Promotor of "Paul is Dead" myth plays bass in Riders in the Sky cowboy group

The Detroit News has a new interview with Fred LaBour, who helped launch the "Paul is Dead" hoax back in the late 1960s.

Back then he was editor of the University of Michigan newspaper. Today he sings and plays bass in cowboy hokum band Riders in the Sky.

From the article:
Driving to Jackson one mid-October afternoon, he tuned into WKNR-FM and heard disc jockey Russ Gibb taking calls from listeners about McCartney’s rumored demise.
The clues were both numerous and, to LaBour, preposterous. So in the context of a review of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road,” he wrote a long story spread across two pages beneath the headline, “McCartney dead; new evidence brought to life.”
The badge on McCartney’s shoulder on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” LaBour wrote, reads “OPD,” for “officially pronounced dead” — the alleged British version of DOA.
The word “walrus,” he noted, used in a Beatles song title and lyric, is Greek for “corpse."
Never mind that the badge really reads OPP, that “walrus” isn’t Greek for anything, that most of the story is even less credible, and that the first paragraph inelegantly declared McCartney to be “deader than a doornail.”
The multitudes were determined to believe, so that’s what they did. Newspapers began repeating LaBour’s alleged facts, and then so did newscasts and national magazines
Because anything worth forgetting can be found on the Internet, websites still trumpet them. LaBour just shrugs and plucks his double bass.


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