Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion

by Alan Goldsher

  Ringo turned to George, who’d just returned from the WC, and said, “Here we go again.”

  George said, “Indeed.” He checked his watch and said, “What say we go to the pub for a quick one.” And then they shuffled off, leaving John and Paul alone in the studio to destroy each other, Abbey Road Studios, and quite possibly the world.

  After George and Ringo left, Paul said, “John, can’t we discuss this before we dive in? We’re on a contractual deadline with this record, plus a fight’ll cost us a fortune in studio time. Besides, I’m afraid I might actually hurt you.”

  John ripped off his own arm and began beating himself on the head. “Look at me, Paulie! What’re you going to do to me that I can’t do to myself?”

  Paul took a step backward and said, “Erm, that’s a new one, mate.” Then he took off his sport coat, took a deep breath, and said, “Right, then, let’s get this over with.”

  And thus yet another battle began.

  GEOFF EMERICK: By then, I’d been working with the Beatles for the better part of two years, and the novelty had worn off. At first, it was a thrill to listen to George work out an intricate guitar part, or to hear John and Paul overdub perfect six-part harmonies, or to watch the two of them try to beat the stuffing out of each other without causing too much damage to their own instruments. But now, it was all a matter of course: Oh, look, what a surprise, John’s destroyed another of Paul’s amps, or, My, my, my, John’s been decapitated, haven’t seen that one before. There’s only so much busted gear, or so many stray limbs, one can see before one gets bored.

  Sure, the Yoko fight was the worst one yet—the only piece of equipment that didn’t get totally annihilated was George’s skintar, which seemed to be indestructible—but when you put it in the simplest terms, it was just another Lennon/McCartney hissy fit. I was so fed up that, as I watched Paul reattach his feet, and John carry the bleeding Ms. Ono out the door to theoretical safety, I said to George Martin, “D’you think you could get me a job with the Kinks?”

  George shrugged, and said, “D’you think you could get me a job with the Kinks?”

  RINGO STARR: I don’t recall exactly how many injuries Yoko sustained—I know she had a nasty laceration on her skull and at least six broken bones—but like most Ninjas, she was a quick healer, and within a couple of days, things were as they were before, with Yoko hanging out in the studio, and John losing focus, then Paul throwing microphones at John’s forehead. Ah, the joys of being a Beatle.

  In all seriousness, the joy was gone. I couldn’t sleep that entire week after the fight, because all I could hear was Yoko’s voice, over and over again: John told me your powers are questionable, John told me your powers are questionable, John told me your powers are questionable. I know I wasn’t , or even Yoko herself, for that matter, but I was still pretty good. It was eating at me, and I was miserable.

  So one day, at about five in the morning, without having slept a wink, I decided that if John didn’t believe in me, maybe he should find himself another drummer.

  GEORGE HARRISON: It was about six in the morning, and there’s Ringo, in his pajamas, banging on my front door and yelling, “Georgie! Georgie, open up!” I ran downstairs, brought Ringo into the kitchen, and prepared him some tea. When I asked him what was going on, he said, “John hates me because he thinks I’m a shitty Ninja, and Paul hates me because I didn’t finish off Yoko the other day, and you hate me because you think I can be replaced by a set of tablas. So I quit.”

  I told him, “I don’t hate you, Rings. But it’s funny you mention that. Because I’m quitting, too.”

  RINGO STARR: I thought, Great, here we go again, another Beatle stealing poor little Richie Starkey’s thunder.

  GEORGE HARRISON: Ringo said, “What’re you talking about?”

  I said, “Yeah, John hates me because, deep down, he’s pissed that my skintar sounds better than any of his damn Epiphones, and Paul hates me because I shoved off during the battle with Yoko, and you hate me because everybody else hates me, and you have a tendency to succumb to peer pressure.”

  Ringo said, “I don’t hate you.”

  I told him, “I don’t hate you, either. So how about we go over to John’s and tell him what he can do with his Poppermost?”

  JOHN LENNON: It was about seven in the morning, and there’re George and Ringo, in their pajamas, banging on my front door and yelling, “Johnny! Johnny, open up!”

