Looking through a glass onion

Earl Fowler

People love to take a good story and run with it. To take an initial premise that might or might not be true and elaborate, extend and exaggerate.

That’s how Trump speeches work. That’s how jokes develop. That’s how we get superstitions, conspiracy theories and, as God is my witness, organized religion.

In my day, it was common knowledge on the pop rumour mill that the woman reclining in a chair and smoking on the cover of the album Bringing It All Back Home was in fact Bob Dylan himself. In drag.

As they had intended but somehow failed to do to Muhammad Ali during his second Sonny Liston fight (which is why Liston took such an obvious dive), the Mafia murdered Jimi Hendrix. Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?

Andy Warhol’s peel-off banana sticker on the sleeve of The Velvet Underground & Nico debut album was laced with LSD. Yeah, it looked like the fruit of an ordinary banana when you pulled off the skin, but aside from the sexual innuendo, that’s what they wanted you to think. Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.

But there was one and only one undisputed champion in the Sixties pop urban legend corpus: Paul is dead.

The story, of course, was that the cute Beatle had been killed in a car crash in 1966 and, with a little timely assistance from Britain’s MI5, replaced by a lookalike actor. We knew this because of the abundant cryptic clues.

After acquiring my copy of the Beatles’ eponymous double album that everyone knows as the White Album, I spent weeks reversing seven consecutive “number nines” — spoken on fascinating sound collage “Revolution 9” — with my index finger spinning the turntable counterclockwise to hear 11 seconds of the eerie message, “Turn me on dead man,” spoken seven times.

Wikipedia’s “Paul is dead” entry lays out the conspiracy theory in Group W groovy tie-dye Technicolor:

Many versions of this theory have arisen since its initial exposure to the public, but most proponents of the theory maintain that, on 9 November 1966 (alternatively, the 11th of September of the same year), McCartney had an argument with his bandmates during a Sgt. Pepper recording session and drove off angrily in his car, distracted by a meter maid (“Lovely Rita”), not noticing that the traffic lights had changed (“A Day In The Life”), crashed, and was decapitated (“Don’t Pass Me By”).

A funeral service for Paul was held, with eulogies by George Harrison (“Blue Jay Way”) and Ringo Starr (“Don’t Pass Me By”), followed by a procession (Abbey Road’s front cover), with Lennon as the priest officiating his funeral and burying him (the alleged “I Buried Paul” statement in “Strawberry Fields Forever”). To spare the public from grief, or simply as a joke, the surviving Beatles replaced him with the winner of a McCartney lookalike contest. This scenario was facilitated by the Beatles’ recent retirement from live performance and by their choosing to present themselves with a new image for their next album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (which began recording later that month).

In (mischievous Riders in the Sky bassist Fred) LaBour’s telling (which went on to be widely believed while he was still a student at the University of Michigan), the stand-in was an “orphan from Edinburgh named William Campbell,” whom the Beatles then trained to impersonate McCartney. Others contended that the man’s name was Bill Shepherd, later abbreviated to Billy Shears, and the replacement was instigated by MI5 out of concern for the severe distress McCartney’s death would cause the Beatles’ audience.

After all, that’s just the sort of thing a domestic counter-intelligence agency would do. No doubt using 27 eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures, with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.

In this latter telling, the surviving Beatles were said to be wracked with guilt over their actions, and therefore left messages in their music and album artwork to communicate the truth to their fans.

Dozens of supposed clues to McCartney’s death have been identified by fans and followers of the legend. These include messages perceived when listening to songs being played backward and symbolic interpretations of both lyrics and album cover imagery. Two frequently cited examples are the suggestions that the words “I buried Paul” are spoken by Lennon in the final section of the song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which the Beatles recorded in November and December 1966 (Lennon later said that the words were actually “cranberry sauce”).

I’ve already mentioned my avant-garde dabbling with “Revolution 9.” The Wikipedia entry continues with another White Album track you might have plundered for a sign or a tip-off, as I did:

A similar reversal at the end of “I’m So Tired” yielded “Paul is dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him… .” Another example is the interpretation of the Abbey Road album cover as depicting a  funeral procession: Lennon, dressed in white, is said to symbolize the heavenly figure; Starr, dressed in black, symbolizes the undertaker; Harrison, in denim, represents the gravedigger; and McCartney, barefoot and out of step with the others, symbolizes the corpse.

The number plate of the white Volkswagen Beetle in the photo — containing the characters LMW 281F (mistakenly read as “28IF”) — was identified as further evidence. “28IF” represented McCartney’s age “if he had still been alive” (although McCartney was 27 when the album was recorded and released) while “LMW” stood for “Linda McCartney weeps” or “Linda McCartney, widow” (although McCartney and the then-Linda Eastman had not yet met in 1966, the year of Paul’s alleged death). That the left-handed McCartney held a cigarette in his right hand was also said to support the idea that he was an impostor.

