Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion Page 6

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: Pete wanted nothing to do with death or undeath. I told him over and over that I wouldn’t hurt him and that he should ask George how simple and painless it was. Of course, I talked to him about it only when John was, erm, out of earshot. Sometimes I just had to throw John’s “all for zombies, and zombies for all” precept right out the window. Sometimes I had to make a decision for the band all by myself, y’know.

  PETE BEST: The one thing that almost convinced me to let Paul do his thing to me was the birds. No matter how unhealthy looking those zombies’ faces may have been, and no matter how many times their fingers fell off during guitar solos, those blokes had the girls drooling over them, and drooling girls looked pretty fookin’ good to me. The thought of that dustmen shite shooting out of my plonker wasn’t very appetizing, however, but having the ability to hypnotize twin sisters into bed, well, that was kind of appealing. Not that they did hypnotize twin sisters into bed, but knowing the ability was there was greatly comforting and greatly exciting.

  Six months before this book was to go to press, I received a scary-as-hell email from a certain German-born, Spain-based photographer-cum-artist-cum-vampire who’d been all but invisible for almost three decades.

  Jürgen Vollmer and his pals Astrid Kirchherr and local artist/musician Klaus Voormann were a tight-knit clique who dubbed themselves the Exis, and that’s “exi” in honor of their pet philosophy, existentialism. (Jürgen cheerfully admits the Exis were a tad on the pretentious side.) The threesome discovered the Beatles when the band was relocated from the Indra to another Bruno Koschmider–run venue called the Kaiserkeller. With their ever-increasing musical confidence and ability to simultaneously entertain and scare the crap out of their growing audiences, the five Liverpudlians knocked the three Hamburgers on their collective hindquarters. The smitten Exis immediately latched onto the undead quintet and held on for dear life.

  By all accounts, Jürgen was the quietest of the Exis, and his near silence came about because he simply didn’t have enough energy to talk; turned out, the poor guy was always starving. After all, what with the scurvied prostitutes and drunks clogging up the streets surrounding the Kaiserkeller—streets that were home to Hamburg’s red-light district—it was difficult for a young vampire to find quality blood without drawing attention to himself. So it was either scurvy-flavored hookers and gin-soaked alkies, or nothing at all.

  In the summer of 2009, Jürgen stumbled onto my website, where he read one of the many blog entries in which I bitched about Stuart Sutcliffe’s reticence to divulge the specifics of his transformation from meat eater to bloodsucker. Jürgen sent me an email:

  MR. GOLDSHER, I WISH TO DISCUSS MR. SUTCLIFFE WITH YOU! MEET ME AT CA L’ISIDRE IN BARCELONA ON AUGUST 15 AT EXACTLY MIDNIGHT! SHOW UP AFTER 12:01, AND I’LL BE LONG GONE! SHOW UP AT OR BEFORE 11:59, AND I WILL KILL YOU IN A HIDEOUS FASHION! I’LL BE THE ONE WEARING THE PRETENTIOUS BLACK CAPE ! YOURS ALWAYS, MR. JÜRGEN VOLLMER.

  What with the formality, the capital letters, the numerous exclamation marks, the incongruous smiley face emoticon, and the threat of a painful death, how could I refuse?

  Despite the menacing tone of his missive, Mr. Vollmer—like his fellow vampire, Mr. Sutcliffe—is as gracious a dinner partner as one could hope for. Better yet, he’s painfully honest and has a fine memory of his brief period as a Beatles-worshipping Exi.

  JÜRGEN VOLLMER: We fancied all five of the boys, but we fancied Stu the best because he was the most interested in what the Exis were all about. He and I had long talks in the Kaiserkeller’s piddling little dressing room about Sartre, and Heidegger, and Jaspers, and Stoker … although he didn’t know I was a vampire, so my lengthy forays into the hidden meaning of Dracula probably confused the hell out of him.

  I knew he was at ease with the otherworldly beings—if you’re with John Lennon and Paul McCartney twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, you’d better be comfortable with the inhuman—but I still didn’t want to spring my vampire life on him. I mean, if your bandmates are zombies, you might be hesitant to become a friend to a Child of Osiris, because, let’s face it, how much inhumanity can one person take? But that all changed when Stu started falling for Astrid.

