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Today Paul McCartney appeared on David Frost’s BBC radio show. Frost had a long and diverse career, but is probably best known for his 1977 series of interviews with Richard Nixon, in which Nixon was paid $600,000 to publicly admit for the first time that Watergate was a big boo-boo.
Thanks to the magic of modern technology, you can click the Play button below to hear Frost and McCartney argue over whether “Eleanor Rigby” is “brilliant” (Frost says it is, Paul humbly dissents).
Meanwhile, in Texas, August 1, 1966 was an important day in the history of modern violence. Late in the morning, an ex-Marine named Charles Whitman ascended the clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin and began raining gunfire on the people below. (He apparently did not like Mondays.) Before he was done, he had killed 14 people and wounded more than 30, in the process creating the template for the mass shootings that now happen seemingly every week. I’m tempted to say that Whitman was the Beatles of mass shootings, but it’s more accurate to say he was the Little Richard or Chuck Berry — or maybe the Jerry Lee Lewis.
As far as I know, there was no connection between The Beatles and Charles Whitman (that was Manson, not Whitman). It would be absolutely incorrect, for instance, to say that Whitman thought the backwards voices on “Rain” had told him to shoot all those people. But starting a rumor to that effect might drive traffic, so feel free to quote me out of context.