Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion

by Alan Goldsher

  I asked him, “Why do you have to do it?”

  John said, “It’s our zombie nature.”

  GEORGE HARRISON: We scaled it down considerably, intending to own the minds and bend the wills of just the people attending the concert at the Deauville Beach Resort. Since hypnosis hadn’t worked when Paul was singing lead, we opted to use “This Boy” as our launching point. Most of the song was sung in three-part harmony, but there was a moment right before the bridge where John did a “Whoa, whoa, whoa” bit, and that was the spot.

  RINGO STARR: Man, that was a disaster. If I were undead, I’d have been embarrassed for all zombiekind. As it was, I was embarrassed to be a Beatle.

  JOHN LENNON: Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I always say.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: We got to the bridge of the song, and we did our hypnotize-with-harmony thing, and nothing. Nobody froze, and nobody yelled their heads off in horror. The whole crowd just sat there and watched while the lenses of all four television cameras shattered. The cameramen were dead before we even had a chance to reanimate them.

  Yeah, we sold a whole bunch of records, and yeah, we earned a whole bunch of loyal fans, but to us, our first trip to the States was a failure. We didn’t kill a single person, except for those cameramen, but they don’t count, because we didn’t really kill them, an’ that. They just died on our watch.

  Nobody said much of anything on the plane ride home. Right before we landed at Heathrow, I leaned over to Johnny and said, “Listen, we did the best we could, and that’s all we could do. We’ll get ’em next time.”

  He said, “If there is a next time.”

  When film director Richard Lester—Dick to his friends—was hired to helm the Beatles’ film debut, A Hard Day’s Night, he’d had only limited experience working with otherwordly beings: the assistant director on his 1963 outing The Mouse on the Moon was a reformed mole man, and his regular collaborator the Brit comic legend Spike Milligan was rumored to have modest telekinetic abilities. So, as Lester told me over too many bottles of wine in March 2005, he was a bit on edge when filming started in the spring of 1964.

  RICHARD LESTER: Three questions gnawed at me from the beginning: How do you film zombies? How do you direct zombies? And are zombies even directable? I had no clue. I had nobody to ask. So I dived in. Brian Epstein swore to me up and down that nobody in the band would harm me, so what was the worst that could happen? I’d lose a few shillings for the studio. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.

  Aside from the one overnight setup when Paul took too many pep pills and turned neon green, the first week of the shoot was a breeze. Word went around the set that George had had some sort of dust-up with a zombie townie, but I chose not to get involved. Georgie’s business was Georgie’s business.

  It all went to shit eight days in. We had about half of the film in the can, and the entire cast and crew felt great about the whole thing, just great … until we all sat down to watch the first batch of dailies.

  To this day, nobody knows exactly how it happened. There was no precedent for it. But then again, nobody had shot a feature film that gave zombies any significant screen time, so how could there be?

  BRIAN EPSTEIN: Ringo looked marvelous. Wilfred Brambell, the actor playing Paul’s grandfather, was genius. Lester’s visual style was original and arresting, full of quirky angles and madcap energy. There was one teeny, tiny little problem:

  No zombies.

  RICHARD LESTER: The studio was putting a lot of pressure on me to finish on time and under budget, so when neither John, nor Paul, nor George showed up on the screen, my first thought was, We pissed away half of our budget: 250K, right out the window. And then I got curious: Is a zombie not showing up on film the same principle as a vampire not showing up in a mirror? How come you could see them perfectly well when filmed with television cameras, but not with movie ones? How come their clothes also became invisible? Then I went into problem-solving mode: How can I make this work? How do I get these boys to be seen on the screen?

  And then the answer dawned on me. Two words: Claude Rains.

  JOHN LENNON: Dick took Paul and me aside and said, “Do you guys want to make this movie work?”

  I said, “Fook, yeah. If Elvis can get people in the theaters, we have to at least try.”

  He said, “This is a major problem. Are you willing to do anything to make it work?”

  Paul said, “Absolutely.”

  Dick said, “Anything?”

