Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (33 page)

GEOFF EMERICK:
Harrison yelled down to us from the top of the stairs, “Emerick and Martin, please go find John’s left pinkie and right thumb. They should be somewhere on the lawn out front. McCartney, please join me on the roof.”

John’s fingers had fallen onto the street side of the studio, and our primary concern was that they’d rolled into the street and gotten splatted by an oncoming bus. Fortunately, there wasn’t much traffic, and we didn’t see any flattened digits on the street, so unless one of the fingers somehow jumped into somebody’s tailpipe, they were around there
somewhere
.

So, George Martin and I—while wearing ties and nice trousers, mind you—got on our hands and knees and poked through the bushes. Nothing. Then we went through the front lawn. Nothing. I asked George if he wanted to run to the roof and make sure John wasn’t messing with us. He told me that, as I was the junior member of the team, it was my job to handle the talent, so I should get my arse up there.

As I headed upstairs, I worried about how the talent would handle me.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
John was inconsolable about the potential loss of his fingers. He said, “How’m I gonna play guitar? How’m I gonna play keyboard? How’m I gonna fix my hair so I don’t look like a prat?”

Harrison and I tried to calm him down, but when a zombie’s on acid, there’s no talking to him, y’know. He went on and on, and his moaning was getting more zombie-like and starting to attract attention. Right then, Geoff shows up, and says, “Good news, boys: we found the fingers!”

GEOFF EMERICK:
We hadn’t found the fingers.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
John sprang up—almost falling off the roof in the process—jumped at Geoff, and tried to give him a kiss on the neck. Not an undead kiss. Just a
kiss
kiss.

GEOFF EMERICK:
I ducked, and he sailed right over me and crashed headfirst into the door. No way I was letting John Lennon get anywhere my neck.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
John popped right on up, shook out the cobwebs, gave us a big old smile, and said, “Right, then. I’m heading downstairs. And the next time you see good ol’ John Winston Lennon, he’ll have ten fookin’ fingers, just like the rest of you cunts.” He paused, then said, “We should do a concert up here someday. It’d be a larf.”

GEORGE MARTIN:
Geoff yelled at me from the roof, “Get a move on, mate! Johnny’s on his way down! He thinks we found his digits!”

I’d come up empty-handed, if you will: no pinkie, no thumb, bugger-all. Thinking fast, I went over to the nearest tree, ripped off
a branch, and broke off two finger-size pieces. It was dark. John was high. At the very least, it would buy me some time.

When I gave John the sticks, he wept with joy. While he embraced me, I patted him on the back and told him, “Don’t reattach the fingers just yet, John. You’re a bit addled, and you don’t want to do something that serious until you’re in a good headspace. Go have a lie-down on the cot in the control room. I’ll be back in a few.”

It took me two more hours to find his fingers. Turned out they’d landed in a robin’s nest. The mother bird took a nice chomp out of the pinkie, but otherwise, they were in fine shape. Paul reattached them while John was asleep on the sofa, and he was never the wiser, and Mr. Lennon’s hands lived happily ever after.

GEORGE HARRISON:
Brian had initially wanted the press and the general public to know we were experimenting with the dreaded lysergic, but the results of said experiments were such failures that we decided to keep it amongst ourselves. Or at least, John, Ringo, and I did.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
The writer asked me a question, y’know. I answered it. I told the truth. Who knew it would lead to what it led to?

BRIAN EPSTEIN:
After Paul told that newspaper reporter that the boys had tried acid, a lot of our American fans went a little bananas. The English press wasn’t particularly concerned—it seemed like everybody in London was tripping that summer, so who cared if a few rock stars were messing about with the stuff?—but in the States, it was another story. Especially for tens of thousands of teenage girls.

T
he lone zombie psychiatrist in the entire state of Wisconsin, Dr. Jennifer Everett, wasn’t the first young woman to join one of the so-called Beatles suicide acid cults that popped up across the United States, nor was she the last. But she is one of the few who escaped both alive-ish and with her mind more or less intact.

Jennifer’s cult leader—a zombie who tried to pass as a man and went by the snappy moniker of Reverend Starkey Best von Pollywog—did a superb job of brainwashing his followers, so Dr. Everett’s memories of her two weeks as a member of the Merry Undead are iffy at best. But in January 2000, she told me enough to paint a picture that was, at the very least, disconcerting.

DR. JENNIFER EVERETT:
Considering how crappy the modern music scene is, people who weren’t around when the Beatles were in their prime will never understand how a little rock group from England could wrap me so tightly around their little finger. And since that cult had an irrevocable impact on my life, and I wouldn’t have joined the cult had it not been for the Beatles, I think about that constantly. Was it their songs that roped me in? Their voices? Their look? The era? No clue. Still haven’t been able to figure it out. All I know is that there hasn’t been a single band either before or since who could get me physically, emotionally, and sexually aroused by simply
being.

I would’ve followed the Beatles anywhere, but by ’67, they weren’t touring, so the only way I’d be able to be with them would be to move to England, but little girls from the Wisconsin heartland didn’t move to England, especially when their parents vehemently despised both
rock ’n’ roll and zombies. So when I heard about Reverend Pollywog, well, the Merry Undead seemed to be the next best thing.

At the time, the Merry Undead was very shrouded in mystery, but if you took away the rainbow-colored school bus, the dashikis, and the copious amounts of acid, it was just a cover for a random nut job trying to fuck as many young girls as he possibly could. The reality was more nasty than mysterious.

