Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (12 page)

And then John throws his Fender Deluxe amplifier at the wall across the room.

GEORGE HARRISON:
Pete did or said something to Bert, and Bert looked pissed, and I was ready to go to bat for Pete. All for zombies, and zombies for all, and yeah, Pete wasn’t a zombie, but he was still one of us. But the second John’s Fender whizzed by my head—and
missed knocking off my nose by only a couple of millimeters, I should note—I packed up and cleared the hell out. I wasn’t gonna let Johnny lay a finger on my GA-40 Les Paul, that’s for damn sure.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
From the beginning of the band, John was the idea man, and most of his ideas were good ones. So I figured, if he thought destroying the studio was a wise move, I was game.

Problem was, my Selmer Truvoice Stadium was a solid piece of equipment, y’know, and seemed like it was built to survive a nuclear holocaust. Now, what with my so-called zombie powers, I’m a strong bloke, but it took me three chucks to turn that baby into sawdust. John, however, trashed his Fender in one toss.

JOHN LENNON:
There was a method behind my mad amp-toss. I’d had my Rickenbacker 325 for three years, and I wasn’t about to turn my beloved guitar into firewood, so I did the next best thing.

PETE BEST:
Man, I loved my Premier drum kit. The cymbals were cherry, the toms rang across the room, and my snare head was to that point where it was broken in but not
too
broken in. Needless to say, I was livid when John started going to town on it, just fookin’ livid.

JOHN LENNON:
The first thing I did after my amp went to the great Fender factory in the sky was take off Pete’s ride cymbal and sharpen it on my teeth. I gave that thing a razor’s edge so sharp it could’ve decapitated a fookin’ elephant. Then I threw it like a Frisbee toward Bert’s recording setup … and I put some quality spin on it, so it did maximum damage. The reel-to-reel machine was in tatters, and the mixing board had sparks shooting out of it.

That felt good, but it wasn’t enough. I was hungry, you see, and that’s
the kind of thing that happens when I don’t have access to sustenance.

I retrieved the cymbal, flung it at the wall, flicking my wrist just so. It cut through like a chain saw, and it moved so fast that it started smoking. The smoke turned to a campfire, and the campfire turned to a forest fire. We grabbed our gear—broken and unbroken alike—and got the fook out of there. For some reason, the story never made the paper.

Good thing Bert took the master tapes with him, or else the world wouldn’t have been treated to our first real record, a cover of “My Bonnie,” which wasn’t released under the Quarrymen or the Silver Beatles or the Beatles or the Maggots, but rather Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers. The whole thing was ridiculous, but I suppose you’ve gotta start somewhere.

O
ne afternoon while I was at the Dakota, out of nowhere, Lennon turned to me and said, “Eppy’s still around, you know.”

I almost dropped my cup of Kopi. “Bullshit. Quit fucking with me, Lennon,” I said. As far as I knew, Eppy—John’s nickname for the Beatles’ brilliant manager Brian Epstein—died of a drug overdose in 1967. Whether or not it was a suicide has always been up for debate.

“Not fucking with you, mate. It’s true,” Lennon said. “Dunno where he’s at, though. Aspinall probably knows.”

Neil Aspinall was the de facto Beatles gatekeeper, and it was his job to know that sort of thing … and to keep it quiet. Turned out John was right on both counts. Eppy was still around, and Aspinall knew his whereabouts—specifically, Edinburgh. (It also turned out that this was the one and only time John blatantly lied to me; he knew exactly where Brian Epstein was.)

I wasn’t comfortable approaching Epstein myself, but Neil kindly offered to set up the meeting. Much to my pleasure, Brian agreed to see me immediately, which was a shock, as I assumed he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d speak to the likes of yours truly. I’m certain the only reason he okayed the meeting is because of Neil’s endorsement.

Brian’s wheelchair-friendly house—it’s a mansion, really—is set so far back from any road in Edinburgh that if you
didn’t
know it’s there, you
wouldn’t
know it’s there … and that’s just the way Eppy wants it. Courteous and affable as one would hope, if not somewhat guarded, Brian insisted on discussing his personal, more recent backstory first, before he launched into the back-backstory.

BRIAN EPSTEIN:
It doesn’t matter whether or not I committed suicide. It doesn’t change the story
before,
and it doesn’t change the story
after.
I was unhappy, I took a lot of drugs, and I died. The end.

John was off in Lennonland for most of ’66 and ’67, but he sensed my state of mind, even though I thought I was doing a fine job of keeping up appearances; he’s always been good like that, John has. One afternoon, he asked me if I wanted him to turn me, claiming that a transformation might brighten my mood.

I said, “No way. My life will end when it’s time for it to end. I don’t want to be around five hundred years from now. I don’t even want to be around
fifty
years from now. Life is meant to be lived finitely.”

He said, “I’m infinite, and I’m doing okay.”

I said, “Well, John, you’re you, and I’m me. So don’t reanimate me. Ever. Don’t try to sneak up on me when I’m asleep or hypnotize me or pull any of that bollocks you pull when you kill a stranger.” I made him promise. And he kept his promise. For seven years.

