So I went about my business and didn’t make any waves. And when Ringo showed up in Melbourne, I smooched him on the lips, then asked Eppy to get me on the next plane back to England.
When I got off the plane at Heathrow, I kissed the ground. Never had an airport floor tasted so sweet.
RINGO STARR: I didn’t pass my Ninja Lord exam. Mistress Sbagw N’phszyz Xi was a very political animal, and she exemplified all that was bad about Ninja bureaucracy. And as I learned in Greenland, the jump from Level Seven to Level Eight was less about skills and more about arse-kissing, and I wasn’t going to kiss anybody’s arse for anything.
However, she did give me a lovely I QAQORTOQ T-shirt, so it wasn’t a complete loss.
BRIAN EPSTEIN: The band’s first real US tour in the fall of ’64 was defined by one thing, and one thing only: screaming. The press played it off like it was fabulous, but really, it was horrific.
The lads didn’t mind the screaming in and of itself—for that matter, John and Paul seemed to get a certain thrill out of the whole thing, especially when a man sitting in the front row at the second Hollywood Bowl show yelled so intensely that blood gushed from his eyes, nose, and mouth and spurted all the way onto Ringo’s hi-hat—but it was difficult to hear what was happening onstage.
GEORGE HARRISON: Touring was a blur. Going from town to town, from city to city, from country to country without a minute to breathe was hard enough. But when you add Mick Jagger to the equation, well, talk about Mania.
RINGO STARR: We were in Chicago for a gig at the International Amphitheater, and after we finished up our sound check, Brian and the four of us went back to the limo, and there he is, Mick Jagger himself, waiting for us in the backseat, his massive lips fashioned into a puffy sneer, or maybe a smile—it was always hard to tell with him. No clue how he got past security. No clue how the limo driver didn’t notice him. It was Ninja-like behavior, and I couldn’t help being impressed and flattered that a fine singer such as Mick would go to all that trouble just to see us.
Mick picked up Eppy by his collar and said, “Brian, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to chat with my favorite Liverpudlians. I need to pick their brains … that is, before they pick mine.” A pretty good line for a bloke from Kent, I thought. Mick kicked open the door and threw Eppy out onto the concrete, then, in a dead-on Lennon voice, told the driver to take us to the William Green Homes.
John said, “What the fook are the William Green Homes?”
Mick said, “Never you mind, Johnny. Just sit back and enjoy the trip.” Nobody said a thing during the fifteen-minute ride to what turned out to be a low-income housing development parked right next to a big, empty field—if you could call it a field. Mick told the limo driver to piss off, that we’d find our own way back to the hotel—if we made it back to the hotel. While the driver sprinted away, Mick said, “Okay, lads, out.”
We stumbled out of the car. The sidewalk was cracked, and there was broken glass everywhere. George whispered to me, “Aren’t you gonna do something, Rings? Get invisible, mate. Save the day.”
I whispered, “You got it.” I might not have made Eighth Level, but I still had a few tricks up my sleeve. Right as I was about to blend into the scenery, a van screeched into the lot and ran over the escaping driver, then plowed smack into the limo.
And out jumped a Zombie.
ROD ARGENT: My bandmates weren’t too keen on tracking down the Beatles; they made it quite clear that they found my little grudge to be pointless. They also thought that any combination of John, Paul, George, and Ringo would easily kill us all, but I don’t think they gave our collective fighting skills enough credit. I personally thought that at least one of us could’ve survived a full-blown Beatles versus Zombies clash.
Having said that, I understood where my fellow Zombies were coming from. The Beatles had killed thousands, and the Zombies hadn’t made one single person so much as bleed. Nonetheless, that left me in the lurch, as I stood no chance of competing with the Beatles as a solo act, even if I’d had ten thousand machine guns and fifty thousand diamond bullets. So once I heard Mick was on the case, I started following him, and he never had a clue. Besides, even if Jagger realized I was on his trail, he probably wouldn’t have known who the fook I was anyhow. The Zombies didn’t exactly travel in the same circles as the Rolling Stones, d’you know what I mean?
