Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion

by Alan Goldsher

  One way that zombies are like regular people is that they have three basic necessities: food, clothing, and shelter. As long as there are living beings with working brains walking the Earth, the food portion of the program is covered. Shelter is generally easy enough to find: if there aren’t any available flats and all the zombie hotels are full, there are always the sewers. Clothing, however, is another matter altogether. Unless you have a tailor who knows what he’s doing, your tattered rags will always look like tattered rags … and smell like them, too. So we decided that in conjunction with our new label, we’d open up a store that sold gear specifically tailored for the undead.

  JOHN LENNON: Up until we launched our little clothing establishment at the end of ’67, the words zombie and fashion were rarely heard in the same sentence.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: We named it Apple Boutique, and as far as I was concerned, it was the cat’s pajamas. We offered a vast array of clothes for the stylish zombie, everything from tattered rainbow slacks to tattered silk shirts to tattered feathered hats to tattered blue jeans to tattered checkered sport coats to tattered ladies’ unmentionables. And everything but everything was lined with a laboratory-developed anti-stink shield. If you were a zombie, you could come by the Boutique and leave looking good and smelling good. Okay, you wouldn’t smell good, but you’d at least smell better, y’know. I mean, there’s only so much twenty-three Nobel Prize–winning scientists can do.

  JOHN LENNON: Our first week in business was brilliant. Every zombie who was anybody came by and dropped fifty, one hundred, even two hundred quid on the slickest rags they’d ever owned. But after that, despite the multicolored mutilation mural on the side of the building that was supposed to hypnotize everybody into dropping their paycheck at the Boutique, the shop died. Practically each day for six months, Paul and I stood in front of the building and all but begged people to come in. Didn’t work. They hated our clothes, they hated the Mystery Tour movie, and it felt like they hated us.

  The two biggest problems were that zombies didn’t have any money, so they couldn’t buy anything; and living beings couldn’t wear zombie gear without breaking out in oozing acne, so they wouldn’t buy anything.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: We didn’t think any of this stuff through. We weren’t good filmmakers. We weren’t good businessmen. We weren’t good clothing gurus. The only two things the Beatles could do successfully were make music and transform living beings into hideous-looking, odiferous creatures that most humans couldn’t stomach. I think we were all looking for some change. But some of us questioned the changes because, erm, they were questionable.

  JOHN LENNON: I met Yoko Ono back in ’66, at the Indica Gallery. She was presenting this exhibit called Undead Death March … April … May … June, and in retrospect, I think that was meant specifically to get my attention.

  I didn’t go in with any expectations. Yoko was an artist, and I like art. If her art was exciting, great, I’d hang out for hours. If it was dull, I could go over to Paul’s place and throw his Aston Martin into his living room.

  Turned out it was exciting.

  There were about five dozen tiny photographs of her in various states of undress all throughout the gallery. For example, in some, her face was covered with a hood, while in others, she had a rope of machine gun bullets wrapped around her waist. The only commonality was that in each shot, she was holding a sword. And that sword looked awfully familiar, like something Ringo might mess about with.

  I wandered over and introduced myself. She pointed at her mouth and shook her head. I said, “So what’s this, then? You’re not talking?”

  She said, “Nope.” Then she got a stricken look on her face, pulled a Ninja star from her pocket, and poked a tiny hole in her forearm; there were already about fifteen or twenty wounds there. After she wiped up the dot of blood, she again pointed at her mouth and shook her head.

  I said, “The sword that’s in the photos. Can you tell me about it?”

  Yoko said, “Well, John, it comes from …” Again, she covered her mouth, and again, she stabbed herself in the arm. There was a bit more blood this time, and I was impressed. Any bird who could tolerate that kind of pain—especially if it was self-inflicted—was okay with me.

  She then grabbed a pad of paper and wrote that the weapon was her Ninja sword, and she was an Ninth Level Ninja Lord, but she was concerned that the Great High Ninja Poobahs would disown her for utilizing it for art’s sake, because Ninjas are never supposed to utilize their weapons for anything other than defense. Thirty-seven pages later, she finally stopped writing, and I was entranced. She had stamina, she enjoyed being photographed in the buff, she knew her way around a piece of equipment that could neatly sever somebody’s head, and she was a Ninja, just like Ringo. I thought, That’s the kind of girl the other blokes’ll love to have hanging around with us at the recording studio.

