The Zombies - Call of The Night

 

The Zombies - Call of The Night

(soniclovenoize “1966 Album” reimagination) 

Side A:

1.  Indication

2.  I’ll Call You Mine

3.  Out of The Day

4.  Is This The Dream?

5.  Goin’ Out of My Head

6.  A Love That Never Was

Side B:

7.  She Does Everything For Me

8.  Call of The Night

9.  How We Were Before

10.  This Old Heart of Mine

11.  Gotta Get A Hold of Myself

12.  I Don’t Want To Worry

This is the second entry in my reimagining of The Zombies discography, which attempts to reorganize the band’s output into five separate albums.  This album attempts to collect The Zombies’ material from 1966, as a stopgap between my previous reconstruction Remember You (which collected their 1965 singles) and their legendary psychedelic masterpiece Odessey and Oracle (1968).  Using the band’s Spring 1966 single sessions as the base of the album, this represents what I believe is a very specific micro-era of The Zombies: the transition from their early pop singles into a more psychedelic album-oriented direction.  I’ve also made some unique edits to some of the tracks in order for this collection to sound more like a unified and cohesive album.  

After the double-punch of back-to-back hits with “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No”, pop-rock darlings The Zombies spent the majority of 1965 attempting to replicate their success.  Despite a great number of original songs penned by bassist Chris White and keyboardist Rod Argent, nothing seemed to stick, and the band focused on touring.  One final attempt at a single was recorded in November 1965 and showed a slight change in musical direction: “Is This The Dream”.  A great pop single with a decidedly beefy, Motown flavor, the song did not make a dent in the charts as it was hoped.  

By the time the band regrouped to try to create another hit, rock music was already changing.  In May 1966, entered the studio to record the more colorful and uptempo “Indication” and “She Does Everything For Me”, the piano jaunt “I’ll Call You Mine” and the moody “Gotta Geld a Hold of Myself.”  “Indication” failed to chart when released the following month, despite being up to snuff and showing the band developing musically, akin to the Rolling Stones’ Between The Buttons and The Beatles Revolver.  Returning to the studio that fall, the band shifted gears completely and recorded the Dianne Warwick cover “Goin Out Of My Head”, with a decidedly lounge atmosphere, complete with vibes and horns.  For good measure, the band also recorded studio demos of several new compositions, such as Argent’s ballad, “A Love That Never Was”, White’s garage rocker “Out of the Day”, White’s dirge “Call of the Night” (which was later rewritten into "Girl Help Me” for the RIP sessions).  Additionally, the band produced group home demos without drummer Hugh Grundy, such as Colin Blunstone’s scant original “I Don’t Want To Worry”.  

Seeing the ending was near, The Zombies decided to go out on a high note, and self-produce one final album they could be proud of.  After relentless rehearsals throughout 1967, the band entered into EMI Studios in June–directly after The Beatles, who had just finished Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band–and quickly tracked the perfect psychedelic pop album, on their own terms.  The resulting album Oddessey and Oracle, although a masterpiece, was completely overlooked and its lead single “Care of Cell 44” did not chart.  Going their separate ways, Argent and White continued their musical partnership into the progressive rock band Argent, with Blunstone, Grundy and guitarist Paul Atkinson all resorting to day jobs.  It wasn’t until legendary American keyboardist Al Kooper rediscovered the album and gave “Time of The Season” a push as a single, that the album got its due: becoming a hit in 1969, a year after the band had broken up!  

The purpose of this series of Zombies album re-imaginings is to reconstextualize their discography away from singles and into albums for appreciation, and the goal of Call of The Night is to represent this specific transitional era of the band that typically gets glossed over.  Being a fan of “Indication” and its associated 1966-era tracks, I’ve always felt it unfortunate that there was not a full album’s worth of material from this era to collect together as its own thing (the songs are usually clumped together with The Zombies’ 1965 singles, which I feel is its own era in itself).  But are we actually able to construct a 1966 album?  We actually can!  

The basis of Call of The Night are the five studio tracks recorded in 1966: “Indication”, “I’ll Call You Mine” (the original, ‘undubbed’ version), “Goin Out of My Head", "She Does Everything for Me” and “Gotta Get A Hold of Myself”.  Additionally, we will use the three studio demo tracks recorded around this time that seem to work well as singular songs: “Call of The Night”, “Out of The Day”, “A Love That Never Was”, as well as the home demo “I Don’t Want To Worry” (I have added reverb to the last one to smooth it out and make it sound less demo-y).  Struggling to fit more material, we will use the live BBC session of “This Old Heart of Mine” from November 1966, in which I have re-edited to omit the audience and announcer to make it seem like a standard studio recording.  With only ten of the necessary twelve songs for an album, we’ll have to look backwards into 1965 for two ‘filler tracks’ that were previously unused in my 1965 Album reimagining Remember You: “Is This The Dream”, a late 1965 single that to this ear sounds more at home on this 1966 album than with the 1965 singles; and Blunstone’s quaint ballad “How We Were Before”--which in itself wasn’t actually released until 1966 as the b-side to “Indication”, as the band held it over too!  

