The Weird Afterlife of The Zombies

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you, as always, so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer, Max the Madman Williams.

What, what, what?

It's going to be great to have you back with me again. You know, kiss and make up and it'll be just fine.

Yeah.

Sorry, I have a zombie's head, man. I'm a zombie's head. I don't mean the Halloween kind. I'm not going to lie, Ben.

When I saw the headline of this particular ridiculous history research brief, you're Ben, by the way, and I'm Noel, about the zombies' weird afterlife, I, of course, assumed that we were going to be talking about, you know, spooky zombies.

I am Ben Bullen. You are Noel Brown. This does not.

Result in a podcast made by three living, non-undead entities. And I think I had the same quick cognitive double take that you experienced there, Noel. But I've got to tell you, we did a great episode on several episodes on the idea of the undead or zombies.

A while back.

Oh, and we, you know, Ben, and that was a Ren Fair special, the zombie episode about zombie zombies and the whole voodoo of it all and the film industry and the, you know, what we, what came to lead to the George Romero Walking Dead style zombies that we know and love today. But this one comes to us from one of our brand new researchers. And while it has to do with the zombies, these zombies are British.

That's right.

Painfully so, folks. And with great thanks to our research associate, Natalia Winkleman, we are going to learn about the weird afterlife of the band, The Zombies. I don't know about you guys, but growing up around our fair metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia, I was lucky enough to catch an amazing oldies radio station called Fox 97.

Did you guys have that growing up?

I didn't, Ben, but one thing I did realize in doing a little traveling as I've gotten older is a lot of those oldies stations repackage the same jingles.

Like mine growing up was oldies, 93, nine.

And then it would say Augusta and I don't know how it works or how the system of Jingledom works, but I've heard that exact same jingle repackaged with different call letters, and it may well have been used by your hometown oldie station.

What was it, Ben? The Fox?

Fox 97. What I loved about Fox 97 was this, you know, like so many radio stations, the DJs had their favorites and their go-tos, but for someone who was not rocking around back in the 50s and 60s, this was like a time machine. You were able to hear these hits from yesteryear. So I didn't know growing up that a lot of the bands I was listening to had long since disbanded or the people who were singing had long since passed away. I thought the zombies were a current band. And my parents just let me believe that for a long time.

Well, Ben, I did a little bit of math.

It's probably not very good math, as I am, you know, want to perform good math. But 1969, you know, in terms of what we would consider, you and I have considered oldies growing up. Now that equivalent would be like, you know, 1999.

Shout out to Prince, or the artist formerly known as. There's something crazy Natalia hipped us to, folks. which is that the zombies had a song hit number three on the big old billboard charts in 1969. However, this occurred two years after the band broke up in 1967. It's crazy, man.

And it's a really neat story for multiple reasons, because you love to see an underdog story and also this whole idea of fake zombies.

What does that even mean?

Well, we're going to get to it as we dive into this particularly ridiculous chapter of music history, and a little more broadly, the once common practice of treating bands like a concept that I think we both love, the ship of thesis. At what point, when you replace enough original members of a band, is that band still that band?

Like, let's talk about the Beach Boys.

I just saw a video today of Mike Love propped up Weekend at Bernie style in a chair. Basically, I don't know if he's even singing, but he's just surrounded by a bunch of young dudes. So is that still the Beach Boys, especially after we've lost Brian Wilson?

I'm going to say no.

Yeah, and some of, Mike Love's interviews have not aged that well either. But before we beach the boys, let's wake up the zombies here. Their origin story, put quickly, is the following. The group we call the zombies forms in Hertfordshire, England in 1961. They're in a little city called St.

Albans.

It's about 20 miles north of London proper, and the band members, when they first get together, they're around 16 years old. This makes sense. It's a tale as old as time. You're a teenager, you've got an instrument, a dream, and at least one parent who will let you wreck their garage.

Totally, and this is like the earliest days of that kind of thing, if you think about it. Like, I mean, the availability of the electric guitar was incredibly new. I mean, that was only really something that came about in the late 50s and early 60s. And they were affordable. And you could pick up a real cheap Silvertone one that was, I think, if I'm not mistaken, made by Kmart or another such big box store. And that was the case in what you might call suburbs of England. And it's something that led to a lot of these British invasion type bands that we know and love today.