  It was a good two years before Yoko and I finally did the do, and it was worth the wait, because that girl knew how to plunk a plonker. Our first night together was endless, and after twelve hours worth of messing about with her, I ran down to my basement studio, snatched up my reel-to-reel tape player and a microphone, took it back up to the bedroom, fired it up, and then Yoko and I curled up in bed and laid down what I still consider to be the greatest achievement of my career.

  RINGO STARR: The night after John did the do with Yoko—and “did the do” were his words, not mine, thank you very much—he came over to my flat and played me the tape. It was twenty-nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds of John letting loose with a zombie moan, and Yoko harmonizing it with a Ninja yell. No verse. No chorus. No lyrics. Just noise.

  John said, “So? D’you like it?”

  I said, “Well, it’s not exactly ‘Day Tripper,’ now, is it?”

  He said, “I know! Isn’t that great? Let’s be honest here, Rings: nobody’ll be listening to ‘Day fookin’ Tripper’ even five years from now, but they’ll be playing this baby on the radio into the next millennium.”

  I’d known John at that point for almost six years, and the smile he laid on me was the biggest I’d ever seen plastered on that gray mug of his, so I knew that if I was honest and told him I thought it sounded like the Undead Tabernacle Choir tripping out on Eppy’s first batch of acid, it’d break his heart. So I deflected the question with a question, and asked, “What’re you gonna do with it?”

  He said, “I’ve got it all figured out. Remember the Robert Whitaker photos those fookers at EMI wouldn’t let us use for that album cover?” I nodded, and he continued, “Well, Yoko and I are gonna do something like that—you know, rip off our arms and plonker, and the like—except the big surprise is we’ll be naked.”

  I said, “Wait a minute, rip off our arms? Yoko’s a zombie?”

  He said, “Oh. No. She’s not. Didn’t think of that.”

  I said, “Yeah, last time I checked, you remove limbs from a real person, and we’re talking either death or zombification. You want to zombify her this quickly? Maybe you should get to know each other a little better.”

  John ran his hand through his hair, which was practically down to his arse by then, and said, “Cheers, Rings, I see your point. Maybe I’ll just have her put her arms behind her back or something.”

  I said, “John, no matter what she does with her arms, there isn’t a single record label in the world who’d touch it.”

  He gave me that smile again, and said, “Oh, yes there is.”

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: I told John, “A half hour of groaning wrapped with a photo of your shriveled zombie dick resting on top of Yoko’s head? There is no way Apple Records will release this. No way, no how, no sir, no, no, no.”

  JOHN LENNON: Here’s an interesting fact that not too many people are aware of: Ninjas who’re Ninth Level and above have a way of making zombies feel physical trauma. No idea how they do it, but they do it. And that’s something James Paul McCartney became painfully aware of one summer night, after he was paid an unexpected visit by a cert
ain Asian performance artist.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: Oh, Yoko hurt me that night, all right. But she never hurt me again.

  JOHN LENNON: Oh, she hurt him constantly. Constantly.

  RINGO STARR: Over the strenuous objections of three-fourths of the Beatles, Apple Records ended up releasing Two Virgins. Actually, it wasn’t Apple, per se. It was a subsidiary of Apple that John dubbed Crapple. No comment.

  Surprise, surprise, the press reception for Two Virgins was dreadful. Mersey Zombie Weekly, who’d always been one of our biggest boosters, called it, “The aural incarnation of an eight-stone ball of Limburger cheese that’d been rolled through the sewers under the Anfield Cemetery, then eaten, digested, and excreted by a human, then balled up again and eaten, digested, and excreted by a zombie, then cooked in a vat along with a puree made from the seven-week-old maggot-infested carcass of a boar that, for his entire life, had been fed nothing but solidified rabbit farts and brussels sprouts coated with last month’s head cheese.”

  Personally, I thought they were being kind.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: They took a beating in the papers, but they weren’t fazed a bit, and by the time we had to hit the studio, John and Yoko were attached at the hip.

