When BEATLE PAUL McCARTNEY scrawled "Hey Jude" on a storefront window, he was accused of being an anti-Semite!
While the Beatles were finishing up their single "Hey Jude" backed by "Revolution' in 1968 their Apple retail store in London had been shuttered. In an attempt in failed publicity, Paul defaced it with a PR blurb and set off a furor!
On 7 August 1968, McCartney took his then- GF, Francie Schwartz, and the Beatles' personal assistant Alistair Taylor to the Apple Boutique, which had closed only a week before.
He promptly scarwled "Hey Jude" on its large plate glass window facing the street. Within a day, the hand-made promo was mistaken for an anti-Semitic graffiti and the window was promptly smashed.
Clueless Paul recalled the troubling incident in 1996 upon the release of "The Beatles' Anthology".
"The windows were whited-out, and I thought: 'Great opportunity. Baker Street, millions of buses going around …' so, before anyone knew what it meant, I scraped 'Hey Jude' out of the whitewash.
"A guy who had a delicatessen in Marylebone rang me up, and he was furious: "I'm going to send one of my sons round to beat you up." Paul said. “I said, "Hang on, hang on — what's this about?" and he said: "You've written Jude in the shop window." I had no idea it meant "Jew", but if you look at footage of Nazi Germany, "Juden Raus" was written in whitewashed windows with a Star of David.
"I swear it never occurred to me.
"I said: 'I'm really sorry," and on and on …'Some of my best friends are Jewish, really. It's just a song we've got coming out…"
"If you listen to the song you'll see it's nothing to do with any of that – it's a complete coincidence," stated Paul.
Paul might have been a reader – of comic books as evidenced in "Help!" – but evidently he was no student of history.
