Where Did All The Pauls Go?

When you start researching Paul McCartney's disappearance in 1966, you assume there was Paul and then there was his one replacement who shows up in November, 1966.  It's a little unnerving at first as you delve into the mystery and find that there were several other Pauls who were photographed at various times from 1963-1966.

One was a Paul who appeared on the Beatles' 1966 tour,  (see photo on right.)

And you start wondering, what happened to these "other Pauls"? 
I was looking for photos of Paul in 1966 and I found a photo of what looks like the "Paul" on the right.
Check out the photo at:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_first_rays/5468694697/

This photo is captioned Paul McCartney 1969.  Not our Paul but a Paul.

Unforgettable

A cd was released in March, 2011 by the His Master's Choice label--HMC 011--that contains parts of Paul's Christmas gift to the other Beatles that Paul recorded in November, 1965.  Paul reportedly had four acetate records made of the tape he recorded:  three were for the other Beatles and one record was supposed to have gone to Jane Asher.
The His Master's Choice rerecording is taken from a tape of Paul and John's "recovered from the Lennon archives."  The cd is called Unforgettable. 
Paul and John used the tape to record song demos and John recorded over Paul's gift recording (see my last post about John's excerpt from Tales of Mrs. Tigglywinkle.)
The liner notes for the Unforgettable cd say that Paul was imitating a disc jockey and the cd had what survived of the original record--5 songs and Paul's introduction to them.
The songs give an idea of Paul's thinking at the end of 1965.

The songs are:
     1.)  Someone Ain't Right, cowritten by Doris Payne (a pen name for the singer Doris Troy.  More about her later.) and Gregory Carroll.  The song Paul played on the tape was Peter and Gordon's recording for their 1965 album, Hurtin' 'n' Lovin'.
     2.)  I Get Around, the Beach Boys' record.
     3.)  Don't Be Cruel, by Elvis Presley
     4.)  ( Love is Like a) Heat Wave, by Martha and the Vandellas
     5.)  Down Home Girl, by The Rolling Stones.

The lyrics of Someone Ain't Right describes Paul's relationship with Jane (?).  It talks about how the girl is avoiding him and how she had better make up her mind to be his.  The interesting part of the song is the lyrics that suggest that they weren't together "physically":
          Don't think you're clever
          Because you never
          Oooooo me, ee.
Paul was supposed to have had a romantic relationship with Jane.  So the song suggests that wasn't the case.

The I Get Around lyrics are interesting because they talk about how Paul is tiring of his current situation and how The Beatles are threatened:
          I'm gettin' bugged driving up and down the same old strip,
          I gotta finda new place where the kids are hip.
                          ---And---
          My buddies and me are getting real well known;
          Yeah, the bad guys know us and they leave us alone.

The Don't Be Cruel lyrics are similar in tone to the Someone Ain't Right lyrics:
          You know I can be found
          Sitting home all alone.
          If you can't come around,
          At least please telephone.

The Heat Wave lyrics describe a love relationship, but with Paul it was also talking about other things that were happening to him:
          Sometimes I stare in space
          Tears all over my face.
          I can't explain it, don't understand it:
          I ain't never felt like this before.
          But that doesn't mean it has me amazed,
          I don't know what to do, my head's in a haze,