  GEORGE MARTIN: I couldn’t figure out exactly what he saw in her. She wasn’t the most dynamic girl I’d ever met, and in terms of conversation, she didn’t bring much to the table. Admittedly, her ability to crawl on the ceiling was impressive, and she could sure take a punch, but as far as I was concerned, Yoko Ono did not belong anywhere near a recording studio … or, at least, one that housed the Beatles.

  While she was quiet enough, John was always distracted by her presence. Now, I’m not the kind of person who angers easily, but after six weeks of him spacing out in the middle of a tune, I finally had to speak my mind. One afternoon, after yet another blown take, I pulled him aside and said, “Listen, John, we have a record to finish. Yoko’s getting in the way, and you know it. She has to be gone—at least part of the time.”

  The whites of John’s eyes flashed red, and for a second, I thought he was going to do me like they did Mick Jagger and Rod Argent. But then he gave me a sappy smile and said, “I love her, Georgie. She stays.”

  I said, “But she’s destroying the—”

  His eyes flashed red again, and he yelled, “I said, I love her. I said, she stays.” And then he grabbed Yoko by the wrist and stomped off to the Abbey Road basement to sulk.

  Paul and I discussed the matter for hours and hours, and we eventually decided the best way to get John to cut the cord—or at least loosen it—wasn’t with anger or violence but, rather, sweetness and reason. So one evening, while the lads and I were sitting in the break room eating a late supper, and Yoko was off in the loo, Paul said to John, “Listen, mate, we all know she’s your girl, and we all respect that, but even you have to admit she’s changing up the vibe here, y’know. When we make records, it’s always been just the four of us, and the four of us love one another, and, erm, having that special sort of love seems to have worked for us, right?”

  John said, “Of course. But it never hurts to add a different kind of love to the mix.”

  Paul cleared his throat and said, “But, erm, if I can be frank, we don’t love Yoko …”

  And then, with a single flick of his index finger, John sent Paul flying through the break-room wall and across the studio, where he landed on and subsequently destroyed yet another guitar amp. John yelled, “You don’t get it, mate! You don’t really understand love!”

  Very calmly and coolly, Paul stood up, dusted himself off, and said, “Of course I don’t really understand love. Neither of us really understands love, because neither of us has a beating heart.” Then his fuse finally blew and he yelled, “But one thing I do bloody understand is how to make a bloody Beatles record, and the only people who should be in the bloody studio when we’re making a bloody Beatles record are the bloody Beatles!”

  John ran through the hole in the wall, picked up Paul’s favorite Rickenbacker bass, and drop-kicked it through the ceiling. Then he tracked down Yoko and they stomped off to the Abbey Road basement to sulk … again.

  After a few minutes of silence, George said, “Fellows, if we’re ever gonna get this record in the can, it seems a new plan is in order.” He turned to Ringo and said, “Yoko’s a Ninja. You know the Ninja brain. Any thoughts on how to get her out of here?”

  Without saying a word, Ringo walked through the hole in the wall, went to the opposite side of the studio, and sat down at his drum kit. He did a neat little snare fill, then he threw his drumsticks into the air; they stuck point-first into the ceiling. He took a long pull of his ale and said very quietly, “The answer is wonderful in its simplicity. I think you gents know where I’m going with this.”

  Paul said, “I know exactly where you’re going with this, mate, but how do you propose we make it happen? Trust me on this: the bird can hit, and hit hard.”

  Ringo polished off his drink and said, “As our Mr. Harrison pointed out, I know the Ninja brain. I know what she’s going to do before she does it.”

  Paul said, “Doesn’t that mean she knows what you’re going to do before you do it?”

  George said, “And she’s a level higher than you, right, Rings?”

  Ringo said, “Two levels higher, actually.”

  George said, “Two levels? You don’t stand a chance.”

  Ringo said, “Cheers, thanks for the support, mate. We’ve gotta try something, because what’s happening right here and right now ain’t working. It’s only a matter of time before Johnny starts in with more of that Two Virgins shite. Do you want that? Because I sure don’t.” And then, after a pause, he repeated, “The answer is wonderful in its simplicity.”

