Why do the rumours come about? Because Paul McCartney’s dead of course.’

About ‘Yesterday, PM’s most famous song:  ‘I dreamed it, didn’t believe it was mine really, I didn’t even write it really in a way….’

See ‘Paul Mc’ give a big wink, when the band is asked about ‘all the time you’ve been Beatles’

He can’t now avoid being asked about the matter: “In America, I was asked a thousand times if I was Paul or his clone.”

 

The last-ever sight of Paul McCartney

Ringo and Paul received a Melody Maker award, in September 1966 (See the video clip, here). Was this on the 13th September?  “This is the very last Paul McCartney public appearance, that was three days before the program was on air.” (Comment on video, by ‘Sun king’) On this view, the program went on air on the 13th which would put the Melody Maker awards on 10th September, the day before Paul died.

That last-ever image of the charming, lovely young musician – he was so good, so true – reminds us of the Roman motto:  He whom the gods love, dies young. 

 

Jane Asher and Linda Eastman

Paul’s girlfriend since 1963, Jane Asher, had a father who was a psychiatrist-hypnotist. Paul and Jane lived in her parent’s flat in Wimpole Street -which some have felt was rather odd. If there was a Tavistock connection as some surmise, it would have been though her father Richard Asher. He would have explained to her the ‘change’ in Paul M. and help her to cope with it: but then, he had to ‘commit suicide’ (due to ‘depression’) in 1969, about a month and a half after Paul/Faul married Linda Eastman – i.e, he knew too much. Jane had to be seen going out with the new ‘Paul.’ But once Faul married Linda Eastman, she was out of the picture and might have needed a warning never to talk about what she knew – her Father’s death would have achieved that, and to this day, she will never talk about this matter.with jane asher

Here is the new ‘Paul’ with Linda.

The US photographer Linda Eastman homed in on the new ‘Paul’ and they married very quickly – the story is, that she said to him, she knew of his identity change, and had it on photographic record, but she would stay mum if he married her and made her a star: Faul realised that this was exactly what he needed! Here was a sexy female with whom he could talk about all the weird stuff he had been through, and she’s keep his secrets, and, she’s be part of his new band Wings and help to build up his confidence, and her Jewish-lawyer father could be exactly what he needed in tricky times, he in fact acted for Faul as the Beatles broke up. (That story comes from the film, ‘Paul McCartney really is Dead – The Last Testament of George Harrisson,’ which we’ll come to.)

On May 19th, 1967, Brian Epstein held a promo party for select broadcasters and journalists for the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band release. The sound technician Roby Grange recalled seeing McCartney, looking very different from the images he’d seen. McCartney and Jane Asher stayed on separate sides of the room the entire night. Grange noticed McCartney spent most of his time around a female photographer, Linda Eastman. He questioned a journalist why McCartney was not around Asher, to which he replied, “That is his girlfriend” “But he is engaged to Jane Asher!” “No, this is a different McCartney.”

The new ‘Paul’ used to go to the synagogue at St John’s Wood with his Jewish wife, which I doubt the old Paul would have done.

The film The Winged Beatle – and The Last Testament are two films I’d recommended on the topic. The Winged Beatle is on Youtube, whereas the Last Testament isn’t, its 900 megabytes, get it from a torrent download.

 

A right-Handed ‘Paul’

Once he broke away from the Beatles and formed Wings, (with help from Linda Eastman) the newPaul grew more confident and had a photo of himself playing right-handed put on the cover of a British pop ‘zine! The real Paul was totally left-handed, as he explained in a 1963 interview:

The only thing I couldn’t cure myself of was being left-handed. I do everything with my left hand, and no matter how I try I can’t change the habit. I just seem to do everything back to front. I used to even write backwards. Every time the schoolmasters would look at my handwriting they would throw swinging fits.

right-handed2

But, these two pictures are probably ‘flipped’ left-right, see comments below.

IndiaGuitar1

 

An Intermediate ‘Paul’

1966_08_29_san_francisco_airport

San Francisco Airport, 29 August 1966, end of the US tour: do you reckon the guy at the bottom is Paul McCartney? To help decide this – don’t rush – I suggest watching The last interview (IMO) the Fab Four ever gave, on the 16th August 1966. Its much better to watch videos rather than just photographs, as there has been so much fiddling with the photos over the years.

Some say the Beatles decided to stop touring and never gave another public concert after August 1966 because the stress of having all their adoring fans around was just too much! If you believe that, note how cool and unruffled the Fab Four appear in that last interview. They are getting over the shock of Lennon’s outrageous remark about Jesus and how Christianity would soon fade away – !! – but no way do they seem about to break up. Note how close and natural is the rapport there between Paul and John: you will never see that again.

