Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion Read online

  I never went outside without a shirt back then. Some zombies grow a lot of chest hair, and I was one of them, and it was embarrassing. It never dawned on me to lop it off until my first girlfriend, Thelma Pickles, gave me a straight razor for my birthday. It grew back faster than the hair on my head, so I had to shave it once or twice a week … yet another reason being undead isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: When that textbook nailed me in the noggin, I felt rage, y’know. I’d never felt true rage before—maybe some very mild anger, or a bit of frustration—but I started seeing red, and then blue, and then purple, an’ that. Literally. If somebody came across my path right at that moment, it’s a guarantee I would’ve hurt them. Badly.

  LAWRENCE CARROLL: It felt like Paul’s piercing screams were emanating from a pinprick in the center of my brain. If automobile alarms existed back then, every car within five kilometers would’ve been buzzing or beeping like nobody’s business.

  John finally came out the front door, and thank God, because what with all the commotion, the next-door neighbor’s schnauzer sounded like it was gonna have a heart attack. Paul let out a wordless roar, then smashed his guitar case against the side of John’s head. Then—and if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I’d never have believed it—John’s head flew about ten meters in the air and bounced off a lamppost. He was screaming “Ahhhhhhhhhh” the entire time, and when his scream mixed with Paul’s roar, it was deafening, but also, in a weird way, lovely. Imagine the vocal outro of “Twist and Shout” being played through ten thousand stereos, all turned up to ten, and you’ll have an idea of what sweet yet terrible sounds I experienced on that hot summer day. My left ear started to bleed, and I yelled, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” but naturally, they couldn’t hear me over the sound of their own harmonized crowing.

  John started running around like a chicken with his head cut off—or a zombie with his head cut off, I suppose. His mouth continued to shriek, so I suppose his vocal cords didn’t get severed, but I don’t know anything about undead science, so maybe zombies can’t have severed vocal cords. In any event, it looked to me like Paul was about to smash John with his guitar case again, but before he could even lift it up, the right arm of John’s headless body ripped off its own left arm and swung it wildly at Paul. Somehow, some way, headless John connected on the second swing, and Paul went down, and went down hard. John’s body felt around blindly on the ground until it found its head, then he ran inside, holding the head like it was a damned rugby ball. Paul was facedown on the sidewalk, clutching what looked like a pair of sausages.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: I was carrying my guitar in my left hand, and my two index fingers in my right, and I was holding on to those fingers for dear life. I can look back at it now and laugh, y’know, because reattaching fingers—especially index fingers—is about the easiest thing you can imagine.

  JOHN LENNON: I wanted to glue my head back on the same way I’d closed Paul’s wounds the previous day, but, as I immediately learned, when a Liverpool zombie’s head is detached from its body, it loses the ability to alter the size and shape of its tongue, until the extrinsic muscles fuse back into place. So after I went inside, I tracked down my aunt Mimi’s sewing kit and did some amateurish stitching, and voila, a working head for good ol’ Johnny, almost as good as new.

  LAWRENCE CARROLL: When John came back out about ten minutes later, Paul was sitting on the ground with his legs folded like he was meditating or something, staring at his guitar case. I knew for sure he was undead at that point, because had he been an average mortal, there’s no chance he would’ve survived getting smacked upside his head by a zombie arm that’d been swung at one hundred kilometers per hour.

  John hunkered down beside him and draped his arm around Paul’s shoulders. I crawled out from behind the bush a bit so I could hear what they were saying. John was doing most of the talking, because Paul was sobbing so hard. John said, “Listen, mate, I barely know you, and you barely know me, and who knows if we’ll even like each other next week, let alone next year? But you’re a fookin’ great guitar player and singer, and I can sing and play a little bit too, and the worst thing that can happen now is we’ll be able to jam together for all of eternity. When we take over the world, you’ll thank me.”

  I assumed at the time that when he mentioned taking over the world, he meant taking over the record charts.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: He could’ve asked first. It would’ve been nice to have some time to mentally prepare. All John had to do was say, “Wanna live forever, mate?” I probably would’ve said yes.

