the zombies

Of course, then I ended up buying the Big Beat version of Odyssey to get the mono and stereo versions.

However, if you tend towards a completist sensibility, it probably would be for the best to just get it out of the way.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005B0PT/qid=1106947103/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-4204839-3895845?v=glance&s=music

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005B0PU/qid=1106947178/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/103-4204839-3895845?v=glance&s=music

Am I going to find either of these at a CD store tonight?

If you see Singles As and Bs, buy it simply for the liner notes.

all you need is "Odessey" and the singles thing.

i'd say get the blunstone comp "some years" too; there's a real falloff toward the end, but it's worth it for "misty roses" and "caroline goodbye."

avoid the reunion shit like the plague--"new world" and "as far as i can see" both suck, and i'm a zombies fan...

I believe it's easy to find, and in my opinion it has about 75% of the Zombies songs you'll ever want to hear, including what seems like about half of the songs from "Odessey & Oracle". And the liner notes really are great: kind of a big narrative collage of cuttings of singles reviews and photos from the English music press.

When it comes to The Zombies, the main thing you need to do is just dance around with friends to "Time of the Season". The rhythm starts and stops and jerks you around a bit, but it's worth it because it's one of the coolest and funnest songs ever.

so ILX is where the girls are. i never would have guessed.

not always right because (a) a lot of recordings from the '60s and before were originally recorded/mixed with a mono product in mind, and stereo mixes created after the fact often rely on some cheesy, unnatural-sounding processing, and (b) some people just plain like the sound of everything piled together into one glorious mono blob. either way you're coloring the sound; it's just a question of which way you prefer it to be colored.

All of disc 1 and everything on disc 2 that's not Odessey at least.

I have proof.

I found out too......

Late!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_uB-0D-gV8mY/RvqkxHuak8I/AAAAAAAAEL4/XRSBTVcWjao/s400/999.jpg

I would search out "R.I.P.", their final album which never actually got a proper release (though all the tracks are available on the aforementioned box set and there's a Japanese CD release too). "I'll Call You Mine" is maybe my favorite song they ever recorded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAxZqr0XYHs

Man this is great for all kinds of reasons including - Schlitz breakfast of champions sweater / cameraman vs pillar FITE / pretty french girls in sequined dresses dancing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eExAFAxZJxE

What's the song out now that samples "She's Not There"? I heard it in the car today, first time. More interesting than particularly good. (Google gave me an Eminem song, but this was a woman.)

Black Hippy "Rolling Stone"

Oh nevermind that samples Time of the Season.

If that's new, that's got to be it--I just got the two mixed up, I think. Thanks.

Only 'recent' song (2012) I know which samples it is from Kompakt. Blond:ish - it's too late:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZtqIM3aqAA

If you're looking for covers rather than samples Nick Cave and Neko Case covered it for the True Blood soundtrack and I think Glee used it as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwSWKZSCBOI

time of the season has been sampled several times... here's some of them not sure if what you're looking for is here

http://www.whosampled.com/The-Zombies/Time-of-the-Season/sampled/

imo, zombies should be held in same regard as the beatles, doors. odyssey and oracle is a masterpiece in songwriting, vocal harmonies and studio mastery. those sample of songs sampling them makes me fucking livid.. sample some unknown shit. but whatever.

anybody go out to see the "odessey & oracle" 50th anniversary tour? chris white plays the second half of the show (when they do the record front to back).

saw them in mpls last night and it was fucking insane. colin blunstone is spot on, the arrangements are super tasteful, i almost wept with joy.

so nice also to hear rod and colin tell little anecdotes between the songs (in the first half when they play their early hits). these guys are obviously so grateful, so happy to being doing what they're doing at 70+

http://www.thezombiesmusic.com/tour-dates

Thought about it but didn't get it together.

Saw the show in Durham, NC last month. The first part was decent,-and the Odessey portion was absolutely great. I enjoyed Chris White breaking up Blunstone and Argent's jeans-and-leather-jackets theme by wearing a high-collared maroon suit that I'm pretty sure was paisley.

the Odessey portion was absolutely great

Yes it was

I saw it in DC. They came back through again and I missed it the second time, but heard folks who attended, praise it

I saw them in an old movie theater outside of Philly between Odessey tours so they basically played whatever they liked and I was blown away. The harmonies were unbelievably tight and Blunstone's voice hasn't aged a day!

Saw them last week and the Odessey set was ace. The first set was ... kind of embarrassing. The two or three or four Zombies hits they played sounded good, the new blues-rock boilerplate they played was embarrassing, and "Hold Your Head Up" remains one of my least favorite songs of all time. There were times I'd be driving around as a kid listening to classic rock radio, and when the song came on I'd keep changing the channel and coming back, always surprised this epic slog was still going. The crowd here was soooooooo not into it, but I suppose humored Rod.