  I’ll freely admit it: I was jealous; I was the odd man out, so how could I not be? John and Paul gravitated toward Klaus because he had an aptitude for music, and Astrid was trying to seduce Stu, and Pete was always trying to score with girls, and George was off doing whatever a zombie who’d taken too many amphetamines does at three in the morning, so I didn’t have a Beatle to call my own. I tried to ingratiate myself, believe me, but outside of Stu, they simply weren’t all that interested. In retrospect, I feel it had a lot to do with the fact that I was too quiet, but I couldn’t help it. I was exhausted, as good blood was at a premium.

  One night while Stu and Astrid were kissing in the corner of the club, I got fed up with the whole situation, so I grabbed Stuart by the collar of his leather jacket and hauled him back to the dressing room. I carried him like he weighed nothing, and I could tell he was taken aback by how strong I was. I held him against the wall by his neck and gave him a brief history of vampires, everything from revenants of the twelfth century to good old Vlad Tepes to the falsitude of bat transformation to the enlightened vampire colony that was already forming in Ibiza. I purposely didn’t mention what is going to happen in Swaziland in 2028, because a prophecy of vampire-based genocide would likely have soured him on the concept of me giving him a nibble on the neck, wouldn’t you say?

  After I released him and he crashed to the floor, he told me the thought of immortality was suddenly appealing now that he’d met the girl of his dreams. He told me that John and Paul weren’t going to zombify him because he wasn’t a good enough bass player. He told me that at first, the thought of living forever sounded kind of daunting, but now with Astrid in the picture, it sounded farkin’ good.

  I said, “I’m glad to hear that, Stuart, just thrilled.” Then I asked him if he wanted to share my life.

  Stu looked at his hands and asked, “How do you think Astrid will feel about the whole thing?”

  I told him that never once in the years we’d known each other did she say anything disparaging about vampirism, and that she was an all-embracing woman who would spend time with Negros, Orientals, Christians, Jews, vampires, zombies, or werewolves, so long as they brought something interesting to the table.

  He asked me, “So let me get this straight: with this vampire thing, unless somebody jabs a stake into your chest, you’re immortal?”

  I told him that was more or less the case.

  He stood up and gently kicked Paul’s guitar case. “To tell you the truth, mate, I don’t know if I’m long for this band. Paulie doesn’t like having me around. John loves me, but he doesn’t like having me around as a musician. And I miss painting. And I love Astrid. I love her a lot, mate.”

  I told him she loved him a lot, too.

  We spent the next few minutes talking about vampire logistics, then Koschmider poked his head in the door and said, “Sutcliffe, get onstage, mach schnell, mach schnell!”

  Stu looked at me and said, “Okay, Jürgen. Let’s do it. Tomorrow at sundown.”

  I couldn’t have been more pleased. Stu was going to be my friend for life.

  STUART SUTCLIFFE: The choice was simple, really. I loved Astrid, and Astrid loved me. Jürgen was a good, kind man, and as much as I loved John, well, let’s just say, if he was a moody cunt in 1960, imagine what he’d be like in 2060 or 2160 or 2260. So Jürgen did his thing, and here I am.

  Paul and Pete were deported that December. The cover story we came up with was that they got sent back home because they set fire to a johnny-hat in the Kaiserkeller dressing room, then were thrown in jail. The real reason they went home was that John Q. Law got wind of John W. Lennon’s plot to go to Magdeburg and dig up Hitler’s brain as a laugh. (The cops watched our every move, and who could blame them? At the time, Germany had the smallest per
capita zombie population in the world, so they didn’t know what John, Paul, or George might do.) After Jürgen turned me out, Astrid and I went underground for a while; then in ’62, when the Hamburg cops decided they wanted to rid the city of vampires, Astrid and I staged my funeral, and it was off to the Spanish islands.

  Jürgen spends his winters here in Ibiza, and his summers in Munich, and he’s still my best mate, and when he’s in town, we’re inseparable. As for Astrid, I get to see her maybe six or seven weeks out of the year. See, she had to continue her life in Germany as if I was dead, so in ’67, she married a nice bloke named Gibson Kemp. I’d bet most of your readers won’t know that he’s the drummer who replaced Ringo in Rory’s band.