  LAWRENCE CARROLL: And then Paul let out this high-pitched, falsetto moan, which got the schnauzer in a lather again. Then John moaned even higher, and they held it for a good long while. It was almost hypnotic. The next time I heard that beautiful sound was when the two of them harmonized the second please in the first chorus of “Please Please Me.”

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: My family wasn’t too keen on having an undead boy at their breakfast nook, y’know, but they said I could keep on living at home, so long as I didn’t slurp out anybody’s brains in the middle of the night. I told them they had themselves a deal.

  As he’s a man who has gone through numerous physical, metaphysical, and spiritual transformations, it’s little surprise that any conversation with George Harrison runs the emotional gamut. One minute, he’s waxing poetic about the joys of sitting atop a peak in the Zaskar Range, studying transcendental meditation with a translucent guru named Kamadeva Kartikeya (which, for those of you keeping score, translates to “God of Love/God of War”), then the next, he’s waxing sarcastic about his years as a Beatle, a period that he repeatedly—and, at times, grouchily—refers to as the Mania.

  That said, George is nearly as honest as John Lennon, albeit he’s less chatty and has a significantly lower level of angst. Another similarity he has to John: George made me jump through a few hoops before he deigned to chat on the record … except his hoops were—hmmm, how does one put this accurately?—sadistic. And I mean sadistic to the tune of making me drop a poker-chip-size tab of acid, then meditate while standing on my head for twenty-four hours straight while reciting the mantra, “Chiffons to hell, hell to the Chiffons.”

  Fortunately, I passed George’s drug-and-meditation test, so in August 2006, he invited me to spend three weeks at Friar Park, his one-hundred-plus-room Victorian mansion near Henley-on-Thames. Unfortunately, for the majority of my stay, Harrison was off in India doing that whole head-cleansing thing, so I was able to get only about six hours of on-the-record material. Luckily, George had fallen off the vegetarian wagon and had recently feasted on the brain of two Bengal tigers and one Bengal fox, and with all that protein floating through his system, the aptly named Quiet Beatle was focused and energetic.

  It should be noted that while I didn’t suffer any violence at the hand of Mr. Harrison, I was stabbed on three separate occasions by three separate intruders. (Apparently, knife-wielding intruders had been a problem at Friar Park since 1999.) My injuries were minimal, as I was able to retaliate with some ninja stars I’d recently been given as a gift. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Thank you, Ringo!

  GEORGE HARRISON: For me, the Mania started fast. One day, I’m talking to Paul McCartney about how I’d learned to play the tune “Raunchy” by Bill Justis, and the next, he’s blowing brain fluid into the conical stump where my big toe used to be, and I’m in the Quarrymen.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: It seemed strange that John didn’t want to transform George, y’know. He knew George was a great guitarist, better than anybody else he’d played with, myself included. He also looked good onstage and was a nice bloke, but, erm, John wanted nothing to do with killing him. And he never really gave me a satisfactory explanation.

  JOHN LENNON: George was too young. Plain and simple. After I reanimated Paul, I vowed never to transform anybody under the age of seventeen again. I was almost twenty at that point, and killing somebody in their teens felt w
rong. Even if they asked for it.

  And Georgie asked for it again and again and again.

  GEORGE HARRISON: Yeah, I guess you could say I pestered John about it. My usual line was, “You killed lots of other people. Why can’t you kill me?” After a few months, I gave up and went to Paul.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: I was happy to oblige George, and would’ve dropped everything I was doing to make it happen sooner than later … but I’d never transformed anybody. Never even considered doing it, y’know.

  At that point, I was ambivalent about my undead situation. On one hand, the thought of being in a band with John until the end of time sounded cool, an’ that, but on the other, I rarely used what John liked to call my “zombie powers,” so I sometimes felt like there was no point to any of this. Oh, sure, I hypnotized a bird or two, but only girls who I knew wanted to be with me in the first place; it was more about speeding things along than taking advantage.

  GEORGE HARRISON: Paul transformed me in my bedroom, and it was awkward, to say the least. It was like being on a blind date, complete with stilted conversation and elliptical innuendo.

