Zombies bring ’60s sound to festival stage
The Zombies, revived in the 1990s, show the enduring appeal of their ’60s sounds
LYNN SAXBERG
Fifty years ago this summer, the Zombies went into Abbey Road Studios to record their second album, Odessey and Oracle. The young band broke up before it was released.
Without a promotional campaign or a tour to support the record, you’d think that would be the end of the story.
But instead of vanishing into the ether, one of the singles, Time of the Season, was discovered almost two years later by North American radio stations. In the year of Woodstock, the hippie anthem topped charts in Canada and hit the top five in the U.S., kicking off a long, slow build for what’s considered a landmark album for the British band, and one of the psychedelic era’s defining works.
Over the years, its cult of appreciation grew as artists like Tom Petty, Dave Grohl and Paul Weller cited Odessey and Oracle as an influence. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it 100th on its list of the greatest albums of all time.
“About 10 years after it came out, a very strange thing happened,” recalls Zombies singer Colin Blunstone in an interview, “Artists started talking about what an influence it had been on them and sales started to pick up. It’s a little bit of a mystery. It can only be word of mouth. Year after year, it sells more and more. It’s exciting and kind of validates what we were doing in 1967.”
Trying to record the best album possible on a limited budget, they went into Abbey Road with the songs arranged and rehearsed, ready to focus on capturing the best performance in the shortest amount of time.
In the studio before them had been The Beatles, who had just finished recording their landmark, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (No. 1 on Rolling Stone’s greatest-albums-of-all-time list). They left behind an assortment of percussion instruments, one of the grooviest keyboards of the day, a Mellotron, and engineers who had been put through their paces.
“We were picking tambourines and maracas up off the floor that the Beatles had left. And the treasured Mellotron — if John Lennon hadn’t left his mellotron behind, there probably would have been no Mellotron on Odessey and Oracle. Because it was there, it was used,” Blunstone said.
Despite the attention to every detail (except for the spelling mistake in the title that was attributed to Terry Quirk, the artist who designed the cover in those pre-spellcheck days), the singles flopped out of the gate and there were no tour dates. Faced with making a living, the band folded by the end of 1967. The record came out in 1968.
But Blunstone and keyboardist Rod Argent never stopped working on music together, eventually reforming the Zombies in the late ’90s. They’ve recorded four albums and are working on a fifth.
The Zombies When: Tuesday, 9 p.m. Where: RBC Bluefest, Bluesville Stage
This week’s run of shows in Canada is a career retrospective that features some of the Odessey material. With original members Blunstone and Argent, the current lineup includes bassist Jim Rodford (who’s also toured with the Animals and the Kinks), his son, drummer Steve Rodford, and guitarist Tom Toomey. Not counting Toomey, the group has been together for 18 years — a fact that astounds Blunstone.
“When the band started in ’64, I think most people thought if we had a three-year career, we would have done really well. No one realized you could have a lifetime career in the music industry, especially as a performer. I see people that I grew up with being laid off after working in banks or for the city in respectable careers. No one knew that they weren’t as secure as the career we chose, being in the music industry.”