  Like I said, Gibson’s a nice bloke, but I’m sure when they were together he touched Astrid in places where I’d prefer she not be touched by anybody but me. That being the case, given the opportunity, I’d fookin’ suck him dry in a heartbeat.

  A quick backtrack:

  In the months before German law enforcement officers sent the Beatles back to the UK, the lads made an interesting discovery: Rory Storm was a Fifth Level Ninja Lord.

  A Liverpudlian singer who had a head of hair to die for, Storm (who was born Alan Caldwell and passed away in 1972, found dead next to his equally dead mother; some say they were both mistakenly killed by a confused low-level yakuza lackey) always had an affinity for the world beyond the world, so much so that in 1958, he named his first band Dracula and the Werewolves. Rory considered the Quarrymen as rivals, and even though he would’ve been thrilled to be undead, he refused to approach Lennon or McCartney with his zombification request, telling anybody who’d listen, “Fook the Quarryboys. I want to have me own bag.”

  Enter.

  A Sixty-sixth Level Ninja Lord,—which loosely translates to Badass Ninjutsu Dude—relocated to Liverpool in 1955, partly because he was fed up with the bureaucracy of the Iga Ueno Ninja scene, and partly because he had an inexplicable affinity for drab cities and lousy restaurants.

  In 1958,quietly opened up a secret-but-not-as-secret-as-a-Ninja-should-be dojo on Molyneux Road, right by the Mersey River. He didn’t do any advertising, per se, and how Rory Storm heard about it is anybody’s guess. But hear about it he did, and Rory became’s first British student.

  Aside from evolving into a solid but unspectacular Ninja Lord, Caldwell was a marketing genius, and when he realized his band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, simply didn’t have the firepower of Lennon and McCartney’s crew, he decided to sprinkle some Japanese flavor into his skiffle stew. But we’re not talking a tinge of Japanese music—that would’ve been tough, as kotos, biwas, and samisens weren’t easy to come by in Liverpool—but rather a sampling of Ninja demonstrations in between songs.

  was less than pleased with his disciple, taking the understandable stance that Ninjas and rock ’n’ roll shouldn’t share the same stage. The old hurts are still there, a fact that was made abundantly clear when I spoke with the then-305-year-old warrior at his home near the top of Mount Omoto in February 2004.

  : Alan Caldwell was a great disappointment to me. His skills: solid yet unspectacular. His demeanor: courteous yet envious. His discipline level: sizeable yet inconsistent. His ultimate life goals: unsatisfactory. He wanted to be an artist—specifically, a musician. Now, I have the utmost respect for music makers, but what Alan Caldwell never realized is that Ninja warriors are just as artistic as the best singer or guitar player or drummer … if not more so. He was quite vocal in his opposition to my opposition to modern music.

  This is not to say I dismissed Alan Caldwell’s goals entirely. As a matter of fact, I thrice watched Alan Caldwell and his band perform. (I refuse to refer to him as Rory Storm; that is a ridiculous name for a Ninja Lord, and no matter what I thought of his skills, Alan Caldwell was a Ninja Lord.) Had Alan Caldwell’s Ninja moves been more than merely solid, and had his band’s music been less derivative, I might not have been so saddened by his choice to merge the worlds of Ninja and rock ’n’ roll. Besides, there was already one Lonnie Donegan walking the Earth, and even to my unenlightened ears, one Lonnie Donegan was more than enough.

  Most galling to me was that he taught the members of his band numerous Ninja moves … and he taught them sloppily. Double spins became half spins. Graceful cat somersaults became clumsy dog rolls. Please do not get me started about their abominable work with the shuriken, as my stomach becomes pained when I think about it.

  However, there was one gentleman in the band for whom there was hope, who had a glimmer of talent. With regular training, with hard work, and with proper discipline, young Richard Starkey—who became known to the world as Ringo Starr, a pseudonym that was far more palatable to me than the silly stage name Rory Storm—had the potential to become Great Britain’s first true Ninja Lord.

  Ringo Starr is happy to talk to you. He’ll tell you stories, he’ll crack some jokes, he’ll laugh, he’ll cry, and he’ll drink you under the table. Thing is, you have to find him first, and good luck with that one.