  He said, “So.”

  Then I said, “So.”

  Then he said, “So.”

  Then I said, “So.”

  That went on for, I dunno, five minutes or something, then I said, “Erm, d’you think we could get started?”

  Paul said, “Starting would be a good thing to do. How would you like to begin?”

  I said, “Well, Paul, I’m new at this sort of thing. How would you like to begin?”

  He said, “Dunno. I’m new at this sort of thing, myself, y’know.”

  That went on for another five minutes. At no point did either of us say the words zombie or undead.

  Finally I said, “Come on, Paul, just bloody bite me already.”

  He went after my neck first. He was very gentle. I barely felt it, and when I didn’t say, “Ouch” or anything, he said, “D’you think it took?”

  I said, “No clue, mate.” I felt dizzy and strange, but that could’ve been from the blood loss.

  He said, “I don’t want to take any chances, so I’m gonna try something.”

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: John may have told me about the toe thing, but there’s also the chance it came to me in one of my many dreams about scrambled eggs.

  GEORGE HARRISON: The world started closing in on me, and the last thing I recall before I woke up undead was Paulie saying, “Take off your shoe, mate.”

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: By the time I began work on George’s big toe, he was at least somewhat undead, because it came off in my mouth like it was a Mars bar—and when I compare George Harrison’s toe to a Mars bar, I’m only referring to the consistency, not the taste. Tastewise, it wasn’t anything close to nougat and caramel. Fact is, a half-zombified toe tastes like a combination of rancid sweat socks, burnt asafetida powder, and, naturally, rotting human corpse.

  In the end, it all came out fine—as everybody knows, George became a great zombie, an’ that—but I never again bit off a toe, zombie or otherwise.

  GEORGE HARRISON: Nobody was shocked when I turned up undead, and everybody assumed John did it, because all of Liverpool thought of him as the kind of guy who’d kill and reanimate his bandmates at the drop of a hat. I didn’t dissuade anybody of that notion, and neither did John. Even then we realized the value of mystique.

  For a few weeks, I had the same problems every zombie guitarist has immediately after transformation—randomly detaching fingers. I’d switch from an E-minor to an A-major, and next thing I know, plunk, my left ring finger’s lying at my feet. I’d take a tricky solo, and plop, off’d come my right thumb and index finger, still clutching my plectrum. It took some messing about, but I got it mostly under control; still, once in a while, I’d forget myself and strum a hard chord, and my whole hand would take a swan dive. That happens even today. Old habits are hard to break. Clapton has the same problem.

  For the most part, things went on as they always did: school, friends, family, music. Yeah, I ate a few folks here and there—I had no choice; brains were the only thing that filled the raging, burning hole in my belly—but trust me, I didn’t kill anybody who didn’t deserve to be killed.

  In 1958, John entered his second unhappy year at the Liverpool College of Art. He was frustrated because his band wasn’t taking off as quickly as he would have liked, and the LCA faculty and student body were less than thrilled with his state of being. It was a rough time for John, but, resourceful as always, he made the best of it.

  In July 1998, former classmate William Norman and ex-painting instructor Dr. Forrest Stephens discussed with me Lennon’s hardships with understandable sympathy.

  WILLIAM NORMAN: It wasn’t like we weren’t fully aware he was undead. Hell, the bloke wore his zombieness on his sleeve, shuffling and moaning about the campus like he was William Baskin or Robert Cherry. We all knew full well he could speak normally and walk quickly, but he insisted on rubbing it in our faces. It was almost like he wanted us to be scared of him.

  John was a skilled illustrator, but his choice of subject matter was a bit on the limited side. Most everything he drew was morbid: cemeteries with elaborate headstones, mutilated corpses, human heads with insect bodies, and the like. Once in a while he’d doodle a music- or history-oriented picture, and I seem to recall him slapping together a comic book of some sort, but the majority of his work was gruesome, simply gruesome.

