I got some measure of revenge, but that wouldn’t come for another six sodding years.
As alluded to earlier, the list of those who have been thought of as the Fifth Beatle is endless: Aspinall and Epstein top the heap, of course, but journalist and eventual press officer Derek Taylor, New York–based radio jock Murray the K, roadie Mal Evans, and even boxer Muhammad Ali are among the many who have had the spurious title bestowed upon them. But none were as integral to the Fab Four’s story as the real Fifth Beatle, George Martin.
A versatile composer, arranger, and engineer, Martin eventually produced all but one of the Beatles’ albums and was oftentimes as integral to the sound of the band as any of the lads themselves. That being the case, Beatleologists have wondered for decades why Martin was never made undead.
By the time the band auditioned for Martin at the end of 1962, Lennon had established his MO of giving immortal life/death to those he loved and respected; as Martin quickly became a beloved father figure, he appeared a logical candidate for the Liverpool Process. Neither Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starr, nor Martin himself would discuss why George was allowed to live, and as of this writing, it remains one of the great mysteries of Beatledom.
On the plus side, Martin is a hale and hearty gent and comes across in conversation as immortal, the kind of guy who’ll be here for the long haul. When we spoke in April 2007 on the rooftop of Abbey Road Studios, the then-eighty-one-year-old Knight Bachelor looked like he could give even the most powerful monster a run for his money.
GEORGE MARTIN: The first question everybody asks me is, “Were you frightened? When they walked into the studio for the first time, did they scare you?”
The short answer: yes.
I spent my formative years living in Highgate, which, as I’m sure you know, is a zombie-free zone. Looking back on it, I realize how prejudiced and small-minded that was, but as a child, you don’t know any better. As an English boy in the 1940s, if your parents told you the undead were awful, then the undead were awful. You didn’t ask questions.
When I moved to London in 1950, I saw a few shufflers here and there, but always from a distance. As I never encountered one face-to-face, the fear remained. No matter how enlightened I became, my trepidation was deep-seated, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t seem to matter, because I worked in the classical music department for EMI. You don’t meet too many zombie orchestra conductors, so I figured my attitude toward the undead would never be an issue.
By the time the lads auditioned for me at Abbey Road Studios in June 1962, I’d been to several parties that counted zombies among the guests but was always too nervous to engage with any of them. That experience of being in close proximity to them got me used to their look and smell, so at least I wasn’t put off by the Beatles’ physicality. Another plus for me was that I was polished and professional enough to the point that I could sublimate my fear. I acted so cool and calm that nobody had a clue I was quaking in my loafers.
As soon as they started playing, any fear, any trepidation, went out the window. After they finished their first tune, I viewed them as moneymakers—some scruffy undead boys from Liverpool who had the potential to make our label, Parlaphone, a load of dosh. But then, after the second tune—and after we discussed music and shared some jokes—I began to see them as the warm, talented, caring, intelligent death merchants that they were. I thought, I could work with these lads.
RINGO STARR: For our first honest-to-goodness session, George brought in a vampire from Glasgow named Andy White to cover the traps. George claims he hired Andy because he was concerned I might not be able to cut it in the studio. Neil and I always theorized that it was because George believed that a band should either be all dead or all alive. But George grew up in Highgate, and everybody knows how those Highgaters think.
He’s since said he was sorry. Numerous times. And all the apologies were completely unprompted. It wasn’t like I had to use my big toe to break his collarbone or anything.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: John and I spent the week leading up to our first real, honest-to-goodness recording session talking. And talking. And talking. And the topic of discussion: mind control.
I firmly disagreed with John’s stance about not wanting to, as he put it, force anybody to buy our records. His line was, “If we have to fookin’ hypnotize someone into liking us, that’s not the kind of person we’d want buying our records anyhow.”