And I just go ahead and say it right now. I watched this recently on a plane.

And I highly recommend if anyone's interested in a little more of a visual account of the story we're going to tell today, check out the documentary hung up on a dream about the zombies, which is a zombies documentary kind of, and then talks about a lot of the things we're going to hit on today with a lot of excellent archival footage and interviews with the band members, most of which are still alive today.

And, It may surprise you to hear that many of these band members are still alive. It reminds me of how startled I was to learn that the band Goblin was not only still around, but regularly performing. And I'm so sad I missed their show.

Did we talk about this when we were on the road, Ben? I talked about it with somebody. Maybe it wasn't us, because I think I talked about it with my friend Eric, who I stayed with for a bit in New York after our cruise.

They must have just played.

Because I definitely saw them years ago doing a similar tour, and they are quite old. But if anyone isn't familiar with Goblin, they are responsible for a lot of Italo disco horror soundtracks from the likes of Dario Argento.

And with the zombies, our origin story will immediately begin with two guys who again, teenagers, right? One is Rod Argent, who will later become the keyboardist of the zombies, and his pal, another guy, Colin Blundstone, they meet up outside of the local pub. And because of their age, they aren't old enough to go inside the pub. There's a later interview with Blundstone where he says, I was literally in a corner singing to myself, doing a Ricky Nelson song, and Rod came over and said, hey, that's really good.

I'll tell you what, if you be the lead singer, I'll play keyboards.

I love that because it's not dissimilar to a lot of origin stories of these like British Invasion, well, American bands too, but like just, it was a matter of, availability, like who was around, who could learn how to play the thing, who had the best voice. It wasn't some like mystical meeting of the minds that was overthought and, you know, overworked in any way. A lot of these stories, the Beatles included, involved just people that like went to primary school together and just picked up guitars in their little small towns and then ended up moving on to bigger and better things, especially as the world of this kind of, you know, rock music was kind of becoming a lot more popular.

This is called getting in on the ground floor, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, you probably run into this with your own friends from childhood or your teenage years. A lot of your friendships are actually based on proximity.

That's exactly what I was going to say. Exactly. Very well put.

Yeah, because you hang with the people that you can meet without needing a car. So Argent, our keyboardist again, he introduces our guy Blundstone to a guitarist named Paul Atkinson and a drummer named Hugh Grundy. I don't know if he's a relation to Solomon Grundy. They later add a guy named Paul Arnold to the mix, and they have here a delightful mix uh description of their quest to get a band name yeah.

Very important very important first step even before you start making a single note playing a single note uh he said blunt stone every young band wants an original name we were just in our teens so we tried the mustangs uh if i'm not mistaken obviously that was probably a maybe that was a popular car at this point but it was definitely an early fender guitar that was called a fender mustang that was the Well, it was a combination of a Mustang and a Jaguar that Kurt Cobain played, but I digress. The Mustang was a popular model, and I'm not sure about the history. You might know, Ben, when did the Mustang become a popular car? Was that more in the 60s, like the mid-60s?

It first came out in 1964, so at this point, it would have been one of those more popular aspirational cars.

Makes sense.

If you were a kid growing up where these kids grew up, You almost definitely did not have a Mustang of your own, but you would know what it was, and you probably would have a poster.

If I'm not mistaken, I think I remember this from the documentary, they tried the Mustangs, he said. I'm pretty sure the name was right. To your point, Ben, if that was an aspirational car, cool guy, sort of piece of, you know, kit, probably there were multiple Mustangs, you know, throughout the countryside. Arnold then came up with the zombies.

I love this quote from Blundstone. To be honest, I didn't even really know what a zombie was. Right. Right. Yeah. I hadn't certainly hadn't taken on the the pop culture cachet that it has today.

No, no, nowhere near at that point.

We were still sort of codifying our pantheon of monsters in Western canon. So it's a great name. It's interesting, right? It's going to grab people's attention. And unfortunately, the guy who coins the name ends up leaving the band. He's kind of like Pete Best at this point. Arnold leaves the band. After he comes up with the name, he's replaced by a guy named Chris White. So 1964, again, the same year the Mustang debuts, the zombies debut as well.

They release an absolute banger called She's Not There. Let me tell you about the way she looked.

That's the way she looks.

The way she dances.

Is the color of her hair. It's like, you know what's funny though, Ben?

