The Zombies
The Zombies

When Odessey and Oracle, the second album by UK pop group The Zombies, was released in 1968, it barely made a dent commercially. And a year later, when ā€œTime of the Season,ā€ the fourth single taken from the record, became a worldwide hit, the band had already broken up, with its members moving on to other projects.

But as its reputation has grown over the past five decades, and the nostalgia economy has risen along with it, the surviving members of the groupā€”vocalist Colin Blunstone, keyboardist Rod Argent, drummer Hugh Grundy, and bassist Chris Whiteā€”have been asked to play all of the songs from Odessey a lot in recent years. Itā€™s a job theyā€™ve willingly taken on since 2008 when the album celebrated its 40th anniversary. But, according to Blunstone, it's a job that theyā€™re ready to move on from following their current co-headlining tour with Beach Boys musical mastermind Brian Wilson where they will be playing the album in its entirety.

ā€œI think this will be the last time we do it for the foreseeable future,ā€ he says, speaking from a tour stop in Arizona. ā€œUnless thereā€™s another anniversary or another special reason to play it. We would like this album to be special, and if we keep playing it, it starts to lose its specialness. I donā€™t think any of us want that to happen.ā€

For fans of the ornate and wily baroque pop that The Zombies concocted for Odessey, thereā€™s little chance of the album losing that special quality. If anything, their love only grows deeper with each spin through its dense and literate material that placed starry-eyed love songs and lysergic visions alongside brutal wartime visions (ā€œButcherā€™s Tale (Western Front 1914)ā€) and dictated letters to an incarcerated lover (ā€œCare of Cell 44ā€). Even if the band had never reunited in various permutations beginning in 1990 for subsequent albums nor received their recent induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Odessey would have cemented their status as pop legends.

In advance of their performance tonight at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Blunstone was kind enough to spend some time on the phone with the Mercury to talk about playing the music of Odessey, the early days of The Zombies, and the band not knowing when they had a hit on their hands.


COLIN BLUNSTONE: Iā€™m glad I got you! I just finished another interview and I thought I might have missed you. Itā€™s a busy day with interviews. Weā€™re not doing as many as we sometimes do because we have to try and protect our voices. It can have a wearing effect on your voice so we have to be a little careful.

PORTLAND MERCURY: Iā€™m glad you mentioned that about your voice because itā€™s remarkable how great you and the band sound even after 50 years.

Well, I think some of that is just luck in your genes. But both Rod [Argent] and I studied for a short time with a singing coach in London who worked with the artists singing in the West End of London, which would be like Broadway in New York. They have to sing every night so their voices had to be strong and had to be really accurate. So as well as teaching us a little bit about actual singing technique, which I knew nothing about, he gave me a set of exercises. When weā€™re on the road, Iā€™ll do those exercises before soundcheck and then do them before we start the show. By the time we start the show, my voice is completely warmed up and Iā€™m ready to go.

This tour is being billed as a celebration of 1968, and youā€™ll be performing all of your album Odessey and Oracle, which is something you and the band have been doing for a number of years now. Do you still get a thrill out of playing these songs, even after all these years?

I do. We first celebrated this in 2008, when it was the 40th anniversary. The idea was to just play it through once. But it became such a popular idea that we did three sold-out nights in London. That was the first time weā€™d ever played most of these songs outside of the studio because the band broke up before the album was released. I hadnā€™t listened to the album a lot over the years, to be honest. They were very fresh for me in 2008, and itā€™s quite amusing that I had to go back and re-learn some of these songs. Then, I think we played the album again the next year because people wanted us to do it. We played five or six shows around the UK. Since then, we celebrated the 50th anniversary and played it all over the UK, Europe, and the States. These dates with Brian will be, for the foreseeable future, the last dates when we play Odessey and Oracle in its entirety. Weā€™re going to concentrate on a new album we just started recording.

What can you tell me about the sound of this new album? Are you trying to capture some of the sound of your ā€™60s work or is something more modern sounding?

Hopefully weā€™ll cover both bases in the hope that we can please ourselves and feel satisfied with what weā€™ve done and then hope that it will please other people. Weā€™ve always worked that way. Weā€™ve never followed trends. There have been times when people have described Odessey and Oracle as a baroque masterpiece or ā€œthe sound of 1968,ā€ but that was never our intention. We just recorded the best songs we had in the best way that we could. Weā€™ve always worked that way and this next album will be the same.

Itā€™s interesting to hear you say that about not following trends. Odessey does sound of a piece with the time that it was recorded but it doesnā€™t sound like you were hugely influenced by other albums or trying to make your own Sgt. Pepper.

We followed the Beatles into Abbey Road. They finished Sgt. Pepper a few days before we started recording Odessey and Oracle so thereā€™s no way we could have heard it. Another description of Oracle is that itā€™s like a flower power album, but really flower power happened a couple of years later, possibly closer to when it was released in America. We were a little bit ahead of all that but it proved to fit into both of those movements.

As you said, the band broke up before Odessey came out and ā€œTime of the Seasonā€ became a big hit. The way I understood it was that it was mainly because there wasnā€™t a lot of interest in the band playing live or what you guys were doing at the time. Was that the primary reason or were there other issues like tensions within the band?

