The other day, your friend Behr (me) fell asleep in a vintage record store. I was looking for some rad vinyl to put on my turntable up at my cabin in the woods, which has a hi-fi in it, when I suddenly got very sleepy. I dropped like a rock onto the floor of the record store, way in the back, while the geek with the glasses and the Gary Numan t-shirt was busy talking to two old guys, one of which was carrying a can of Schlitz around the record store with him.

During my slumber, I heard the voice of God speaking to me. I can recall the words quite clearly.

Behr, kill me a son, said the voice

You must be putting me on, I answered in the dream

No, God's voice said angrily.

What?

You can do what you want, but the next time you see me coming you better run, He told me.

Where do you want this killing done? I asked (I am no stranger to killing)

Out on Highway 61, He answered.

 

So, that was it, that was the dream. I woke up confused, clutching a Patsy Cline album and looking up at the ceiling. It was brown and discolored and there was some kind of leaky pipe up in there somewhere. I asked the record store guy where Highway 61 was and he pointed me over to the "A-D" section of the rock and roll section. Well, that was crap, so I tried to leave and record store guy told me I had to buy something on account of using the store for nap time. I thought about killing him right then and there, just tearing his throat out with my X-man type hand, but I calmed myself with elvish techniques for relaxation, and bought the first record album I saw. It was Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles, who had a run of middling hits in the 1960s.

Outside, I contemplated the message from God and opened the trunk of my Pontiac and took out the lug wrench. I went back in the store and hit the record store guy in the head as hard as I could with it. He collapsed on the floor and I dragged him out to my car and threw him in the trunk. Then I went to find a lending library so that I could find a book of maps. I needed to know where this Highway 61 was so I could take record store guy out there and kill him so that God would be pleased with me. I am already sworn to the Dark One, but it is always a good idea to hedge your bets.

Assuming he wasn't a test tube baby, record store guy had to be someone's son. There had to be monkey business between two young people wriggling around on a twin size bed at some point in order to conceive this piece of shit that I was going to kill. I found a lending library on the edge of town, parked my car in the back of the parking lot in case he woke up and began making noise in the trunk. Inside, I went to the map room and began pouring over maps of the United States of America to find Highway 61. I learned it ran from New Orleans to Minnesota, so I began driving west from Utica, which is where I am hiding out from the FBI in a Unabomber style cabin in the woods on the outskirts of town.

Consuming tons of coffee and brandy, I managed to drive to Missouri, where I picked up Highway 61 and began driving south. I was looking for a good place to do a righteous killing (on account of God having asked for it), but I was very tired and there was a quaint bed and breakfast off one of the exits. A nice old lady who gave me a handjob later that evening checked me in. There was a record player in the room she rented to me. I took out my new record album and started playing it.

Roll up... for the mystery tour!

That's an invitation

To make a reservation

I looked curiously at the strange artwork on the album and the three gentlemen the band, all of whom I know to now be dead. This song was giving me the answer to my slumping presidential campaign. I would dig up The Beatles from their graves, shove metal rods in their arms and legs, work some kind of medieval wiring system in their mouths, and with non-scientific methods manipulate them and make them go on tour again in support of the Behr for President campaign. It was a novel idea!

The first song on the album was like fun circus music. The next track was less circusy.

Day after day
Alone on a hill
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
But nobody wants to know him
They can see that he's just a fool
And he never gives an answer
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning round
Well on the way
Head in a cloud
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hears him
Or the sound he appears to make

I was feeling bummed out after listening to that, so I stopped the record at that point, and took off the ratty bathrobe I was driving around with (nothing on underneath) and went to sleep.

Jack Lemmon, the outspoken and controversial front man for The Beatles, died in 2001. I went back to the lending library and looked up information on where he was buried and learned I would need to drive out to Westwood, California, which was a long drive and took me two days on account of the problem where my bowels let loose all the time without any notice. I had to have the Pontiac completely cleaned six times during the drive.

In Colorado, I stayed at another bed and breakfast with a turntable in the room and continued listening to the album while brushing my teeth with the toothbrush the withered old man at the front desk gave me. When I got to Westwood, I found the grave, which said "Jack Lemmon in," which seemed like a mistake to me. I dug him up with the help of some migrant workers and when I went to put him in the trunk, I realized record store guy was still in there. I needed to drive back to Highway 61 and get the killing done. It had slipped my mind.

Now it's past my bed I know
And I'd really like to go
Soon will be the break of day
Sitting here in Blue Jay Way

I headed back to Highway 61 and stopped and stayed in a run down 1950s style motel out in the desert. There was no turntable there. In the morning, I started driving east again to Highway 61. I was so tired at that point that as soon a I reached Highway 61, I pulled over, took Jack Lemmon's body off of the record store guy, who smelled rank after four days in my trunk, and then pulled the piece of shit out of the trunk. I made him stand up, walked him over to the edge of the road, reached up with my X-man type hand, and snapped his neck. I didn't have time to get fancy or do any torturing. This was a mission from God.

Though she was born a long long time ago
Your mother should know (your mother should)
Your mother should know

After the killing was done as was commanded, I went back to the lending library to find information on the other Beatles. I had one and needed others, but my trunk was not large enough for four bodies. I needed to get a livestock truck from my presidential campaign.

