Forty years later, Paul's still not dead

By Eric Hanson

I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that Paul McCartney was dead. I was on the school bus. This was October 1969, 40 years ago this month. McCartney was 27. I was 13 and in the ninth grade.

The bus was just turning out of Southwood Drive onto Normandale Road when Talla showed us the album cover from the Beatles' "Abbey Road" with the ominous photo of Paul walking across the street barefoot. She explained that being photographed barefoot was an omen of death.

The hand held in benediction over Paul's head on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper" seemed more plausible.

Then she explained that if you played "Revolution 9" backwards you could hear the words "Turn me on, dead man." The entire bus was paying attention now. Words heard when you played a record backwards were solid proof that someone was dead. The rumor had begun in September with an article in a student newspaper at Duke University. Then, on Oct. 12, a listener phoned WKNR FM in Detroit and announced, "Paul is dead." He'd been listening to "Revolution 9" backwards. He didn't explain why.

Two days later an article spelling out more details appeared in a newspaper at the University of Michigan. On the 21st, an overnight disc jockey discussed Paul's death incoherently and at length on WABC in New York.

Celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey hosted an hour-long television program exploring the evidence. Nobody went to the effort to pick up the phone and call McCartney, but Paul probably wouldn't have answered anyway.

Of course Paul wasn't dead -- he was giving an interview to LIFE magazine. The interview appeared on Nov. 7, with the McCartney family featured on the cover. The Beatles were finished, though; irreconcilable creative differences between John and Paul broke them up.

There were no omens before John Lennon was killed in 1980.

Matters of life and death and the suddenness and randomness of events in between are an obsessive topic among young people. They are talked about on school buses, in dorm rooms, among the cubicles in offices. Nobody knows what it all means, much less where it is headed. Life and death, I mean.

Sometimes it seems useful to collect evidence and statistics and signs. There is reassurance in sorting through facts. I sorted the fact of Paul's non-death into a folder with the early, actual deaths of Keats and Shelley, Kurt Cobain and Stephen Crane, Jimi Hendrix and James Dean and Sylvia Plath, and the less-early deaths of Lennon and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who were barely middle-aged.

But the deeds of the living became more instructive and interesting to me. The odd jobs that famous authors were doing before they became famous authors. The ages people were when they made their great discoveries or met the people who made all the difference. How old Picasso was when he entered his Blue Period. The items accumulated and became a book.

Paul McCartney isn't the only person to hear the rumors of his own death. In 1916, just before his 21st birthday, the poet Robert Graves was reported dead on the Western Front; his parents received his personal effects. Graves inserted an announcement in The Times of London to explain that he was still alive. He lived another 70 years.

Ernest Hemingway survived a plane crash while on safari in Africa and read his own obituary in the newspaper. In 1888, premature obituaries of Alfred Nobel described him as a merchant of death, which, some say, led to his founding of the peace prize that bears his name. Mark Twain twice read his own obituary in the newspaper, leading to the famous remark, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

Death, even the rumored kind, has a way of focusing the mind, prompting us to take stock of who and where we are. Forty years later, with a knighthood, a Super Bowl performance and other accomplishments to his credit, Paul McCartney lives on.

Eric Hanson, a Minneapolis writer and illustrator, is author of "A Book of Ages."

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