Anyhow, there’re John, Paul, and George all huddled together in a desolate Chicago field, and there’s Ringo going in and out of focus—Ninja Lords drive me nuts with the disappearing—and there’s Jagger giving them a look. I said, “I’m here, Mick! Let’s do this!”
MICK JAGGER: My first thought: Who the fook is this?
ROD ARGENT: I was right. The cheeky bastard didn’t recognize me.
MICK JAGGER: My second thought: I might be able to use this guy. I said to him, “State your business, mortal!” There was no need for me to call him “mortal,” or to speak like a sixteenth-century knight. It just sounded cool.
He held up his hands and said, “I’m here to offer you aid, O great hunter Jagger.”
Again, I said, “State your name!”
“I am Rod Argent, co-leader of the rock band the Zombies.”
I said, “I am vaguely familiar with your band, but I need proof you are who you say you are. Recite your discography, mortal!”
He said, “Our first single has just been released, O great hunter. ‘She’s Not There,’ backed with ‘You Make Me Feel Good’!”
I said, “State the label and catalog number!”
He said, “Decca F11940!”
I said, “I am familiar! You may join the hunt!” Of course, I was talking out of my arse. He could’ve told me his first single was called “Wankity Wank Wank” for the Wank label, and I wouldn’t have known any better.
He said, “Thank you, O great hunter! What would you like me to do?”
I said, “You can clean up the mess after I’m done with these cunts. Now fook off and let a professional handle this.”
ROD ARGENT: No way was I gonna take that from a guy who’d been making a living by covering other musicians’ songs. I mean, if you can’t write your own sodding tunes, you shouldn’t be ordering people around, right? Right.
So I told him, “I’m sorry, O great hunter, but I insist on being part of this battle.”
Mick pointed his gun at me and said, “Stand down, Zombie.”
I said, “I refuse.”
He said, “Leave, immediately.”
I said, “Never.”
He said, “Piss off.”
We went back and forth for a good long while.
GEORGE HARRISON: While those two idiots prattled on, I said to John, “Hey, how about you and I attack Jagger, and Paul and Ringo go after Argent?”
John said, “I have a better idea.”
ROD ARGENT: Lennon tapped me on the shoulder, and next thing I know, we’re at the Chess Records Studios.
MICK JAGGER: He wouldn’t have been able to hypnotize me if I wasn’t engaged with that Argent chap, I can tell you that much.
JOHN LENNON: There’s little in this world I like more than fighting at a recording studio. Something about all that equipment gets those zombie juices bubbling.
But when I went to attack Mick in the studio, something felt wrong.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: Right after we got to Chess, we dumped Mick and Rod into the recording room, then snapped them out of their spell. After all, we weren’t ones to murder a bloke when he can’t at least try to defend himself, y’know. When they got their bearings, I tried to rip off Argent’s plonker, but the closer I got to his body, the weaker I became. On the other hand, whenever I walked toward all the guitars and basses against the back wall, I felt stronger than I’d ever felt. The moment I got a gander at the sunburst Fender Jazz Bass in the corner, some force made me pick it up and strap it on.
GEORGE HARRISON: It sounds ridiculous, but a 1952 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop just appeared in my hands.
JOH
N LENNON: Next thing I know, I’m strumming a 1955 Gibson Les Paul TV. My hands automatically went to a blues in the key of A.
MICK JAGGER: I was a Willie Dixon fan, but I’d never heard his song “Built for Comfort” in my life. And yet there I was, standing in front of a microphone, singing it like I’d written it. The right key, the right lyrics, the right vibe. For that moment, any urge I had to murder the Beatles went right out the window.
ROD ARGENT: I didn’t even like the blues that much, but I did some background harmonies behind Mick with a sense of soul that I never knew I had.
RINGO STARR: There wasn’t a drum kit in the studio, so I sat on the floor and minded my own business.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: We jammed until it was time to go back to the Amphitheater, about three hours. I don’t recall how many songs we played, but before we set foot in the studio, we didn’t know a single one of them.
We never heard or saw an engineer, but when we walked out of the studio, right on the floor near the front door were four reel-to-reel tapes, each labeled BEATLES/STONES/ZOMBIES BLUES JAM. Since there were four Beatles, one Stone, and one Zombie, the Beatles got to keep them all. Majority rules.