It actually has kind of a Monster Mash-y quality to it.

Like the zombies, it's such an evocative name.

Because of course it is easy to think about like a song like the Monster Mash or the spooky thing. But that one does have this spooky organ. It's like this like Farfisa organ kind of thing. And folks who have seen the Kill Bill episode, may remember this song was pretty interestingly remixed for the very important pivotal sequence in the end of part two, when the bride and Bill meet. There's a really cool sequence where this song is used to great effect.

Yeah, and She's Not There leans heavily on complex harmonies. It's bluesy, it's melodic. It also has a lot of keyboard or organ in it because it's written by our keyboardist, Argent. It's a hit, and their first album, Begin Here, is released the next year in 1965. They're off to a wonderful start. They're touring the Americas. They're on the second wave of the British invasion that was started by the Beatles.

They were as famous as BTS is now.

I guess.

Yeah, maybe, maybe close, maybe not quite as famous, at least over here, but they were, uh, making some waves because boy, oh boy. I mean, there were bands like that now just seem like a footnote. I think the zombies, uh, gets a little more, um, love and some of these, but like bands like Herman's hermits, you know, and like, uh, I don't know. There, there were tons of you and the mysterious.

Exactly.

Cause tons of these little flash in the pan kind of almost borderline novelty, uh, British invasion acts that aren't really remember the turtles who I think we love as well.

Uh, he might've been American.

No, there's no way, but they did happy together of course. Um, but there were a lot of, a lot of the bands of the thing bands, you know, the Beatles kind.

Of kick, kick that off. Yeah.

And also folks, just to, just to stay honest here, um, Q and the Mysterians were not British. I'm just thinking of the bands from the 1960s. I think they're actually from Michigan. So shout out to Max Williams there. So these guys are doing a great job. They're living life high on the hog. They're also very young to be rock stars. It's 1967, and lo and behold, it is time for our boys to record their second album.

Oh, and really quickly, Ben, the Turtles were absolutely from the United States. They were from Los Angeles, which absolutely adopted a lot of the British Invasion kind of sound and sort of became its own thing. A lot of that echoes in the canyon. I can't remember the name of the canyon. But like some of the also ran, I literally just Googled also ran British Invasion bands. You got the Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits, Jerry and the Pacemakers.

That goes well with the naming convention of that band that you mentioned, Ben, which would have been perfectly at home in this list. the Spencer Davis group, the Yardbirds, the Hollies. Some of these were kind of one-hit wonders. The Trogs, who had the smash hit Wild Thing, but then not much else.

Yeah, and the zombies are existing in this same milieu. If we go back to Blundstone and we hear the story of how their second album came together, it's kind of funny. It reminds me of sneaking around and doing kind of off-the-book stuff at our old office job. Blundstone says, They somehow managed to get into Abbey Road, the infamous Abbey Road Studios. Normally, this was reserved for EMI artists.

It was very expensive. They had to get in and out quickly. They actually borrowed John Lennon's Mellotron and got through this recording gig by avoiding the studio's employees. And they were trying to cram all the time in in the most efficient way as possible.

They did a lot of live takes. It was definitely trying to be, like you said, Ben, as efficient as possible. Fun story about the employees. They, I guess infamously you could say, wore lab coats and they treated the place almost like.

A laboratory facility.

It was the cutting edge of recording technology. EMI, the label, also actually made a lot of the equipment specifically for or the equipment was made for the studio.

And so that stuff is really, really sought after.

And there are like audio plug ins that like copy a lot of the pieces of hardware equipment that EMI made for Abbey Road. But she had like bands like Pink Floyd that would record there, like just, you know, the biggest of the big British bands worldwide. would record in Abbey Road, and John Lennon's Mellotron is probably a fixture there. It's probably the one that he used when they made, like, Strawberry Fields.

Yeah, he probably kept it there, and they were borrowing it with hard air quotes. They might not have asked Johnny themselves. They did manage to record this LP. They released two singles from it. Unfortunately, both of those singles flop, and the band has been going through some inner turmoil. Blundstone is talking about this too. He says they had a very rough period.

They had been touring the.

Far East where they got very badly ripped off. And then he says, quote, there were some quite scary things that happened to us there. End quote.

We don't know exactly what those were, but it sounds unpleasant.

They tell some stories about that period in the documentary, Hung Up on a Dream, that I was talking about.