  I said, “Yes, anything. What’re you thinking?”

  And then he showed us a roll of duct tape.

  RICHARD LESTER: In the 1933 version of The Invisible Man, when Claude Rains wanted to be seen, he wrapped himself in gauze. There wasn’t any gauze on the set of A Hard Day’s Night—and based on what we’d learned to that point, soft material became invisible on camera when it was resting on an undead body, which I eventually learned was due to the noxious gasses that emanated from the Fab Four’s rotting, pus-covered, nausea-inducing skin.

  The good news was, we had plenty of duct tape.

  I told the guys, “Get into your trailers, get naked, and get Ringo to cover your entire body with this stuff.”

  They stared at the tape for a bit, then Paul said, “Dick, that’ll look ridiculous.”

  I said, “It’s better than nothing, Paulie. And if you don’t do that, that’s exactly what this damn movie will be: nothing.”

  RINGO STARR: Maybe it was because I was the last one to join the group, or maybe it was because I wasn’t a zombie, but I sometimes felt like the band’s whipping boy. Think about it: If I’m not picking up their fallen testicles, I’m wrapping duct tape around their naked bodies. And how many songs do they let me sing per album? One, that’s how many.

  On the plus side, that was the last time I ever had to handle Lennon’s and McCartney’s boy parts.

  GEORGE HARRISON: Ringo was very thorough. He didn’t miss a spot. I’m not necessarily convinced he needed to stick any tape on that little area between our bollocks and our arseholes, but he claimed he was following Dick Lester’s orders.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: Me, I liked having tape up in that particular vicinity. Still stick some on there once in a while, y’know.

  RICHARD LESTER: I never, ever, ever told Ringo Starr to put duct tape on the area between John Lennon’s, Paul McCartney’s, and George Harrison’s respective zombie scrotums and anuses. Even if I wanted or needed tape there, I wouldn’t have broached the subject; yes, I was from the States, but I’d worked in the UK long enough to know that that little spot of body isn’t the kind of thing you bring up in conversation.

  But considering how nicely A Hard Day’s Night came out, it was worth it.

  GEORGE HARRISON: I refuse to discuss the removal of the duct tape. I’m not going to tell you who did it. I’m not going to tell you how it was done. I’m not going to tell you the aftermath. There are some things better left unsaid, and some memories better left unremembered.

  Irvine Paris had just turned twenty when he landed a job as the arts critic for the Liverpool Herald in 1960. A staunch Beatles fanatic, he wrote lovingly about the band for his entire fifteen-year tenure with the newspaper. Every record write-up or concert report or hard news story was glowing. Never an ill word was written.

  Except for two teeny-tiny negative write-ups. And the first was a critique that almost ended in a Liverpool-style fatwa.

  John’s first book of verse, In His Own Write, was published on March 23, and Paris’s review, which ran the following day, wasn’t exactly what you would call glowing.

  JOHN LENNON IN HIS OWN WRONG

  Farcical Poetry or Poetical Farce?

  By Irvine Paris

  March 24, 1964

  For the last thirteen months, Beatles cofounder John Lennon has been Liverpool’s darling. He can do no wrong. His group’s music is scintillating. His public demeanor has been exemplary. He is a credit to our city, to rock ’n’ roll musicians, and to the undead. However, you cannot ex
pect perfection. John Lennon is going to have a long career, and there will be missteps along the way. Beatle John’s first misstep was a big one.

  Considering its amateurishness, one wonders if In His Own Write, Lennon’s collection of simplistic poems and pointless stories, is a joke on fans of the Beatles. This gentleman who, along with his partner Paul McCartney, cocomposed some of the most memorable pop ditties in recent music history, has presented a pile of dung that could be enjoyed only by a six-year-old zombie of dubious intelligence.