'Hold Your Head Up' is a great song and Odessey and Oracle is better than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

I agree wholeheartedly with the second part of that.

josh, i think the first set was really hampered by the guitarist's unwillingness to play the earlier mod tunes in that mid-'60s style. his tone was just super lame rock guitar guy (as were the solos). thank god that argent et al. seemed to have insisted that his tone for "odyssey" had to more or less mirror the lp. obv. stuff like "she's not there" can easily be ruined by being overblown (see: santana).

first avenue crowd was clearly in the mood to humor the band (or maybe they genuinely were into it, i don't know), applaud loudly at the new songs, and sing along with "hold your head up" (a song i don't like at all). looking around, the feel was kind of like a state fair vibe. lots of mom / daughter, dad / son combos.

colin's big smile and his hand gestures were more or less identical to this performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtyROCysfN0

Yeah, guitarist's tone was the worst. The ugly PRS was a red flag. I guess he used to be in a Santana tribute band?

Anyway. O&O could not have been performed more faithfully.

I consider myself a fan and have Zombie Heaven and Odyssey and I have no idea what this "Hold Your Head Up" song you guys are talking about is. weird.

not going to post the video in this thread, but it's been a classic rock radio staple for decades, you've certainly heard it. it's not a zombies song but white/argent wrote it

Interestingly, at the show I saw, Argent prefaced the song by saying "a lot of people think I wrote this, but it was actually Chris White". They are both officially credited, though.

yeah that was cool. i also lol'd when rod said something like, "i've been performing this song for a number of years. for some reason, people seem to think the lyrics are 'hold your head up, woah!' actually the lyrics are 'hold your head up, WOMAN.' so, if you're going to sing along -- and we really hope you do -- for god's sake, get it right."

Verbatim here, and probably everywhere, iirc, since they've been doing the same exact setlist for a couple of years.

Man, that reminds me--Rod Argent is 71, and still shredding on the keyboards, while playing just about the whole show standing up. That was something to see.

Do keyboard players tend to lose dexterity as they age? I would imagine so, and maybe Argent has, but I couldn't tell.

Aside: Great article from last year about the group that toured the US as the Zombies to cash in on their success. Included 2/3 of ZZ Top!

https://www.buzzfeed.com/danielralston/the-true-story-of-the-fake-zombies-the-strangest-con-in-rock?utm_term=.it8GBR9V9b#.uvYAWMYeYq

which, as the article explains (though i've read this elsewhere on some zombies fan site), led the zombies to record their great lost album, unreleased until 2012 i think.

anybody have an opinion on "rip" ? it's one of those things (like the vu quine tapes) that i keep thinking i'll buy but never do.

thanks for that youtube clip upthread. i've always loved that song and that 'era' of the zombies but hadn't seen that video before. plus, i never realized what a tall drink of water blunstone used to be.

just came back from seeing the Zombies at the Grammy Museum, in a small theater there. It was about an hour and forty minutes, the first hour being an interview with Colin, Rod, Chris, and Hugh, and the remainder being a set of Zombie songs (including a pair of new ones, which I thought were a cut below but performed with a lot of joy that was infectious.) This set was just Rod on piano and Colin singing, which was remarkable. He can still belt it out at 71. They played about ten songs, i think. Such legends.

wow

i did not know that...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usvuOs7o944

would have thought all the ilx chillwavers would have hepped me to this fact. i have been playing old prefab a TON recently.

holy shit, that's really good. not a reimagination as much as a perfect match.

Picked up Time of The Zombies, a double LP comp Epic put together in the '70s. The second side is a bunch of stuff slated for RIP (post O & O sessions w/Argent & White), and almost all new to me. It's like The Left Banke if they'd been grownups.

Sounds tempting

Can’t check now but I think all of that is on the Zombie Heaven box

Zombie Heaven has everything from the '60s. RIP itself finally came out in the 2000s.

Time of the Zombies is so great, plus you get all of O&O in it

I thought Heaven had a bunch of post O&O stuff on it and comparing track lists on discogs it sure she seems like all of Time is on Heaven but maybe I’m misunderstanding you

Bad phrasing on my part. Zombie Heaven is their complete recordings (all of which were made in the '60s) RIP was later broken off as its own individual release a few years later.

...and apparently a bundle of recordings not included in the box were released as Into The Afterlife in 2007.

This should be a fun listen

https://omny.fm/shows/the-true-story-of-the-fake-zombies/trailer

Rod Argent suffers stroke, cancels tour.

https://deadline.com/2024/07/the-zombies-cancel-tour-rod-argent-suffers-stroke-1236009361/

Saw and enjoyed the Zombies "Hung up on a Dream" film doc Sunday night. It was directed by Robert Copolla Schwartzman, son of Talia Shire, brother of Paul, and from the band Rooney. After the screening, Rooney did 2 songs, and then backed Colin Blunstone on Tell Her No, She's Not There, This Will Be Our Year, Caroline Goodbye, Hung Up on a Dream, and Time of the Season. After that Bob Boilen of NPR Tiny Desk fame interviewed Colin and Robert.

The doc shows how the Zombies enjoyed and learned from being on Dick Clark traveling bills and Murray the K shows from the likes of Patti Labelle & the Bluebelles, and Aretha Franklin and others, but did not enjoy getting paid little on those gigs or on a series of gigs they did night after night in an arena in the Philippines, and elsewhere. The Zombies did not turn on each other, they were just mad at promoters and management. The doc does its best despite not alot of old footage and conveys how Rod Argent, and Chris White and the others created O & O and other original cuts. The doc goes deep on telling the stories of each original member

Blunstone still sounds good at age 80