And largely it had to do with um, borderline being held hostage by promoters where they were like, I almost liked them. I want to say it was something along the lines of like the promoters wouldn't give them their passports back. And they kind of were like, you know, siphoning money off of the top. And these guys were getting paid pennies on the dollar. And, uh, but that was also happening in, in the, in the States and even in the UK, like these guys were successful in a lot of these younger bands, uh, were blowing up what they call the hit parade. But much like even in America, I just heard an interview with Lance Bass from NSYNC.

I was thinking that went viral.

Dude, $ 35 a day. $ 35 a day per DM.

They made a shitload of money for the labels and for the promoters and that horrible Perlman, Lou Perlman guy. But these young guys, similar to the boy band model that we're talking about with bands like NSYNC, They were living on the road, sleeping rough, you know? Splitting rooms at the Holiday Inn, that kind of level. If they had rooms at all. They would be living in rented vehicles, exactly. Yeah.

So, Blundstone is having a day-to-day life that is in sharp contrast to the image that a lot of the fans are assuming. He says, the guys came back to England. They saw a single had been released in their absence. It was a cover of of a song called Going Out of My Head by Little Anthony and the Imperials, and he says everybody in the band hated the song, the mix was atrocious, so they broke up with their producer, and because of all those horrible things that happened when they were touring the Far East, they broke up with their agent, so suddenly they had no agent, no manager, no producer, and they said, what gives? There's not a lot of interest in our band.

Yeah, and I mean, they're kind of approaching that level of diminishing returns where they've put all this like you know heart and soul into making these records I mean Odyssey and Oracle is one of my favorite albums of all time and it is a beautiful baroque piece of work and now it's looked at as a masterpiece but back when it came out Like you said, Ben, both singles flopped.

It was an absolute, you know, more or less commercial disaster.

And it started from some, you know, like the whole story behind it is fascinating because the title of the album actually came from a misprint or a misspelling, rather, in the art that was created for it. It's spelled, Odyssey is spelled incorrectly. I believe it's spelled like O-D-E-S-S-E-Y as opposed to O-D-Y-E-Y.

S-S-E-Y, isn't that right?

Yeah, yeah.

So imagine insult upon injury here. You have the album title, you like the cover, but you don't have your agent, you no longer have your producer, and even your graphic designer is not up to snuff. Your graphic designer has misspelled Odyssey with an E where that first Y should be. But I like it because it's a cool play on words.

And they said, all right, we're going to keep it. We're going to call it A Journey Through Songs. But if you look at other sources, aside from the co-founders in their interviews, you'll see other people saying that the band was so stressed out and having such a bad time that they actually did not notice the misspelling and may have made up that story to rationalize it.

After the fact i can't remember i think it's addressed in the documentary as well um but i don't i think i think the idea is that that whole misspelling they didn't care enough to fix it isn't true i think if they had wanted to they probably could have gotten it redone but they were just sort of like that's actually kind of cool um and it is it is kind of cool um so as we were saying the album came out in 67 uh really didn't make any noise at all uh the band had actually because of a lot of these factors, broken up before the album even came out because they just felt like there was, like you said, Ben, the interest in the band had kind of waned.

Yeah.

And, you know, again, they're very young kids. They've traveled the world. It's fair enough for them to say, hey, guys, good hustle. We had a go at it on to adult life. But that's not what happened. Because, as you know, if you're a fellow music nerd, folks, at this time, an album would not release across the world on the same day and date. So the album comes out in the UK in 1967. The band has already broken up and said their goodbyes. But the album hits the United States in 1968 entirely by chance.

Yeah, there was a guy from the band Blood, Sweat & Tears who had become, I want to say, an executive at CBS, or a producer. He was an album producer. Because a lot of the record producers were not freelance. They would be hired guns for these different record labels. And he really liked the album, and he was able to, I believe, get a distribution deal through CBS. And it was a different lead single over here.

It was Time of the Season.

Whereas, if I'm not mistaken, the first single from the British version was the first song.

On the album, which is like, Good morning to you, I hope you're feeling better, baby. It's called Care of Cell 44.

And it's kind of an intense song because it's this jaunty little Britpop bop that is someone writing to their lover or their loved one who is about to get out of prison. and very kind of upbeat. And it's a wonderful song with incredible harmonies. But y'all, if you know The Zombies, it's probably time of the season you know. Like, what's your name? Who's your daddy?