But the last song--Down Home Girl--is the most interesting.  The lyrics talk about a girl whose perfume smells like turnips and kisses taste like pork and beans.  Is that Jane Asher?  The song describes a girl who dances in clubs:
          Everytime you monkey [note: a 1960's dance] girl
          You take my breath away.
But the most unusual lines are:
          I'm gonna take you back to New Orleans
          Down in Dixieland
                 --And--
          I can tell by your giant step
          You been walkin' through cotton fields . . . [!]
This is clearly not Jane Asher.  The song suggests that she was a black girl.  Who was she? 
It could have been Doris Troy.  She wasn't a Southerner but she was an American.  She cowrote and sang the 1963 pop hit, Just One Look.  She first visited England in 1965 where she sang back up vocals to Dusty Springfield's song, In The Middle of Nowhere.  (Remember The Beatles' Nowhere Man?  I connected the song with the contents of a play I think was used to menace Paul. See my post of April 23, 2011.) Troy moved to England in 1966 (or 1969, depending on the source) and made a career of singing background for The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Dusty Springfield and others.  She also was signed to Apple records by George Harrison in 1969, which suggests she had a past connection with The Beatles. 
But I'm thinking the black woman Paul apparently had a relationship with had a stronger personality than Troy because of Paul's 1966 interview with journalist Maureen Cleave where speaking of America he said,  "And it's a lousy country where anyone who is black is made to seem a dirty n*gger.  There is a statue of a good Negro duffing his hat and being polite in the gutter.  I saw a picture of it."  Paul might have been wanting to sour the future of the replacement Beatles (he knew he was leaving the group and that the "powers that be" had plans to keep the group going with look-alikes), but I also think his statement sounds like a man in love who was trying to impress the woman he was in love with. 
There's a possibility the black woman was Madeline Bell.  She is a soul/r and b singer from New Jersey who toured England and the rest of Europe in 1962 and 1963 in the Langston Hughes' play, Black Nativity.  She stayed in England after the close of the play and worked singing back-up gigs.  With Doris Troy, she sang back-up to In The Middle of Nowhere.  She became a close friend of Dusty Springfield and lived with her in several flats in 1965 and 1966.  It's interesting that in the 1966 French film that I think was about Paul--Masculin Feminin--the Paul character's love interest is a singer named Madeleine.  Madeleine in the film might be a composite of Ms. Bell and a (yet to be identified) French ye-ye singer that Paul was apparently in love with.  Also suggesting a connection, Martha Reeves of Martha and the Vandellas was a close friend of Dusty Springfield.  (Springfield was credited (as they say) with helping popularize Motown record music in England when she convinced the producers of Ready, Steady, Go, the British TV music show she hosted, to film a special featuring Motown music.  She met Martha Reeves on the special and sang with her.)  So there are two direct connections in Paul's choice of songs--Doris Troy and Martha Reeves--and the possible indirect connection of Madeline Bell.

And, again, this opens up a new avenue to explore in finding out what happened to Paul. 
        
         



  

Lucy

The name Lucy (or the variant, Lucie) is mentioned by Paul, John and replacement John [the man who replaced John Lennon beginning in 1966] from 1965-on:

1965:  On the tape that had Paul's Christmas gift recording for the other Beatles (called Unforgettable), John recorded over it with a reading from children's author Beatrix Potter's book, The Tale of Mrs. Tigglywinkle which is about a little girl named Lucie who loses handkerchiefs and a pinafore and goes looking for them.  (A passage from the book):  "Lucie climbed upon the stile [a set of steps for passing over a fence or wall] and looked up the hill behind Little-town - a hill that goes up-up into the clouds as though it has no top!"


1966:  Paul's quote from John Micheline's short story, "In the Bronx":  "Lucy had no panties on." [Mispelled as "Lucie" in the article.]  The boy in the short story goes to a playground and finds Lucy swinging on a swing.  The air pushes her dress aside and she has no underwear underneath.  He describes her as a wild girl.  The boy takes her to a park and kisses her.  She pulls away from him and tells him she will tell her boyfriend that the boy raped her.  The next day, the boyfriend finds the boy and beats him up.

1967:  Replacement John's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds about someone on an LSD trip and a girl named Lucy who appears and disappears throughout the experience.

1973:  Replacement John's Bring on the Lucie (Freda People) which was supposed to be an anti-war song but has more personally-directed lyrics like:
     [spoken word intro]:  Alright boys, over the hill!  .  .  .
     We don't care what flag you're waving;
     We don't even want to know your name.
     We don't care where you're from or where you're going;
     All we know is that you came.
     You're making all our decisions .  .  .   [This passage suggests that the B/Featles were not fully aware of who was behind the things happening to them; akin to Faul's Maybe I'm Amazed's lyric:  "Maybe I'm a man, maybe I'm a lonely man who's in the middle of something that he doesn't really understand."]
     Well, we were caught with our hands in the air .  .  .
     We understand your paranoia,
     But we don't want to play your game.

It's difficult to speculate how all the references connect, but it appears that Paul met a girl--or thought he did when he was in a hallucinatory state--possibly in a park--and something happened between them.  An incident--or virtual incident--that could have been used against Paul.
   

