Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (37 page)

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
We’d been discussing starting up our own record label for a while, but we got serious when we got back from India. John wanted to call it Maggot Music, but that was summarily voted down. By me.

JOHN LENNON:
To us, the music industry didn’t work. A band would get a record deal; then, unless they immediately hit the charts, they’d become persona non grata. There was no nurturing. No vision. No love. And no monsters.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
Outside of the Grateful Dead, we were the only successful rock band that had a zombie, y’know. There were plenty of jazz monsters around—Miles Davis is a vampire, of course; and Thelonious Monk is an unclassifiable deity, kind of like our old friend Roy Orbison, I suppose—and the classical world was littered with swamp things, but in rock ’n’ roll,
nothing.
So we decided that our new baby, Apple Records, would have a roster consisting entirely of otherworldly beings. (George came up with Apple, because it reminded him of the satisfying crunch of a fresh skull. Good one, Georgie.) Thing is, it’s not easy to find monster musicians in Europe, as England isn’t loaded with clubs that offer open-mic nights for so-called creatures, so we had to put the word out all by ourselves. And that meant hitting the streets. And the sewers.

JOHN LENNON:
Neil and I designed these leaflets alerting the monster world that we were accepting demos from non-mortals of all shapes and sizes. We hung the posters all over London, and got only one single demo from one single band, and we didn’t consider signing them, because, well, let’s just say that “Something Fishy’s Going On” by the Raspberry Blueberry Booger Boogie Beat Extraction featuring Willie the Hydra wasn’t exactly a toe-tapper. We found out quickly that the chance of finding a solid, well-oiled all-monster band was unlikely, as your typical moleman doesn’t have the means to buy a decent guitar or rent a decent rehearsal studio.

So we ripped down the old notices and replaced them with new posters announcing a one-day-only audition. Be you monster, human, man, woman, or child, if you were good, you’d get signed. But if you were bad, you’d get killed.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
John talked a good game but didn’t follow through. We didn’t kill anybody at the audition, although John took a couple
of token swipes at an American bloke named James Taylor, who hightailed it right on back to Heathrow, y’know. Once we abandoned the monster idea, we gave the label a rest. That left us with a lot of time on our hands, y’know, so John and I put our heads together and came up with what seemed like a damn good idea.

By the late-sixties, zombies were accepted in most parts of society, but that didn’t mean we were catered to—like, good luck finding an undead restaurant. So John and I decided we should give something back to our zombie brethren.

One way that zombies are like regular people is that they have three basic necessities: food, clothing, and shelter. As long as there are living beings with working brains walking the Earth, the food portion of the program is covered. Shelter is generally easy enough to find: if there aren’t any available flats and all the zombie hotels are full, there are always the sewers. Clothing, however, is another matter altogether. Unless you have a tailor who knows what he’s doing, your tattered rags will always look like tattered rags … and smell like them, too. So we decided that in conjunction with our new label, we’d open up a store that sold gear specifically tailored for the undead.

JOHN LENNON:
Up until we launched our little clothing establishment at the end of ’67, the words
zombie
and
fashion
were rarely heard in the same sentence.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
We named it Apple Boutique, and as far as I was concerned, it was the cat’s pajamas. We offered a vast array of clothes for the stylish zombie, everything from tattered rainbow slacks to tattered silk shirts to tattered feathered hats to tattered blue jeans to tattered checkered sport coats to tattered ladies’ unmentionables. And everything but
every
thing was lined with a laboratory-developed anti-stink shield. If you were a zombie, you could come by the Boutique
and leave looking good and smelling good. Okay, you wouldn’t smell
good,
but you’d at least smell
better,
y’know. I mean, there’s only so much twenty-three Nobel Prize–winning scientists can do.

JOHN LENNON:
Our first week in business was brilliant. Every zombie who was anybody came by and dropped fifty, one hundred, even two hundred quid on the slickest rags they’d ever owned. But after that, despite the multicolored mutilation mural on the side of the building that was supposed to hypnotize everybody into dropping their paycheck at the Boutique, the shop died. Practically each day for six months, Paul and I stood in front of the building and all but begged people to come in. Didn’t work. They hated our clothes, they hated the
Mystery Tour
movie, and it felt like they hated us.

The two biggest problems were that zombies didn’t have any money, so they couldn’t buy anything; and living beings couldn’t wear zombie gear without breaking out in oozing acne, so they
wouldn’t
buy anything.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
We didn’t think any of this stuff through. We weren’t good filmmakers. We weren’t good businessmen. We weren’t good clothing gurus. The only two things the Beatles could do successfully were make music and transform living beings into hideous-looking, odiferous creatures that most humans couldn’t stomach. I think we were all looking for some change. But some of us questioned the changes because, erm, they were questionable.

JOHN LENNON:
I met Yoko Ono back in ’66, at the Indica Gallery. She was presenting this exhibit called
Undead Death March … April … May … June,
and in retrospect, I think that was meant specifically to get my attention.

I didn’t go in with any expectations. Yoko was an artist, and I like art. If her art was exciting, great, I’d hang out for hours. If it was dull, I could go over to Paul’s place and throw his Aston Martin into his living room.

Turned out it was exciting.

There were about five dozen tiny photographs of her in various states of undress all throughout the gallery. For example, in some, her face was covered with a hood, while in others, she had a rope of machine gun bullets wrapped around her waist. The only commonality was that in each shot, she was holding a sword. And that sword looked awfully familiar, like something Ringo might mess about with.

I wandered over and introduced myself. She pointed at her mouth and shook her head. I said, “So what’s this, then? You’re not talking?”

