Andru Reeve - Turn Me On Dead Man

In the fall of 1969, a chilling rumor paralyzed the music world: Paul McCartney had died in a 1966 car crash and was replaced by a lookalike. Join host Terry Shepherd as he sits down with author Andru J. Reeve to deconstruct the greatest conspiracy theory in rock history. Decades before the internet, this viral hoax spread through whispered dorm-room gossip, underground college newspapers, and late-night radio broadcasts. Reeve shares his exhaustive, pre-digital research journey through the Library of Congress to trace the origin and explosion of the "Paul is Dead" myth, exploring the sociological and religious undertones of a fandom obsessed with deciphering hidden messages.

Discover the analog contagion that gripped a generation:

• The pivotal October 1969 phone call from a nervous college student to Detroit DJ Russ Gibb that broadcast the rumor to the masses.
• A breakdown of the most infamous "clues" planted on the Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's album covers, from hidden backwards audio to barefoot tableaus.
• Why Paul McCartney's retreat to a Scottish farm with his wife Linda inadvertently fueled the public's paranoia.
• The strange cottage industry of hoax-inspired novelty songs, including Terry Knight's "St. Paul" and Jose Feliciano's disguised contribution as "Warbly Finster".

Explore the complete story in Andru J. Reeve's definitive book, Turn Me On, Dead Man: The Beatles and the Paul is Dead Hoax, featuring an annotated list of 140 clues from the height of the frenzy. Available wherever cool books are sold.

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SPEAKER_00 0:35

In conversation with Terry Shepard, award-winning broadcaster, narrator, and author, a deep dive into the writer's craft with the artists and support systems who create the stories we love.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

In the fall of 1969, a rumor swept across college campuses and airwaves. Paul McCartney of the Beatles had died in a car crash, and the surviving band members had replaced him with a double. Students and disc jockeys poured over album covers and songs claiming to uncover hidden clues. Headlines, radio shows, and late-night debates turned the rumor into a cultural phenomenon. Turn Me On Dead Man tells the story of how the Paul is Dead hoax spread and why so many people believed it. From a phone call to a Detroit radio station to a satirical review in the Michigan Daily that became front-page news, the book traces the rumor's rapid rise. With careful research and rare material from newspapers, radio transcripts, and first-hand accounts, Andrew J. Reeve reconstructs how a six-week frenzy convinced thousands that the Beatles were sending secret messages about their fallen bandmate. Andrew Reeve joins us to talk about Turn Me On Dead Man, The Beatles and the Paul is Dead hoax. Andrew, why write the book in the first place?

SPEAKER_02 2:01

I think it all started when I was uh a kid and got hooked on the Beatles. It was one of those things where you're young and you discover something that's exciting like that. Some people go for baseball, some people go for whatever. And to me, it was the Beatles. It's like, what is this? It's so amazing. So I had to find out everything I could find out about the Beatles. I read every book I could get my hands on, I listened to all the records. And through it all, I noticed there was this one little incident in their history, and there wasn't much about it. Up until the I decided to write this, there wasn't really a in-depth, I don't know what you call it, uh a book or even just a long passage. I I remember reading Nicholas Shaffner's book, Beatles Forever. And I think it was like a page devoted to Paula's dead. And I was just I was fascinated. What is this? Who are these people? Who's Russ Gibb? And that pretty much started it for me. So I wanted to find Russ Gibb. I wanted to find Fred Labor, who was the college kid who wrote this article. And then I started thinking deeper about it. It's like, what caused this? You've you always hear death rumors. This person's dead, that person's dead, but it's easily debunked or proved. These days, it takes five seconds to find out if somebody is dead or not. Back then in 1969, I think the fascinating thing was that nobody knew. And the Beatles, or at least Paul McCartney, contributed to all that because he didn't come out and say, Here I am. So therefore it fed into the rumor and kept building it and it was like a this huge snowball. I thought when I first read all this, what is this all about? I need to find out more about this. How could a rumor develop and then just just stay like that and grow and not be quashed right away? Shouldn't it have been quashed? I would think so. And so I started the first thing I did was I tried to find Russia. Back then there was no internet. I started this book in the 80s. There was certain, there's the ARPANET, but there was no real internet to speak of. So I basically used letters. I wrote letters to people. I said, Russ Gibb, where is he? And finally this guy from uh a radio station, like a consultant, says, I think I know where he is. And he sent me this article from the newspaper, and it turned out he was still in Detroit, which is where he started. That's how he started, that's how the whole thing pretty much started was at the radio station.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Tell us more about how you gathered your information in a time before the internet.