  Lennon thought he was somewhere in China, studying kung fu with a rogue group of former Shaolin monks. I wasted ten days and almost ten grand on that tip.

  McCartney said he hadn’t spoken with Ringo in several years, but added that one of his mates told another one of his mates that Starr was in Los Angeles, holed up with a swimsuit model. Wrong-o.

  Harrison didn’t have a clue, but he had a gut hunch that the drummer was in South America, possibly Brazil. All I got out of that trip was sun poisoning and the knowledge that I look horrible in a Speedo swimsuit.

  If the rest of the Beatles didn’t even know where Ringo spent his time, how the hell was one little journalist from Chicago supposed to track him down?

  Ultimately,pointed me in the right direction, explaining that after the Beatles’ demise, Ringo made it his goal to move up fifteen levels on the Ninja Lord scale, and the only way to make that happen is to practice your Ninja art in the coldest place on Earth. So, since 2001, Ringo has been bopping between London, the North Pole, and the South Pole.

  In December 2005, before I’d fully healed from the various beatings John Lennon imparted upon my body, I went to my friendly neighborhood camping supplies store, bought nearly three thousand dollars’ worth of cold weather gear, and boarded a plane to Bumfuck, Antarctica, where, for twelve days, I drank a whole lot of piping-hot miso egg-drop soup with good ol’ Richie Starkey.

  RINGO STARR: The Hurricanes only did three Ninja/rock shows in Liverpool. Rory wanted to keep the Ninja stuff secret until we got it just right, and, man, talk about secret—outside our families and our Ninja master, he didn’t tell anybody about the gig. Our audience consisted of Rory’s sister, , and two of ’s disciples. Not an auspicious way to start a new trend, eh?

  But Rory’s goal wasn’t to start a trend; all he was concerned about was, as he so inelegantly put it, “kicking some fookin’ Quarrymen arse.” Nobody was beating down my door with an invitation to join their band, so I stuck with Rory, even though I didn’t want to kick anybody’s fookin’ arse. Personally, I thought John, Paul, and George were fine fellows, spot-on musicians, and a credit to the living and undead alike.

  The Hurricanes had already been playing at the Kaiserkeller for a good long while when the Beatles were unceremoniously dumped into the club, and I’ve gotta tell you, the audiences that saw both bands play were treated to one helluva show. The Beatles’d go on first, roar through fifteen or twenty songs in forty-five minutes, then John would pick three girls from the crowd, bring them up onto the stage, and juggle them, while the other guys played circus music in the background. I still have no idea how he was able to do that without hurting anybody.

  Then it was our turn. Rory liked to structure our sets so we’d play two songs, then give five minutes of Ninja demo, then two more songs, then more demo, and so on. Musically speaking, we weren’t too bad, and our Ninja moves improved more every day, especially those of Johnny “Guitar” Byrne, who got
to the point where he could open a bottle of beer with a Ninja star from ten meters away. Bruno probably could’ve charged more than a three-deutsche-mark cover—today, it’s a common triple bill, but in 1960, no club in the world could deliver a Ninja/zombie/music trifecta—but Mr. Koschmider wasn’t exactly the brightest star in the Hamburg sky.

  I thought Pete Best was one helluva drummer, and aside from that one Wednesday night when George broke a guitar over his head, hauled him up with one hand, and threw him all the way across the club, I saw no indication that any of the other Beatles were dissatisfied with his drumming. I jammed with them every so often, and though they always liked my playing, they never came close to asking me to join. And I was cool with that. I knew if I left the ’Canes and neglected my Ninja studies, would be pissed. And is the last person in the world you want to piss off. So I treaded water and waited to see what would happen next.

  JOHN LENNON: It was the day after Crimbo, 1960. Paul, some bird that Paul’d picked up, and I were at a party at Paul’s mate Neil Aspinall’s flat. Right before midnight, I dragged Paul into Neil’s bedroom—I accidentally ripped off his right hand, but he slapped it right back on, so that’s neither here nor there—then threw him onto Neil’s bed and asked him, “What the hell’re we doing, mate?”

  He said, “I dunno about you, but I’m repositioning my hand, which you just ripped the hell off. And I’m drinking, y’know.”

  I said, “I don’t mean here, I mean here.”