  Consider, if you will, the opening two verses of the piece entitled “I Eat Salami”:

  I eat salami mixed with brains

  Sitting in the winter rain

  Song on my lips, chunks in my teeth

  My favorite Scottish town is Leith

  Googly moogly bombity bombie

  I’m a gray and rancid zombie

  Bombity bombie your blood is red

  You are alive, I am undead

  Upon a cursory read, one would assume that the sole message Lennon attempted to get across in “I Eat Salami” is that he’s lonely. One would also assume that since Lennon is Lennon, such is merely a surface message and a deeper meaning is hidden beneath. After four or five reads, one realizes that this is not the case. The remainder of the poem consists of nonsense words similar to “googly moogly” and off-putting imagery similar to that in line three. That sort of imagery—descriptions of death, dismemberment, and oozing innards—grows tiresome.

  So please, please, Beatle John, please, please go back to the guitar. We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah … but only when you are singing, strumming, or talking. Leave the verse to the experts.

  JOHN LENNON: If you like my book, you like my book. If you don’t, you don’t, sod you, it’s your loss. Irvine Paris? The little git didn’t bother me a bit.

  NEIL ASPINALL: Irvine Paris bothered John quite a bit.

  We all knew what happened when John really lost his temper—lunchtime killing sprees, ripping off his own left leg and tossing it out a hotel window, eating all the live pigeons he could get his hands on, that sort of thing—but he always managed to regain control of himself within a few hours. However, when he saw Paris’s review, he crossed over to what George began calling “Johnny’s dark place.”

  BRIAN EPSTEIN: John walked through the door of my flat—literally walked through it; he broke the thing to smithereens—holding the newspaper an arm’s length away from his body, between his thumb and index finger, as if it were a fish that had been dead for a week. He yelled, “Oi, Eppy, did you see this?”

  I hadn’t. It was unquestionably a grim review, and I can understand why he was so upset: up until then, nobody had ever written an ill word about him or the band, and as anybody in the arts field knows, that first bad review is tough to swallow.

  I sat him down, gave him some tea, and said, “Listen, John, people will say what they’ll say. Sometimes they’ll like you, but sometimes they’ll want to tear you down. What someone says about you shouldn’t change you or your vision or your dreams. Keep writing your poetry. Keep writing your songs. Be the best John Lennon you can be.”

  He calmly said, “Right, then. I understand, Brian, I understand. Not every word written about us can be a good word. Writers have their opinions, and they’re allowed to write them. I believe in artistic freedom. I believe in individuality. I believe in the right of every man to look at the rest of world from his own perspective and to share that perspective with the rest of world. And now I’m going to the Herald offices to Midpoint Irvine Paris’s arse.” Then he stood up, smiled, gave me a little pat on the shoulder, and went on his merry way.

  Still not sure why he crashed through my picture window rather than walking through the hole in the door he’d created five minutes before. But that was John Lennon for you.

  Fortunately for Irvine Paris, John was so upset that he got lost on the way to the Herald offices. He somehow ended up in Everton, and his car ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere, and he didn’t have any money with him. Paulie found him three days later, in the Everton Cemetery over on Long Lane, curled up under the threshold of a small mausoleum. John claimed it was the only comfortable place he could find to sleep, but I think he settled there so that when he was found, it would look more dramatic. I think he was pretending.

  JOHN LENNON: Of course I was pretending.

  BRIAN EPSTEIN: Irvine Paris wisely went underground for a while. John did too, but in his case, underground meant two weeks in the Liverpool sewers. We had a tour coming up, but neither Paul nor George would go down there to get him out, so it was up to me, and as much as the thought of it repulsed me, I did it because that’s what managers do.

  Seeing how those zombies lived, all I can say is, no wonder they’re so grouchy.

  Thanks to his laconic wit, his cuddly demeanor, and the fact that he was the Beatle least likely to launch an unprovoked physical attack that could lead to a crushed larynx or a dislocated kneecap, Ringo Starr had developed a little following of his own. As a matter of fact, the Queen herself believed that he was actually the band’s founder and leader.

  Which put Jimmy Nicol in an awkward position.