SPEAKER_02 4:40

I was fortunate to live in Washington, D.C. at the time, and so I had access to the Library of Congress. You see that big building, the Library of Congress, you can actually go in there and access their files. So I'd go in there on my days off from work. I worked at a TV station in D in DC, and on my days off, I'd walk over to the Library of Congress and I'd go through, dig through their files. Each day I had a list of things I wanted to find out, and so I would access newspaper headlines, I would access telephone directories, and I started talking to collectors, record collectors, geatles collectors, and pick their brains to see if they knew anything. And sometimes I'd get little nuggets of information and I'd use that. And it took me three years from 1988 to about 1991 just to get the basic stuff pulled together. And then I kind of went more deep. I started thinking about the uh sociological aspects of this and the religious significance of it. And I go into that in the book, of course. I talk about these clusters, that's what these these kids were called. A lot of this was generated on uh college campuses and these these kids were dubbed clusters, and they would take records and play them backwards, and then they would come up with these I guess because most of them have been exposed to Christianity, like a lot of times Christian symbolism, things about the position of this and position of that and the blessings, take this brother, may it serve you well, people buried with without shoes. Supposedly that's some sort of Christian burial technique, especially in Italy and some other places, England. It was just it just was the more I looked into it, the crazier it got. And it was hard to corral some of it sometimes. Sometimes it was just so far out. And but I was able to put some sort of structure to it. And so that was the that was really the goal over those three years, to putting structure to the whole thing. So it wasn't just me regurgitating a bunch of clues. They the kids came up with, oh, I don't know how many, 50 or 60 clues that they gartered from the record albums, the songs and what was on the covers on the sleeves. And I put some form and structure to all that, I think. And that was my contribution to that. And like I said, that was my goal was to tell that part of the Beatles story that had never been told before.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

What was WKNR FM's Russ Gibbs contribution to the story?

SPEAKER_02 7:23

Actually, Russ Gibbs, what his contribution was, he was a self-promoter. He was a impresario, I guess you would call, in the Detroit music scene. And you have to remember, Detroit in the 60s was this hotbed of music. And I go into that, why Detroit was such a center of music. It's not so much anymore. It is some somewhat in some quarters, but it was a huge hotbed of rock and roll music. And I think, to me, I think it was because there's so much money there. There's all these executives, auto executives that had a lot of money, and uh their kids were able to buy guitars. So when the Beatles came along, they were able to buy the guitars and form bands. So it was really big, and Russ Gibbs latched onto that, and he was a self-promoter and promoted these bands in turn and had the Grande Ballroom and the East Town Theater and a couple other places. He was the first person to bring the Who over to America and I think Led Zeppelin. But yes, before Russ Gibb, though, there were a lot of kids still, we're still talking kids, that promoted this. And a lot of them worked for their student newspapers, their college university newspapers. And one of them was Tim Harper. And Tim Harper, this would be I'd say three or four months before Russ Gibb even talked about the rumor. He had heard about the rumor from some kids, and it was basically the way rumors were spread back then. It was word of mouth. It wasn't the internet. There was no internet. The internet was talking to people, talking on the phone, gossiping with people, smoking a joint, and over the joint talking about Paul Paul is dead in this case. Did you hear Paul is dead? And a lot of it came from thin air, I think. I'm not a conspiracy guy. This is not this book is not some sort of weird weird wild conspiracy thing. I'm trying to trace the rumor and how it started in a journalistic way. And I think I did that. But I do look at these these goofy things and these goofy conspiracy theories that they came up with. But Tim Harper is one guy, and and Tom Tsarski, who is the Tom who called Ruskia, had heard about the rumor himself and and tried to solve it himself. He was a kid, he was just a nerd. That's what he told me. I'm just a nerd. I didn't have any girls. I wasn't out on a Saturday night, so I sat in my room and I latched onto this thing. It's this all thing, and I wanted to know is it all dead? And I figured the person who would know is Russ Gibbs. Uncle Russ. He would know. And so of course I was a nerd. I didn't have a girl on Saturday night, so I woke up nice and early on Sunday and I gave Russ a call. And Russ kept me on the phone for an hour. And yeah, that long distance bill was insane. That's back when you paid for every minute you were on the phone. And it was a long distance call for him. That was how that happened. But I don't know if I ever did find exactly where it started. I have a lot of theories about how it started. I just consider Russ Gibb the guy that did the most to spread the rumor worldwide with his radio show. And because a lot of people heard his show, and those people spread it to other people. And he was pretty well known in radio, so other disc jockeys, he's also talked about it. You look at that time, October 14th, October 12th, that that era that that period. October 12th was the Ruskibb phone call. October 14th, Fred Labor heard the radio show and wrote this satirical record review of Abbey Road, which had just come out. That contained a lot of the original clues, like Turn Me On Dead Man, playing number nine backwards, and the tableau on the front of Abbey Road where Paul is barefoot and John is dressed like a preacher, and George is a gravedigger, and all that, the little tableau, and then Sgt. Pepper, how Paul is turned backwards. He's always singled out something different about Paul on every album. He's the walrus, right? Maybe not. But they said the walrus was Paul. Even the Beatles said the walrus was tall. Right?

