Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (23 page)

But when I went to attack Mick in the studio, something felt wrong.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
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.

JOHN 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 M
C
CARTNEY:
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.

O
ne 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.

A
s 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
milli
second—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.

Besides, we were only millimeters away from hitting the Toppermost of the Poppermost, and I wasn’t about to let anybody or anything stop us.

CHAPTER FOUR