I’d tell him, “I don’t care who buys our record, just as long as they buy it, y’know. And it’s not like they’ll be permanently under our power.” Actually, I didn’t know that for certain. I wasn’t even certain we’d be able to get hypnosis onto wax. And if we could, I had no idea of the effects. It was dangerous, unknown territory. It could’ve blown up in our faces. It could’ve ended the world as we knew it. But I wanted to give it a shot. Why bloody not?
JOHN LENNON: The morning before the session, we were all at a restaurant, and Paul was blathering on about mind control, mind control, mind control. He was driving me mad, so instead of agreeing to disagree, then closing the topic, then finishing off breakfast, then heading off to the studio to cut our first record, I ripped his lips off.
RINGO STARR: I wouldn’t have chosen to tear up Paulie’s face mere hours before he had to sing into a microphone for several hours, but that’s me.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: Ripping off my lips was one thing, but tossing them over to George was another.
GEORGE HARRISON: We weren’t being malicious. We were just having a bit of fun. I mean, what’s a few rounds of keep-away between mates?
PAUL MCCARTNEY: When George accidentally threw my lips over John’s head and into a bowl of porridge belonging to the poor bloke at the next table over, that’s when I, erm, lost it.
RINGO STARR: Paul yanked off John’s left ring and index fingers, right there at the breakfast table. Before it could escalate, I threw a shuriken toward Paul’s wrist and pinned his shirt to the table. I gave John his fingers back, then I retrieved Paul’s lips from the poor soul who’d gotten splashed with oatmeal—and I picked up his check, of course—and said, “Okay, lads, let’s go record ourselves a number one hit! Let’s go to the Toppermost of the Poppermost!”
John used his detached fingers to poke me in my eyes, then said, “What the fook do you know about the Poppermost, Ninja?” Then he tore off his leg below the knee and used it to clout me on my forehead.
At that moment, as I wiped away the blood that was dripping into my right eye, I knew in my heart and soul that the Beatles were ready.
CHAPTER THREE
1963–1964
Mick Jagger has a diamond shard embedded in his upper right incisor, and the general belief among the rock cognoscenti is that he put it there for one reason, and one reason only: because it’s really fucking cool.
Wrong. Truth is, the sinewy frontman of the Rolling Stones wants that diamond easily accessible in case he needs to launch it into an errant zombie.
You see, Mick Jagger, while he digs the musical stylings of Messrs. Lennon and McCartney, despises the undead. He always has and always will, and he refuses to discuss why. Some have theorized that his mother, Eva, survived an undead attack in her teens, and he wants to do some avenging, while others believe Mick was bullied in preschool by either a zombie or a schoolmate pretending to be a zombie. Regardless of the backstory, Jagger has dedicated his life to three things: making music, having as much sex with as many of the planet’s most beautiful women as possible, and ridding the galaxy of the undead.
Which is why it was curious that in the spring of 1963, he struck up a friendship with the Beatles. Needless to say, the first thing I asked Mick when I spoke with him in Sapporo, Japan, in March 2006—in the midst of yet another Stones world tour—was, why did he make nicey-nice with a band of zombies?
MICK JAGGER: When we first met, the Beatles had no idea about my stance on the undead; all they saw was my sincere enthusiasm about their work. No way they could’ve known how I fe
lt about zombies, really. I kept it under wraps because, if I was gonna get close to them, I had to earn their trust, mate. If they thought I had it out for them and I came with a frontal attack, I’d have been a dead man. And if one of the three zombies didn’t get me, the Ninja certainly would’ve.
I never discussed my zombie hate in public. Nobody outside of my inner circle knew how I felt, and I thought nobody ever would, because at that point, there weren’t any journos digging into my past. And it’s a good thing nobody was digging, because I had a few secrets I wanted to keep buried for a while. For instance, rock fans didn’t need to know about Norbert.
English zombies, in contrast to the majority of the undead men and women who inhabit our fine planet, are a relatively docile group, feeding only when hungry, and, for the most part, getting physical only when defending themselves. Thus, unlike in North America—where you can’t throw a stone without hitting a zombie exterminator’s storefront—British zombie hunters are few and far between.