The little, ah!

I mean, it is evocative and absolutely phenomenal. And to your point, Ben, it sounds like a modern, it sounds modern. I love it. In so many ways, it really does, especially given what an influence a song like that had on a lot of bands that are big now.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's not the first single. But it's 1969 when Time of the Season becomes a hit in the United States. Technically, that's two years after it was released originally. And Blundstone himself has always found it interesting that people say 1969 was the summer of love and that Odyssey and Oracle epitomizes this period because it was recorded two years prior to the fact. So the same way that the name The Zombies was chosen before there was ever some sort of overarching zombie culture, Odyssey and Oracle was recorded before the Summer of Love that it came to characterize.

Well, timing is everything, man, because it's like, you know, the most recent Paul Thomas Anderson movie, One Battle After Another, he'd been writing and working on and workshopping for, I want to say, like 20 years. And it comes out, and it just feels like a film of our time and describing directly what's going on with all of the controversy around immigration and like internment camps and, you know, the craziness within the government and a lot of the just really gnarly rhetoric.

And that's how things work sometimes.

You'll have like a record that drops that just feels like it was made to describe the time, but it turns out it's kind of a coincidence in the way events sort of align and people sort of impart their own meanings.

And another quick historical pickle for the long-suffering members of the Zombies here, they had no idea that the song was a massive success in the States. They were broken up. Their quartet, as Stephen King would have said, had left for separate directions. Two of the musicians were writing music for other projects. The other three, including Blundstone, got day jobs.

And he has this anecdote about about how he ended up working at an insurance agency for almost a year, and he said, I didn't feel like it was my great calling or vocation or anything. It's just that I had to get a job. I didn't have a choice.

Well, it's so easy to take for granted how, to your point, Ben, releases happen instantaneously worldwide. When it comes to music, everything's streaming immediately. Everyone has access to everything all the time. which can lead to kind of decision fatigue in a way, and things just don't feel as special anymore. But back then, it's like, if something dropped in America, it would have a totally different trajectory in the UK and vice versa, having to do with what DJs decided to pick it up. There was no grand scheme of like, you know, the Illuminati of the music industry deciding what was going to get big. It was a lot more based on happenstance.

Right. Yeah.

And also, this was far before the era of what we would call social media. So even if you say you were a fan of the zombies in the United States, the odds are high that you haven't ever met them.

Right.

You may not have ever seen a show. You just love time of the season because it's been playing on the radio constantly and other unethical groups.

Took advantage of this.

There's a management company in 1969 called Delta Promotions. Natalia, I want to point out that your drug jokes are awesome. Natalia ultimately teaches us that Delta, whose story is very fuzzy and sketchy, managed not one, but two entirely fake versions of the zombies. Other groups, they played instruments They toured around the United States, Delta promotions raked in the cash, but none of them were the zombies themselves.

Some of them were.

Like blues guys, but whatever they were playing was sometimes not even close to the actual sound of the zombies. But audiences didn't know that, so they just paid their money for the ticket and got to say, wow, I can't believe I saw the zombies live. They sound way different than they do on their records.

Yeah.

No, it's certainly not.

And I think a lot of folks maybe assumed that the band were not a live performing band. That was really common back then. The Beatles did do their famous tour of the United States and, you know, Ed Sullivan show and all that. But then once they really started getting into their super psychedelic period, they didn't play live like at all.

And that was not uncommon.

Yeah, so we're not calling the audience gullible or knuckleheads. They just didn't know what the score was. The first imposter band was called the Texas Zombies. And even, it's so weird, we've got a quote for you here, folks, but it's so weird how even the members of these so-called imposter bands were getting the rug pulled over their eyes.

Correct.

And this is one of the members of that iteration of the Fake Zombies Recall. As far as the zombies, I was told they didn't exist, that they were only a studio sound. I was just excited and flattered. I'd only been playing for a few years, and the other guys were pro-level at that point. I didn't look at it as anything more than a chance to have some fun, hang out with some cool guys, learn some songs, go somewhere outside of this hillbillyville, and earn a little money.

