Next thing you know, the Beatles are again a viable entity.
The only Beatle who stayed in touch with me after I finished my interviews for this book was Ringo Starr, so it was a bit of a shock when the name john lennon popped up on my cell’s caller ID. I put my phone on speaker, clicked record on my digital voice recorder, hit the phone’s send button, and said, “Hey, John. Long time, no hear.”
“Good afternoon, scribe, good afternoon. And of course it’s long time, no hear. Why the fook would I bother calling you if I didn’t have anything specific to talk to you about?”
I wasn’t offended. That was just John being John. “Understood,” I said. “Which means you have something specific to talk to me about.”
“I do,” John said. “I most definitely do.” He paused, then said, “Here’s a question for you, mate: If you Google the phrase, ‘The band is reuniting,’ how many hits do you get?”
“What are you talking about, John?” I said. “That makes no … wait a sec. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
John ignored me. “Four hundred and twenty-nine thousand, that’s how many. Now, how many hits do you get if you Google ‘the Beatles’?”
“No clue,” I said.
“Three hundred and eighteen thou. Point being, a search of ‘the Beatles’ needs to exceed a search of ‘The band is reuniting.’ So, y’know, the Beatles are reuniting. And you need to cover our first show.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Where’s it happening? Wembley Stadium? The Rose Bowl? Folsom Field?”
“Nope,” John said. “Double Door.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. Double Door is a Chicago dive club a few miles away from my apartment. It has a capacity of about four hundred, and is a haven for either up-and-coming or come-and-gone indie rock bands who have cult (read: limited) audiences. “Why in God’s name would the Beatles play Double Door?”
“It’s a practice run. Next Wednesday. Six o’clock. We’re not even advertising it.”
“No advertising on a Wednesday evening?” I said. “Sir, you are gonna be playing for an empty house.”
“As long as there’s one person there, we’re cool. So you’ll be there, right.”
There was no question mark at the end of that sentence. John wasn’t asking. John was telling.
Size-wise, the Double Door dressing room adds up to approximately the total square footage of four airplane lavatories. The walls are covered with hand-drawn flyers, graffiti, and stickers, and the floor is gummy with months-old booze—not exactly the kind of place you’d expect to see John, Paul, George, and Ringo prepare for their big return.
The guys were genial enough to me, but quite distant, which I attributed to flat-out nervousness; after all, they hadn’t played a live concert for a paying audience since 1966, and you’d have to be inhuman and heartless not to have a case of the jitters.
Paul asked me to take a peek into the club and get a head count. Including the bartender and the bouncer, there were a grand total of eleven bodies. “Great,” Paul mumbled. “That won’t even cover our gas money up to Milwaukee.”
We silently ate a few pieces of crappy pizza and drank a few bottles of beer, then it was time. I wished them luck, and John, Paul, and George trooped off to the stage. But Ringo, who was decked out in his finest Kabuki finery, held back.
He fixed me with a long look and asked, “What do you think of all this, Alan? You think it’ll be good?”
“Who knows?” I said. “It could stink, but it could be a blast. One thing I do know is that, no matter what, it’ll be interesting.”
Ringo gave me a little smile and said, “Interesting. Right.” Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of earplugs. “Here,” he said. “Wear these.”
I joked, “Why? Have you guys gone metal? Are you turning it up to eleven?”
He shook his head. “Just trust me. I’m wearing a pair myself. Now put ’em in, or I’ll go Ninja on your arse.” The plugs were a bit hollow, and didn’t block out much noise, but Ringo was a trustworthy gentleman, so I went with it.
After I gave him one of those hipster handshake/hugs, I told him, “I’ll see you after the set, man. Break a leg.”
He gave me a weird smile, shrugged, and said, “I’ll probably break something.”