Paul Was Trying To Tell Us Something (continued)

In the last post I quoted from a short story--"In The Bronx"--that Paul said he was reading when he was interviewed by journalist Maureen Cleave for an article she was writing.  The paragraph in the short story after the one I quoted I think is also indicative of Paul's state of mind at the time:

      "I walked wobbly with my head limp and I did not know why, but I walked and there was fear in me.  I did not know what was good or bad.  I did not know my mother, my brother, or my father.  No one seemed to be real.  Everyone seemed to be acting a part in a play.  I did not understand the reason why life must be such a mystery."

In the short story, it was the boy's state of mind.  For Paul, I believe it was a coerced state of mind.

Paul Was Trying To Tell Us Something

Maureen Cleave, a British journalist and friend of The Beatles, interviewed each of them starting in March, 1966 for The London Evening Standard newspaper.  Near the beginning of the article she wrote:
    

"This interesting and complicated young man arrived in the restaurant for lunch with a book he had just bought.  A costly and significant-looking paperback entitled In The Bronx and Other Stories [story collection by Jack Micheline.]  He opened it at random, composed his features and, in a solemn voice, began to read it aloud:  'Lucie (sic) had no panties on . . .'"

I read the short story and, again, during this critical time period I think Paul was trying to clue people into what was happening in his life.  The Lucy quote I'll write about in the next post, but there was a very interesting part of the short story that I believe reflected Paul's situation at the time.

First, background on the short story.  The character Micheline was writing about was a boy growing up in the Bronx, probably in the 1940's.  He was describing the boy's feelings and his surroundings.

The quote:
   

"All the time there were forces at work trying to shape my mind, to tell me what to do and how to think, to say this was good and this was bad, to tell me what to believe or disbelieve.  Luckily I had a mind and I was able to hold just a little doubt in my mind.  Otherwise I would have been crushed and shaped into a mind that was not mine."

I think Paul was bucking the system and I think they were not going to let him leave The Beatles quietly.

Disinformation With Intent To Discourage

If you are reading this blog you are interested or at least curious about the mystery surrounding Paul McCartney and his disappearance around September/October, 1966.  Theories abound and I'll be adding more information to them tomorrow or Sunday.

Let's take a look back, though, at The Beatles.  They were 4 (or possibly 5 or 6) young working class men who were musically talented and wanting to make a name for themselves in England in the early-and-mid 1960's.  They had working class parents who had limited educations.  They had what amounted to high-school educations (and Ringo had less.)  They were intelligent but because of the intensely hard work it took for them to establish themselves they had practically no time to add to their intellectual knowledge.  They had working class sensibilities which means they were extremely down to earth, practical and literal.  Because of the rough and tumble atmosphere they found themselves in at the beginning of their collective career they also were street-wise.  They were very close knit and surrounded themselves with a very few men who had sensibilities like them (except in some senses, of course, for Brian Epstein.)  They grew up in a country with an entrenched class system that was all about limiting or denying opportunities to anyone who did not have wealth in his or her background or some tie to a royal title.

They were interested in making music and making money.

So when you, dear readers, read about The Beatles' involvement in the occult, the illuminati, some cosmic conspiracy, reincarnation or a dozen other far-out ideas, I wouldn't believe a word of it.  It's the kind of disinformation that is used to disgust people and get them to not look at what REALLY happened to The Beatles.

Another Bit Of Evidence That There Were Two Pauls

Cottages and Villas The Birth Of The Garden Suburb by art historian Mireille Galinou chronicles the development of the English Eyre estate that resulted in the area of Northwest London called St. John's Wood.  Ms. Galinou spent five years researching the Eyre estate and the book is a thorough and detailed work [not an advertisement.]

St. John's Wood is where Paul bought his house so I was interested in what Ms. Galinou would write about him. This is what she wrote about Paul McCartney in the Appendix 10, Distinguished Residents section of the book: 

     Sir Paul McCARTNEY (born 1942), musician
     The Liverpool singer, former member of the Beatles, has been based in St. John's Wood
     for a number of years.  He purchased his house there as early as 1966 but did not 
     immediately adopt it as his residence.

Paul, by all the accounts I've read, bought his house on April 13, 1965 and moved into it in late March, 1966.  So Ms. Galinou is referring to the Paul replacement and not Paul.