 

 

Sources used:

• The Zombies - Zombie Heaven (1997 CD release) 

 LISTEN TO THIS RE-IMAGINING ON MY PATREON

The Zombies - Remember You

 The Zombies - Remember You

(soniclovenoize “1965 Album” reimagining)

 

Side A:

1.  She’s Coming Home

2.  I Want You Back Again

3.  I Must Move

4.  If It Don’t Work Out

5.  Don’t Go Away

6.  I Know She Will

 

Side B:

7.  Just Out Of Reach

8.  Whenever You’re Ready

9.  I’ll Keep Trying

10.  I Love You

11.  Don’t Cry For Me

12.  Remember You

 

At long last, we are revisiting The Zombies!  This is the first in a series of album reimaginings which recontextualizes The Zombies’ discography as a series of albums, rather than the scattered releases that have existed in numerous forms throughout the last 50 years.  Remember You collects the singles sessions recorded throughout the spring and summer of 1965 into a cohesive album, meant to be the proper follow-up to their debut album Begin Here.  The best sources were used, additional mastering performed on the demo tracks to match the mixes of the single releases, and presented as the band originally intended– all in mono!  

Following the surprise double-punch hits of 1964’s “She’s Not There” and 1965’s “Tell Her No”, The Zombies seemed to be a formidable adversary of another British pop group.  Although sharing three-part harmonies, original intricately-written pop songs and a modern rock ‘n’ roll backbeat, these “Fab Five” seemed a bit more posh and cultured than their Liverpool contemporaries.  Their two hits were collected into their debut album Begin Here in April 1965 (or alternatively, released as The Zombies in the US in January 1965) and the band embarked on endless gigs throughout the European college circuit, displaying their songwriting prowess as well as their penchant for American R&B covers.  

While The Beatles were asking for Help and The Rolling Stones were Going Out of Their Heads, The Zombies’ patrons Decca Records chose to instead make them a “singles band”, and to forgo recording another proper LP like their contemporaries.  On March 2nd, the quintet entered the studio to record a slew of new, original compositions, in the hopes that one (or more) would be a hit: keyboardist Rod Argent’s “She’s Coming Home” and “I Want You Back Again”, and bassist Chris White’s “I Must Move” and “Remember You”.  Also tracked was a song penned by lead singer Colin Blunstone, “Just Out Of Reach” (and its variant “Come On Time”) meant for the film Bunny Lake Is Missing, which actually featured the band on-screen!  An additional session was held on March 31st for two more songs meant for the film’s soundtrack: “Nothing’s Changed” and an alternate version of “Remember You.”  “She’s Coming Home” b/w “I Must Move” was released in April, but did not hit the Top 40.  “I Want You Back Again” b/w the Begin Here deep-cut “I Remember When I Loved Her” was released in June but barely scraped the Top 100.  Strike one and strike two...  

After returning from their first US tour, the band re-entered the studio on June 24th in a second attempt to record a hit single, this time with Argent’s uptempo rockers “Whenever You’re Ready” and “I’ll Keep Trying”, and White’s ballad “Don’t Go Away”.  A second session a few weeks later on July 8th spawned even more excellent quality songs: White’s “I Love You”, “Don’t Cry for Me” and “I Know She Will”, Blunstone’s “How We Were Before” and Argent’s “If It Don’t Work Out”.  While the later became a demo presented to Dusty Springfield for her Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty album, “Whenever You’re Ready” b/w “I Love You” was released as a single in August in the US (September in the UK) and while it gained critical praise, refused to chart.  Three strikes and The Zombies were out.  

Although music history would later trumpet the band’s 1968 last-ditch effort Odessy and Oracle as a forgotten cult classic, the sixteen original songs recorded by The Zombies during the spring and summer of 1965 remained as either failed singles or outtakes in the vaults, heard only as bonus tracks on various reissues.  Four of these recordings (“I’ll Keep Trying”, “If It Don’t Work Out”, “Don’t Cry for Me” and “I Know She Will”) would later be embellished and overdubbed in the studio by Argent & White in December 1968, for inclusion on a proposed posthumous Zombies album R.I.P., which was ultimately scrapped, leaving these revised versions also unreleased.  Luckily, the entire Zombies discography was collected and released on the boxset Zombies Heaven in 1997.  

