"Hey, Hey We're The Beatles". Or - Why 'Paul Is Dead' Is Not A Conspiracy Theory Too Far
Was Paul McCartney killed in car crash in 1966 - perhaps even ritually murdered with a silver hammer - and replaced with a doppelganger?
Well it’s an interesting theory. But not one to which five or ten years ago I would have given much credence. It would have required me to believe in something which at the time I would have considered impossible: that the world was run by a Predator Class so powerful, controlling and malign that they were capable of micromanaging every last detail of popular culture for their nefarious ends.
Heaven knows what I would have thought of this essay by Patrick O'Carroll (see link at base of article) - https://jamesperloff.net/hey-hey-were-the-beatles/ - which makes the case that the Beatles - like the Stones - were never about innocent entertainment but were in fact as manufactured and inauthentic as The Monkees, a psyop designed to promote anti-family-values (drugs, sex, alienation) and engender societal fragmentation by deepening the generational divide.
I cannot vouch for any of the claims made. Most of them derive from the deep-dive research done by Mike Williams - aka Sage of Quay, who has dedicated his life to exposing the inconsistencies in the official Beatles narrative: everything from the changing physiognomy of Paul McCartney to numerological symbolism to the band’s implausibly prolific (and varied) output.
As I often say about so-called conspiracy theories, there is rarely a single killer fact that suddenly turns unbelievers into believers by sheer weight of its stunning logic. Different people find different ways in, depending on their predilections. For example, with the ‘moon landings’ what finally convinced me to be a sceptic was not the flag shadows (or any of the other photographic evidence), nor the technical/scientific detail about fuel loads and the Van Allen belt, but simply listening to the testimony of the ‘astronauts’ talking about their experiences. Wherever these shifty, evasive men had been, it clearly wasn’t the moon’s surface.
It’s the same with the Beatles. Some people - women especially I find - claim to be able to see clear differences between the face of young Paul McCartney and that of the man who allegedly replaced him. Some people are even into the gematria stuff, which I find incomprehensible. Personally, what raises my suspicions is not just the unfeasible vastness of their catalogue but more puzzingly its lack of a distinctive idiom. Led Zeppelin always sound like Led Zeppelin; Pink Floyd always like Pink Floyd; Oasis always like the Beatles. But I do not believe, even if we are to accept the notion that two young men from Liverpool were more preternaturally talented than any songwriters who have ever lived, that Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, When I’m Sixty-Four, Yesterday, A Day In The Life, and Strawberry Fields were all composed by the same duo. If you disagree, I suggest first you ask yourself: Is this what my gut tells me or is it this just what I’ve been programmed to think via the cunning ruse of having heard all these songs packaged on albums bearing the Beatles brand?’
Even among groups who consider themselves to be Awake, I notice there’s a lot more resistance to ‘conspiracy theories’ about the Beatles than there is to ones about, say, 9/11 or the moon landings. The argument often made is that even if some of it is true, it’s too niche, too trivial to merit wasting our time on when there are so many more important battles out there for us to fight.
But there’s some flawed logic there. Suppose the Beatles/Tavistock Institution theory is correct then it’s a far, far bigger deal than either the faked moon landings or 9/11. It makes almost everyone who was a teenager from the 1960s onwards the potential victim of an MK-Ultra-style experiment on a global scale to mess with their heads, turn them on to casual sex and wanton drug use, alienate them from their parents, and embrace the New Age. It means the Conspiracy is bigger, much bigger - and more insidious, more personal - than we might ever have dreamed in our worst nightmares.
I think that’s one reason why ‘Paul is dead’ etc get such pushback, even from avowed conspiracy theorists. The Beatles are so inextricably bound with our lives (and designedly so, I’d argue) that to have them taken away from us is like losing a piece of ourselves. One of the first songs I remember loving, for example, was Octopus’s Garden. Abbey Road had just come out, my Dad used to play it on his Eight-track in the Jensen, and I, being four years old, just couldn’t get enough of that catchy song about horticultural cephalopods. The line about ‘oh what joy for every girl and boy,’ made me feel as if the whole song had been written me for personally.
