Paul McCartney as a rigorous intuition subject.

[justdrew]

a close look at the lyrics of "Band on the run" would be welcome. I'm not a huge fan of Wings (and the other solo McCartney), but there are some good songs that garner occasional enjoyment, if not heavy rotation. Jet for instance and (already mentioned?) Spirits Of Ancient Egypt

[Hammer of Los]

God help me, I went down this hole a few years back, nothing was resolved.

You and the rest of us man! God bless you. It's like the moon hoax, we know we should just stay away, but it's just too tempting. If you warn everyone to stay away, more will be tempted to look.

Still, this hole looks nice and safe and warm and dry, much more comfortable than other holes I've been.

I'm guessing they're all ancient egyptian solar cultist Isis worshipping mystery school adherents.

[justdrew]

I think of this more as modern folklore than a rabbit hole, don't really believe there was a permanent replacement, but I could see a double might temporarily have existed for some reason, but even that seems unlikely. but anything's possible.... so who knows? The crowley stuff may not have fully originated within the band, as I'm sure there were lots of other designers involved with their visual presentation.

The above picture by Michael Gillette can stand as my preferred theory... Not just Paul was replaced for a time by a double, but the whole band. This was necessitated by the actual Beatles going on a brief off-planet tour, possibility the only earth band to play off world so far, since I suspect relations have since deteriorated. As I say, folklore

[Nordic]

If I were a rock star, and couldn't leave my house, or hotel, without thousands of screaming hysterical people following my every move, I might very well hire a body double as a decoy. Why not? Makes perfect sense.

[IanEye]

Vince, I spent a good portion of last night watching the Rotten Apple series, i made it to #54.
it is certainly intriguing viewing.
it might sound funny saying this on a Canadian Board, but watching the series has the same hypnotic allure of the group Boards of Canada. are you familiar with them?

the way he takes snippets of the Beatles songs and twists them around like silly putty, all the while blending imagery through a kaleidoscopic cuisinart of nostalgic paranoia put me in the same head space as Geogaddi.

The whole 'LOVE = CODE' thing is interesting.

But I am not sure i buy into 'the Walpurgis is Paul' scenario that he is making.
The doppelgänger concept in Pop Culture is one that has certainly fascinated me in the past.
But the 'real' pre-66 McCartney was clearly interested in Crowley as evidenced by the Ian Iachimoe signature on Paperback Writer, so one doesn't need a replacement Paul to lead one to think that McCartney proper is a pretty odd dude, fake moustache or otherwise.

I like justdrew's theory! I have always thought that in the promotional music videos for Strawberry Fields & Penny Lane there is a certain 'Narnian' quality about the Beatles. That is, for us they were only gone for a weekend but in fact they had gone to another dimension and stayed there for quite awhile, only to come tumbling out of a cupboard at Abbey Road Studios in time for tea. But they pretty much crammed a whole decade into the span from 64-66 anyway, so it could just be that...

I am a sucker for symmetry though, and i like the clever tricks the editor plays with mirrors - eye did something similar when i made my 'Bluebird' mix last August:

I can tell you from experience that making this type of imagery has a mesmerizing effect on the conjuror as well as the audience. i fear somewhat that iamaphoney might get lost in the world of loops & spool of whorls he is creating.
Like a centipede foolish enough to crawl into a Chinese Finger Cuff.

But eye see Dr. Robert walking on down the hall, which means i should probably get back to Ziegler's table in the Gold Room.

sincerely, eyEnaI
.

[Hammer of Los]

I'll be honest, whenever I start looking at photographs I become convinced the early Paul is a different man to the later Paul.

Sorry 'bout that.

No, no, I'm agnostic really.

Well, confused anyway.

[justdrew]

I wonder if a correspondence of Beatles songs and tarot cards could be made?

[Bruce Dazzling]

I wonder if a correspondence of Beatles songs and tarot cards could be made?

It's interesting that you mention Fool on the Hill, as that's one of the first songs to appear with the higher pitched Paul vocal (Penny Lane, When I'm Sixty Four, and Hello Goodbye are others from this period). The official story is that they used a production trick called varispeed to change the pitch because Paul wanted to sound different, but the song also contains the line:

"The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud"

Here's a decidedly different vocal on the demo, and note that the "man of a thousand voices" line is absent in this version.



And compare this image from Lucifer Rising to the one that you posted above of Paul in Magical Mystery Tour.



This is from the sacrifice scene in Help!



And this is from Lucifer Rising.



Magical Mystery Tour.



Lucifer Rising.



This is part of the Sgt. Pepper cover.



Compared to the tower card.



And cripes! I have to go to work.

[justdrew]

in the video there's two or three moments where he's standing on a rocky outcropping just like in the card design. the first is at about 30seconds-1 minute in.

if he was interested in "magik" and such that's fine by me, and not hard to see why it would be best kept veiled, but who if anyone might have been a mentor I wonder or perhaps he just read books?

