Paul McCartney has told a bizarre story about his Beatles hit ‘Hey Jude’ suggesting that the song once offended a Jewish man.
The Beatles put a sign in the window of their one time Apple clothing store simply stating ‘Hey Jude’.
“I liked the name Jude. I didn’t realise it meant Jewish, which it does. We put it up on the window of our shop so that people going by on the buses would see it,” he tells GQ.
He then went on to say, “I got this furious phone call from this guy who was Jewish. He said ‘what are you doing. How dare you do this, hey Jude. Because in Hitler’s day, the Nazi thing, ‘Juden Raus’ meant ‘Jews out’. I didn’t connect. I heard the name first in one of the musicals. I liked the name. He rings me up and he says, “you’re doing this and you’re making fun of the Jews”. I said, “no wait a minute’. He said ‘I am going to send my son around to beat you up’. I said ‘hey baby, nothing to do with that’. I was suddenly alerted that it would have caused him a lot of problems because his family would have experienced that. I calmed him down and his son didn’t come around to beat me up.
Sir Paul has been saying some unusual things on his promo tour for Egypt Station. Last week McCartney blamed the breakup of The Beatles on John Lennon.
McCartney Hey Jude comments are about 12 minutes into the GQ interview.
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