When we made it back to the Amphitheater, I gave the tapes to Eppy, then never saw them again. Eppy told us that somebody nicked them from the dressing room. Bloody Chicagoans.
BRIAN EPSTEIN: Nobody nicked the tapes. Here’s what happened.
I opened the boxes when I got back to my room after the show, and I swear to you, the tapes were alive. They were brown snakes with green dots, and their tongues were about six inches long, and they smelled like feces. It was grotty. Utterly, utterly grotty.
We were staying by Lake Michigan, so I left the hotel, ran across the street, and tromped through the sand, right up to the water. I flung the tapes as far as I could, and once the fourth one hit the water, a fireball rose from the lake and whizzed around about a meter in the air, like a giant soap bubble. It lit the entire area, so I could see thousands and thousands of dead fish float up to the surface. And then the entire lake turned red. And it bubbled and steamed. And it smelled like the snake, except a thousand times more potent.
At that point, I decided it was time to go back to the hotel and crawl under the covers. Or hide under the bed.
One of the longest running jokes among music fans is, when Bob Dylan talks, people listen … but they can’t understand a single word he says. It’s been said that the man speaks like he has a mouthful of marbles or like he has cotton in his cheeks or like he has several ounces of hydroponics caught in between his teeth. Considering he’s been a professional musician since 1961, and has thus successfully conversed with countless managers, promoters, agents, sidemen, engineers, roadies, and groupies, I thought the whole you-can’t-understand-Bob deal was an exaggeration.
It wasn’t.
In March 2007, I sat down with Dylan for a total of eight hours over three days, and, aside from “Hi there,” “Send me a copy of your book when it’s done,” and “You’ll pick up the check, right?” I couldn’t make out a single complete sentence, rendering all of my interviews useless. Thus it was up to the venerable Eppy to tell the story of the Beatles’ infamous first meeting with Dylan in New York on August 28, 1964.
BRIAN EPSTEIN: Bob liked the boys’ records, and the boys liked Bob’s, so when he and a writer named Al Aronowitz popped by our hotel, we were glad to invite them up.
They blathered about nothing memorable for a while, then Bob pulled out a joint. We were familiar with what Paul still likes to call “herbal jazz cigarettes,” but the Beatles had never indulged, and frankly, considering how those pep pills affected them back in Germany, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of them sucking down what some might construe as a foreign substance.
Ringo was the first Beatle to get high. He inhaled almost an entire joint all by his lonesome and was fine; all he did was giggle a lot. John, Paul, and George went next, and you could say they were fine, too. Their brains didn’t melt out of their ears. Their eyes remained happily in their sockets. Their tongues didn’t swell up like balloons. Their skin didn’t turn any odd colors.
No, what happened was, they got gas. And they found the whole thing hilarious.
I remember John broke wind first, and he said, “Whoa, sorry about the air tulip, boys.”
George followed suit and said, “Oopsie. Quite the trouser trumpet there. Apologies.”
And then came Paul, who said, “Uh-oh, somebody let loose with a big, old rumbler, y’know, and I think his name is Little Paulie Macca.”
And then the barrage started. One, right after the other, right after the other: some dribblies, a few rooters, a handful of rippers, a bunch of spoofies, a goodly number of piffles, a zump or two, a heap of flutters, a number of freeps, a gaggle of chuffs, and a collection of arse crunchers.
Now, I appreciate a good tooter as much as the next chap, but the weed caused a mess in the lads’ respective gastrointestinal systems that took those pipe rotters to a whole other level. By the time they finished their second joint, the room was filled with noxious lavender-colored smoke.
After they were done smoking the marijuana, Bob stood up, breathed in a big lungful of the gassy purple haze—remember, heat rises—and said, “This is beautiful, man, just beautiful. I’ve never experienced such a beautiful moment. Beauty. That’s what this is. Beauty. Beautiful.” For a bloke who wrote such meaningful lyrics, Bob wasn’t the most articulate gent in the world when he was surrounded by a bunch of undead quiffers. But I can’t blame him, I suppose; I was feeling a bit woozy and silly myself.
