Yesterday, the Hoaxes Seemed So Far Away : Books: Andru J. Reeve’s ‘Turn Me On, Dead Man’ relives America’s obsession with Paul McCartney’s rumored demise.

By now, most people are aware that the Fab Three are recording some new Beatles music, working with demo tapes of the late John Lennon provided by his widow, Yoko Ono.

In some circles, of course, this actually means that the Fab Two are recording, because Paul McCartney has been dead since Nov. 9, 1966, killed in a car crash and replaced by look-alike William Campbell in the most elaborate pop hoax of all time. It first became public in the fall of 1969, when clues allegedly planted by the Beatles themselves were finally uncovered.

What, you missed this?

Maybe this will ring a bell:

As the Beatles cross “Abbey Road,” McCartney is out of step. He’s barefoot (that’s how corpses are buried in Italy) and holding a cigarette in his right hand (the real McCartney was famously left-handed). The license of a VW Beetle in the background reads “28IF”--the age McCartney would have been that year . . . if he had lived!

Or take the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” cover. It includes a foreground flower arrangement (beside a grave!) that looks like both a P and a left-handed bass guitar, and an open-handed palm above McCartney’s head (an Eastern blessing for someone about to receive a religious burial).

Or those unsettling audio clues: the distorted voice saying “I buried Paul” at the end of a slowed-down “Strawberry Fields Forever.” And there’s that weirdest of tracks: “Turn me on dead man” can be heard when the words number nine in “Revolution 9” are played backward.

Spooky, no?

Now you can relive those yesterdays in Andru J. Reeve’s “Turn Me On, Dead Man: The Complete Story of the Paul McCartney Death Hoax,” published by Popular Culture, Ink. The 218-page book uncovers the origins and evolution of events in the fall of 1969, when rumors of McCartney’s death were the bizarre obsession of American radio, newspapers and television.

Reeve, ironically, was only 7 in 1969 and doesn’t remember the original buzz. But he came across a two-page account of those weird events in the late Nicholas Schaffner’s 1977 book, “The Beatles Forever.”

“It’s probably not fair for me to write about it,” Reeve says from Sacramento, where he works as a television news tape editor. “But even though there had been books about every aspect of the Beatles, nobody had done this, and I realized there was an opening.”

When he started on the book in 1988, Reeve was working at Biznet while spending most of his free time researching at the Library of Congress and interviewing key figures involved in the hoax, particularly Detroit deejay Russ Gibb, who first fielded phone calls about the rumor, and University of Michigan graduate Fred LaBour, whose lengthy expose in the Oct. 14, 1969, Michigan Daily is considered the catalyst for much of the madness that followed.

McCartney himself, Reeve recounts, never quite knew how to handle the rumors of his death, shifting from initial “No comments” to such typically flippant replies as “Don’t even feel under the weather!” McCartney also said of the impostor Campbell: “Splendid . . . he can deal with John.”

Reeve also pinpoints a possible starting point for the Paul Is Dead rumor: musician and Grand Funk Railroad manager Terry Knight and his 1969 single, “Saint Paul.” Usually thought of as a hoax-fueled novelty, this very strange song actually came out in May 1969--five months before the first article on the subject appeared in the campus paper at Drake University in Iowa. More mysteriously, “Saint Paul” is the only Knight composition administered by Maclen Music--McCartney and Lennon’s exclusive publishing company.

“That’s my original contribution” to hoax history, Reeve says.

Reeve’s research pulls all this and much more information together, with a back-of-the-book nod to other Beatles rumors and an index with more than 70 clues (and analysis).

The book is available for $40 from Popular Culture, Ink., P.O. Box 1839, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48106; by calling (800) 678-8828, or from Borders Bookstores and Tower Music.