In 1974, John Lennon and Yoko Ono dug up my grave, and John reanimated me. Initially I was livid, but when he apologized and
said he did it because he was lonely, well, I had to forgive him, didn’t I? He bought me this house and made arrangements so I’d have enough money to be solvent until the end of time. In 2001, he said, “I’m glad I set you up with the dosh, Eppy. Imagine if you had to go back to work. You might get stuck managing some sad cunts like those fookin’ Gallagher brothers.”

The problem is, since I’d been dead for so long, John was able to reanimate only my head. My body, as you can see, is mostly paralyzed. I can move my neck, and my hands are fine, and I have some slight movement in my arms, but my legs are useless. I have live-in help, and John made sure that will always be the case. John Lennon has murdered God knows how many thousands of people, but he’s a good man.

I’m blathering on. You didn’t come here to talk about me. You want to hear about the lads.

I saw them perform for the first time at the Cavern Club, and I knew right away they had
something
. I didn’t know anything about the undead—after all, there weren’t any zombies on tony old Rodney Street, where I grew up—and I wasn’t sure whether I should expect a murderous rampage for an encore, or what. Turned out the lads could keep it under control … most of the time. But only most of the time. Once in a while, they went off the rails. I assume you’re familiar with the Shea Stadium show.

In any event, our business marriage happened fast. After that wonderful Cavern performance, I told John that they needed a manager. He immediately agreed and asked where he should sign. The rest, as they say, is history.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
Some folks say the Beatles’ story began after that Quarrymen show at St. Peter’s, y’know. Some say it was when we went off to play in Hamburg. Some say it was when Stu went vampire
on us, and I took over on bass. Some say it was when we started our residency at the Cavern Club. Me, I point to the day we brought Brian Epstein aboard … and we restrained ourselves from zombifying him.

That’s when I realized John might be right. Maybe we could do it. Maybe the Beatles could take over the whole world. And our first step toward world domination took place at the Decca Records studio, way out in bloody West Hampstead.

CHAPTER TWO

1962

BRIAN EPSTEIN:
One of the first things I did when I took on the band was to make certain they developed some semblance of onstage decorum. They were a rough lot, those lads, and it showed before, during, and after their performances, and it needed to stop. It was all fine and good for them to wrap a bar stool around a heckler’s neck in Hamburg, but not in the UK. They had to learn to look, and somewhat act, the part.

The first problem was their hair. The Exis got them in the habit of wearing what I suppose you could call a pompadour, and to my mind, that didn’t sit well with their overall look. I felt that having their ’dos stick up in the air
emphasized
what should have been
de
emphasized. That said, God knows I didn’t want them to cut it; they needed as much cover on their heads as possible, because John and George periodically broke out in festering skull sores, and long hair covered the evidence. More or less.

Problem number two: their attire. They often wore leather, and to me, that made them look, erm, aggressive. Granted, they
were
aggressive—
they were undead, for goodness sake, and you couldn’t expect anything less—but I felt like a change of costume would tone things down without sacrificing their innate zombieness, something John was quite concerned about, because, as he famously told
Mersey Beat
, “Until the end of time, I intend to stay as true to my zombie roots as possible.”

So I suggested they try wearing matching suits, with the proviso being the suits were always a dark color. If they wore a lighter tone, any blood or brain fluid that spilled between sets would stain and be easily seen, whereas with black, nobody would be the wiser. I took them shopping, and they looked smashing.

I firmly believed that a spiffy look would lead to a spiffy record deal. A logical thought, but at first, I was very, very wrong. Not a single label wanted to touch us. I didn’t know why, and I couldn’t figure out how to rectify it. Aside from the afternoon that George overturned a city bus, the boys handled the constant rejection well, but I could tell that John was reaching his boiling point.

Z
ombies have been a familiar entity throughout the world for many decades now, and though the majority of them look somewhat grotesque, most of us have seen enough of the undead that we’re rarely fazed in their presence. A lumpy, gray face? So what else is new? Oddly positioned limbs? No biggie. Scars, permanent dried blood, scars, festering sores, and more scars? Who cares?

On the other hand, few have seen a Midpointer up close and personal; thus, Midpointers tend to elicit a more noticeable reaction: they don’t cause a panic, but if you encounter one, you’ll likely be, at the very least, taken aback. It has nothing to do with the Midpointer attitude—demeanor-wise, they’re a perfectly nice lot, if not a little depressed—but rather their physicality. I can report that an up-close encounter with a Midpointer will disconcert even the most jaded zombie enthusiast.

Midpointers are partly alive, partly dead, and partly undead, but unfortunately for them, they take on the worst physical characteristics of all three states of being. Immediately after their zombie-to-Midpointer transformation, their skin tone changes from typical undead gray to an almost translucent white, so translucent that in the correct light, their body’s infrastructure is visible. Making matters worse for the passerby, the infrastructure is inevitably severely damaged, so if you catch a glimpse of a Midpointer with his shirt off, you might be treated to a view of a lacerated liver or a punctured lung or a squashed heart. That being the case, Midpointers tend to wear extra layers of clothing, so, for the most part, you’ll only be treated to the sight of a chip in the skull or a sheared cornea. The clarity of the skin makes any scars and bloodstains stand out in sharp relief, which doesn’t exactly sweeten the view.