NEIL ASPINALL: Can zombies fly? Not by themselves, but when pushed by another zombie, they can cover quite a distance in the air. Which is exactly what happened when George shoved John off the Abbey Road roof.
JOHN LENNON: I was just standing there, caught up in the moment, playing what I thought was a nice little solo, trying to do my best Eric Clapton impression, minding my own fookin’ business, wrapped up in the tune, when all of a sudden, I’m wrapped up in a juniper bush three blocks away, with the neck of my Epiphone jammed into my chest, right where my heart resides. It was the dictionary definition of impalement, and if I’d been a vampire who prayed at the altar of Les Paul rather than Jesus Christ, I’d have been done for.
I yanked my guitar out of my chest—neither my axe nor my body were badly damaged, thank goodness—and ran like the wind back to Abbey Road.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: From the moment John landed in the bushes to the moment he returned to the roof, we’re looking at, erm, fifteen seconds, maybe twenty. To give you some context, George kicked him off during the tune’s bridge, and he was back by the end of the third verse.
After we finished the song, John leaned into the mic and said, “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. And now, for your listening pleasure, I present to you Mr. George Harrison.” Then he unplugged George’s guitar and shoved him down onto the pavement.
GEORGE HARRISON: I landed on a fat policeman, so I didn’t sustain any significant damage. The policeman, however, didn’t look too smashing, but I didn’t have time to help him out; after all, I had a concert to get back to. A wonderful, horrible, lovely, terrible concert.
RINGO STARR: When George came back onto the roof, he pushed Paul out of the way to get to John. I don’t think he intended any harm, but it appeared that Paul didn’t give a damn about George’s intentions, especially when Paul landed arse-first on one of the bobbies.
After that, it was every zombie for himself.
GEORGE MARTIN: I had turned the mixing board over to Geoff Emerick so I could grab some lunch in my office up on the third floor. I was seated at my desk, one bite into my BLT, when I saw George fall past my window. Before I could even get up to look at where he’d landed, there went John. And then, in due order, Paul. And then, astoundingly enough, George again, and then, naturally, John. It was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one right after the other.
I sat back down, afraid to look at what was happening down on the ground, so I pulled rank, called Geoff, and told him to go outside and give me a report.
GEOFF EMERICK: By the time I made it onto the sidewalk, the boys had stopped shoving and started making music, so I only saw the aftermath. The single useful observation I can offer is that those Beatle blokes had some terrific aim: five separate falls, five separate cops landed upon. It was a breathtaking display, truly breathtaking, and from that moment on, as far as I was concerned, those bastards could do no wrong. If they wanted to take over the world, they had my vote, because nobody else would be able to do it better.
JOHN LENNON: Tossing George and Paul from the roof, then watching them fall on those pigs, jazzed me up. It felt like I was back at the Indra Club or the Star-Club or the Cavern Club, speeding on greenies, playing music all night long, and doing damage upon whoever or whatever tried to block me from getting to the Poppermost. I thought, This is a good way to feel. This is how all zombies should feel. No, this is how all humans should feel. So after Yoko and I tied the knot, the two of us started a protest. Our motto: give war a chance.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: I sympathized with John’s sentiment—what fun is life without a little bit of spilt blood?—but the press was killing him, and I thought it best to let him fly solo. For that matter, I started to distance myself from him and the band altogether.
RINGO STARR: I wasn’t surprised to see John encouraging the masses to beat the crap out of one another, but seeing it from Yoko was another story. She was a Ninja Lord, and Ninja Lords don’t condone pugnacious, aggressive behavior—in other words, we don’t start shit, we finish it. And there’s Yoko, standing right beside the most pugnacious, aggressive man in rock history, rooting him on. rang me up, and he was pissed, and it takes a lot to piss off .
He was so angry, in fact, that he strongly suggested I call up Rory Storm and organize a Hurricanes reunion. He felt we needed to demonstrate that Ninjas who were part of the rock ’n’ roll world weren’t all violence-mongering performance artists.
I told him I’d consider it. But I didn’t. Maybe I should’ve.
GEORGE HARRISON: I ignored John’s whole bloody protest. Talk about Mania.