It was even more difficult to find one in 1955, the year that a young Mick Jagger started looking for somebody to mentor him in the ways of zombie extermination. After months of searching, Mick finally found his guru; serendipitously, the guy lived in Kent, almost right around the corner from the Jagger family’s prim middle-class abode.
Norbert Eliot didn’t advertise his services and was surprised when the skinny, thick-lipped thirteen-year-old undead-hater showed up on his doorstep with dreams of zombie butchery dancing through his head. For the next three years, six days out of the week, two hours each day, Mick went to Eliot’s cramped house and trained with the veteran zombie hunter, eventually surpassing his teacher in strength and knowledge.
Eliot has a soft spot in his heart for his most famous student and still speaks of him with an affection that borders on love. The sad irony of it all is that in 2000, Norbert, after a six-day battle, was beaten by a four-hundred-plus-pound Irish zombie, who, rather than finish him off, decided—you guessed it—to make him undead. Eliot, who still lives in Kent, has come to terms with his state of being, and, in December 2008, spoke with me about his years teaching the man that some call Lips.
NORBERT ELIOT: Some young men came to me full of spit and vinegar, without a milligram of discipline. Others had a heap of physical aptitude but not a single iota of mental acumen. But Mick Jagger, well, that boy had the whole package: fire, desire, a sense of purpose, and a set of lips I knew would serve him well.
He was such a slight lad that the first thing I did was get him into shape. We spent three or four months on a handful of exercises that combined yoga, martial arts, and ballet. His favorite move was a pelvic thrust and a strut, something that he used to fine effect as both a zombie hunter and, eventually, a rock performer. I still find it amusing that for eleven years, Mick pretended he couldn’t dance; I taught him well, and the bollocks story about him learning his more sensual moves from Tina Turner cracks me up to this day.
I wouldn’t let Mick near an honest-to-goodness zombie for a full year, which frustrated him to no end. He wanted to kick some undead arse, and he wanted to kick it immediately, but he simply wasn’t ready. Even if he were ready, it wouldn’t have mattered, because none of my students were allowed to spar until they’d been with me for a year, and I wasn’t going to make an exception for Mick just because he was more skilled than my other lads and lassies.
I staged my sparring sessions in my basement. My house is tiny, and one might think that a fight between a husky, plus-size zombie and a teenage apprentice zombie hunter in a room that could fit only a bridge table and four folding chairs wouldn’t be very useful for the youngster; I mean, how many fifteen-year-olds can handle themselves against an undead individual who’s been there, done that, and killed everybody, let alone in such a tiny area? Not many. So to an outsider, that wouldn’t seem logical. But when you saw how my kids moved once they got into the heat of a real battle, you’d agree that it made a lot of sense.
For most of our second year together, Mick would get his arse handed to him five days a week, but in year three, he started holding his own in the basement, and when it came time to fight in the real world, Mick was ready.
He never knew that I arranged his first battle. He thought he’d stumbled onto a zombie robbing a young woman in Godmersham Park, but in reality, I planned the whole thing. I watched from behind a nearby tree and was so proud of my Mick, the way he knocked the zombie to the ground with a mere twitch of his hips. But the pièce de résistance was when he pinned the zombie to a tree, then kissed him on the chest with those lips of his, which resurrected the zombie’s heart, making him mortal and, thus, killable. I had to run over and intervene, or else the one zombie in the world that I actually liked would’ve been a goner.
Mick left me when the Stones began gigging regularly; he told me there was nothing else I’d be able to teach him that he couldn’t figure out for himself. He came to me for one more lesson in 1963, however, and I taught him a few more things that I’d been saving for the perfect occasion.