Most of us, I’m sure, have similar stories. Even if you ‘never liked the Beatles’ (as lots of people like to boast), you won’t possibly have been able to escape their cultural influence, be it the yoga, sitars and meditation they imported from their stint in India with the Maharishi, or Jane Asher’s cakes - early precursor to Bake Off - or the young female fans screaming to the point where they wet themselves or your sheer irritation at how annoying Imagine is or how inept the lyrics to Live and Let Die are. The Beatles were like a virus, inserted into our software, which has been playing havoc with our system ever since.
But rather than admit this possibility, many of us go into denial mode. The “why are you bothering me with this trivia when there are so many more important issues to consider?” is one of the standard defensive responses. Another is to make a big deal about the elements of Sage of Quay’s research you find least compelling - “Well he looks like the same person to me!” “I don’t buy into all that numerology bollocks” “Yes they could have written that many songs in that short a period.” - and ignore the accumulated weight of evidence that forms the whole picture.
“I don’t buy into conspiracy theories where I can’t see all the receipts” someone boasted on my Telegram channel, as if this statement alone consigned ‘Paul is dead’ to oblivion. But in a conspiracy, almost by definition, the evidence is hidden behind layers of deception. So, of course, you’re not going to find videos of Paul’s replacement confessing: “I admit I’m a fake.” About the best you’re going to get, which is more or less what we’ve got, is very rare instances, caught on camera, where people who would have known the original Paul - like George Harrison’s widow - address the imposter as ‘Billy’ (as in Billy Shears or William Shepherd).
Individually, the pieces of ‘proof’ that the Beatles were a Tavistock Institute psyop seem quite flimsy. (Though I do love the outtake where The Snowman composer Howard Goodall asks George Martin some informed questions about the degree to which he wrote the Beatles songs for them and Martin gives him the Masonic signal that means ‘shut up this instant!’). But when added up, they form a case too compelling to be easily dismissed.
Yet dismiss it, still, a significant proportion of Awake people do. And they do so with the kind of vehemence, indignation and righteous anger we’ve come to expect from Normies whenever they have their paradigm challenged, but which seems quite surprising when expressed by the sort of Awake types normally quite comfortable with the notion that the world is a massive deception.
I understand the strength of that emotional response: for reasons I’ve outlined above. What I don’t get is the logical capitulation. It’s like this: you accept that the world is run by a Cabal evil and skilled enough to fake the moon landings, assassinate a president in broad daylight, murder nearly 3,000 Americans in central New York in order to launch a ‘War on Terror’ which will kill many hundreds of thousands more innocents while enriching their mates in the arms and oil industries, and invent and promote two world wars which killed still millions more; and yet you maintain that this same Cabal would draw the line at creating a number of fake popular music ensembles in order to reshape popular culture?
What I’d like to ask to these Beatles-conspiracy-deniers is: what kind of Normie-tastic, self-delusional planet are you living on? It’s not as though - thanks to Dave McGowan’s superb research in Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon; research, mark you that probably cost him his life - we don’t have chapter and verse on a very similar, US-based project to destroy American Christian family values and counter the anti-war movement by weaponising the West Coast sound and flooding the market with LSD and hippie values.
We KNOW that the Doors, the Byrds, Frank Zappa, Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Mamas and the Papas et al were mostly from intelligence or military backgrounds, mostly couldn’t play their instruments, had most of their records made by session musicians (‘The Wrecking Crew’), were so useless live that the only way they got away with it was because their audiences were too high to notice, that the whole operation was orchestrated by the three-letter agencies and seasoned with a grotesque infusion of Satanic ritual (the Manson family et al) and paedophilia.
If They could pull off this trick with the (alleged) creators of Eight Miles High, Monday Monday, and Come On Baby Light My Fire, it hardly seems beyond the bounds of credibility that They might have done something similar with The Beatles and The Stones.
I’m not saying for absolute certain that They did. What I am saying is that the case has sufficient merit not to be dismissed as “one of those discredited, crazy theories put out to discredit the Awake community.” Those who stridently make such an assertion really need to pause for a moment and remember the days when they were similarly dismissive about the 9/11 ‘conspiracy theory’, the Kennedy ‘conspiracy theory’ and the fake moon landings ‘conspiracy theory.’ You were wrong, then, about those. What makes you so sure you aren’t wrong now about ‘Paul is dead’?