JOHN LENNON: Yoko and I weren’t going to take to the streets and start tearing things up. That would’ve led to riots, and riots are too messy for anybody’s own good. No, Yoko and I were looking for real wars, with real battle plans and real strategy. Any random wanker could throw another random wanker off a roof—Paul McCartney and George Harrison are two excellent examples—but it took a special kind of person to participate in a well-organized military action.
I wasn’t looking to start World War III, and something like Vietnam was too sloppy for my taste. I suppose if you put a gun loaded with diamond bullets to my head and asked me to choose what kind of conflict I wanted, I’d have said, “How about a rematch of the Revolutionary War? I bet we’d kick those Yanks’ arses this time.”
In the end, it was Yoko who came up with what I initially thought was a brilliant idea: build a giant bed in front of the Sexmuseum in Amsterdam, surround it with bombs, barbed wire, guns, and the like, and lie about in it for seven straight days. My wife was a fookin’ genius.
NEIL ASPINALL: John knew that Paul, George, and Ringo wouldn’t fly out to Denmark and give him a hand with his ridiculous bed idea, so he called me. He knew that when it came to him, my hand was always available for the giving, even if I knew his idea was the stupidest thing in music history.
After day two, the public began avoiding the Sexmuseum like John and Yoko had the plague. But wouldn’t you? First off, there was the smell. On a good day, John’s zombie stink was tough to handle, but after forty-eight hours without a shower, you could get a whiff of eau de Lennon from half a kilometer away. Second off, there weren’t too many folks, undead or alive, who were sympathetic to his cause. If you’re a zombie, and you’ve got that so-called zombie nature working for you, sure, violence is lovely, but far from essential. And for people like me—you know, people who enjoy living—giving war a chance was just silly.
JOHN LENNON: We packed it in on the fourth day. Like they say in the United fookin’ States, you can’t win ’em all.
The music world’s most notorious, ball-busting-est accountant, Allen Klein, was retained by the Beatles in 1969 to tidy up their financial affairs, affairs that had grown progressively messier after Brian Epstein’s untimely death. Thing is, not all four Beatles agreed with the hire, the lone dissenter being Paul McCartney, yet another bullet point in the ever-growing list of reasons why it was all but impossible for John, Paul, George, and Ringo to be in the same room together.
I met with Klein in February 2009, and even though he was nearing the end of his long, colorful life, Klein was a force to be reckoned with, and it’s easy to see how and why he scared the shit out of high-profile clients, because—as every sentence he delivered was yelled at the decibel level of a small jet—he scared the shit out of me, without even getting up from his deathbed.
ALLEN KLEIN: Listen, brother, managing musicians is a pain in the ass. They’re all kvetch, kvetch, kvetch, and “Where’s my money, where’s my money, where’s my money,” and “Find me a private plane in an hour,” and “Help me get rid of this dead hooker,” et cetera, et cetera, et fucking cetera. And that’s just regular human musicians. Add three honked-off zombies, a confused Ninja, and a royally screwed-up financial portfolio into the equation, and you’re looking at a pain in the ass like you wouldn’t believe.
I have no clue what happened between John, Paul, George, and Ringo that made them h
ate one another so much. Might’ve been that they had creative differences. Might’ve been that they were growing up and growing apart. Who knows? All I know is that our numbers meetings turned into hours and hours of recriminations and finger-pointing … and, for that matter, finger removal.
The fit hit the shan, as some say, in the winter of ’69. I was sitting through another Beatles bitchfest in the big conference room up at Apple Records’ offices, and as usual, John and Paul were in each other’s faces, throwing the periodic punch, and George was sitting on the floor in the corner, in a trance, trying to get in touch with his inner I-don’t-know-what-the-fuck, and Ringo was slumped down into a chair, looking like he was gonna cry. It was a sad, sad scene, and if I wasn’t getting paid a huge fucking pile of money, I’d have told them all to break up and fuck off, then I’d have flown back to Jersey and washed my hands of them. But I was getting paid a huge fucking pile of money, and I thought it might be nice to do something to earn it, so after Paul threw John into a file cabinet, I grabbed a stapler and chucked it out the window. Nothing. Then I grabbed the phone and chucked that out the window. Nothing. Then I grabbed the tranced-out Mr. Harrison and chucked him out the window.
