R.I.P. by Mark Owens

level of close examination as radio DJs were consulted for technical expertise on the Nightly R.I.P. News and teenagers ran their turntables backwards, listening intently on headphones Notes on the Paul McCartney Shadow Canon for evidence of secret messages. How else to by Mark Owens interpret this momentary crisis if not as an episode of McLuhanite media panic, in which the P.I.D. counterculture’s questioning of dominant power structures and the air of conspiracy around the “Paul is dead.” So claimed the rumors that assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther began circulating in September 1969, that Paul King, Jr. collided with a general acknowledgment McCartney of the Beatles had been killed in of a new, globalized media landscape? As the an automobile accident in November 1966 and first fully mediated rock ‘n’ roll band—endlessly replaced by “Billy Shears,” a talented impostor televised, recorded, photographed, and filmed— look-a-like made to resemble McCartney with the the Beatles, and particularly Paul, “the cute aid of plastic surgery.1 Clues to the conspiracy, Beatle,” provided an ideal screen on which to so the story went, were to be found hidden in project this matrix of cultural anxieties. the album artwork, song lyrics, and back-masked Certainly, the timing couldn’t have been recordings on the Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery better. Dated to late 1966, Paul’s supposed Tour, White Album, and Abbey Road LPs. “death” coincided closely with the publication Originally limited to the underground press and of Roland Barthes’ essay, “Death of the Author,” college newspapers, the rumors gained traction which first appeared in the Minimalism issue when an anonymous caller to DJ Russ Gibb’s of Aspen magazine in the Fall of 1967, just a radio show on WKNR-FM in Detroit identified few months after the release of Sgt. Pepper, only as “Tom” spelled out the death clues on air. the first purported post-Paul release by the Soon, national news outlets picked up on the Beatles, showcasing an entirely new look and story, and a brief period of public hysteria took musical direction for the band, packaged in hold, prompting LIFE Magazine to send a crew a deluxe gatefold sleeve designed by Peter to Scotland to track down McCartney, who was Blake. It was in the similar context of the literal living in seclusion on his private farm. “Paul multimedia experience of Aspen, a boxed edition is still with us,” announced the cover of the designed by Brian O’Doherty that included November 7, 1969 issue, featuring a black-and- essays, phonograph records, and text pieces, white photograph of McCartney and his family that English readers first encountered Barthes’ huddled together in the windswept Scottish classic argument for the autonomy of writing countryside.2 Inside, an article titled “The and the constitution of the text by the reader. Magical McCartney Mystery” systematically laid “[A] text is made of multiple writings, drawn out the supposed evidence, while in a sidebar from many cultures and entering into mutual McCartney himself succinctly dismissed the relations of dialogue, parody, contestation,” entire affair, stating, “It is all bloody stupid.” Barthes explained, “but there is one place where While perhaps no more than a blip on the this multiplicity is focused and that place is the larger cultural radar, the Paul Is Dead hoax reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.”3 remains a watershed moment for the history By activating the “readers” of the Beatles albums of design and media culture more generally. and giving them agency to decipher the “text,” Never before had the general public paid such the Paul Is Dead phenomenon would appear close attention to the materials and techniques to bear out Barthes’ claims on a wider socio- of designed communications, nor found them cultural level. the subject of such widespread discussion and Nevertheless, many of the Paul Is Dead debate. Legions of Beatles fans poured over the rumors resisted the more radical implications album artwork, viewing typography in mirrors, of Barthes’ argument. For, the assumption, scrutinizing the occult symbolism of minute repeated again and again, was that the original graphic details, and unpacking the significance Paul McCartney had been replaced, and that of the cropping, reproduction, and placement the death clues had been purposefully planted of photographs. So too, the technology of sound by the surviving Beatles as a way of exposing recording was subjected to an unprecedented their unwilling complicity in a conspiracy 121 orchestrated by shadowy government radical at the time, Svenonius’ argument has and corporate interests. Throughout, the largely been vindicated over the course of the “authorship” of the Beatles records and past decade. the singularity of the flesh-and-blood Paul Recent books like The Unknown Paul McCartney were never really in question. McCartney (2002) and Abbey Road studio The LIFE