  I ran downstairs, brought the two of them into the kitchen, and prepared them some tea. When I asked what was going on, they started shouting at me at the same time: “You want to murder us because of this, and Paul wants to murder us because of that, and blah, blah, blah, and we quit.”

  I said, “Funny you mention that. Because I’m quitting, too.”

  RINGO STARR: I could see the headlines. It’d say in big, bold capital letters head zombie leaves beatles, earth stops spinning on its axis. Then, underneath, in small type, That Drummer Ninja Bloke Whose Name We Forgot Also Did Something.

  GEORGE HARRISON: I asked John, “So you’re miserable, and I’m miserable, and Rings here is miserable. What next?”

  John said, “How about the three of us start our own band?”

  Ringo said, “Brilliant! Let’s go tell Paul.”

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: It was about eight in the morning, and there’re John, George, and Ringo, in their pajamas, banging on my front door and yelling, “Paulie! Paulie, open up!”

  I ran downstairs, brought the three of them into the kitchen, and prepared them some tea. When I asked what was going on, they started shouting at me at the same time: “You want to murder us because of this, and we want to murder you because of that, and blah, blah, blah, and we quit.”

  I said, “Funny you guys are telling me this. Because I’m quitting, too, y’know.”

  Ringo said, “You’re quitting? You’re quitting? Fook that. I’m joining up again.”

  George said, “Well if you’re joining back up, then I’m joining back up.”

  John said, “The Beatles can’t be just you two sad sacks. I’m back in.”

  I said, “You know what, lads? Count me in, too.”

  John’s face lit up. He said, “We’re back, and back forever, mates! If each one of us quitting the group didn’t break us up, we’re never breaking up. We’re a band, a true band, and will be that for all eternity. Nothing can come between us—nothing. And I will kill, maim, or destroy any living being or supernatural entity that tries to separate us from one another. Four equals one. All for zombies, and zombies for all, and all zombies for Ninja Lords, and Poppermost, here we come!” He paused and said, “Now I’m sick of the sight of you cunts. Stay out of my fookin’ face until 1969.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1969

  GEORGE HARRISON: We didn’t see one another for a good three months. Ringo flew off to either the North or South Pole—I don’t recall which—to engage in some Ninja foolishness. Paul went on an eating tour of Europe, which meant two-hundred-some-odd people unknowingly sacrificed their brains and lives for the good of rock ’n’ roll. John and Yoko created a hybrid cannabis seed that enabled a zombie to get high without it changing the color of his skin or causing him to excessively break wind. Mr. Lennon grew a lot of it, and Mr. Lennon smoked a lot of it; he had constant munchies and ended up glomming down a couple of hundred human brains himself. Me, I built a few more instruments, got deeper into my meditation, and took a tour of the Wormwood Scrubs prison, where I chowed down on the cortexes of some of the blokes who were serving life sentences. Just because John and Paul got their tasty brain treats from innocent people didn’t mean I had to follow suit.

  We were all having a lovely time apart from one another, and it turned out that this was one of those instances where absence did not make our unbeating hearts grow fonder. When we got together to shoot the film Let It Be at the coffin-like Twickenham Film Studios, things went downhill immediately.

  RINGO STARR: The other three blokes had eaten mo
re gray matter in three months than they’d eaten in their entire adult lives combined, and I’d been studying with an Eighty-Eighth Level Ninja Lord at this tiny island in the Weddell Sea, and the skills I learned, well, as they say in the movies, if I told you about them, I’d have to kill you. Point being, all four of us were stronger than ever, which made sitting in a dank studio doubly frustrating. And John brought Yoko along, which didn’t help matters.

  JOHN LENNON: We weren’t in Twickenham for ten minutes, when Paul launched an unprovoked attack on my girl.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: I swear on Robert Johnson’s eternally damned soul that I didn’t mean to hurt Yoko. All I did was kiss her on the cheek. But—and I know this is going to sound clichéd, but it’s the absolute truth—I didn’t know my own strength.

