Yeah Yeah Yeah

Above, the picture from the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album, showing the Fab Four in the picture that led to so much speculation.  You see, the license tag on the Volkswagen parked all crazy behind the band reads LMW 28IF, which played into the rampant speculation (sparked by a bored all-night disc jockey*) that Paul McCartney was dead, slain in a bloody car crash, and he WOULD have been 28 by now IF he had lived.

Another part of the rumor was that The Beatles were dressed for a funeral. John Lennon is dressed in white, the color for mourning clothes in Eastern religions. Ringo Starr is in black, the Western funeral mufti.  George Harrison is in denim, the traditional cloth for mourners among people whose idea of a proper vacation was a week in Twitty City. And McCartney is barefoot, because in some cultures, they bury people without shoes. I am taking my fireproof Rockports with me.

Well, Paul's still around, at 77, and so is that white VW. I don't know if it's the exact car in the other picture up there, but Volkswagen took a picture of a white Beetle (!) at the same place on Abbey Road to plug their new assistive parking technology in an advertisement.

The real car belonged to someone who lived in the neighborhood and did not park so well, but they sold it in an auction in 1986, and now that car can be seen at the Autostadt Museum in Wolfsburg, Germany.


* That DJ was Russ Gibb, who took a call from someone in October, 1969. That person told him to spin "Revolution 9" on the Beatles’ White Album backwards.  The words “number nine, number nine” were said to come out sounding like “Turn me on, dead man.” Play the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever" backward and you hear John say, “I buried Paul.”

And the classic example of that puckish Beatles humor came when someone from their office called to tell Paul he was reported as dead, and the cheeky bassist replied, "Oh, I don’t agree with that.”

All this happened after The Beatles stopped covering Larry Williams ("Bad Boy", "Slow Down", and "Dizzy, Miss Lizzy") and Carl Perkins ("Honey Don't", "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" and "Matchbox") songs and began Taking Themselves Very Seriously ("I am he as you are he as you are me/ And we are all together" are actual lyrics in "I am The Walrus") which is always the part where I reach for the remote.

Did you know that if you take any Kanye West CD and hit yourself in the head with it, you will hear voices singing, "Some people will buy anything"?