Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (8 page)

Parnesy screamed and screamed and screamed, and, finally, after Paul accidentally-on-purpose dropped him on his arse, Parnesy said, “Okay, okay, you’re hired, you’re hired. My boys are going on a Scottish tour. Get a drummer, pick a better name, and you can back up Billy Fury.”

Fury said, “Mr. Parnes, with all due respect, there’s no fookin’ way they’re backin’ me up. I don’t want to fookin’ die.”

Parnesy picked himself up, dusted himself off, and shot a long look at Fury. After a moment, he said, “Understood,” turned to the lads, and said, “You’ll back up Johnny Gentle.” Johnny Gentle was another singing mediocrite who I wouldn’t have hired to wipe my bum.

John said, “Brilliant. So you’re hiring us on merit, right?”

Parnes said, “Fook, no. I’m hiring you because you’ll kill me if I don’t.”

John grabbed his guitar from the bandstand and brandished it over Larry’s head as if it were a mallet, then said, “I asked you, You’re … hiring … us … on … merit. Right?”

Parnes cringed and said, “Of course I’m hiring you on merit, Mr. Lennon. Of course.”

John put down his guitar, smiled, and said, “Great! We’ll take it.”

GEORGE HARRISON:
Picking a name for our band was a contentious struggle, and I wanted no part of it. It was a powder-keg topic, and in those early days, I didn’t offer up an opinion unless I was asked, and even then, I was as noncommittal as possible. You never knew what would set off John or Paul. And if they disagreed with something you said while they were hungry, forget it.

The day after the Blue Angel audition, John showed up to rehearsal with a
long
list of name suggestions, and I remember each and every one of them: the Deads-men, the Deadmen, the Undeads-men, the Undeadmen, the Rots, the Rotters, the Dirts, the Dirty Ones, the Grayboys, the Eaten Brains, the Eating Brains, the Mersey Beaters, the Mersey Beaten, the Bloodless, the Graves, the Headstones, and the Liverpools of Blood.

Paul ripped off John’s right arm and used it to slap John across the face, then he said, “Those’re horrible, mate, just horrible, y’know.”

John took back his arm, bit off the pinkie, spit it toward Paul’s gut—apparently Johnny didn’t take too kindly to being slapped, especially with his own hand—and said, “I had this dream last night—”

Stu interrupted him. “Brilliant. Here we go again with the dreams.”

STUART SUTCLIFFE:
It seemed like every fookin’ evening, like at three in the fookin’ morning, John would ring me to tell me about some fookin’ dream he’d had. One night he’d dream about being in heaven and talking with Robert Johnson about the Devil, then the next, he’d dream about being in hell, talking to the Devil about Robert Johnson. Even if it was a good dream, he’d be upset, and I was happy to try and calm him down, but, well, shite, he could’ve called Paulie once in a while.

GEORGE HARRISON:
I ignored Stu and asked John what his dream was about. If nothing else, it would be an entertaining story.

He said, “Right, then. So I’m sitting on a canoe in the middle of the Thames, floating about without a paddle, and the sky is fookin’ orange, and I see some girl in another canoe, and she’s got two paddles. She’s got these eyes that’re shining like silver or diamonds, and she says, ‘John Winston Lennon, d’you want to eat a piece of pie?’

“I say, ‘I don’t want any pie, I want one of your fookin’ paddles. This river smells like shite, and I wanna get back to Liverpool.’

“She says, ‘What if I set the pie on fire, John Winston Lennon? What if the pie has flames shooting out of it? Tasty, tasty flames.’

“I say, ‘It’ll probably improve the scent around here, but I don’t want any pie. If you wanna feed me something, get me some fookin’ brains.’

“She says, ‘So I can’t interest you in a flaming pie, John Winston Lennon?’

“I say, ‘No, you can’t interest me in a flaming pie, you sparkle-eyed wench.’

“She says, ‘You know what? You’re a right cunt, John Winston Lennon. Can I interest you in flaming
hell
?’ Then she sets me on fire, whacks me on me head with her paddle, and turns into a giant silver bug.

“I jump into the water so as not to burn, then I say, ‘What’s this Kafka shite, then?’

“She says, ‘I’m not a cockroach, idiot. I’m a beetle. And you’re going to die a real death. Unless you call your band the Beatles. And that’s Beatles with an
a.’

“I say, ‘What d’you mean Beatles with an
a
? Are you talking B-E-A-T-L-E-S or B-A-E-T-L-E-S or B-E-E-A-T-L-E-S or A-B-E-E-T-L-E-S or—’

“She says, ‘Figure it out for yourself, cunt. Figure it out for yourself.’”

John ran his hand through his hair—which was getting a bit shaggy, I should note—and said, “And then I woke up.”

See? Entertaining.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
I was tired of arguing, y’know. By then, I didn’t care if it was the Deads-men or the Deadmen or the Undeads-men or the Undeadmen or the Rots or the Rotters or the Dirts or the Dirty Ones or the Grayboys or the Eaten Brains or the Eating Brains or the Mersey Beaters or the Mersey Beaten or the Bloodless or the Graves or the Headstones or the Liverpools of Blood or B-E-A-T-L-E-S or B-A-E-T-L-E-S or B-E-E-A-T-L-E-S or A-B-E-E-T-L-E-S or A-B-C-D-E-F-G. If Johnny wanted to let a giant dream bug dictate our name, that was his prerogative.