  GEORGE HARRISON: The second Paul’s lips touched Yoko’s face, she went flying across the room; she landed on a cameraman, who promptly died … and whose brain I promptly ate. Can’t let fresh gray matter go to waste, I always say.

  The only reason John didn’t rip off Paul’s head on the spot was that he tripped over a microphone cord. When he fell, he landed face-first in a pile of dust.

  And then he sneezed.

  RINGO STARR: John’s sneeze wasn’t particularly loud, but it had the strength of a hurricane, and it blew a hole in the concrete floor. Let me reiterate: John sneezed through concrete. He stared down the hole for a bit, then sat up, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and sneezed again, killing the rest of the camera crew.

  GEORGE HARRISON: When Paul went to help Yoko up, he accidently winged her up to the ceiling. In typical Yoko fashion, she hung up there like a bat and said she wasn’t coming down, ever. Paul mumbled, “We should only be so lucky.” I shudder to think what would’ve happened had John heard him.

  RINGO STARR: We were at Twickenham for just over two weeks, and here’s the scorecard: George quit, and then returned to the band six times; seventeen cameramen, three production assistants, and two grips were killed; Yoko suffered another twelve broken bones; and John and Paul whaled on each other for a combined total of twenty-six hours. When John knocked down the entire west wall of the studio with his left index finger, we knew it was time for a change of venue.

  In an ingenious move, we decided to shoot the remainder of the movie at Abbey Road. In an uningenious move, John asked Magic Alex to redo the studio.

  People go to Paraguay for two reasons: to eat sugarcane or to disappear. A loosely governed country with plenty of remote places to make oneself scarce, Paraguay has been a favorite getaway for Nazis, white- collar criminals on the lam, and escaped prisoners for almost a century.

  Yanni Alexis Mardas—known to Beatleologists as Magic Alex—isn’t running from either the law or any of Simon Wiesenthal’s minions, but there are four gentlemen who he isn’t exactly anxious to break bread with. Those four gentlemen are the Beatles, and—as Alex admitted to me in June 2009, while we were huddled under an oversize umbrella in a field far outside the city of Fuerte Olimpo—John, Paul, George, and Ringo have a legitimate reason for wanting Alex’s scalp.

  MAGIC ALEX: It was 1965, and I was twenty-one, and it seemed like every man I knew was enjoying the era of free love … but not me. Ladies weren’t interested in a kid from Greece who spoke lousy English and had really thick eyebrows. This is why I decided to end the Beatles. If I finished off the biggest band in the world, I’d become famous, and if I became famous, I could get a pretty girl to love me.

  I was a scrawny young man, and I knew a physical approach wouldn’t work for me—after all, look what they did to a strong, learned zombie hunter like Mick Jagger. So if I was gonna put the Fab Four to eternal death, I’d have to go a different route. And that route was electronics. But all I knew how to do was change a lightbulb, plug and unplug a cord, and turn something on and off, so step one was to learn something about electronics. It took me a few weeks to figure out how to take apart and put back together a telly. So that was a start.

  Step two: meet some or all of the Beatles and earn their trust, which was easier than it sounded. See, John Lennon liked watching the telly, so I paid an old Grecian Ninja pal of mine to break into John’s house while the band was on tour, and destroy his TV. The next day, I put a leaflet in John’s mailbox advertising my services as a repairman. He called me, I fixed his television, gave him some good acid, and we were fast friends.

  Step three: build a machine that would act as an aural diamond bullet. Naturally, that proved to be more difficult. It took three years to build and cost me two toes, as well as the lives of six other zombie hunters, but it was worth it. I created a set of speakers that, when properly placed, created a frequency that would kill any zombie within a two-meter radius. I hoped.

  Step four: convince the band to let me install my system at Abbey Road. I’d earned John’s trust, so it was a go. No problem.

  Step five: convince George Martin to let me install my system at Abbey Road. Big problem.

  GEORGE MARTIN: Magic Alex was the most ridiculous person I’d met in my life. Electronically speaking, he was good at three things: changing lightbulbs, plugging and unplugging cords, and turning things on and off. Apparently he could fix a television, but I never saw him do anything that would lead me to believe he even knew what a tube was.