Like in many small rock clubs, the Double Door sound system leaves something to be desired, so after Paul counted off one-two-three-four, and they launched into “All My Loving,” it sounded like shit. George’s guitar fed back, and Paul’s bass sound was a mushy mess, and the only piece of the drum kit that could be heard with any semblance of clarity was the hi-hat. I assumed the onstage sound wasn’t much better, but oddly enough, the boys didn’t seem fazed; quite the contrary, they seemed to be having a blast, especially John, whose smile lit up his face and whose skin tone was as close to vibrant as a zombie’s will ever get.
Once the tiny audience realized they were watching the honest-to-goodness Beatles, they fired up their cell phones and started spreading the news, and within twenty minutes, the club was packed. Forty-five minutes and ten well-performed classics later, John said, “We’d like to thank you all for coming tonight. Before we call it an evening, there’s one thing I’d like to say.” And then he uttered a brief five-word sentence. I still don’t know what language it was in. Possibly Latin. Possibly Sanskrit. Possibly an ancient dialect that only zombies understand.
And the effect of this sentence was shocking.
A yuppie standing immediately to my left began bleeding from his ears. And then his nose. And then his mouth. And then his neck. And then something sprang from his chest. It might’ve been his heart. It might’ve been a rat.
A boy who couldn’t have been more than seventeen flew straight up to the ceiling at what had to be twenty-five miles per hour. And then he fell back to the ground. And then back to the ceiling. And then back to the ground. And then his skull shattered into dozens and dozens of tiny white shards.
A young woman directly behind me yelled, “Oh, my God! My tit fell off! Jesus fucking Christ! My left tit fell off!” A young woman kneeled down to see what had happened to her friend’s breast, and her head promptly exploded, covering all of us in the immediate vicinity with foul-smelling, boiling-hot gray and yellow goop.
And then the Beatles threw down their instruments and jumped off the stage into the fray.
As I watched Paul McCartney suck the bartender’s brain from her ear, and George Harrison rip both the bouncer’s arms from their sockets, and Ringo Starr pepper the defenseless audience with shuriken, John Lennon grabbed me by my collar, shoved me against the wall, ripped out my earplug, and whispered, “Welcome to the Poppermost, scribe. Enjoy the fookin’ ride.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The longer I do this whole book-writing thing, the more I realize that it’s a group effort, and one couldn’t ask for better teammates than my ubertalented editor, Jaime Costas, of Gallery Books; and my ultrakind agent, Jason Ashlock, of Movable Type Literary Group. From conception to execution to completion, their respective belief and creativity helped bring this project to life … and undeath. In any branch of the entertainment industry, you’re lucky if one person totally has your back, and I’ve got two, and how fookin’ awesome is that?
Isaac Adamson, C. J. Gelinas, and Jaime Woods pored through what Isaac called “the bat-shit crazy” first draft, and offered many musical, magical, and mystical notes, concepts, and jokes. They also corrected several boo-boos; any remaining mistakes are on me.
I’m a straight-up fan of illustrator/graphic novelist Jeffrey Brown, and couldn’t be more thrilled to have him on board. He’s the Billy Preston of Paul Is Undead, the dude who came in at the end of the session and laid down a solo that took the jam to a higher, richer level.
Louise Burke, Jennifer Bergstrom, Anthony Ziccardi, Stephanie DeLuca, Richard Yoo, Felice Javit, and the entire Simon & Schuster crew has been nothing but exemplary.
This is big-league publishing at its finest, folks. A special shout-out to Jaime Putorti for her sick, sick design work.
Cara Garbarino, your photo makes me look way cuter than I actually am. Folks, if you dig the picture, please visit www.TheAtelierChicago.com.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and George Martin provided the internal soundtrack for not only this project but the majority of my music-listening life. If they were to enjoy this book .0000000001 percent as much as I adore their songs, I’d be a happy boy.
And finally, infinite thanks to my beautiful, clever, intrepid copilot Natalie Rosenberg, without whose support and input this book wouldn’t sing. I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion Page 26