I’m not sure how much longer we stayed. It might’ve been ten minutes, and it might’ve been ten hours. Lavender zombie poots have a way of making time a bit stretchy.
As a group, Ninjas, when they’re not defending their turf or assassinating a politician, are an affable lot, and Ringo Starr was about as affable as they come. That being the case, most people appreciate and respect your typical Ninja, but there are pockets of folks throughout the world who despise these noble warriors. These anti-Ninjite malcontents tend to gravitate toward one another and eventually form hate groups. One of the most militant Ninja hate aggregations is based in Montreal; demonstrating a serious lack of creativity, they are known simply as the Fuck You Ninjas.
Formed in 1959, the FYN was never the most skilled unit, but they got their strength through sheer numbers. In his unimaginatively titled 1980 manifesto All Ninjas Must Die: How to Kill a Ninja in Three Easy Lessons , former FYN defense secretary Wilfred Hinckley White wrote, “Our plan has been, is, and always will be to surround, surround, surround our potential victim. If you put the Ninja in a box, cover all of his escape routes, and have one hundred men pointing one hundred guns at his heart, you’re going to WIN! That was our plan for Richard ‘Ringo’ Starkey ‘Starr’: surround him and shoot him dead.”
Brian Epstein learned of the plan from a Canada-based Fifteenth-Level Ninja Lord named Roger Aaron. As Aaron, who’d infiltrated the FYN in 1962, explained to me in a December 2003 interview, the FYN versus Ringo waterloo went down during a concert at the Montreal Forum on September 8, 1964.
ROGER AARON: The FYN had only one plan for Ninja killing—encircle the target with as many armed men as they could recruit—and they used it over and over. It was unbelievably simplistic, but undeniably effective, and almost impossible for a lone Ninja to escape. It’s possible that a single Ninja with, say, Sixty-sixth Level skills could put the kibosh on it, but I was only a Level Fifteen, so I had no chance … and neither would Ringo. My only hope of protecting him was to get the Beatles to cancel the show.
Brian Epstein didn’t believe me, and I suppose I can understand why. It was late ’64, and the Beatles were just about the biggest thing in the world, so undoubtedly thousands of crackpots were coming out of the woodwork. Imagine if you answered the phone and a stranger said to you, “I’m a Ninja Lord who’s been undercover for a few years with Canada’s most dangerous Ninja
killers. They’re called Fuck You Ninjas, and they’re planning to murder your drummer, and you have to leave the country immediately.” What would you think? I know exactly what you’d think. You’d think, This guy is a big bag of crazy. So the show went on.
The night of the concert, the FYN didn’t waste any time; they opened fire during the band’s second number. (I still wish they’d waited, because I really wanted to hear the band do their thing.) As was the case with most of the Beatles’ public battles, it was over in minutes, and if it hadn’t been for the speed and exactitude of John, Paul, and George’s counteroffensive, the death toll that night would’ve been in the thousands.
The second Wilfred White gave the go signal—no, not the second, the millisecond—John was off the stage and in the audience, scooping up every firearm he could find. By my count, he himself disarmed seventy-three shooters in nine seconds, leaving the FYN with one hundred and twenty-seven armed attackers. Paul took care of another seventy-one, and George, sixty-three. Within thirty seconds, only twenty-something guns were trained on Ringo, and that’s a manageable number for even a Fourth Level. For a Seventh Level like Ringo, escaping was a breeze.
Ringo was unharmed, and to his credit, he even managed to take out a few FYNs with a strategic toss of his crash cymbal. I’d venture to say that John, Paul, and George took between fifty and seventy-five bullets apiece, but none of them were of the diamond variety, so they also walked away intact, albeit pockmarked with steaming, noxious bullet wounds.
Sadly, fifty-three innocent mortals were killed in the attack, and another two hundred and seven were injured, but if it hadn’t been for the Fab Four’s quick thinking and quicker defense, we’d be looking at a stadium full of dead Beatles fans, and, worst of all, one very dead Ninja drummer.
JOHN LENNON: Nobody but nobody was going to kill a Beatle on my watch … unless it was me doing the killing. Like I always say, all for zombies, and zombies for all.
Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion Page 14