Lost at zee
Ill-fated Memphis powerpoppers re-emerge after 43 years. By Will Hodgkinson.
Zuider Zee
★★★★
Zeenith
LIGHT IN THE ATTIC. CD/DL/LP
ZUIDER ZEE must have seemed a safe bet. Four friends with a deep love of The Beatles and a road-tested work ethic, their sound combined the melodic sophistication of the Fabs, the rock’n’roll passion of Big Star and the cosmic dancing of T.Rex. CBS duly hyped Zuider Zee as capable of filling some Lennon-and-McCartney-sized shoes, but the Memphis-based band’s self-titled 1975 album came and went without a trace. Listening to this collection of earlier, previously unreleased recordings, from the wild, Wings-like Haunter Of The Darkness to the ELOtinged epic rock of After The Shine’s Gone, you wonder: why wasn’t this band huge? At the very least it should have been a beloved cult concern, along the lines of Sparks and Cheap Trick. As it turns out, bad luck and bad timing stopped Zuider Zee in their tracks. Singer/songwriter Richard Orange and drummer Gary Bertrand, friends since high school in Lafayette, Louisiana, earned their stripes in the Sergeant Pepper-like Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band. Then, in 1971 the music entrepreneur Lelan Rogers flew in by private plane to talk 16-year-old Orange into moving to Jackson, Mississippi and leading the house band at BJ’s, a nightclub Rogers co-owned with the singer BJ Thomas. When Rogers subsequently moved to Memphis he took Orange and his gang with him, where they lived in poverty-stricken squalor and survived, according to the singer, by taking “lots of acid for about six months to a year”. They became Zuider Zee and developed a florid style with shades of The Kinks and Bowie, which didn’t go down too well on the Southern rock circuit the band found themselves on. One can only imagine what the greasy denim crowd made of Lancelot’s Theme, with its medieval flute and words of courtly love. With concerts proving an unrewarding slog, especially after Richard Orange was crippled in pain with a herniated disc in May 1974, hope was pinned on the debut, but by the time of its release CBS had lost interest. The album received no advertising or radio support and, despite words of praise from Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, sank without trace. A year later bassist John Bonar was sacked for borrowing the tour van to see a girlfriend, where he was attacked by two criminals who stole all of the band’s equipment. A subsequent new line-up supported the Sex Pistols in Memphis in January 1978 – “Sid Vicious stumbling around out of his gourd… all very unremarkable,” remembers Orange – but the dream was over. What we are left with is this unearthed treasure trove, where ‘60s garage band innocence meets ‘70s virtuoso rocking in a most delightful way.