I can remember sitting around with friends, earnestly discussing whether the line “Bury my body” uttered in the fade-out to “I Am the Walrus” was further proof of McCartney’s demise. (It’s actually a nod to King Lear.) And in his book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, late Fabs scholar Ian MacDonald adds an interesting footnote:

A dozen other song references were recruited to the myth while further “clues” were discovered on the Beatles’ LP covers, with Sgt. Pepper supplying a particularly rich fund of coincidences. There, McCartney (the only one holding a black instrument) wears a badge on his sleeve bearing the letters O.P.D., supposedly an abbreviation of “officially pronounced dead” (in fact it stands for Ontario Police Department); he is likewise the only one facing away from the camera and on some shots, while Peter Blake and Jann Haworth’s cover shows an ominous hand above his head and the Beatles apparently clustered around a grave. The singer’s black carnation in the “Your Mother Should Know” sequence of Magical Mystery Tour kept up a mad momentum …

That this absurd War of the Worlds-calibre canard gained as much traction as it did, in the face of repeated denials from McCartney (who turned 82 in June) and the other Beatles themselves, remains a testament to the stunning gullibility of a society wary of what was then known as the Establishment (and which Donald Trump successfully rebranded in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign as “the swamp.”)

You didn’t have to be a member of the hippie counterculture of the Sixties to have harboured serious qualms about the official versions of the Kennedy and King assassinations or the thin justifications (shown to be a patchwork of lies when Daniel Ellsberg released the explosive Pentagon Papers in 1971) given for risking your life while bombing innocent Asian villagers in the Vietnam War.

New Left activist Jack Weinberg of the Free Speech Movement is generally given credit for encapsulating the sensibility of his generation in a 1964 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: “We have a saying in the movement that you can’t trust anyone over 30.”

As distrust of government and the mainstream media mushroomed, you could hang your Che beret on any daft belief you wanted at Alice’s Restaurant. Especially at a time when so-called mind-expanding drugs like LSD were being sold as a shortcut to spiritual awakening (instant karma, baby!) and a sort of psychotherapeutic free-for-all. Newspaper taxis appeared on the shore, waiting to take you away. Do not adjust your brain, there is a fault in reality.

Which brings us to the wholesale surrender of rational faculties — analogous to what we see today at Trump rallies, where Mafia Don is madly cheered by acolytes for spouting easily disprovable lies and risible conspiracy theories — that MacDonald limns in “the mass use of LSD and the creative randomness embraced by the Beatles in their music of the period.”

To place a priority on one or the other would be invidious, since to some extent they merely coincided. This would not, however, overestimate the Beatles’ influence on young people at the time. More seriously, it would place some responsibility upon the group for the harmful consequences of fostering such a randomized sensibility.

They had, after all, for several years been playing with exactly the sort of half-intended hidden messages which Charles Manson later read into songs like “Helter Skelter” and “Piggies.” Indeed, “Revolution 9” itself became for the Manson family a prophesy of the impending apocalypse and an artistic justification for their murders. (Careless of the consequences of what he and the group were doing, Lennon went on to acknowledge this penchant for mischief — and express his disdain for those who fell for it — in the complacently sarcastic “Glass Onion,” recorded two months (after Revolution 9).

See now, that’s interesting.

I was too young, stupid and under the spell to realize that in “Glass Onion,” Lennon was openly mocking the “Paul is dead” constituency (which he would further deride in his post-Beatles “How Do You Sleep?” fulmination against McCartney as “those freaks” who “said you was dead”).

But it’s all there. “Glass Onion” is largely an exercise in distancing Lennon from the diehard detectives (every high school, every college campus had at least one) devoted to sifting through the mysterious hints, sexual subterfuge (a four of fish and finger pies, she’s coming down fast but don’t let me break you, happiness is a warm gun, and like that), and gleeful Lewis Carroll/Goon Show-inspired silliness as an avenue to some kind of elusive truth about the universe that the Beatles were in on and was ours to uncover. Else why all the bushwa and razzmataxman?

Remember the caustic, self-referential lyrics?

