The traffic lights changed from green to red
They tried to stop but they both wound up dead
Interestingly, this phrase while overlooked at the time germane to the rumor, closely follows the "Wednesday morning at five o'clock as the day begins" detail from the Paul is Dead legend, with "Cutie" sometimes cited as being a lovely meter maid named Rita that Paul had offered a ride to. If you follow the mythology even further, the two were supposedly flirting as Paul was driving, "he didn't notice that the lights had changed", lost control of the car while trying to avoid a lorry van leading to an accident that killed either both of them or just Paul, depending upon who's version of this myth you encounter. The accident scene is then described in "I Am The Walrus" (policemen standing in a row etc) as is the moment when John heard about the crash while "sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun", and so on, with Paul's "resurrection" then outlined in "Here Comes The Sun King".
The inclusion of "Death Cab For Cutie" in MMT was, according to the rabid Cluesters as one of the first metaphorical admissions by the band as to what actually happened to Paul -- who if you look closely is the only one of The Beatles not present in the audience watching the strip show -- with Vivian Stanshall often cited as one of the possible musical "stand-ins" for the deceased Paul on subsequent recordings. Specifically "Lady Madonna" (which also has a reference to the press blackout engineered to cover up the event with the "Wednesday morning papers didn't come" lyric) where Mr. Stanshall was allowed to use his natural voice rather than mimicking Paul's more choirboy singing -- the same voice is supposedly the one heard singing "Oh Darling" and "I've Got A Feeling", which (supposedly) is a very different voice than the one singing on "Hey Jude" and "Let it Be" etc.
It is all of course just cranberry sauce (ha ha), but it does sort of make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end when you let your imagination read-in to the different lyrics. It's all just in fun of course, a grand set of coincidences and juxtapositions of random elements specifically cherry picked to create some sort of subtext, but it does lend a creepy air of prescience to the inclusion of what otherwise is an element in MMT that otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with The Beatles. I've always been fascinated by the death rumor, don't believe a word of it, but the morbid creepiness that these associations suggest lend an extra air of profundity to the non-sequitor nature of the scene's inclusion. Then again the entire MMT film is an extended exercise in linking non-sequitors, so make of it what you will.
For those who have never heard of any of this or would be interested in reading more, here is a Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_is_deadthat more or less covers the basic elements of the myth, which again I don't buy for a minute beyond possibly being a morbid publicity stunt cooked up by John as revenge for the backlash of his "bigger than Jesus" controversy, a conclusion supported by a book about the phenomenon by Andru J. Reeve called "Turn Me On, Dead Man" that will definitely give any devoted Beatle fan some creepy if harmless fun.
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