McCartney threatened in 1968 because of Hey Jude

Paul McCartney has been threatened in 1968 as a result of the promotion of the Beatles single Hey Jude. He reveiled the story in a video interview by GQ magazine. The reason for this was the German meaning of the name Jude, which is Jew. When the title of the new single came to hang on the windows of the Apple shop in London for promotional reasons, it caused an unintentionally wrong association. And at least one angry reaction.

We put it up on the shop window: Hey Jude. So the people going by on the busses would see it, thinking ‘what’s that?’, you know, an intriguing ‘aaah’, and then it was our record. But I got this furious phone call from this guy, Mr. Leon, who was Jewish, who was furious and said: ‘What are you doing? How dare you do this?’

The response was not entirely incomprehensible, certainly not considering it was relatively short after the horrors of the Holocaust. In Nazi Germany, restaurants, businesses and shops of Jews were plastered with the text 'Jude', so that everyone could see which background the owner had.

I didn’t realize it meant Jewish. (…) I didn’t connect. I actually heard the name first in one of the musicals. Anyway, he rings me up, being furious, ‘How could you do this, making fun of the Jews, we’ve got enough!’ I said ‘No, no, no, wait a minute… I swear to you it’s nothing like that.’ He said: I’m gonna send my son to beat you up!’.

McCartney manages to calm down the angry caller and explains to him that Jude in this case is only a name in a song and that there is absolutely no condescending action towards Jews.

But of course, you know, suddenly I was alerted to the fact that it would have caused him a lot of problems. Because his family would have experienced that, from first hand probably. Anyway, I calmed him down, he was cool, and his son didn’t come around to beat me up.

Hey Jude celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this summer. The song has been a regular feature of McCartney's live shows since the late 1980s. In the same interview he explains that he doesn’t intend to take the track of the setlist:

Whenever I going to do a new tour I think I just switch up all the songs. But then I go, mmm, I got to do Hey Jude. Because it’s so much fun. And it’s great to hand it over to the audience. You know what the greatest thing is? You feel this sense of community. And in these times, when it’s a bit dark and people are being separated by politics and stuff, it’s so fantastic to see them all come together, singing the end of Hey Jude. I’m very happy about that, so I’m keeping it in the show.

Watch the entire interview here:

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André Homan

André Homan is a Dutch writer and journalist.

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