Magazine article, with its half- engineer Geoff Emerick’s memoir, Here, There serious overview of the clues and reassuring and Everywhere (2007) have gone a long way cover headline, aimed to quell any doubt. toward repairing Paul’s tarnished reputation, Even McCartney’s rebuttal seemed definitive: illuminating his early engagement with the “Can you spread it around that I am just an musical avant-garde and the importance of his ordinary person and I want to live in peace?”4 contribution to the Beatles, particularly in the Nevertheless, more than forty years on, the Paul studio.6 Alongside the inevitable passages of Is Dead rumors have never really gone away, hagiography what emerges from these narratives having experienced a temporary resurgence is a portrait of Paul both as an accomplished with the tragic murder of John Lennon in 1980 songwriter and as an inventive, groundbreaking and a renewed life on the Internet in recent producer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist. years. Beneath the occasional “Paul is dead” From the beginning, Emerick explains, Paul was joke on David Letterman or Saturday Night the most engaged in the technical aspects of Live persists a degree of uneasy skepticism, recording, often buddying-up to the engineers an unincorporated kernel of resistance and a at Abbey Road and working closely with George feeling that something about Paul McCartney Martin on instrumentation and arrangements. eludes full comprehension. In what follows I In this sense, Paul’s contribution to the Beatles, want to suggest that we might begin to describe especially beginning with Sgt. Pepper, exceeds this feeling and perhaps even give it a name. the normal kinds of agency one might attribute to membership in a rock’n’roll band: the writing R.P.M. of a given song, the playing of a particular instrument, or the contribution of a specific In a transcript of a lecture published under line of verse, guitar riff, bassline, or drum fill. the title, “R.P.M. The Movement to ‘Reconsider Instead, McCartney’s influence iseverywhere . Paul McCartney,’” Ian Svenonius has made a In order to take the full measure of this excess compelling case for Paul’s status as the more we thus need to look beyond the orthodox avant-garde Beatle.5 Against the conventional touchstones and expected “masterpieces” to a wisdom that holds John Lennon to be the most group of lesser-known musical artifacts we might “artistic,” “political,” and “radical” member of call “The Paul McCartney Shadow Canon.” the Fab Four, Svenonius traces many of the Beatles’ most important innovations to the P.I.A. direct influence of McCartney: theSgt. Pepper “concept album,” the surrealist and verité A belated footnote to the Paul Is Dead mystery experiments of the Magical Mystery Tour and arrived in 1970 with the release of the self-titled Let It Be films, the bands’ first public admission debut LP by Emitt Rhodes, a singer-songwriter of LSD use, and the vaudevillian, music hall from Los Angeles who had enjoyed moderate aesthetic that spawned psychedelia and glam, to success in the late 1960s fronting a band called name just a few. Lennon, meanwhile, has been The Merry Go Round. Coming hard on the lionized for his selfish post-breakup rejection heels of the break-up of the Beatles and almost of his former bandmates (“I don’t believe in simultaneous with McCartney’s self-titled Bealtes, I just believe in me.”) and self-conscious debut LP, the release of Emmit Rhodes was pose as the rebellious outsider, impulses that accompanied by widespread speculation. Whose Svenonius sees as ultimately complicit with voice was this? Written, performed, and recorded capitalist imperatives. Endlessly scapegoated entirely by Rhodes in his home studio in the L.A. as “lightweight,” Paul’s penchant for melody suburb of Hawthorne, by any measure the twelve and showmanship actually facilitated a far- song album is a pop masterpiece, with distinct reaching conceptual project, one that would echoes of McCartney’s unmistakable melody and seek to fashion the Beatles into the world’s first vocal style. In a radio interview by telephone “rock’n’roll Gesamtkunstwerk.” Considered on The Barry Richards Show shortly after the 122 album’s release, Rhodes was asked bluntly, to diminish his accomplishment, then, it is worth “Who are you?” as Richards went on to pose the noting that there are precedents for the kinds question, “Has anybody out of Los Angeles ever of echo effects found on Emitt Rhodes. The come up with the idea that it’s a long-lost Beatles Beatles themselves sometimes wrote songs to album? … There are a lot of record stores around be recorded by other musicians, and with the here, people who work in the record stores say founding of Apple Records in 1968 the band that there are clues on the album to the Beatles, began to recruit new recording artists for the to McCartney and the Beatles and things.”7 label, often producing and writing material for Rhodes denied any connection, going on to them.

Load more