Now, I know this is improper and goes against campaign finance laws to use campaign funds or resources for person reasons, but this was for the campaign. Putting The Beatles on tour again was going to win me the White House.

Rex Harrison was next on my list. He was the lead guitar type person, and hung out with elves a lot. At the lending library I learned he had been cremated, which put a real bump in the road as far a my plan moving forward. I had the rudimentary ability to manipulate dead bodies by shoving metal rods in their arms and legs, but not only had Harrison been cremated, his ashes had been scattered and weren't sitting conveniently in an urn.

What I needed was a replacement for Rex Harrison, someone with the same kind of "vibe" (Internet kiddie term), ability with a guitar, and appearance. I had to pass off someone else as Rex Harrison.

I am he as you are he
As you are me and we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun
See how they fly
I'm crying   

What? I had put the album on in the house I was "borrowing" by tying up the family that lived there and putting them in the basement. This was a weird song. I turned the album off and went to sleep.

Chopper and Chester arrived with the livestock truck in the morning and we hid my Pontiac in the weeds somewhere off the main highway in Ohio and then tossed Jack Lemmon's badly decomposed body into the back of the livestock truck. I told them about the problem with Rex Harrison and Chopper did something he calls a "facepalm" and told me that Rex Harrison was not in The Beatles. Then he said, "Are you sure that is Lennon in the back?"

"Yes, it is Lemmon."

"Lemmon or Lennon?"

"Is there a difference?"

"I don't give a fuck, this is your crazy idea, friend Behr. It isn't like anyone is going to be able to tell who these corpses are. Stop for beers and shots. I'm way too sober to be hanging out with you, friend Behr."

You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello, hello
I don't know why you say goodbye
I say hello
Hello, hello
I don't know why you say goodbye
I say hello  

With that, Chopper stormed off in a huff. He walked down to a seedy neighborhood bar a few blocks from the house and never came out again. Well, he did, just not that day. I left without him and he ended up taking the Pontiac back to Utica the next day.

Chopper had made an important point. Due to the decomposition of the bodies, no one would know it wasn't the real Beatles. I could not retrieve Rex Harrison. Drummer Sammy Davis Jr.'s body was in California (and I'd already left California and come back east). Paul McCartney was buried in England, so that was going to be a major undertaking. I decided to go with look-a-like corpses.

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me  

I found a graveyard with minimal supervision and started looking around. I found a couple of local meth addicts and paid them fifty bucks each to help me dig up three bodies. One needed to be black, so he could pass for Sammy Davis Jr., but the others needed to be caucasian so that my tomfoolery would not be discovered. We had to discard fifteen bodies in the creek because everyone we dug up was white. We needed to find another graveyard. This was some kind of white nationalist cemetery. I paid the addicts for helping me and drove off with three bodies in the back of the livestock truck. I had a tarp thrown over them with cinder blocks holding it down as I drove. I finally found another graveyard and there I found a more approprate stand-in for Sammy. I finally had my Beatles for the reunion tour and headed back to Utica to begin work in my science-free lab.

Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout
The pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray
And though she feels as if she's in a play
She is anyway  

Forcefully shoving metal rods into the arms and legs of decomposed bodies is risky business, and the risks were made known in the Tom Cruise film Risky Business, in which Cruise does pretty much the same thing I'm doing. There were a lot of issues, and I had to get two replacement bodies because Jack Lemmon fell completely apart when I shoved a three foot steel rod into his spine. Fake Sammy was fine, I managed to get all the rods into him without significant damage to the undercarriage. After two weeks of work, keeping at it twenty-four hours a day, every day during that period, I finally had all the rods properly installed.

Organizing the big reunion show and campaign fundraiser was going to be tricky. I asked Chopper about venues, and he suggested the site of Woodstock, where liberalism bloomed in the foul 1960s. He thought it would be amusing to hold a rally for what we stand for on such sacred ground for the liberals. Alas, when we went there, the people in town drove us out with torches and baseball bats. I wasn't sure what to do, but Chopper suggested I rent a venue somewhere with my significant financial holdings. I reminded him that the FBI had seized my accounts, but he reminded me that I had hidden some money under my former friend Dale's name (he was the church-going friend I framed for the murder of his wife fifteen years ago) in the Cayman Islands.

Baby you're a rich man, too
You keep all your money in a big brown bag
Inside a zoo, what a thing to do
Baby you're a rich man

I called around and found a venue in Syracuse, New York and paid big money to rent it for three days. It was going to take time and practice to get these corpses to move right, not to mention getting them to properly sing and dance during their performance. If their movements were slow and uninspired, I could explain it as them being old now.

At Chopper's suggestion, I placed full page ads in all the big newspapers and also advertised on television and the radio. Knowledge of the event became public, and I issued a press release stating that they all had faked their deaths in order to spend some time away from the spotlight. As you well know, there was a lot of excitement in the country and around the world at this annoucement. The pressure was on, with only a week to practice and get my bodies doing the right thing. And, as you well know, on the afternoon of August 9, 2019, the big reunion of The Beatles happened.

All you need is love, all together now
All you need is love, everybody
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

 

 

The lyrics are by The Beatles from the album called by the same name as the title of said writeup and their corpses nodded in agreement that I could use them here.