[Bruce Dazzling]

in the video there's two or three moments where he's standing on a rocky outcropping just like in the card design. the first is at about 30seconds-1 minute in.

if he was interested in "magik" and such that's fine by me, and not hard to see why it would be best kept veiled, but who if anyone might have been a mentor I wonder or perhaps he just read books?

Well, perhaps McCartney gave us a few clues to this.

In a Rolling Stone interview he once said:

"There is such a thing as magic, and the Beatles were magic. It depends on what you believe life is. Life is an energy field, a bunch of molecules. And these particular molecules formed to make these four guys, who then formed into this band called the Beatles and did all that work. It's something that must be thought of as Magick with a 'k'."

In the liner notes of his Memory Almost Full album, he said the following:

"His Royal Highness The King of Cosmania and Surrounding Regions deigns to give his thanks to the following people..."

The King of Cosmania can be an anagram for Son of the Magickian.

And supposedly this is the photo of Crowley that was to have been used on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.



Derek Taylor, the Beatles Press Officer said that they went with a different photo because it looked too much like McCartney.

[Magnus]

I started this series about a year ago and then dropped it, because the way it sucked me in frightened me a bit. I'm in in the mood now though (need a pleasant diversion/rabbithole badly), and am glad this thread reminded me of it. Thanks to whoever linked to the Nothing is Real: Paul was Replaced site, http://invanddis.proboards.com/index.cgi?#general, I didn't come across that one last time and it's helped me understand this series. See, I went to the movie "Sgt. Peppers's...." thinking it was the new Peter Frampton/Bee Gees movie, and when I made the Beatles connection soon after, also learning then that Paul from Wings sang "Yesterday" and "Let it Be", two of my most treasured 45's from very childhood, my first thought was, "No way! The dork from Wings can't be the same guy!". I didn't really mean it, of course, but now I suspect my instinct was right.

This video has some very telling body comparisons between the two, except the face on the one by the pool is hidden. If it is Paul, then it's undeniable to me that it's not the same guy with the long calves at the beach. Does anyone know where the old pool pic is from? The recent pic of old Macca at the beach with the woman - anyone know who she is? Her height?



I also ran across some pics comparing the opposite direction hair swirls of the two, can't find them at the moment. Also the last interview before their hiatus in '66 compared to the first one after their return. (My first ever Beatles interviews! Lost my cherry!) In the second one he seems to have a more upper class accent than the former. I'm a Yank but I was joined at the hip with a Scouser friend for awhile way back, and she felt very strongly about things like that, changing one's accent to be more upper class. And she was very typical of the council house class of that area, from what I understand. Maybe it was the acid that changed Paul, but I really don't think so, he seems like an entirely different person in the second interview.




Tonight I saw this one with some clips of Heather saying some very compelling things. I found the full interview of that day and it is worth watching to the end, regardless of how you feel about her. I remember some pretty nasty headlines about her around that time being thrust into the MSM, dismissed them, but at the same time the idea that she was a real c*** kind of lingered in the back of my mind. And I didn't give a damn about any of them, or any tabloid stuff at all for that matter, I didn't seek it out at all, yet I formed the opinion that she was as she was being portrayed. Strange. I feel differently now, I really feel she's being honest in that interview, and not crazy but desperate, and terrified. I think she was slandered horribly and her emotional state is a result of that and whatever else she's experiencing. Never in a million years did I ever think I would feel that way about her. Interesting that she started a campaign for truth in media. It's at the very end of Part 2, when she gets her last words in before the interview is over.

[Nordic]

Wow. I can't wait to check out these videos. In the meantime, I just remembered that a while back (probably 5 or 6 years ago) I heard an interview with Paul, on the radio, and I was amazed. The guy being interviewed sounded like kind of a wanker, a guy who was really completely untalented, uninteresting, and a bit full of himself. He read a poem that he'd written about John, and it was absolutely terrible, just maudlin dreck, embarrassingly bad. I kept thinking "this is one of the Beatles? How is this possible?"

I attributed it at the time to old age, when wildly successful artists get lazy and think their every thought, however lame, is something wonderful (because everybody around them tells them so).

But now? Down the rabbit hole ......

[vince]

Hey, guys... Just thought I'd warn ya'; in the middle of the series, a man starts to appear (looks a little like Micheal DesBarres to me). He starts throwing suitcases around. This lead one IAMAPHONY fan to request in interview. In HIS site:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MikeyNL1038
features a lot of sub-titles for the IAMAPHONY videos that are a little hard to hear.
He never got an interview, though.

[IanEye]

Hey, guys... Just thought I'd warn ya'; in the middle of the series, a man starts to appear (looks a little like Micheal DesBarres to me). He starts throwing suitcases around.

really? Micheal DesBarres??

I thought he looked like Nilsson.

[anothershamus]

Ringo to the Rescue!