And that is coming to us from an article by Daniel Ralston for BuzzFeed, The True Story of the Fake Zombies, The Strangest Con in Rock History. So, Daniel, Delta Promotions asked these Texas zombies to go on a short tour as yet another band. They're a less successful band that also recently broke up. They're called The Rose Garden. They were a folk rock quintet from L.A., and they had a 1967 Top 20 hit called Next Plane to London.

That's the only song the fake band bothered learning. The rest of their set was perfect. pretty much generic blues.

So audiences were so hungry for live music that they just didn't really think to question it. They were just like, don't look a gift band in the mouth. So the fake Rose Garden, despite the fact that the real Rose Garden had a female lead singer, Diana DeRose, And this Rose Garden duplicate or doppelganger act had a male lead singer.

DeRose was from West Virginia, but reportedly claimed that she was from Blackpool, England. And even fact checking stuff like that wasn't a particular priority in this era. And one of the great drug jokes that Natalia made is the fact that when there were women rock journalists writing about these types of bands and interviewing people that had gone to the concerts, it was all kind of a drugged out game of telephone. Very difficult to fact check just about anything when everyone was all looted up, zooted and looted.

Yeah, and nobody was confronting the fake Rose Garden that would later become the fake zombies about this. People asked, people started asking, hey, where's your female lead singer? And they would say, oh, you know, She's somewhere else. And they got they got their jimmies about them because they realized they could get away with this. As you said, no audiences were just so thirsty for live music. So the fake Rose Garden slash fake zombies decide to tour without a keyboard player for their gigs where they pretend to be the zombies and the zombies die. music is pretty keyboard heavy.

Yeah, and they had a really funny fake backstory that maybe added a little bit to the mystique, the idea that their keyboard player got busted in Dallas and was rotting in a jail cell somewhere. So Delta seemed to have a pretty good handle on this fraudulent band business model. The concert promoters in most cities knew what they were in on the scam. They knew they were getting fake versions of these bands, but obviously they could get them for a lot cheaper, and people were still paying for tickets.

They operated as independent entities, with each taking a huge percentage of the money earned. So a very similarly, I don't know, advantage-taking model to what was going on with the real zombies. Even these fake zombies were also getting taken for a ride. Yeah, because they were really getting extorted.

Since what could they do, right? Because if they tried to get a more fair deal from these different venues, all those venues had to do was threaten to expose them. And that's where we see one of the fake zombie members, people like Mark Ramsey, say, you know, we were getting swindled. The audience was getting swindled. The fans would leave disappointed.

The band would leave town as quickly as possible. They were like traveling con artists for a while. But oh, yeah.

Skip in town. Right. Right. Before people came after them with, you know, pitchforks.

Yeah. Yeah.

And this is just the first fake zombies band. The second fake zombies band is what we can call the Michigan zombies.

These folks were actually really, really good.

Right. And to be clear, Ben, I'm pretty sure we're on the same page here. We're just using the shorthand for like they were just billed as the zombies. It wasn't like it was the Texas zombies, the Michigan zombies on the on the billboard or the posters. It was just right.

Yeah, they were called the the first one was called the original zombies.

Exactly. So therein lies the grift.

And it is funny because this does sort of predict the future of like really elaborate tribute acts, which is not illegal, obviously.

I do sometimes wonder, and I used to run sound at a venue.

That hosted a lot of tribute acts, how that works in terms of royalties.

I've always wondered.

I imagine a lot of the lesser known ones fly under the radar, but I guess if you're like the biggest Kiss cover band in the world, like Kiss Army, maybe you are having to kick back a little bit to Kiss, especially since we know a lot of those Kiss guys are pretty litigious.

Gene Simmons runs a financial empire that happens to also play music.

Correct.

And is, uh, by all accounts, I'll see it a real piece of work.

Uh-huh. No, not, not, not, not a good dude.

Um, so most of the time Delta would claim to the whole ship of thesis argument or question that their touring zombies did have one original member, um, which gave them a little air of credibility. Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is where we go to Chris White, one of the Zombies, actual, I'll call them. He remembers the time a local radio promoter reached out to him and said, hey, the zombies are apparently coming to tour my city. And White said, well, they're not the real zombies because we are and we're here. The promoter said, well, I don't know.

You might be the fake zombies. How do I know you're really Chris White? And this was enough of an impetus, enough of a feather on the camel's back of misidentification that For the original zombies to say, okay, we have to go back, we have to get the band back together literally and do a third album if only to establish that we are who we are and are in fact alive.

