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This is
sold as fiction and while reading it gives one the disheartening sense
of cheap historical fiction, it isn’t even that good. It is more like a
long pamphlet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses told through Beatles lyrics
and stretched to an over-stuffed 666 pages – it must repeat a lot of
stuff and add an advertisement for subsequent Uharriet products, along
with lyrics somehow related to a songwriting contest – to imply occult
wizardry.
I suspect that Thomas E. Uharriet did something
Beatles fanatics have done for decades, which is to connect the lyrics
of Beatles songs into a narrative, a story. Uharriet seems to grab
connectors the way Kevin Spacey’s character Verbal Kint did in “The
Usual Suspects”, stringing them together to make a ramshackle
explanation. Along the way he divulges an Illuminati-created Beatles
intelligence operation through his lyrical account, which is purported
to be in the words of William Shepherd, who replaced McCartney in 1966.
The book seems to have only one purpose, which is to rat out the entire
Illuminati-created Beatles intelligence operation, which is either
Luciferian or Satanic. Uharriet doesn’t know the difference and uses the
words interchangeably.
According to this book, told in the first person
by the guy we have known as Paul McCartney since 1966, the whole thing
has been orchestrated from the grave by “the beast” Aleister Crowley. It
is suggested that Crowley may well have been the father of William
Shepherd, the McCartney replacement, and according to numerous internet
conspiracy buffs also the father of the late Barbara Bush. Small world,
isn’t it? Crowley was personally seeding the Illuminati, of which Sir
Paul McCartney is said to be a member in high standing.
Uharriet is a mystery one could probably solve if
the subject inspired curiosity, but he doesn’t, at least in me. He lives
in Utah, which in some scenarios would make him suspect from the start,
and he has written other books on religious figures. Paul McCartney, in
his telling, is a Christ figure right down to the death and rebirth
thing, though in Stephen King fashion, replacement Paul seems to have
come from the Pet Cemetery.
He is bossy, arrogant, doesn’t sound much like a
Brit, and he is at a loss to understand why John, George and Ringo don’t
seem to like him. His defense is that Paul chose him for this role he
took on, because it was an occult sacrifice, and his reward is that he
gets everything that is Paul’s – his fame, his chicks, his money, and
his influence. He even gets to be a knight.
Uharriet’s schtick, apparently, is that he
“encodes” his religious tracts, as he has the Billy Shears book,
creating acrostics, though to what purpose is unclear. Encoding, in
Uharriet’s world, apparently means to highlight selected words on a
page, so that if you read just those words they reveal hidden meaning
within the text. Possibly the least sophisticated coding device in the
history of secret messaging, Uharriet’s hidden meanings don’t vary at
all from what the text on the page actually says. It’s like embedding
knock-off versions of Cliffs Notes, a reach around for the imbecilic
reader.
This book, on its face, has all the sophistication
of an imaginative middle-schooler who enjoys comic book narratives.
Beyond being insulting, and making the reader feel
a little cheapened by having run their eyes across Uharriet’s
acrostically-pained pages, The Memoirs of Billy Shears does have curious
associations. These, most notably, are in the person of Gregory Paul
Martin, the oldest son of Beatle producer George Martin, who has done an
audio recording of the book in the voice of Paul McCartney.
It is worth noting that Gregory Paul Martin is the
half-brother of Giles Martin, who has played a central role in the
remastering of his father’s Beatle recordings, also working with Cirque
du Soleil to create their Vegas Beatles spectacle “Love”. Gregory Paul
Martin claims to have met Paul McCartney when he was a small boy, and to
have had some contact with him over the years. One senses he has mostly
been a well-connected, but not particularly in-demand actor, who saw a
job with Uharriet’s MACCA CORP and took it. Reading the book in an
imitation of Paul McCartney’s voice is a little creepy and does nothing
to legitimize this suspect work.
In fact, published in 2009, The Memoirs of Billy
Shears encouraged other attempts to capitalize on the Paul is Dead
conspiracy, which have included false news confessions from Ringo Starr,
and an audio recording that purports to be George Harrison doing the
same. The Harrison audio is clearly a lame attempt at extorting a
legend, if only for internet attention, the executor having apparently
never listened to the spoken word of the real George Harrison, and
apparently assumed no one else had either – a bold step into stupid.
Uharriet’s book is not better.
It is puzzling that he gets away with associating
himself with Paul McCartney, whose photograph he includes on the back
dust cover, as if it is an author’s credit. His MACCA CORP, a Utah
corporation now inactive, obviously references the name the press has
given to McCartney.
The Beatles, as Apple, have been one of the most
litigious enterprises in music history, aggressively going after anyone
attempting to leverage their products in any way. So why is this
knucklehead Uharriet still around?
It is part of the McCartney mystery, as is why
anyone would buy The Memoirs of Billy Shears. I have a long feature on
all of this soon to be published with the upcoming edition of the CCJ.
You could look at it as a further exploitation of the Paul Is Dead
conspiracy. - RAR
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