SPEAKER_01 11:52

What is the distilled version of the story of what happened to Paul that you have concluded is the tale that you tell?

SPEAKER_02 12:02

The tale, the myth of Paul McCartney is that it goes all the way back to 1966. He left the recording studio after a fight with the other guys and hopped into his Aston Martin and sped into the rainy, chilly night. Fred Labor also talked about this in his newspaper article. He sped into the night and lost control of his car and it crashed. And he was decapitated. And he was killed. This would be November 9th, 1966. That's how how specific these cloosters were about the death. It happened on a specific day, which I believe was Wednesday morning at five o'clock, if I'm not mistaken. And so supposedly the Beatles decided that they didn't want to risk their fame and they want to keep the Beatles going. So what they did is immediately found a double to replace Paul McCartney. And this guy he named, or he was named William Campbell. They dubbed him Billy Shears, and they mentioned him in a song or two. And supposedly he was a Paul McCartney lookalike, and you could not tell the difference. He played the bass left-handed, he looked exactly like Paul, he sounded like Paul. And so therefore they could keep up the ruse that Paul McCartney was still alive. But of course, John Lennon being the kind of cheeky jokester that he was, decided he wanted he just couldn't keep it to himself. And so he and the other Beatles decided to plant clues to the record albums in the songs and on the covers. And it began supposedly with Sgt. Pepper. That was the first album that came out after Paul's demise. And so you have Paul McCartney again, like I said, singled out in different ways. You have the flowers on the front. The name Beatles is spelled out in the flowers. So is that like a grave grave site or something? But then if you squint and you look at the word Beatles, it also says tall with a question mark. And you look at the bass drum that's in the center of the Sgt. Pepper album cover, and it there's something written on the drum, and if you split it in half with a mirror, it says one. He died. And on the back, his back is facing the camera. Why is Paul singled it up? Is that because he's trying to hide his face? He's not so confident about the way he looks yet, so he's not sure he should show his face. So he's turned to this back facing the camera. If you open the album cover up, you see Paul sitting on the ground, or Paul in quotation marks, the fake Paul. And he has a little patch on his shoulder, and it says OPD officially pronounced dead. And then you of course Magical Mystery Tour is the next album, and you have even more clues on there. You have the you have a booklet inside, 24 pages. And one of the scenes, there's there's scenes from the movie that they made. A little magical mystery tour film, TV film. There's one scene where there's two tables and it looks like a crucifix. So there's the religious symbolism. There's Paul McCartney or the fake Paul McCartney, the devil, sitting behind a desk, and there's a sign on it that says, I was. Not I am, I was. There's the walrus song in there, I am the walrus. Who is the walrus? John Lennon tells us on the next album on the white album, Last Onion, the walrus was tall. What is significant about the walrus? The walrus is a symbol of death in the Icelandic culture or the Eskimo culture. I could go on and on. In my book, in the one of the appendixes, I have 140 clues listed and they're annotated clues, so I go into detail about what the people believed back then, but then I follow it up in most cases with a comment on why it's not successful. It was it's fun, believe it or not. I still get chills. I listen to some of these songs and I think about how it relates to Paul is Dead, and it gives me chills, so I can see why these kids did this. It was exciting. It was a parlor game. This is before video games and before the internet, and before streaming and TV. These kids would sit around smoking dope and drinking beer and they'd play this game, this Paul is Dead game. It was fun. That's pretty much what it comes down to. It was fun. It was a mystery to be to be solved, to be uncovered.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

What are some of those songs that still give you chills and why?