Reverend Pollywog was a marketing genius. He somehow got all the hippie girls in the streets to talk him up—“Oh, the Merry Undead are soooooo beautiful, and they’ve got the best drugs, and they hang out with all the coolest zombies”—so when the bus rolled through Milwaukee that summer, Pollywog didn’t have to do any recruiting. He had his pick of the Beatle-loving litter. He thought I was cute. I was in.

I have vivid memories of getting on the bus, but after Pollywog shoved his tongue down my throat, it gets hazy. I remember the other twenty-three girls and I were constantly naked. I remember eating lots and lots of Corn Flakes—and to this day, when I walk down the cereal aisle at the grocery store and get a glimpse of that white Kellogg’s box, I get the heebie-jeebies. I remember a lot of tambourines. Oddly enough, I don’t remember listening to much music.

In the end, only two of us were actually turned into zombies—me and this seventeen-year-old from St. Louis named Annie—but I’m pretty certain that wasn’t the game plan. I think Pollywog wanted us all undead, but for some reason, the other girls never got reanimated. We never got an explanation, because when we woke up in a back alley in Taos, New Mexico, the Reverend was long gone. We pieced it together as best we could and decided that Pollywog had gotten a lousy batch of acid that had killed everybody so quickly, he had time to zombify only the two of us. I was happy to not be six feet under, but on the minus side, zombies weren’t welcome in my part of Wisconsin, so I haven’t seen my family since.

J
ohn Robert Parker Ravenscroft—aka, John Peel—was one of the UK’s most in the know disc jockeys, always presenting the hottest and hippest tunes on his radio show, always seen at the hottest and hippest musical gatherings throughout London. On June 25, 1967, Peel wasn’t yet an employee of the British Broadcasting Corporation, but he managed to sneak into the BBC studios, where the Beatles were scheduled to perform a tune to be shown via satellite to a worldwide audience. (The Beeb, who’d commissioned the number, nixed the first draft of the song, which Lennon had entitled “All You Need Is to Die a Painful Death.” It still hasn’t been established whether or not John was yanking some Beeb chain.) When I spoke with Peel in June 2004, only four months before his death, he explained that he wasn’t the only music-biz luminary in the studio audience that viewed the event The Sun dubbed “the literal and figurative definition of a bloody mess.”

JOHN PEEL:
The joint was crawling with stars: Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Marianne Faithfull, Graham Nash, the works. I was so uncool that I wanted to run around and get autographs, but I was cool enough to not actually do it.

Some of the lot were perched in their seats, while some were on the floor, when the director gave the go-ahead. But before John could even get through the first verse, who bursts through the door and jumps right into the fray, lips a’kissin’ and hips a’wigglin’? That’s right, kids, everybody’s favorite zombie hunter.

Mick Jagger strode right up to John, raised his arms to the sky, and said, “O zombie Lennon! It ends here. In full view of a worldwide audience, you shall taste death.”

John said, “You’re right, Mick. It ends here.” And then he ripped off his headphones. And then the madness began.

If I hadn’t seen the videotape in slow-mo, I wouldn’t have believed it went down the way it did. It was one of those things so utterly inhuman and
wrong
that my mind couldn’t even process it. What happened was, John ripped Paul’s bass from his hands and pulled off the neck—it was a shiny new Rickenbacker, which is probably why Paul got so pissed—then gnawed the end with his teeth until it was as sharp as a knife. He then lifted it above his head and brought it down through Mick’s right shoulder. Mick’s arm detached and flew across the studio and fell right at Eric Clapton’s feet, staining his nice hippie-dippy outfit bright red, and let me tell you, Slowhand wasn’t pleased. John grabbed Mick by the back of his neck, then wrapped his entire mouth around Jagger’s gaping arm wound; his cheeks puffed in and out for a bit, then Mick collapsed on his arse. From where I was sitting, Jagger looked deader than the Big Bopper.

John yelled at Eric, “Oi, Clappy, toss that arm over.”

Clapton yelled back, “Are you a fookin’ nutter, mate? I’m not touching this thing!” He then kicked Mick’s arm—which flew smack into the side of Marianne Faithfull’s noggin—then stood up, and sprinted out the door.

Marianne shook her head and said, “What a pussy,” then, as John requested, she tossed Mick’s arm across the room. I should note it was a perfect throw. That Marianne was a keeper.

John caught it neatly with one hand, then said to McCartney, “A little help, Paulie?”

Paul, who was staring at the remnants of his bass and practically weeping, said, “Not today, John.”

John gave Paul a disgusted look, then asked George, “How about you? Are you on board?”

George sighed, and said, “I suppose so,” then he walked over to Mick’s fallen body, made a fist, stuck his hand into the open stump, and lifted Jagger over his head. He didn’t seem too happy about it, truthfully, but he managed to walk Mick over to John.

And then came another moment that my mind couldn’t quite process: John took Mick’s body from George, licked both Mick’s arm and stump, then jammed the whole mess back together. Almost immediately, Mick’s eyes popped open and, with the biggest smile on his face, he said, “Holy fook! Undead is life! Why didn’t you tell me, John? Why didn’t you say something?”

John wiped the blood from his lips and said, “Would you have listened?”

Mick said, “Probably not, probably not.” He looked around the room, then asked, “So, erm, where does a guy procure some brains around here? That’s what you zombies do, right? Procure brains?”