That got their attention.
When George came back up, I told them all to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, because it was time for Professor Klein to give them a lesson in how to be a rock star. I said, “Listen to me, you undead limey schmucks, you have dozens more records to make, and they’ll all go platinum fifty times over, and right there, you have money. If you get off your undead asses, you can start touring again, and you’ll sell even more records and have even more bread. If you stop throwing one another off buildings, you might see a newspaper article in which you’re not referred to as ‘thrill-seeking has-beens.’ Five words, boys: Get. It. The. Fuck. Together.”
After McCartney cracked Lennon in the head with a clipboard, he said, “You might be right, Allen. John turned me into a zombie so we could make music together forever, and you know what? That was only twelve years ago. That’s twelve years down, and eternity to go. Now, I don’t know any zombie musicians who’re as good as John Lennon and George Harrison, and aside from the brilliant Ringo Starr, I don’t know any Ninja musicians who aren’t shite.”
John looked around the room, nodded, and said, “I hear you, Paul. I hear you loud and clear.” Then he overturned the conference room table. With his pinkie. At that point, I got the fuck out of there. I had a hunch it was all over but the formalities, and I sure as shit didn’t want to be there when the formalities started.
Two weeks later, I get a midnight phone call from Lennon: “Oi, Kleiny, wake up, mate, we’re packing it in. Call Paulie and tell him that if I ever see his ugly mug again, I’m shoving a diamond bullet so far down his throat, he’ll shit five carats.”
I said, “That sounds great, John. I’ll send you my bill.”
And then I hung up. And that was the end of the Fab Four.
MICK JAGGER: I owe the Beatles, I really do. Who knows where I’d be now without receiving Lennon’s and McCartney’s zombie kiss. Dead in a Soho gutter? Maybe. Singing in a Rolling Stones tribute band in Galway? Possibly. Raising money to make a documentary on undead hunting? Perhaps.
But going on the Bigger Bang world tour in 2006? Absolutely not.
GEORGE MARTIN: When some people lose a significant other, they’ll keep bits and pieces of that person around as a reminder of their love. Sometimes it’s a shirt that retained a certain scent, or a sweet message on an answerphone. I like that idea. I like that a lot.
They put me through hell, but I truly, truly love John, Paul, George, and Ringo, so I held on to dozens of physical Beatles memories, such as the mixing board that Paul melted with his mind during the Revolver session, and the Gibson J-160E that George ate, then regurgitated, while we were cutting Beatles For Sale. For that matter, I still haven’t cleaned the stain on the carpet from the blood that Ringo spilled near the end of that devastating fight with Yoko during The White Album session. And you know what? I never will.
BRIAN EPSTEIN: I loved every minute of what George always calls the Mania: the endlessly creative recording sessions; the excitement of touring; seeing the world from a first-class seat; watching John and Paul mess about with the press. Even the Shea riot was somehow magical.
I’m just glad I was dead for most of the bad bits.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: We had a good run, but enough was enough, y’know. I mean, how many times can you fight the same argy-bargy with the same fighters? Getting mashed or mangled or beheaded or disemboweled day in and day out didn’t physically hurt me—nothing physically hurt me—but I was bored. Wouldn’t you be? Imagine waking up knowing you’ll have to beat John Lennon with a two-by-four in the morning, then shove a chainsaw up his arse in the afternoon, then rip off both his ears after supper. And then imagine you’ll have to do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. And then imagine you’ll have to do it for all eternity. Just thinking about it is getting me exhausted.
Nobody deserves that. It’s no way to live. It’s no way to die. And, erm, it’s especially no way to be undead.
GEORGE HARRISON: It was the Greek dramatist Menander who first said, “Time heals all wounds,” but clearly he wasn’t a zombie, because our wounds are everlasting. The scars and stitches and bloodstains aren’t going anywhere. Our zombieness is a uniform we can’t ever remove … or, for that matter, properly wash.