  DR. FORREST STEPHENS: When it came to painting, young Lennon had more talent in his little gray finger than 95 percent of my students, but he had difficulty focusing. During class, he had a tendency to go off into the ozone for minutes at a time. I have a distinct memory of him standing motionless in front of an easel, staring out the window, and still holding his wet brush, with red paint splattering on his shoes: drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. It was such a brilliant tableau that I wondered if he was pretending.

  JOHN LENNON: Of course I was pretending. Each and every one of those ponces at school was a racist. They all grew up in nice neighborhoods, in nice houses, with nice parents, and nice friends, and nice bank accounts, and heaven forbid they socialize with the likes of me. Heaven forbid they get their hands a little bit dirty. I was different. I was the other. I was an alien, and you can’t forget that alien is the first half of the word alienated. So yeah, I spent most of my four years at that fookin’ school all by myself.

  The only good thing that came out of the entire experience was meeting Stu.

  Lennon’s college chum Stuart Sutcliffe died in 1962 of a brain hemorrhage. Or did he?

  Considering how much the two budding artists respected and—let’s just go ahead and say it—loved each other, and considering John Lennon’s habit of murdering and reanimating those closest to him, it’s little surprise that Beatleologists worldwide have long theorized Sutcliffe continued to shuffle about this immortal coil post-1962. Unfortunately, none of them had the wherewithal, connections, or financial means to do the legwork. That’s where I came in.

  Lennon was uncharacteristically evasive when I asked if Sutcliffe was still around, saying, “No comment, mate. You’re on your own with that one.” When I pressed the issue, John gave me a backhand to the noggin that sent me flying across his living room. After I wiped the blood from my face and sloppily taped up my broken nose, I changed the subject and made a mental note to never again mention Sutcliffe in Lennon’s presence.

  So in the fall of 1999, it was off to Germany for the first of my three meetings with Astrid Kirchherr, photographer/stylist/early Beatles worshipper, and Sutcliffe’s fiancée at the time of his supposed death. When the talk turned to Stu’s current, shall we say, situation, Astrid was polite but vague; she insinuated that there was a possibility he was still around but provided no concrete leads. Realizing Lennon was right—that I was on my own with this one—I followed a hunch and made what some might construe as a questionable decision: I flew to Liverpool, bought myself the biggest shovel I could find, took
a taxi out to the Huyton Parish Church cemetery, and dug up Stu’s grave.

  Turned out my hunch was on target: Stuart Sutcliffe’s death was a nondeath, an elaborate piece of performance art. His casket was empty, save for an index card that said, “Probably in Ibiza, living the eternal nightlife. Ta-ra!” Based on the two-sentence note, my gut told me that Stu had been turned into a vampire; after what I’d seen over the previous several years, somebody Stokerizing Sutcliffe seemed like a logical conclusion. My gut, it turned out, was right.

  The vampire community in Ibiza is downright cordial—hell, if you got to spend eternity partying in paradise each night from dusk to dawn, you’d probably be pretty darn cheery yourself—and I had no problem finding Mr Sutcliffe. After offering a succinct, sarcastic, and patently false story about how he was transformed from human to bloodsucker (“John knew a guy who knew a guy”) and snidely explaining why he’d gone underground (“I was trying to avoid journalists—you know, like you”), Stu bought me one of the best meals I’d ever eaten—the so-called blood martini was a little creepy, but when in Ibiza, do as the Ibizans—then spoke until sunrise about his brief tenure with John’s merry band of misfit zombies.

  STUART SUTCLIFFE: I couldn’t play a damn bit of bass, and it drove Paul “Mr. Perfectionist” McCartney nuts. Yeah, I sometimes played a half step out of key, but so what? Where’s it written that just because everybody else is playing in E, the bassist can’t play in E-flat? Nowhere, that’s where. Okay, I’m having a laugh here. I couldn’t play for shite, but John’s attitude was, you look good, you dress cool, and, frankly, we can’t find anybody else we can stand, so climb aboard.

  Sometimes after we finished up a rehearsal, I’d hang out in the doorway and listen to John and Paul have these endless arguments about me. John would say things like, “Band unity, mate. All for zombies, and zombies for all. Toppermost of the Poppermost.”