  The three of them took a vote, and it was decided that Paul would go down to the basement and invite Yoko into the recording room for a confab … alone, sans John. Turned out that wasn’t a problem, because she wanted to have a little chin-wag with the boys.

  Yoko was in the same outfit she’d been wearing since the recording sessions started: studded leather underwear, studded bra, a black hood, and a pair of swords crisscrossed between her shoulder blades. She unsheathed one of her swords, rubbed her index finger along the blade, and said, “I think I know what you gentlemen wish to discuss. I want to discuss it, myself. I respect that you all love John. But please respect that I love John, too. I love him in ways you can’t imagine.”

  George said, “I don’t want to imagine.”

  Yoko yelled, “Silence, guitar monkey,” then pulled a Ninja star from who knows where and flung it at him.

  The star found its target: George’s forehead. He calmly plucked it out and said, “Right, then. I’m going to the loo.” He looked at Ringo and said, “Would you like to take over now?”

  Ringo said, “Gladly,” then he hurled a timpani mallet across the room.

  If Yoko had moved a thousandth of a second slower, the mallet would’ve struck her in the eye, and she would’ve been blinded, and the battle would’ve been over before it started. Considering what happened to Abbey Road that evening, that probably would’ve been best for everyone.

  Ringo then fell on her with a sense of fury and fire that I sometimes wished he applied to the drum kit. Yoko reached for her sword, but Ringo stepped on her wrist; she let out a Two Virgins–sounding scream that broke three of the VU meters in the recording room and caused poor Geoff Emerick’s ears to spurt blood.

  The main problem for Ringo was that Yoko had two levels on him, and he’d be able to keep control of the battle for only so long. She threw him off—quite easily, it seemed—rolled out of his reach, then leapt up onto the ceiling like some sort of supernatural cheetah. While she was hanging upside down, she said, “Not a single scratch, fellow Ninja. But I’m not surprised that’s the best you can do, Starkey. John told me your powers are questionable at best.”

  I don’t think I’d ever seen Ringo look so hurt. He asked Yoko, “Did John
really say that?” I thought he might burst into tears.

  Yoko said, “Yes, Ninja Lord. John really said that.”

  Once he gathered his composure, Ringo ripped off his striped button-down shirt and flung it over his shoulder. Now, I’d never seen Ringo topless, and was shocked at his muscles, because they weren’t just muscles; they were muscles on top of muscles on top of more muscles. He gave Yoko his best steely glare—which wasn’t very steely, because Ringo really is a sweetheart—then said, “Yours are the only powers that are questionable, fellow Ninja,” dashed to his drum kit, tore his ride cymbal from its stand, and whipped it at Yoko. She skittered quickly across the ceiling, but not quite quickly enough; the cymbal buzzed through her right biceps, and several dollops of blood dripped onto Paul’s amplifier.

  Paul stared at his favorite amp as it shorted out, and whispered, “Yoko Ono must die, y’know.” And then he clenched his fists, raised his arms to the sky, fell onto his knees, and yelled, “Yoko Ono must diiiiiiiiiie!” He let loose with a moan that caused chills to run down my spine, then picked up his blood-soaked amp and launched it at Yoko. Since she was nursing her arm wound, she never saw it coming. Yoko fell from the ceiling onto the floor in a heap, landing headfirst. She must’ve had one hell of a hard head, because she didn’t even blink. She stood up and spit out some unintelligible noise; it might’ve been something in Japanese, or it might’ve been some nonsense syllables, but whatever it was, it summoned John from the basement, and John was not happy.

  John glanced at the blood gushing from Yoko’s arm and the lump that was growing on her forehead, walked over to Paul, and whispered, “You did this.”

  Paul said, “Actually, it was Ringo.”

  John said, “Ringo would never commit such a heinous act. I know it was you, because I know you better than you know yourself. For over ten years now, together, we have moved the heavens and the Earth. Together, we have made beautiful music. Together, we have created armies of the damned. And now this. And now, James Paul McCartney, you must feel the hurt that I feel. You must taste the pain that I taste. My suffering is infinite, and you shall suffer equally.”