NEED TO KNOW
Paul McCartney knows the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory was never more than just a rumor — but the silly urban legend may actually have been more on the nose than he realized.
The Beatles rocker, 83, opens up about his struggles with the transitionary period after the legendary rock band broke up in his new oral history book Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, which is set for release on Nov. 4.
In an early excerpt published in The Guardian, McCartney said he’d heard the rumor of his death before, but things really picked up in the fall of 1969 after an American DJ stirred the pot, causing “millions of fans around the world [to believe] I was actually gone.”
He recalled joking to his then-wife Linda, “How can I possibly be dead?” just after the birth of their daughter Mary, now 56. Still, the musician admitted that with the benefit of hindsight, he felt as though the rumors of his untimely demise might have been more accurate than he’d realized.
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“In so many ways, I was dead… A 27-year-old about-to-become-ex-Beatle, drowning in a sea of legal and personal rows that were sapping my energy, in need of a complete life makeover,” he wrote, adding that he wondered if he’d ever be able to move on from the “amazing decade” he spent with the Beatles.
As for his legal rows, McCartney famously sued his bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in 1970 in an attempt to dissolve the band’s contractual partnership, as he did not want manager Allen Klein in charge of their financial affairs. A London judge eventually ruled in McCartney’s favor, and he told British GQ in 2020 that suing the band was “the only way for me to save The Beatles and Apple.”
Three years before the breakdown of the Beatles, McCartney bought a sheep farm in Scotland, and when all hell broke loose, he saw it as a good escape from London. In the book, he describes his family’s time there as a “wild adventure,” during which they thrived in the “isolation” of the place, per The Guardian.
“For the first time in years, I felt free, suddenly leading and directing my own life,” he wrote.
The “Paul is dead” theory alleged that McCartney died in a car crash in 1966, and that the Beatles covered it up by replacing him with a look-alike. The claim has been denied over the years multiple times by various parties, though McCartney leaned in with a 1993 live album titled Paul Is Live. In 1969, he did an interview with Life magazine that largely quashed the rumor.
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The Beatles disbanded in 1970, and McCartney went on to forge a successful solo career, both on his own and with his band Wings.
He previously talked about feeling adrift after the Beatles broke up in a post on his website in 2023, writing that his biggest question after the group split was “whether to keep going.”
“It was a hard act — some might say, an impossible act — to follow,” he wrote. “The ingredients in the Beatles were so unique. You had John right there, who could have made any group brilliant. Then you had George’s talent, and Ringo’s, and then me.”
He continued, “I didn’t know what to do with myself, and trying something new was really risky.”
The rocker’s new book is drawn from dozens of hours of interviews with McCartney and other key players in Wings’ history, weaving “together the improbable trajectory of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band (featuring co-founding members Linda McCartney and Denny Laine) across the technicolor 1970s until their dissolution in 1981.”