She said, “Nope.” Then she got a stricken look on her face, pulled a Ninja star from her pocket, and poked a tiny hole in her forearm; there were already about fifteen or twenty wounds there. After she wiped up the dot of blood, she again pointed at her mouth and shook her head.

I said, “The sword that’s in the photos. Can you tell me about it?”

Yoko said, “Well, John, it comes from …” Again, she covered her mouth, and again, she stabbed herself in the arm. There was a bit more blood this time, and I was impressed. Any bird who could tolerate that kind of pain—especially if it was self-inflicted—was okay with me.

She then grabbed a pad of paper and wrote that the weapon was her Ninja sword, and she was an Ninth Level Ninja Lord, but she
was concerned that the Great High Ninja Poobahs would disown her for utilizing it for art’s sake, because Ninjas are never supposed to utilize their weapons for anything other than defense. Thirty-seven pages later, she finally stopped writing, and I was entranced. She had stamina, she enjoyed being photographed in the buff, she knew her way around a piece of equipment that could neatly sever somebody’s head, and she was a Ninja, just like Ringo. I thought,
That’s the kind of girl the other blokes’ll love to have hanging around with us at the recording studio.

It was a good two years before Yoko and I finally did the do, and it was worth the wait, because that girl knew how to plunk a plonker. Our first night together was endless, and after twelve hours worth of messing about with her, I ran down to my basement studio, snatched up my reel-to-reel tape player and a microphone, took it back up to the bedroom, fired it up, and then Yoko and I curled up in bed and laid down what I still consider to be the greatest achievement of my career.

RINGO STARR:
The night after John did the do with Yoko—and “did the do” were his words, not mine, thank you very much—he came over to my flat and played me the tape. It was twenty-nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds of John letting loose with a zombie moan, and Yoko harmonizing it with a Ninja yell. No verse. No chorus. No lyrics. Just noise.

John said, “So? D’you like it?”

I said, “Well, it’s not exactly ‘Day Tripper,’ now, is it?”

He said, “I
know
! Isn’t that
great
? Let’s be honest here, Rings: nobody’ll be listening to ‘Day fookin’ Tripper’ even five years from now, but they’ll be playing this baby on the radio into the next millennium.”

I’d known John at that point for almost six years, and the smile he laid on me was the biggest I’d ever seen plastered on that gray mug of his, so I knew that if I was honest and told him I thought it sounded like the Undead Tabernacle Choir tripping out on Eppy’s first batch of acid, it’d break his heart. So I deflected the question with a question, and asked, “What’re you gonna do with it?”

He said, “I’ve got it all figured out. Remember the Robert Whitaker photos those fookers at EMI wouldn’t let us use for that album cover?” I nodded, and he continued, “Well, Yoko and I are gonna do something like that—you know, rip off our arms and plonker, and the like—except the big surprise is we’ll be naked.”

I said, “Wait a minute, rip off
our
arms? Yoko’s a zombie?”

He said, “Oh. No. She’s not. Didn’t think of that.”

I said, “Yeah, last time I checked, you remove limbs from a real person, and we’re talking either death or zombification. You want to zombify her this quickly? Maybe you should get to know each other a little better.”

John ran his hand through his hair, which was practically down to his arse by then, and said, “Cheers, Rings, I see your point. Maybe I’ll just have her put her arms behind her back or something.”

I said, “John, no matter what she does with her arms, there isn’t a single record label in the world who’d touch it.”

He gave me that smile again, and said, “Oh, yes there is.”

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
I told John, “A half hour of groaning wrapped with a photo of your shriveled zombie dick resting on top of Yoko’s head? There is no way Apple Records will release this. No way, no how, no sir, no, no, no.”

JOHN LENNON:
Here’s an interesting fact that not too many people are aware of: Ninjas who’re Ninth Level and above have a way of making zombies feel physical trauma. No idea how they do it, but they do it. And that’s something James Paul McCartney became painfully aware of one summer night, after he was paid an unexpected visit by a certain Asian performance artist.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
Oh, Yoko hurt me that night, all right. But she never hurt me again.

JOHN LENNON:
Oh, she hurt him constantly.
Constantly
.

RINGO STARR:
Over the strenuous objections of three-fourths of the Beatles, Apple Records ended up releasing
Two Virgins
. Actually, it wasn’t Apple, per se. It was a subsidiary of Apple that John dubbed Crapple. No comment.

Surprise, surprise, the press reception for
Two Virgins
was dreadful.
Mersey Zombie Weekly
, who’d always been one of our biggest boosters, called it, “The aural incarnation of an eight-stone ball of Limburger cheese that’d been rolled through the sewers under the Anfield Cemetery, then eaten, digested, and excreted by a human, then balled up again and eaten, digested, and excreted by a zombie, then cooked in a vat along with a puree made from the seven-week-old maggot-infested carcass of a boar that, for his entire life, had been fed nothing but solidified rabbit farts and brussels sprouts coated with last month’s head cheese.”

Personally, I thought they were being kind.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
They took a beating in the papers, but they weren’t fazed a bit, and by the time we had to hit the studio, John and Yoko were attached at the hip.

GEORGE MARTIN:
I couldn’t figure out exactly what he saw in her. She wasn’t the most dynamic girl I’d ever met, and in terms of conversation, she didn’t bring much to the table. Admittedly, her ability to crawl on the ceiling was impressive, and she could sure take a punch, but as far as I was concerned, Yoko Ono did not belong anywhere near a recording studio … or, at least, one that housed the Beatles.