Finding More Information In 1960's Songs and Why I Look There

The whole Paul-Is-Dead controversy began in October, 1969 in Detroit.  As I say in the introduction to my blog, I was a kid Beatles' fan among thousands of kid Beatles' fans in Detroit.  We heard "Penny Lane" in 1967 (although I swear I heard that song in the fall of 1966.  But that can't be, right?)  We Beatles' fans knew something was wrong with that song.  Paul's voice was not the same.

When Sgt. Pepper came out, alot of us did not like the music and the vibe that The Beatles were projecting,  It was off, it was not right.  So most of us kissed off Beatle fandom and became Monkees' fans.

So when the Paul-Is-Dead backmasked clues started surfacing, many of us thought it was a publicity stunt that The Beatles were using to--as they say in Detroit--"goose up" their sagging popularity.

As I started researching the changes in the members of the group, it occurred to me that--if  there were heavy duty  machinations with The Beatles--whoever surfaced among them would want some way to talk about it.  Blurting it out publicly would have gotten band members replaced--and whatever consequences followed from that.  So they hid their information in their songs.

The music industry is a fluid situation:  musicians quit bands and join new ones; musicians hang out together; they listen to each others' music and the gossip they hear in recording studios.  So I reasoned that other groups would want to share their information and gossip.

The results from testing songs backwards were 'way more than I expected:  pop and rock musicians had bits of information about behind the scenes problems with The Beatles, and they shared their knowledge and gossip in backmasked songs.

Other Voices, Part 17: The 1967 Yardbirds' Song, "Dazed and Confused"

The Yardbirds were a British invasion group who, in 1967, consisted of Keith Relf, Jimmy Page, Chris Dreja, and Jim McCarty.

Keith Relf took a song called "I'm Confused (Dazed and Confused)" by Jake Holmes and reworked some of the lyrics.  The Yardbirds did live versions of the song, two of which showed up in two releases:   Live Yardbirds:  Featuring Jimmy Page, released in 1971 and Cumular Limit, released in 2000.

The lyrics suggest a man who is abused, tense, and not knowing if--for instance--he is going to be dumped from his band.

Think of Paul in April, 1966 with a publicly visible chipped tooth. 

Listen to the song at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYDhx_DgDxE  .

Here are the lyrics:

     I'm dazed and confused,
     Is it stay, is it go?
     Give me a clue,
     'Cos I just want to know.
     Give me a clue as to where I am at.
     Feel like a mouse, and you act like a cat.
     Yeah I'm
     Yeah I'm
     Yeah I'm
     Yeah I'm,

     I'm dazed and confused,
     Hangin' on by a thread.
     I've been abused,
     I'd be better off dead.
     Can't stand the heat,
     And I'm starting to crack,
     If you're out to get me,
     You're on the right track.
     Hey, hey!
     Hey, hey!
     Hey, hey!

     I'm dazed and confused.
     Is it stay, is it go?
     I still love you,
     But I still want to know.
     Secrets are fun to a certain degree,
     This one's now fun 'cause the secret's on me.
     Yeah, yeah,
     Hey, hey!

     I'm dazed and confused,
     Is it stay, is it go?
     I've been abused,
     And I sure wanna know.
     Give me a clue as to where I am at,
     Feel like a mouse, and you act like a cat.
     Yeah!
     Hey, hey, hey, hey!

Reversed, you can hear them say PAUL--I count--TEN times, beginning at 1:19 in the reversed track.

Other Voices, Part 16: "Good Vibrations"

I was reading a 2001 book, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds:  The Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century by Kingsley Abbot.  It chronicles The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson's gargantuan effort to, basically, out-Beatle The Beatles.

The Beach Boys recorded for Capitol records.  Capitol was owned by EMI, the record company The Beatles recorded for.  Capitol--after a few fumbles--released The Beatles' recordings.  The Beatles made massive inroads on the American pop scene from 1964-on, so you can imagine that Brian Wilson would have been curious as to what The Beatles would be planning for future music, and--with a little poking around Capitol's Los Angeles headquarters--would have gotten some advance knowledge.

It's also more than possible that Brian Wilson was "tuning into" the gossip about The Beatles that was floating around Capitol records.  The Beach Boys also hired Derek Taylor, fresh from being The Beatles publicist, as their publicist, so Brian Wilson had more insider knowledge about The Beatles.

While the other Beach Boys were off touring, Brian with an English advertising man turned lyricist, Tony Asher [!], and a heavy contingent of studio musicians, put together the album, Pet Sounds.

They had three hits from the album:  "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "Sloop John B", and "God Only Knows".  Brian worked on the album from the fall of 1965 through the spring of 1966.

On May 16, 1966, Pet Sounds was released in the U.S.  The album and the single "Sloop John B" sold better in Europe than it did in the U.S.

Given all the efforts Brian Wilson made to outdo The Beatles, I thought he might have slipped in a few comments on the state of The Beatles, late 1965 and 1966.

He did.

I'll talk about the Pet Sounds hints in a coming post.  (I still have to do a little more research on them.)

But, a track that Brian considered for Pet Sounds and held off the album for "more work" was the song, "Good Vibrations."  Brian, according to the Pet Sounds book, "proceeded to experiment with different feels and arrangements for some 90 hours of tape, in four different studios, before finally constructing a finished master from many separate, quite disparate fragments."  This sounded, to me, like it had backmasking written all over it.  I thought the backmasked song would directly mention our Paul.  Instead--and, remember, the song was released in November, 1966, a month before the new, new Beatles were beginning to record what would become the Sgt. Pepper album--the main backmasked words throughout the song are:  "she's . . . shear", as in "the one and only Billy Shears" mentioned in the first track on Sgt. Pepper.