But should this really be the fate of the only band that this author believes could hold a candle to The Beatles?  Are two albums and a smattering of random songs the best way to appreciate The Zombies through the modern lens?  I propose that it is not, and we are able to make an additional two albums as a stopgap between Begin Here and Odessey and Oracle, as well as a restructured R.I.P. as a fifth and final album.  

The first entry into this reimagined Zombies discography is Remember You, which specifically culls the best twelve songs from the sixteen recorded between March-July 1965, for a theoretical August 1965 release.  I believe this specific set of songs could have been quite a strong album in itself, far superior to Begin Here.  I have used Zombie Heaven as the source material, as it features all the original mono masters of the songs; I will be using the original 1965 “undubbed” versions of the four R.I.P. tracks, for which I have used Ozone Izotope Master Rebalance to match the mix of the other songs.  

 

Sources used:

• The Zombies - Zombie Heaven (1997 CD release) 

   

   LISTEN TO THIS RE-IMAGINING ON MY PATREON
  

The Zombies - RIP

The Zombies – R.I.P.

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1.  She Loves The Way They Love Her

2.  Imagine The Swan

3.  If It Don’t Work Out

4.  Smokey Day

5.  I’ll Keep Trying

6.  Conversation Off Floral Street

Side B:

7.  I’ll Call You Mine

8.  Telescope (Mr. Galileo)

9.  I Know She Will

10.  To Julia (For When She Smiles)

11.  Don’t Cry For Me

12.  Walking In The Sun

This is a reconstruction of what would have been the final Zombies album, an intended 1969 release as a posthumous follow-up to their sleeper-hit Odessey and Oracle.  While all 12 albums tracks were collected in the box set Zombie Heaven in 1997 and then sequenced as originally intended as an official Japanese release in 2008, my reconstruction attempts to create a more well-rounded and cohesive album with a new sequence that more evenly distributes the posthumous 1969 Argent-led tracks with the overdubbed 1964-1966 Blunstone-led outtake tracks, as well as using alternate mixes of both.  Also through creative editing I was able to add more Colin Blunstone vocals to the album and less Rod Argent lead vocals.  In effect, my R.I.P. seems a bit less awkwardly anachronistic, and more a cohesive theoretical baroque-pop follow-up to Odessy and Oracle. 

The Zombies are a perfect example of how sometimes great things can be overlooked and simply fall through the cracks.  Despite consistently producing some of the most well-crafted and well-performed pop-rock songs of the 1960s, the amount of new material from the band approached a near standstill by 1966.  The music scene was becoming increasingly psychedelic and the generally straight-laced Zombies were in danger of becoming irrelevant.  With a label quickly becoming uninterested and a live circuit drying up, they pooled their own scant resources together and financed the recording of their sophomore album, a sink or swim record entitled Odessey and Oracle.  Recorded literally as The Beatles walked out of EMI Studios after completing Sgt. Pepper in 1967, The Zombies utilized the plethora of exotic instruments their British pop brethren left lying around.  Adorning magnificently-written psychedelic pop songs with these instruments as well as serendipitous harmonies, the outcome was one of the greatest masterworks of the 1960s, let alone 1967.  But the unfortunate reality is that relatively few people really paid attention.  The magnificent “Care of Cell 44” ceased to be a hit, live gigs dried up and singer Colin Blunstone, having no stake in The Zombies’ publishing royalties, left the band because he simply didn’t have the money to continue.   The album was released to silence in 1968. 

Yet due to friends in high places—namely Al Kooper who championed the band to Columbia in the US—Odessey and Oracle was given a second chance on the other side of the Atlantic.  But because of the fatal choice to push “Butcher’s Tale” as a single, the album again fell to silence.  It wasn’t until another year passed that radio picked up on “Time of The Season” which propelled the song to an eventual status as an anthem of the Summer of Love, despite being two years late and from a band that had ceased to exist.  But keyboardist Rod Argent and bassist Chris White, whom were already occupied in their current project Argent, were offered the chance to essentially capitalize in the unexpected interest in the dead Zombies who were suddenly undead.  In an effort to create closure to the band that had passed away before it’s time—and a chance to not only clear the vaults but to advertize their band Argent—the pair began work on the final Zombies album, the posthumous R.I.P. 

