Paul Isn't Dead

Forty years ago this week a rumor raced around the world that Paul McCartney was dead. He was 27. The main evidence, apparently, was the message heard by teenage fans who played Revolution 9 backwards. McCartney had also been photographed walking ominously barefoot on the cover of Abbey Road, and there was that hand of benediction over his head on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. How could anybody doubt it?

The rumor began in September with an article in a student newspaper at Duke University. Then on October 12, a listener called WKNR FM in Detroit, announcing that "Paul is dead", and supplying elaborate evidence, including the phrase "Turn me on, Dead Man" on Revolution 9. Two days later an article spelling out more details appeared at the University of Michigan. On the 21st, an overnight disc jockey discussed it incoherently and at length on WABC in New York. Celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey hosted an hour-long television program exploring the evidence, but nobody went to the effort to pick up the phone and call McCartney. If Paul wasn't dead, though, the Beatles were. The band had broken up, and Paul verified the fact in an October 24th magazine interview. The interview appeared in LIFE magazine. Paul McCartney appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

(I remember hearing this rumor, just as I remember hearing about the Kennedy assassination and the murders committed by the Manson Family, on the school bus.)

Paul Meets George

In September 1954, 12 year-old Paul McCartney met 11 year-old George Harrison on a Liverpool bus. A Book of Ages is full of crossed paths and lucky meetings. John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono at a gallery opening when he was 26; Elvis meeting the Beatles when he was 30 (he didn't know their names and couldn't tell them apart). Elvis meeting President Nixon. Che Guevara meeting Castro, Gertrude Stein meeting Alice B. Toklas, Lillian Hellman meeting Dashiell Hammett, J. D. Salinger meeting Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain meeting Sigmund Freud, Freud meeting Jung, Freud meeting Salvador Dali, Lincoln meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, T. S. Eliot meeting Groucho Marx, Charles Lindbergh meeting Hitler. Sylvia Plath meeting Ted Hughes at a party in Cambridge; she bit his cheek till it bled. Rodgers meeting Hammerstein, Astaire meeting Rogers, Rolls meeting Royce. When partners meet there is an electric spark. It can happen anywhere, at any age.

Elvis and the Beatles

On August 27, 1965 Elvis Presley received a visit from the Beatles at Graceland. Because he couldn’t tell them apart and didn’t know their names he addressed each of them individually as “Beatle.”

At age 30, Elvis was the elder statesman of Rock 'n' Roll, the King, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Maharishi of Pop. One pictures the youngsters kissing the hem of his garment and only half ironically. Elvis appears nine times in A Book of Ages, John and Paul several times each.