  A solid journeyman traps-man, Jimmy was hired to replace Ringo on a brief tour of Europe, China, and Australia when the world’s favorite Ninja took ill with tonsillitis—or so the newspapers were told. As Jimmy explained when I spoke with him at his London home in October 2000, the tonsil story was just that, a story.

  JIMMY NICOL: When Brian Epstein called to invite me on tour, the first thing I asked was, “Can I get speak with Ringo before I decide? I’d like to get his blessing.” He told me the same thing he told everybody else: Ringo was sick and in the hospital and, because of his tonsils, unable to talk. That sounded odd to me, but I didn’t dwell on it. The most important thing was to learn the material.

  After a couple of shows, I more or less forgot about the Ringo situation, but on the plane ride from Amsterdam to Hong Kong, Paul came by my seat and said, “Listen, mate, you’ve played great over the last week, so I’m going to tell you something that only six or seven other people in the world know about, but you have to promise not to discuss this with anybody other than John, George, and me. If you open your yap to the outside world, there could be dire consequences, y’know.”

  I said, “My yap is sealed.” Of course my yap was sealed. I knew what’d happened at the Cavern Club back in ’62 and was well aware what “dire consequences” meant.

  Paul said, “Ringo’s not sick.”

  He stared at me like he wanted a response, but I kept quiet, for fear of saying something that could lead to pain. Finally, once I realized he wasn’t gonna open up his mouth until I said something, I asked, “Did Ringo shove off, then?”

  He nodded, then said, “He sort of did, Jimmy. He sort of did.” Then he kind of sighed all sadly and said, “See, Ringo is a Seventh Level Ninja Lord, y’know, and to reach Level Eight, he has to complete the Shu Shen Shwa Triumvirate to the satisfaction of Mistress Sbagw N’phszyz Xi, who happens to be the world’s only living Twenty-Sixth Level Ninja Lord, and she’s in bloody Greenland. We can’t let anybody know about it, because if people know Ringo feels the need to jump a Ninja Lord Level, they might think of him as vulnerable, and that could lead to an attack, and, really, who needs that sort of malarkey? The thing is, Ringo could’ve hopped a taxi to the West End to study with a Twenty-Fifth Level, but he had to go to sodding Qaqortoq, Greenland. D’you know what I mean? That Ninja lot is completely mental.”

  We stared at each other for a bit, then I said, “What the bloody fook are you goin’ on about?”

  Paul said, “Don’t worry about it. Just tell everybody Ringo has a sore throat, and he’ll be back soon.”

  I said, “Will he be back soon?”

  Paul said, “Dunno, mate. That’s why I’m discussing this with you. You play some mean drums, and you’re a nice bloke, so if Ringo refuses to leave Greenland after he’s Level Eight, would you be i
nterested in joining us permanently? Or at least semipermanently?”

  Obviously I was flattered, but I wondered exactly what “joining us permanently” meant. Did it mean I’d be a drummer or a zombie or a zombie drummer? I wasn’t too keen on the last two. I’d been known to faint at the sight of blood, and the thought of eating brains was, well, let’s just say that eating English food was more appealing, and anybody who’s shoved down English faire, circa 1964, knows that’s saying something. I didn’t want to close off the idea, but I didn’t necessarily want to keep it open, so I told Paul, “Let’s see what happens.”

  He smiled and said, “Sounds good, Jimmy.” Then he leaned over, touched me right below my earlobe, smelled my neck, and said, “Sounds good indeed.”

  I suddenly got dizzy and felt cold all over. Ringo couldn’t get back fast enough.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: If Ringo had gotten stuck in Qaqortoq, we’d have killed Jimmy in a heartbeat, y’know. That cat could play.

  JIMMY NICOL: It wasn’t like I could up and quit. I couldn’t come across as scared, either—I think they can smell fear, and they don’t like it—so I did my best to go about my business without making any waves. But it’s hard to act normal when you’ve got people holding up RINGO FOREVER, JIMMY NEVER signs, or when John Lennon leaves both his thumbs in your hotel room’s sink for a laugh, or when gorgeous young sex slaves beg to taste your dustmen, whatever that is.