The plan was simple: the first side of the album was to feature “new” Zombies recordings and the second side of the album to feature newly finished outtakes from the numerous singles-sessions from 1964-1966.  Argent and White collected the best of the series of demos recorded in-between the demise of The Zombies and the formation of Argent, recordings which were used to secure their own record contract.  While sometimes reminiscent of the mid-60s psyche-pop of The Zombies, their songs bared a stronger resemblance to the tail-end of the 60s and the hard rock/prog of Argent.  In stark contrast to this, the outtakes found on side B were simply anachronistic, sounding exactly like they were: tracks recorded around1965 with new layers of lush harmonies and some with new orchestration.  As it stands, R.I.P. sounded more like a document of how far recording techniques had progressed in the 1960s.  Of the Side B tracks, only “Walking In The Sun” approached the soundquality of Side A with newly recorded symphonic instruments and new lead vocal by Colin Blunstone juxtaposed with the backing track dating from a demo session in 1964.  Singles were released for “Imagine The Swan” and a newly-finished “If It Don’t Work Out” (which was originally a 1965 demo for Dusty Springfield), both failing to replicate the success of “Time Of The Season” or even their 1965 hit “Tell Her No” and the R.I.P. album was scrapped. 

Of the 12 songs slated for the album, most trickled out as bonus tracks on various compilations throughout the decades.  It wasn’t until 1997 with the insanely comprehensive four-disc box set Zombie Heaven that the public heard R.I.P., as all 12 of the tracks from the album were featured on the ‘rare/studio outtakes’ disc .  Finally in 2000, the same exact R.I.P. masters as found on Zombie Heaven were released as their own standalone album in correct track sequence, albeit as a Japanese import with numerous bonus tracks (followed by a 2008 compilation of outtakes from this era of the band called Into The Afterlife).  In plain sight—but also apparently as overlooked as  Odessey and Oracle was in 1968—we could hear the bizarre combination of late-60s proto-prog and mid-60s pop.  Perhaps we can have a second memorial service for The Zombies and allow this album to better rest in peace?

My reconstruction of R.I.P. had two main goals:    

1) To resequence the songs and use some alternate mixes so that the vast time difference between recording dates is less-apparent, making the Argent-led songs and the refurbished classic Zombies songs intermingle, in turn making a more cohesive album.  

2) Less Rod Argent and MORE Colin Bluestone!  After all, he was the voice of The Zombies.  To do this we are able to use recordings from Blunstone’s first solo album One Year (produced by fellow Zombies Argent & White), replacing Argent’s vocals with Blunstone’s.  Just as well, we will drop the two weakest Argent-led songs for others, making the album more Zombie-like and less Argent-like.

Side A begins much as the official R.I.P., with “She Loves The Way They love Her”.  Instead we use the version from One Year but with the audience sound effects from the R.I.P. version overdubbed at the appropriate points, effectively “replacing” Argent’s vocals with Blunstone’s.  The R.I.P. mix of “Imagine The Swan” is next, with the orchestral mix of “If It Don’t Work Out”  from the compilation Into The Afterlife following, an attempt to make a more baroque-pop follower to Odessey and Oracle.  Next, Colin Blunstone’s lead vocal from “Smokey Day” is extracted from his One Year album and superimposed into the alternate mix of Argent’s “Smokey Day” (a bonus track on the Repertoire remaster of Odessey and Oracle), again creating a new Colin lead vocal that sings a harmony to Rod’s.  Note that the vocals fall out of sync in the last verse, due to Colin intentionally deviating from the rhythm of the vocal; no attempt was made to change his artistic decision to sing the verse in that manner.  The R.I.P. versions of “If It Don’t Work Out” and “Conversations Off Floral Street” end the side, the later being the only post-break-up song on the album featuring the original Zombies lineup, including guitarist Paul Atkins and drummer Hue Grundy.

Side B opens with the R.I.P. version of “I’ll Call You Mine”, following with an unused Argent track from this era which seemed more appropriately Zombie-esque, “Telescope” from the Into The Afterlife compilation, which replaces “Girl Help Me”.  My own unique edit of “I Know She Will” follows when the first half of the orchestral version from Into The Afterlife is edited together with the second half of the full-band mix found on the R.I.P. album, creating a strong dynamic and emphasizing its orchestration.  Next is another “more Zombies-like Argent track” taken from Into The Afterlife and remixed my myself, the classical “To Julia” which occupies the same idiosyncratic function as “Butcher’s Tale” held on Odessey and Oracle and replaces “I Could Spend The Day”.  The R.I.P. mix of “Don’t Cry for Me” attempts one final ruckus before giving way to my own unique edit of “Walking In The Sun”, again editing the orchestral version from Into The Afterlife onto the full-band R.I.P. mix, creating a wide dynamic. 

Sources used:

The Zombies - Into The Afterlife (2007 Rhino Records)

The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle (1992 Repertoire Recrods)

The Zombies - R.I.P. (2008 Imperial Records Japan)

Colin Blunstone - One Year (2007 Water Music Records)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

*md5, artwork and tracknotes included