MICK JAGGER: Norbert showed me a blocking spell that would cloud zombies’ minds a tiny bit, just enough so they’d never have a clue of either my abilities or my burning hatred. So John, Paul, and George had no idea what I was about. They liked me, even. They thought I was just another singer from just another band who dug their tunes, and whose tunes they dug. I think Ringo might’ve been suspicious, but I can’t be sure.
RINGO STARR: When we first met Mick Jagger, I thought he had zombie exterminator written all over him, but I kept it from the other lads. He seemed like a nice enough bloke, plus I figured fellow musicians—especially those he respected—would be exempt from any attacks. Shows what I knew.
Nobody can say for sure what Roy Orbison is. A zombie? A vampire? A regenerated Frankenstein-like monster? A deity? An alien? A scientific experiment gone horribly awry? No clue. And Roy ain’t sayin’.
All we know for sure is that if you search really hard, you can find him, and if you manage to find him, he’ll talk to you, as long as you give a literal blood oath that you’ll never tell anybody where he is or how you tracked him down or what he smells like. Honorable journalist that I am, my lips and nose are sealed. Plus the guy scared me shitless, and I truly believe that if I spill the beans, he’ll come after me. And he won’t show any mercy.
In 1963, the Beatles went on a tour of the UK with Orbison, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Tony Marsh, and a handful of other Brit acts. As Orbison was a veteran whom the lads believed could offer them some pointers about tunes and touring, they followed Roy around like puppy dogs. They were so impressed with him that they never noticed that something was a bit off with the man.
Unlike the Beatles, who wore their zombieness on their sleeves, Orbison kept his otherworldliness under wraps; he was so good at hiding it that even fanatics like Lennon and McCartney had no idea what Orbison was. But on the way to a gig in Sheffield, damned if they didn’t get a good idea.
ROY ORBISON: They were good men in those days, the Beatles were. I think the press painted them all wrong in the later years—yeah, I suppose journalists had it out for them after they offed that Tyler guy from New Musical Express, but in ’63, they were okay with me. They caused a little trouble, but they were twenty-ish-year-old zombies, and if you think twenty-ish-year-old zombies are always gonna behave themselves, you’re not exactly in touch with reality.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: I wanted something to remember this tour by, and a mere autograph wouldn’t suffice—I needed a real souvenir, something special. I mean, we’re talking about Roy bloody Orbison, y’know. We didn’t know where the Beatles were headed, and who knew if we’d ever be in close proximity to such a fine musician ever again? If I’d have gotten nailed with a diamond bullet and gone to my grave without having taken the opportunity to liberate a treasure from Roy bloody Orbison, I’d never have forgiven myself.
ROY ORBISON: That Paul McCartney was awfully grabby, and I’m certain he thought he was being
subtle. He thinks I didn’t know he ripped off about twenty of my guitar picks, and that I didn’t see him snatching a couple of my broken guitar strings off the stage. But when he filched my shades, well, that was a problem.
GEORGE HARRISON: He should’ve gotten Ringo to do it. That would’ve saved us all a lot of nightmares.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: Roy’s sunglasses were the big prize, y’know, but he always had them on. Always. Before the shows, during the shows, after the shows, in the hotel, at restaurants, going for strolls, while he was catching Zs, all the bloody time. A couple of weeks into the tour, I realized the only chance I’d have to get them would be while he was asleep in the tour bus. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t gonna try.
JOHN LENNON: I told him, “No way you’re gonna get those glasses off his face while he’s asleep, mate. You’re a zombie, and zombies aren’t good tiptoers.”
He said, “I can do it, y’know. I can be subtle. I can be quiet.”
I said, “Right. But what happens if you manage to be subtle? What if you somehow get the shades? What’re you gonna do with them? It’s not like you can wear them around and about.”
He said, “Haven’t planned that far ahead yet.”
I said, “Maybe you should.”
PAUL MCCARTNEY: My thinking was, What’s the worst that could happen? If he wakes up, I’ll tell him I was playing a practical joke, just, erm, having a laugh.
Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion Page 10