Weā€™d be playing nonstop for three years. When we recorded ā€œSheā€™s Not There,ā€ Rod and I were 18. Three years is a lifetime when youā€™re teenagers. Weā€™d been very poorly managed, which meant that the non-writers in the bandā€”Hugh Grundy, Paul Atkinson, and Iā€”were absolutely and completely broke. Rod and Chris White, they were in a totally different financial situation. And one of the things that happened was Paul got married and he said to us, ā€œI just got married. I have absolutely no money. I have to get a job.ā€ There was no choice in it. That was one of the factors in the band finishing.

I also think that we perceived ourselves as unsuccessful. Remember, this is an age before the Internet. Our judgement was based solely on the UK charts and the US charts. Later on we realized we had a hit somewhere else. It happened to us just before we finished. We were invited to go to the Philippines. We thought we would play in a hotel bar or something. Weā€™re thinking of it more as a holiday. What we didnā€™t realize was that the Philippines is a huge country and, at the time, the third biggest English-speaking nation in the world. When the Zombies arrived there in 1967, we had about five records in the Top 10. We thought we would be playing to 80 peopleā€¦ we opened to 28,000 people at the Araneta Coliseum. We played a residency for 10 days. But our manager in his wisdom got us an incredibly low fee. It was heartbreaking to be playing for wonderfully receptive audiences and get paid an absolute pittance. That was the beginning of the end. Weā€™re not a band that is particularly motivated by financial gain. All we want to do is make beautiful music. But when youā€™re financially abused like that, itā€™s heartbreaking.

While Odessey wasnā€™t a huge hit at the time of its release, its reputation has grown considerably over the years. When did you start to get wind that it was having that kind of long tail influence?

Slowly but surely people started to namecheck it. It probably took about 10 or 12 years before we really began to believe it. Itā€™s just word of mouth. Itā€™s led by tastemakers like Tom Petty and Dave Grohl and, in the UK, Paul Weller. We were very reluctant to believe it was actually happening because, as I said, we perceived ourselves as unsuccessful when we finished, and that sticks with you. Gradually, we couldnā€™t avoid acknowledging what was happening. Iā€™m eternally grateful for it. Donā€™t get me wrong. Iā€™m not taking it for granted. But it is a little bit of a mystery.

I wanted to dive back into the beginnings of the band. Before you joined up with the rest of what would become the Zombies, what were you doing? Were you in bands at that time?

No, no. When the band got together in 1961, I was 15. The guys basically came from two separate schools in a place called St. Albans, which is just north of London. Rod got the idea that he wanted to have a band. His older cousin Jim Rodford, who went on to be a founding member of Argent and was with The Kinks, he was in one of the top local bands called The Bluetones. Rod saw him play and he absolutely loved it and he vowed that, when he was old enough, he wanted to form a band. He found a couple of guys in his school. Paul was playing in a folk club in his school and Rod liked his guitar playing. Hugh was in the Army Corps in the school and he was playing the side drum. Rod thought he was the best and asked him to be in the band. A friend of Rodā€™s called Paul Arnold didnā€™t go to the same school, but he knew that Paul was making a bass guitar in woodworking class even though heā€™d never played bass before! This is a pretty scruffy bunch. I went to the same school as Paul, and it was a pretty strict school and we had to sit in alphabetical order. So Paul sat right next to me and one day he said, ā€œMy mate is putting a band together. Youā€™ve got a guitar?ā€ I said, ā€œYes,ā€ and that was my audition for The Zombies. I came along as a rhythm guitarist. I just happened to be sitting in the right school in the right order. That led to 50 years in the music business.

What was the bandā€™s repertoire in those early days? Were you mostly doing R&B and pop covers or was there original material in the mix?

Not at the start, there wasnā€™t original material. We started in ā€™61 and we were playing pop tunes. As time went by, we got very interested in rhythm and blues. At one time, we were called The Zombies R&B. In the spring of ā€™64, we got into quite a big rock ā€™nā€™ roll competition. Local bands came from all over. It went on for 10 weeks with over 100 bands. I cannot tell you how surprised we were, but we won it. That led to a recording contract with Decca and introduced us to our first producer, Ken Jones. Right before we went in for our first session, Ken said, ā€œYou could always write something for this session.ā€ I didnā€™t really think much more about that. But Rod and Chris went away and wrote songs. I had no idea they could write! Three days later, we came back and Rod plays us ā€œSheā€™s Not There.ā€ I think we all knew it was a special song. It was released as a single by Decca and quickly became a hit in the UK. Famously, there was a TV program at the time called Jukebox Jury where well known people would judge the new releases. On that week was George Harrison and he really liked it. For Harrison to say that he liked our first record was just unbelievable. Suddenly, we were a professional group.

You know, if we had a choice, I wish that had come a year later so we would have had a chance to get out on the road and play all those clubs that The Stones used to play in London or go to Germany like The Beatles. We missed out on that. We were thrust straightaway into the spotlight. We went straight from being an amateur band playing local gigs to playing our first tour with Dionne Warwick and The Isley Brothers. We managed to do it, but it might have been more comfortable if we had been able to get out on the road and learn our craft a bit better.

(Tues Sept 17, 8 pm, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, $69.50-139.50)