SPEAKER_02 16:51

Oh, definitely I am the walrus. I remember the first time that I was working on this book and I started doing the clues. I started listening to the songs one by one. This is back in 1988, 10. I was a young kid at 26 years old. And I was sitting there in my apartment, and I was listening to songs, and when I got to I'm the Walrus, it was nighttime. So it was darkest. And I'm listening to it. And I just got this chill on a science. What if he really is dead? What if they really did put the clues in the record albums? I almost convinced myself that it could be true. But of course, in the morning light, Homerheads prevailed, and I was back to my cynical self with a cynical eye catch and the whole thing. But there are moments, and and still I'm fascinated by the fact that Paul does seem to be singled out and they do joke about things in the songs. They did put backwards things in the songs. And the things that aren't backwards, sometimes they sound backwards. Especially on the White Um. There's so much stray audio on the White Elbum. There's all kinds of interstitial things recorded. This what is the song?

SPEAKER_01 18:05

There's so many songs I get Revolution 9, Glass Onion, for sure. That's the title itself has a secondary meaning as one of the as the holders on the casket, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:16

Glass Onion, the handle on the casket. But I was thinking about the in in-between song things. I'm sorry. I'm blanking right now.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

And then, of course, Day in the Life. You can never take that one apart too much.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

Well, Day in the Life. There's so many songs about car crashes and cars in general. There's songs about death and car crashes throughout the catalog, Beatles catalog. It's fascinating. I don't know if they did that on purpose. It just happens to be the fact. Paul died in a car crash, and look at all these songs about cars. And car crashes. You were in a car crash and you lost your hair. What's that about? That's the Ringo song. Don't pass me by. What is that about? Baby You Can Drive My Car? Good morning. It had the car crash happened in the morning, and John Lennon says, now you're in gear. Nothing to do to save his life.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Do you think the Beatles latched onto this and just ran with it?

SPEAKER_02 19:16

That's one theory. One theory is that the Beatles decided Paul's not dead, but let's just go ahead and run with this and see how far we can take it. And the thing is, I don't think that's really true. I don't think they they embraced this at all. I think what happened was it was a wild coincidence that a lot of this stuff happened. And Paul at that time was getting fed up with I think being in the limelight. He even said that himself. And he it coincided when this rumor really rose to prominence in October. Right now, as we're speaking in October, so it is the anniversary, at this around this time, he was thinking about holidays. He's a family guy. The Beatles had just finished Abbey Road. They had a long, hot summer working on the album, and he just wanted to take it easy. He just got married to Linda and he bought a farm up in Scotland and he wanted to relax and get ready for the holidays. And drop out of the limelight and not deal with the Beatles anymore. There he is, and these people are saying, Hey Paul, can you come into town? Can you come into London and debunk this? Can you get in front of the cameras and tell the press that you're not dead? Paul says, Screw it. I'm not gonna do that. I'm with Linda right now. I'm just don't worry about it. It'll fade. That's what he said. Of course it didn't fade. It got worse and worse. And snowballed, and finally he did get in front of the camera, but I'm not gonna give too much away. You'll read about it in the book. What's different about this new edition? Most of it, the bulk of it is what I I came out with the book in 1994, and I wasn't happy with a lot of it because the internet had just come into being, and I thought there was a lot more to say about this. And so I revamped the book ten years later in 2004. And this book is pretty much that book. I did update it, of course, and mentioned a few people that have passed on, including Russ Gidd, who's no longer with us. I mentioned also that Fred Labor, who went on to fame. If you've ever heard of the band Riders in the Sky, they're pretty well known, but they certainly are even better known since 2004. They won some Grammys. Grammys for their work on a couple of films, Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc. And so I mentioned that in this new edition. It has a brand new cover, it's a beautiful cover, and I have a new afterword. It's about four pages long, and I go into a lot of details, updates in that afterword, and also some thoughts that I have. 30 years on since I started this whole project. I can't believe I was a kid. I was in my twenties when I came up with this, when I decided I was gonna write this, and it's kind of stayed with me all these years. People are always asked to be from an update book. And so I figured, okay, it's 2025, I'll go ahead and do it now. But this is it. I'm not gonna do it anymore.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

And then came a plethora of novelty tunes.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

