The Zombies Interview for Aquarium Drunkard
Link to the full article & interview
by Allen Thayer
It’s common knowledge amongst armchair pop music historians that The Beatles album Rubber Soul inspired The Beach Boys’ creative genius Brian Wilson to raise the bar for the group’s seminal sleeper album Pet Sounds and that album, in turn, galvanized The Beatles to respond with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That’s usually where the factoid ends, but there’s another iconic album that emerged from this friendly transatlantic competition that perfectly encapsulates the zeitgeist of late-sixties pop-psychedelia and continues to inspire musicians around the world: The Zombies’ Odessey & Oracle.
Recorded at Abbey Road studios immediately after the Beatles finished rolling-tape on Sgt. Peppers, the album even benefited from the Fab Four’s forgetfulness in leaving behind John Lennon’s Mellotron and a plethora of percussion instruments. Like Pet Sounds and it’s aborted follow-up Smile, Odessey & Oracle was not an overnight success, but literally took decades to earn its reputation as one of the greatest albums of the late-sixties psychedelic era. As such, it’s fitting that Brian Wilson invited the Zombies to open for his band of new, old (Blondie Chaplin), and older (Al Jardine) members of the Beach Boys for the upcoming tour “Something Great from ‘68” that kicks off in Las Vegas at the end of August.
This tour hits the road just in time to celebrate a couple major milestones for the Zombies: their recent induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the release of their (almost) complete discography on vinyl with The Complete Studio Recordings, out on Varèse Sarabande . While the Zombies’ admittance into the hallowed hall might seem like a foregone conclusion today as their enduring anthem “Time of the Season” has become synonymous with Summer-of-Love retrospectives, their position in the pantheon of rock was the result of decades of building momentum, much like the popular reassessment of the Beach Boys’ post-Pet Sounds material Brian’s promised to feature on this tour, from the albums Friends (1968) & Surf’s Up (1971). Besides its clever rhyme, the “Something Great from ‘68” tour pairs two bands with more in common than meets the eye.
Even before Clapton, Hendrix, Petes (Townsend and Frampton) blues-based pop music was a guitar game and much like the Beach Boys (no disrespect to brother Carl Wilson’s shredding), the Zombies are not a guitar band. They are a keyboard-band that sang harmonies before the Beatles normalized the group vocal style. “It was so unusual to have a keyboard-driven band at the time,” Argent recalls. “The few pieces of film that exist from that time with our hit records, like ‘She’s Not There,’ you never see the keyboard playing at all because the cameramen didn’t understand that concept at all . . .