Glass Onion

I told you about Strawberry Fields

You know the place where nothing is real

Well, here’s another place you can go

Where everything flows

Looking through the bent-backed tulips

To see how the other half lives

Looking through a glass onion

I told you about the walrus and me, man

You know that we’re as close as can be, man

Well, here’s another clue for you all

The walrus was Paul

Standing on the Cast Iron Shore, yeah

Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet, yeah

Looking through a glass onion

Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah (yeah, yeah)

Looking through a glass onion

I told you about the fool on the hill

I tell you man, he’s living there still

Well, here’s another place you can be

Listen to me

Fixing a hole in the ocean

Trying to make a dovetail joint, yeah

Looking through a glass onion

It’s a goal

It’s a goal

It’s a goal

It’s a goal

It’s a goal

It’s a goal

It’s a goal

At the risk of sounding like one of those freaks myself, the glass onion strikes me as a brilliant but withering description of layers of meaninglessness, with nothing at the transparent core. A riff on the emperor having no clothes. As Yoko says at the end of “Revolution 9,” you become naked.

Wikipedia:

Lennon wrote the song to confuse people who read too much into the lyrical meanings of Beatles songs, which annoyed him. Many lines refer to earlier Beatles songs … . The song also refers to the “Cast Iron Shore,” a coastal area of south Liverpool known to local people as The Cazzy.

Thing is, he’s more than writing to confuse the deluded. He’s making fun of them. The Cast Iron Shore was where mounds of clammy rubbish from Liverpool’s sewers washed up on the Mersey. Can you dig it?

The Beatles Anthology book that accompanied the release of that glorious three-volume set of double albums in 1995-96 quotes Lennon as saying:

I threw the line in — “the Walrus was Paul” — just to confuse everybody a bit more. ... It could have been “the fox terrier is Paul.” I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry. I was having a laugh because there’d been so much gobbledygook about Pepper — play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that.

For the record, ho ho, it was McCartney who wore the walrus costume in that bizarre “I Am The Walrus” video. We can guess what a dovetail joint is, yeah.

Whatever.

The point is that you can’t carelessly play around with the minds of the deadly earnest, the habitually stoned, the needy and mentally ill — the way Trump inflames the looniest, most suggestible members of the MAGA movement  de souche — without engendering dangerous, unpredictable consequences.

One more quote from MacDonald, who was 54 when he died by suicide in 2003 after a lengthy period of clinical depression:

To the extent that they were invoked by the aleatory philosophy of derangement associated with the Sixties counterculture, obsessions such as those which beset Charles Manson, and later Lennon’s assassin Mark Chapman, were inevitable. As prominent advocates of the free-associating state of mind, the Beatles attracted more crackpot fixations than anyone apart from Dylan. While, at the time, they may have seemed enough like harmless fun for Lennon to make them the subject of the present sneeringly sarcastic song (“Glass Onion”), in the end they returned to kill him.

Is it a stretch to speculate that would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks, a registered Republican, was similarly unmoored by one or more of the dozens of false conspiracy theories promoted by an amoral grifter with origami-like cock-and-bull proclivities? Happiness is a warm gun.

Your guess is as good as mine, but I’ll venture a prediction you won’t hear on Miss Cleo’s Psychic Hotline. Anyone who works for the former and perhaps future president goes into it knowing there’s an excellent chance that they’ll eventually be thrown under the bus, ejected and castigated when he deems it in his interest to do so. Assertively operating as he always does in that twilight zone between the semi-persuasive and the full-on psychotic, Trump might even exhort the MAGA Mansons to string up members of Congress on a makeshift gibbet during a January insurrection. Sounds ludicrous, I know, but just sayin’.

My prediction: Craving attention as ever after being decidedly rejected in November’s election and finally purged by the Republican elite — still desperate to be seen as the smartest guy in the room —  it would be completely in character for Trump to heap ridicule upon the loyal, no longer useful suckers and rubes and deluded buffoons in shiny jackboots for imbibing his rebarbative snake oil in the first place. In the psychopath world, enmity always trumps friendship.

“A friend,” Trump is fond of saying, always misattributing the quotation to Abraham Lincoln, “is one who has the same enemies as you have.” Notwithstanding the “all you need is love” and “give peace a chance” philo-babble of the later Flower Power era, a young Lennon on stage at his cruellest — mimicking the disabled by posturing, grimacing, parodying speech defects and making jerky, spastic movements just as Trump does to denigrate rivals  — shared the same impulse to rave, berate and bully like a latter-day Lear on the Cast Iron Shore.

The obvious difference is that to judge by the kinder, simpler, contented music Lennon had issued on the Double Fantasy album three weeks before Chapman gunned him down at 40, the merry-go-round-riding young man, “just a jealous guy,” had disembarked forever. Years of contemplation, watching the wheels go round and round, will do that. “We have grown, we have grown.”

At nearly twice that age, Trump remains what he has always been. A strident alpha male who knows it all but, when thwarted, sulks like a little boy looking through a glass onion.