There were all the novelty songs that came out. Depending on how you count, it's either four or five novelty songs. And then one of them was So Long Paul, which was actually written by Jose Feliciano, written and performed. Although he used the pseudonym, he called himself Worbly Finster. So long, Paul, we hate to see you go. So long, Paul, after making all that dough. And then the other one is that I love is we're all Paul Bearers. And that was written, that was done by Zacharias and the treaty. And the guy that who was Zacharias actually contacted me. He got a copy of the book after it came out in 2004. And it's a guy named Zach Van Arsdale. And he's a pretty well-known songwriter. He's had songs covered by the cream of the crop of I can't even remember all the people that have done his songs. And he's was a performer himself. You could probably look him up. And what was pretty cool though is I talked to him. I said, hey, I always wanted to do a video of that song. And he's just have at it. So if you go on YouTube and you go and look up where all Paul Bearers, you'll see a video that I created about 15 years ago. That was with his blessing. It's not real, it's not real complicated. I'm an editor and I use really I used really high highfalutin equipment when I worked in TV. But for this, I was using the YouTube tools and the tools I had online. They're pretty rudimentary. And so it's not real flashy or anything, but it's fun. And I found a lot of really cool pictures to hook up. So that's on YouTube. If anybody wants to see that, I'll probably put a link on my website, on my Facebook page, rather, if you ever want to see it.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Coming back to the Michigan connection, there is that story of Terry Knight's St. Paul and what it was and what it became.

SPEAKER_02 24:17

We were mentioning, we were talking about the novelty songs, and there are really only four novelty songs, but some people throw in Terry Knight's St. Paul as the fifth novelty song. But he did not write that as a novelty song for Paul is Dead, supposedly. He wrote it because he was a musician himself. He was in Terry Knight in the Pack, who had a song, I Who Have Nothing, I believe was their hit. It was a cover of a Ben E. King song or something like that. It was a minor hit. It was they probably had a few more hits regionally because there were a Detroit band, Detroit, Michigan band. And that's back in the old days. You could have a regional hit. It wasn't all national. You could have a hit in LA that people in Pennsylvania would never hear. I remember the song Signs by the Five-Man Electrical Band. I never heard that growing up, but it's supposedly in the West Coast huge song. And that's true with Terry Knight and the pack. They had a lot of regional minor hits in Detroit. But despite all that, they didn't really take off. And so they broke up the band and Terry Knight became a solo artist. And he decided he that was right when Apple Records was starting, but the Beatles were starting their own records label. And so he jetted over to London and decided he was going to apply to pitch himself to be on Apple. If it worked for James Taylor, why wouldn't it work for Terry Knight, right? So he goes over there and he sees what's going on at Apple, and he thinks that to him, Paul McCartney's holding the whole thing together. That was what he his impression when he wrote over there. So he thought that Paul was a saint because he was keeping the Beatles together. That was how he saw things. So when he came back, basically went he got signed to Capitol Records for a limited contract, a couple of singles. So his first single was Saint Paul. And it was a song about Paul McCartney. Why not? And uh it doesn't say he's dead, but what is a Saint? Saint is dead, isn't he? Usually people get sanded after they're dead. So people drew conclusions. That song came out before Paul was declared dead. So therefore, maybe that started the rumor.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

And there's another little interesting piece in that for some reason the lyrics and music to that song is published by Macklin, which is Lennon and McCartney's publishing company.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

Lennon and McCartney's Publishing Company. They actually own it. If you go to the catalog, you will find that song St. Paul is part of the Macklin music catalog. I'm not sure it is anymore. Maybe it's not. I have not checked it in 20 years, but 20 years ago it was. And there are a lot of explanations for that. Some people say that that was because the Beatles had something to do with it, and they put a Terry Knight up to it and said, Hey Terry, we want you to write this song about Paul because we're going to start this rumor. And that was the that was what some people believed, and they believe it to this day. But another explanation might be because the song contains the music to Hey Jude at the end. There's a coda to the song, Hey Paul. And so the Beatles supposedly sued him or sued the label and got them to change the publishing from storybook music, which was Terry Knight's publishing company, and they assumed the control of publishing because of that unauthorized use of Hey Jude in the Dakota of the song.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Every October, I get email asking about this story, and I continuously refer them to your book as the real definitive and most accessible deep dive into what happened, the clues, what might have been behind it. Why do you think this thing endures?

SPEAKER_02 28:28

Probably for the same reason that it fascinated me.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

The book is Turn Me On Dead Man: The Beatles and the Paul McCartney Death Hoax by our special guest, its author, Andrew Reeve. Available wherever cool books are sold.

SPEAKER_00 28:45

In conversation with Terry Shepard, it's a copyrighted presentation. All rights reserved. I'm Lisa Davis. Join Terry Shepard next time in conversation.