He declared we would be the Silver B-E-A-T-L-E-S, and I gave it a thumbs-up, because I needed to focus my energy elsewhere. Y’see, I was having some issues with a certain percussionist.

S
acked just before the Beatles exploded onto the international scene, Pete Best is the unluckiest footnote in rock ’n’ roll history. A solid if not unspectacular drummer and a notorious grump, Pete joined John, Paul, et al. in 1960, right after the Scotland tour with Johnny Gentle, a tour that left the boys miserable and broke. Pete was a classically attractive young man, and, almost immediately, a goodly portion of the band’s ever-growing female fan base took to him like flies to a corpse.

Pete, who still resides in Liverpool, has mixed feelings about his twenty-four months as a Beatle (or, more accurately, his one month as a Silver Beatle and his twenty-three months as a regular Beatle), and during our five-hour, increasingly drunken chat at Le Bateau over on Liverpool’s tony Duke Street during the summer of 1997, his emotional conflict was always evident, and I couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. But Pete Best doesn’t want you to feel sorry for him. He just wants you to listen.

PETE BEST:
Except for George, who was a couple of years younger than us, we were all about the same age, but John and Paul were clearly the bosses. You know how sometimes when you have a boss who’s really charismatic and mysterious, you spend a lot of time with your coworkers trying to analyze him? Well, that was what it was like with Stu and me. We used to talk about John and Paul all the time:
Did John like my snare fill on “Be-Bop-A-Lula”? Did Paul notice that Stu’d dropped a couple of notes on “Long Tall Sally”? Did they mind that I’d scooped that blond bird who was off to the side of the stage, shaking her big titties at us? Were they going to kill me and turn me into a zombie without any advance notice?
It was always a head game with Lennon and McCartney, and what with their habit of murdering at the drop of a hat, the stakes were high.

Two weeks after they brought me aboard, we went to Hamburg to play what seemed like five hundred shows at a sleazy joint called the Indra Club, run by this dodgy bloke named Bruno Koschmider. Bruno ran us ragged: we played seven nights a week, and some nights we’re talking six hours straight. It got to the point we were eating uppers like they were sweets.

You could always gauge how many uppers John, Paul, and George had taken by their skin tone: If they took four pills or less, they turned green—like as green as a lawn in the middle of the summer. Anything beyond that, they turned bright fookin’ yellow, so yellow that they glowed in the dark. Green and yellow complexions
are the best advertisements for undeadness, so everybody knew what we were about. But even with the stench of death that permeated the club, the crowds packed the joint night after night after night.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
Pete wanted nothing to do with death or undeath. I told him over and over that I wouldn’t hurt him and that he should ask George how simple and painless it was. Of course, I talked to him about it only when John was, erm, out of earshot. Sometimes I just had to throw John’s “all for zombies, and zombies for all” precept right out the window. Sometimes I had to make a decision for the band all by myself, y’know.

PETE BEST:
The one thing that almost convinced me to let Paul do his thing to me was the birds. No matter how unhealthy looking those zombies’ faces may have been, and no matter how many times their fingers fell off during guitar solos, those blokes had the girls drooling over them, and drooling girls looked pretty fookin’ good to me. The thought of that dustmen shite shooting out of my plonker wasn’t very appetizing, however, but having the ability to hypnotize twin sisters into bed, well, that was kind of appealing. Not that they
did
hypnotize twin sisters into bed, but knowing the ability was there was greatly comforting and greatly exciting.

S
ix months before this book was to go to press, I received a scary-as-hell email from a certain German-born, Spain-based photographer-cum-artist-cum-vampire who’d been all but invisible for almost three decades.

Jürgen Vollmer and his pals Astrid Kirchherr and local artist/musician Klaus Voormann were a tight-knit clique who dubbed themselves the Exis, and that’s “exi” in honor of their pet philosophy, existentialism. (Jürgen cheerfully admits the Exis were a tad on the pretentious side.) The threesome discovered the Beatles when the band was relocated from the Indra to another Bruno Koschmider–run venue called the Kaiserkeller. With their ever-increasing musical confidence and ability to simultaneously entertain and scare the crap out of their growing audiences, the five Liverpudlians knocked the three Hamburgers on their collective hindquarters. The smitten Exis immediately latched onto the undead quintet and held on for dear life.

By all accounts, Jürgen was the quietest of the Exis, and his near silence came about because he simply didn’t have enough energy to talk; turned out, the poor guy was always starving. After all, what with the scurvied prostitutes and drunks clogging up the streets surrounding the Kaiserkeller—streets that were home to Hamburg’s red-light district—it was difficult for a young vampire to find quality blood without drawing attention to himself. So it was either scurvy-flavored hookers and gin-soaked alkies, or nothing at all.

In the summer of 2009, Jürgen stumbled onto my website, where he read one of the many blog entries in which I bitched about Stuart Sutcliffe’s reticence to divulge the specifics of his transformation from meat eater to bloodsucker. Jürgen sent me an email:

MR. GOLDSHER, I WISH TO DISCUSS MR. SUTCLIFFE WITH YOU! MEET ME AT CA L’ISIDRE IN BARCELONA ON AUGUST 15 AT EXACTLY MIDNIGHT! SHOW UP AFTER 12:01, AND I’LL BE LONG GONE! SHOW UP AT OR BEFORE 11:59, AND I WILL KILL YOU IN A HIDEOUS FASHION! I’LL BE THE ONE WEARING THE PRETENTIOUS BLACK CAPE
! YOURS ALWAYS, MR. JÜRGEN VOLLMER.