Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (40 page)

I said, “And I’m c-c-c-c-c-curious. Tell me about your little system here. It’s all treble and midrange. Why can’t I hear the bass? Who puts together a sound system that doesn’t have any bottom?”

He said, “The b-b-b-b-bottom’s there. You just can’t hear it.”

MAGIC ALEX:
The human ear can’t hear fifty-eight thousand hertz, but the body can
feel
it. I don’t think the zombie ear can hear it, either, but
my working theory was that fifty-eight thousand hertz, combined with the proper amount of treble and middle, would create an identical frequency to that of a diamond bullet being fired from a Howitzer. One E-flat-minor chord, three dead zombie Beatles.

RINGO STARR:
Alex gave me some gobbledygook about low frequencies being good for the soul. It took only one shuriken to the chest to get the truth out of the little Greek freak.

MAGIC ALEX:
After Ringo coerced a confession out of me by cutting off my left nipple, he said, “I’m gonna let you live, but only because I don’t want George Martin to have to scrub the bloodstains from his mixing board again. I am, however, gonna tell the other lads exactly what went down here, so I recommend you leave the continent as soon as possible. I’ll give you a one-hour head start, then I’m gonna make three quick phone calls.”

I went to Greece, then the United States, then Canada, then Mexico, then back to Europe, and now here I am, in beautiful Paraguay. And you know what? I don’t care if you print how and where I’m living. It’s been thirty years, and I can’t imagine the guys are still mad at me.

JOHN LENNON:
Wait, you know where Alex is? Give me that little fooker’s address …

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
After George Martin put the studio back together, we finished shooting the movie, and since the film didn’t really have a climax, y’know, we decided to stage a concert on the Abbey Road roof. And everybody knows how that went.

GEORGE HARRISON:
From the get-go, that show was a mess. I don’t know what the exact temperature was outside, but it was the kind of chill that could cut through even cold-blooded blokes like us. The cold also wreaked havoc on my instruments; the double-reeded plonker-phone was barely staying together, and my skintar got chapped like you wouldn’t believe. Making matters worse, we were several stories up in the air and couldn’t catch a positive vibe from the crowd; but even if we’d been at ground level, it wouldn’t have made much difference, as most of the crowd was comprised of cops, and London’s finest don’t have much in the way of positive vibes to offer.

By the time we launched into our third tune, I was in a foul mood, simply foul, so when John accidently knocked my patch cord out of my amp, well, my reflexes took over.

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 M
C
CARTNEY:
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 M
C
CARTNEY:
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.