People have interpreted the Billy Shears passage as, "Billy's here":  a new Beatle OR "Billy Shears" as in the real name of the new Beatle Paul.  It follows that "she's shear" would mean "she's here" by the first interpretation.

But "Good Vibrations" preceded Sgt. Pepper.  How did Brian Wilson know?

Denny Laine's "Boulevard de la Madeleine"

In my October 18, 2012 post, I detailed the connections between the characters and incidents in the 1966 French movie, Masculin Feminin and a Paul's--I believe the real, original Paul's--life.  The main female character's name was Madeleine.

In a song by Denny Laine--who later was in the last Paul's group, Wings--released in October, 1966--called "Boulevard de la Madeleine", Laine describes a young man who waits in Paris, in love, for a girl who never comes.

Our Paul might have had a place in Paris according to hints from the Los Angeles fanzine, KRLA Beat.  But I think Masculin Feminin was about the real Paul and I believe that is why the movie's director Jean Luc Godard waited for the denouement of Paul's life before he released the film.

Interesting!  Paul's song, "Michelle" was, I think, written by the real Paul.  If there was a real Madeleine, who is (or was) she?

Is "John" Our Paul's Real First Name?

In my April 22, 2013 post, I speculated that our Paul's real name might be David Black.  But I thought back to my Beatle fan days beginning in 1964 and how in Detroit we heard that Paul's real first name was JOHN and that he used his middle name, Paul:  1,) to not confuse fans with two Johns in the group; and 2.) because, John, being the founder of the group, should be the one to use his own first name.

Interesting . . . especially when the later claim was that Paul's first name was JAMES, (named after his father), and that the official recording of his first name is listed as JAMES.

In the first two editions of the book, The Beatles:  The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies, Paul's first name is listed as JOHN.  Both editions (1968 and 1978) were, of course, published after our Paul was--I believe-- removed from the group.

But that detail  I heard as a kid Beatles fan coupled with the information from the book strongly suggest that our Paul's real first name was JOHN.

The Bill Haley Concert in Liverpool---And The Three Pauls

In my post of March 6, 2013, I talked about our Paul and our John's interview in Japan on June 30, 1966 where Paul talks about seeing Bill Haley and his Comets in England for their 1957 tour.  Paul says he was TWELVE when he saw them.  This would put his birth year at 1944 (or, possibly, 1945.)

I was curious to see if anyone writing about Bill Haley talked about Paul, and I found a 1990 book by Bill Haley's eldest son, John W. and co-author John von Hoelle called Sound And Glory that did.  They mention Paul being at a Bill Haley concert:
     "On the 20th. of February, the Comets play to enthusiastic audiences at the Odeon Theater in Liverpool.  Among the hand-clapping, foot-stomping kids were two very special young men; sixteen year old John Lennon and his new buddy Paul McCartney."  (pages 158-159.)

The official story is that real John and real Paul met for the first time on July 6, 1957.  It's possible real Paul and real John went to the concert separately.

But wait!  In a July 14, 2014 Rolling Stone interview, the man who took our Paul's place in late 1966--in other words, the current Paul--said he saw Bill Haley at the Liverpool Odeon in 1957 and was "about 13 or something" at the time.

Remember, real Paul McCartney's birthdate was June 18, 1942 and he would have been 14 not 12 or 13 at the time of the concert.

Twelve-year old our Paul saw Bill Haley but not with John Lennon and--very likely--not in Liverpool.  And as for the longest-lasting Paul?  Who knows?

The British Class System: A 1963 Scholarly Look

So's you don't think I'm unduly dwelling on the popular conception of a reordering of the class structure in England in the 1960's and the stiff class stratification that was the reality in England at that time, I started looking at the scholarly writings concerning the English class system and found a very interesting article by Cambridge University sociologists John H. Goldthorpe and David Lockwood that was published in the Sociological Review (new series), Volume 11, No. 2, July, 1963 called "Affluence and the British Class Structure."

They focused mainly on whether the working class was making any headway in pulling themselves up into the middle class--or whether there was a large glass ceiling in place preventing that.

The researchers looked at three studies of working and middle class attitudes and concluded:
     1.)  "The majority of people have a more or less clearly defined image of their society as being stratified in some way or other; that is to say they are aware of inequalities in the distribution of wealth, prestige and power."  (page 146.)
     2.)  "In particular, there is no firm evidence either that manual workers are consciously aspiring to middle class society, or that this is becoming any more open to them." (my emphasis; page 155.)

On the general values from a working class perspective, Goldthorpe and Lockwood quote working class parents who said that the best job for a son was:  "A trade in the hands" and "A good steady job." (page 147.)

Remember that three of the real Beatles had manual jobs when they first started out:  George worked as an apprentice electrician; Paul got work from the Labour Exchange coiling cables for an electrical firm; Ringo had an apprenticeship at a Liverpool equipment manufacturer.  John did go to art school, but was shifted over into learning lettering which--if he hadn't quit school (or gotten expelled)--would have led to a "good steady" manual office support job.

The article talked about the solidarity of working class people--an "us against them" attitude--that, of course, was expressed clearly by the real John at the Royal Command Performance in November, 1963 and got real Paul and real John ousted from the group.