For sure, but it didn't take off right away.

They made an album that they would consider or what you could consider like a proof of life album called R.I.P., which is clever considering the zombies of it all. It didn't get released in the UK until the 2000s, like until 2010. It was also a difficult task to reform the band because some of those guys, like you said, had kind of gone straight. They were working, you know, square jobs and maybe didn't really have any interest in doing this.

So they had to be convinced.

Yeah, yeah, and their reunion did, by the way, ultimately fail, and they abandoned the recording session, which is part of the reason RIP doesn't come out until so much later in the game. And this teaches us another lesson, because Delta and companies like them are getting backlash from bands whose identities it had stolen, right? And they could only do this grift, like a Ponzi scheme, up to a certain point. They eventually realized they could no longer keep up this grand charade, which I like to pronounce that way.

The beginning of the end comes when a fake version of the animals, also created by Delta, get confronted by the founder of the actual animals, a guy who still fascinates me named Eric Burden. He's got a bit of an ego, does Eric, so he doesn't take well to impersonators.

He sure does.

And by the way, there's a really great publication called Far Out Magazine out of the U.K., And they have a really cool article called Delta Promotions, the company responsible for a string of fake bands. So Delta was not only ripping off the zombies, they were ripping off other bands like The Animals, other bands like The Archies, and a handful of others. So they were taking advantage of that sort of live music scarcity and the fact that a lot of these bands maybe were more studio creations.

And because there wasn't that instantaneous cancel culture kind of ability for people to call this stuff out.

On the internet.

It's not really the same thing as cancel culture, but you see what I'm saying. They were able to pull this off for a lot longer than you certainly would be able to get.

Away with today.

And one version of this that is sort of contemporary is a band doing this themselves.

I don't know if you know the band Death Grips. They did a thing for a while.

They considered, you know, they're all about these like elaborate kind of performance art kind of things where they even like, I think they, They took all the money that the label fronted them for the promotion of this album that they made called No Love Deep Web. And they spent it all on a lavish, like, you know, staying at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and making videos from inside of it.

And then they leaked the album themselves.

But they also would often hire fake musicians to go on tour as themselves and play music.

Impersonating Death Grips.

They would also even do stuff where they would have shows set up where the equipment would just be set up on stage and then no one would ever come on stage.

My favorite version of this is the legendary MF Doom for any hip hop fans. You're probably already aware, folks, that MF Doom became notorious over the course of his career for booking himself for so many shows that it'd be impossible for him to go to all of them. and then sending his own hand-picked impersonators with an MF Doom mask to perform. Just absolutely legendary. He never did the thing, though, that Eric Burden did when Eric Burden confronted the fake animals. He went to that fake animal show with a baseball bat, and apparently he got a bunch of his biker gang friends to dance chase the fake animals around and physically threaten them into no longer performing.

And so Delta, in a way, is kind of like those studios who do those purposeful ripoffs of blockbuster movies. So instead of the Terminator, you'd have the Eradicator at your local blockbuster or something.

Mockbusters. Mockbusters.

Thank you. Perfect.

Delta Promotions is doing that with music. They dissolve and the bands that are in their ill-gotten roster disappear. Our Texas Zombies go home to Dallas. A few of them get together and later form a little band called ZZ Top.

That is so cool. You guys know ZZ Top, the beardies, the beard guys.

The beardies and the one guy on the drums.

The one guy on the drums. Does he not have a beard as well? I guess maybe you're right.

He has, but he doesn't have a wizard beard.

It's not his wizard. He would get caught in the sticks.

There you go.

You got to think about the sticks. Congratulations, however, to the real zombies. Despite their trials and travails, they entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, just two years after the 50th anniversary of of Odyssey and Oracle. And that is our episode, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in. Big thanks to our super producer, Max the Madman Williams.

Huge thanks once again to our research associate extraordinaire on this one, Natalia Winkleman. Really, really excited to talk about music history. I think the both of us are music nerds in our own rights. Jonathan Strickland, The Quizster, AJ Bahamas, Jacobs, The Puzzler.

Dr.

Rachel Big Spinach Lance, as well as, of course, the Rude Dudes of Ridiculous Crime. If you love us, you'll love them. We can't wait for them to come back on the show very, very soon.

We'll see you next time, folks.

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The Weird Afterlife of The Zombies

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