  But John believed in him, so he was not only happy but eager to have ridiculous Alex set up his ridiculous speakers in what was about to become a ridiculous playback room.

  MAGIC ALEX: Boy, oh boy, did those speakers sound wonderful.

  GEORGE MARTIN: The playback sounded like it was coming from seventy-two transistor radios, a third of which were working at half power. But I couldn’t say a bad word about it, because in 1969, what the Beatles wanted, the Beatles got.

  RINGO STARR: I was there right when Alex was putting the finishing touches on his system. When he fired up half of the speakers, it sounded like shit. But it didn’t just sound bad, it sounded … wrong.

  MAGIC ALEX: My biggest tactical error was not setting up zombie test runs. Finding a zombie to listen to some tunes from Magic Alex’s magic speakers wouldn’t have been a problem, because in London, the undead are always hard up for work, and I could’ve gotten one to come by my studio by offering him ten pence.

  RINGO STARR: Once Alex got all seventy-two speakers going, it sounded a little bit better, but only a little bit. Even so, something still wasn’t right.

  MAGIC ALEX: I don’t care what anybody says, but Ringo Starr is as good a Ninja as you’ll ever find. I never saw him coming. All I felt was a whoosh, and then I was naked. And then the studio temperature dropped. A lot.

  RINGO STARR: I slammed the door shut and said, “Right, Alex, you’ll get your clothes back when you tell me what this is all about.”

  He started shivering and whined, “I’m c-c-c-c-c-cold.”

  I said, “And I’m c-c-c-c-c-curious. Tell me about your little system here. It’s all treble and midrange. Why can’t I hear the bass? Who puts together a sound system that doesn’t have any bottom?”

  He said, “The b-b-b-b-bottom’s there. You just can’t hear it.”

  MAGIC ALEX: The human ear can’t hear fifty-eight thousand hertz, but the body can feel it. I don’t think the zombie ear can hear it, either, but my working theory was that fifty-eight thousand hertz, combined with the proper amount of treble and middle, would create an identical frequency to that of a diamond bullet being fired from a Howitzer. One E-flat-minor chord, three dead zombie Beatles.

  RINGO STARR: Alex gave me some gobbledygook about low frequencies being good for the soul. It took only one shuriken to the chest to get the truth out of the little Greek freak.

  MAGIC ALEX: After Ringo coerced a confession out of me by cutting off my left nipple, he said, “I’m gonna let you live, but only because I don’t want George Martin to have to scrub the bloodstains from his mixing board again. I am, however, gonna tell the other lads exactly what went down here, so I recommend you leave the continent as soon as possibl
e. I’ll give you a one-hour head start, then I’m gonna make three quick phone calls.”

  I went to Greece, then the United States, then Canada, then Mexico, then back to Europe, and now here I am, in beautiful Paraguay. And you know what? I don’t care if you print how and where I’m living. It’s been thirty years, and I can’t imagine the guys are still mad at me.

  JOHN LENNON: Wait, you know where Alex is? Give me that little fooker’s address …

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: After George Martin put the studio back together, we finished shooting the movie, and since the film didn’t really have a climax, y’know, we decided to stage a concert on the Abbey Road roof. And everybody knows how that went.

  GEORGE HARRISON: From the get-go, that show was a mess. I don’t know what the exact temperature was outside, but it was the kind of chill that could cut through even cold-blooded blokes like us. The cold also wreaked havoc on my instruments; the double-reeded plonker-phone was barely staying together, and my skintar got chapped like you wouldn’t believe. Making matters worse, we were several stories up in the air and couldn’t catch a positive vibe from the crowd; but even if we’d been at ground level, it wouldn’t have made much difference, as most of the crowd was comprised of cops, and London’s finest don’t have much in the way of positive vibes to offer.

  By the time we launched into our third tune, I was in a foul mood, simply foul, so when John accidently knocked my patch cord out of my amp, well, my reflexes took over.