But I don’t think we undead get enough credit for our sensitivity. Everybody assumes that just because we would kill a man as easily as we would shake his hand, we have no feelings. Every time John called me a rotting corpse who can’t find his way through a C-sharp-minor scale without a flashlight, it stung. Every time Paul told me I’d be a better guitar player if I put my left fingers on my right hand, and my right fingers on my left, I felt it. And whenever Ringo chastised me, well, that was especially painful, because Ringo never chastised anybody.
To me, we pulled the plug on the band at exactly the right time. Think about it: how many shots to the heart can one zombie take? I can tell you unequivocally that that number is finite … even if that heart is inanimate.
RINGO STARR: I could’ve gone on playing with them. Hell, if any of the others had given even the slightest hint of interest in continuing, I’d have done anything to make it happen, anything. But zombies are a stubborn lot, and once they make a decision, it’s all but impossible for anybody to unmake it.
Shutting it down wasn’t all bad. My drums weren’t going anywhere, so I’d always be able to play. I had dozens and dozens of Ninja Lord levels to conquer. And besides, murdering humans for either food or a few sadistic laughs wasn’t exactly my bag—I didn’t even like witnessing that sort of behavior—and if I could curl up in bed knowing that I wouldn’t have to watch John snake his tongue up the bloody hole in some poor fan’s neck the next morning, well, that wasn’t a bad thing.
JOHN LENNON: We were a rock band. Nothing more. Nothing less. I don’t even know why we’re talking about it. The records are there, and the corpses are there, and that’s all you need, because at the end of the day, that’s what the Beatles were about: music and death.
EPILOGUE
1970–Present
What with the five major riots, the eighteen arrests, the dozens of, ahem, odd musical choices, and the countless number of assassination attempts, recapping Lennon’s, McCartney’s, Harrison’s, and Starr’s post-Beatles life would require an entire book unto itself. After spending so much time in close confines with zombies, my health-insurance rates have skyrocketed, so I’ll leave that journey to another intrepid journalist.
While checkered and oftentimes disparaged, John’s, Paul’s, George’s, and Ringo’s post-Beatles careers have had some definite highlights, my personal favorite being John Lennon’s spectacular destruction of Phil Spector. After the legendary producer remixed—and, in Lennon’s mind, ruined—their album Let It Be, John tracked him dow
n in his underground compound in Bolivia and hypnotized the hell out of him, turning the already unhinged Spector into a raging, wig-wearing nutbag. To me, that was far more elegant and appropriate than a mere murder. Death is over in a heartbeat, but insanity lasts a lifetime.
Conversely, there were also plenty of lowlights. Lennon and McCartney’s two-year post-breakup press battle in Mersey Zombie Weekly was an embarrassment for everybody involved. Harrison’s stab at starting his own religion—which he clumsily dubbed Undead Transcendental Inner Outer Everythingness—was a very expensive, very public fiasco. Starr’s awkward traveling Ninja demonstrations would’ve been impossible to watch even if they lasted only fifteen minutes. But six hours? You’re the man, Rings, but come on.
The lowlights eventually far outweighed the highlights, and by the turn of the millennium, the band was all but forgotten. Sure, you’d periodically stumble across a Beatles tribute on some college radio station, and every once in a while you’d hear about a Beatles convention in a random town like Bismarck, North Dakota, or Portland, Maine, but at the beginning of the aughts, the Fab Four was yesterday’s news.
What was most heartbreaking about the situation was that the boys’ financial situation had gone to hell, and—save for McCartney, who was a canny investor—the Liverpudlians were all but broke. Doubly heartbreaking was that because hip-hop, sampled beats, prefab bands, and tarted-up pop tarts, were the music industry norm, nary a record label or concert promoter was interested in financing a Beatles reunion.
That is, until 2003, when Max Brooks’s book The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead climbed onto the bestseller charts, and all of a sudden, zombies were kind of cool again. The following year, the remake of the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead and the undead farce Shaun of the Dead were box office smashes. Three years later, Brooks followed up Survival Guide with another bestseller, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, then three years after that, Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem helped turn the undead into a legitimate cultural phenomenon. As the decade came to a close, zombie flicks were clogging up the movie theaters, and zombie clothing stores were clogging up the malls. Next thing you know, it was safe for a zombie to walk the streets without fear of persecution, be it a high-functioning behemoth or a low-functioning groaner.
Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion Page 25