Here is a picture alleged to show the ‘three Pauls.’ Do you reckon the second of these, is the guy we saw coming down the steps in the above image? Its important here to bear in mind, that doubles are common in showbiz, and their presence does not mean that anyone is dead.

three pauls

 

Testimony of ‘Big Mal’

The Beatles’ faithful roadie Mal Evans went with the new Paul to Kenya in November 1966, and came back with him, but got bumped off (shot ‘by accident’ by the LA police) just before his tell-all book Living the Beatles Legend could be published, in 1976. But, a page of it has allegedly  been viewed by Winged Beatle (61 minutes into that video) and do we reckon its genuine? A blurry Xerox scan of the original, it concerns that crucial arrival back in London on 19th November: Mal was given the unpleasant job of instructing Paul’s longtime housekeeper-butler George Kelly to pack up and leave – then the new Paul arrived the next day so the two never met, Mal stayed with him. This text is implying that a pro-British colonial style hospital in Kenya performed the initial plastic surgery on ‘Paul.’ My inserts are in square brackets.

George [Kelly] is not very happy about it. He didn’t understand it, but I had no choice. Brian [Epstein] could have sent somebody else to tell him the bad news, but the easy way was letting me tell him, even though I was closer to George K and his wife than others. I felt so bad and was actually crying in front of Brian, begging him to not let me do this, … poor George, he didn’t understand a thing. Why, he cried bitterly, why? He kept asking me this question again and again. I was standing there as a butcher with his knife. ..George and his wife left Cavendish [Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood, where Paul had lived] the same evening. The next day Paul arrived. We were all there, Neil [Aspinall], Robert [?], John, Brian [Epstein], Ringo, Anita [?], George [Martin] and Tony [?]. Everybody was excited and stunned. It was amazing.  They did a good job in Nairobi. It was really happening, it was like we had known him forever. Brian was afraid – Neil assured him that he could trust Pete [Best, early drummer]. But Brian needed a commitment from him. John was paralysed. Just don’t go there, he said, we don’t need frigging Pete involved… I felt bad again …I tried to tell them that I had to see my family sometimes, but Brian and John insisted that I should say with Paul for a while. …We all had to get high. It was so unreal and that is why John invented Strawberry Fields.  Nothing is real…Big Mal page

That is the amazing moment, when Lennon first sees it, the replacement, ‘Faul,’ ‘False Paul’. (For more on this text, see Clare Kuehn’ page, 2/3 of way down). We reflect that this film was made by ‘Iamaphoney’ – a consortium who also make the ‘Rotten Apple‘ series. Clare Kuehn described them to me thus:  “the funding seems to have come probably from Neil Aspinall; a white knight group of leakers inside the circle, shall we say, but where the final revelations have been stymied by lawsuits from others, or were never intended to come out.” (Neill Aspinall was the Beatles roadie). So if you believe all that, it might follow that someone has got some more pages of that Big Mal manuscript, somewhere…

 

‘Last Testament,‘ a Film

There is a gripping and scary 90-minute film,  “Last Testament of George Harrison” – although the ‘Plastic Macca’ website is unimpressed, saying many PID Truthers think it is “just disinfo to discredit PID. It makes outrageous claims & focuses on goofy theories rather than sound forensic evidence that proves Paul was replaced.” Well OK but I’m recommending it, as the best film available and an excellent intro! Yes it does get things out of sequence, most importantly that it has PM killed on 9th of November 1966 – which is impossibly late. The drama has to revolve around October 1966 IMO, because that is the month with no trace of PM anywhere, he’s just gone. Then the new replacement appears in November. The Last Testament has ‘clues’ appear on the Rubber Soul and the Butcher’s cover – however they are both from well before their given death-date, which would set up severe paradoxes. Remember this film is advertised as fictional, and it might have been necessary to put in some ‘wrong’ bits so that for legal reasons they could claim it was fiction: just as they might have someone else reading George Harrison’s voice onte film.

In The Long and Winding Road, “The wild and windy night that the rain washed away, has left a pool of tears” – a memory of Paul’s burial?

In Northern song of Yellow submarine, George Harrisson sings,

If you listen late at night, you may think the band’s not quite right / If you think the harmony is a little dark and out of key / You’re correct, there’s nobody here.

Indeed the band was not quite right, which was why it could never perform in public again, after August 1966.

The Winged Beatle describes the tribute songs that were composed in 1969 when the Paul-is-dead story broke: Lennon had been putting so many clues everywhere that he could not really be surprised. Their old albums climbed back into the charts again as Beatlemania reappeared with a macabre twist, with folk buying albums to search for ‘clues.’

The Strawberry Fields Forever video (1967) showed how the new Paul’s hair parted from left to right, whereas for the original Paul it was the other way round. The Who sang, “And the parting on the left is now the parting on the right And the beards have all grown longer overnight” (Won’t get Fooled again) A lot of facial hair had to appear to cover up the surgical  scars of the new ‘Paul.’

Surely the new Paul had the instructions – ‘take these broken wings and learn to fly all your life / You were only waiting for this moment to arise.’ (Blackbird, on White Album)

He did a fine job.

Sir George Martin is sometimes described as the ‘Fifth Beatle,’ for having been so much involved in producing their early albums: “He is considered one of the greatest record producers of all time,” (Wiki). Here is his new (2004) heraldic coat of arms His OBE Order of the British Empire is indicated in his Latin motto. Amore solum opus est will roughly translate as ‘All you need is love.’ Three beetles are on either side of a tyre-tread design going through them, maybe squashing the fourth?

amoresolum

Have fun listening to me and Jim Fetzer with Clare Kuehn on the Real Deal, two hours!

See also, Earlier article.

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