This review in the 1964 British Invasion series is dedicated to one of my favorite bands in this golden age of British pop and rock music. The Zombies added a level of sophistication to the music travelling from the British Isles across the pond to the US, by mixing R&B influences with the esthetics of the Brill Building songwriters. Procol Harum’s Matthew Fisher (organ on A Whiter Shade of Pale) said of the band: “I always liked The Zombies songs. The thing was, however, that you had this feeling about The Zombies that they were rather an intellectual group. I saw them as music for the more serious rock n’ roll enthusiast.”
The Zombies – She’s Not There
Rod Argent remembers vividly the first rehearsal he had with Colin Blunstone in the very early days of The Zombies, even before they settled on a band name: ”We were a three-guitar format. Colin was supposed to be the rhythm guitarist, and I heard that he sang a little bit. We all got together, played a bit of an instrumental, and then in the first break, I wandered over to a beat-up piano and started playing ‘Nut Rocker,’ the old B. Bumble and the Stingers hit. Colin ran over and thought it was fantastic. He said, ‘You’ve got to play piano in this band!’ And I looked at him and thought, I don’t know, groups are guitars – that’s what we should be doing. I wasn’t so sure about this.” But that was not the only musical instrument switcheroo that took place that day. Argent continues: “About 20 minutes later, Colin picked up an acoustic guitar when we were having coffee and he started singing an old Ricky Nelson song. I thought it was fantastic. I can still hear Ricky Nelson in Colin’s voice. I said, ‘My god, I had no idea you could sing like that. You’ve got to be lead singer.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll play piano and you be lead singer.’” And so the final roles of the band members fell into place, bringing about one of the most accomplished music ensembles to come out of the British Invasion phenomena of 1964.
‘The Zombies’ was an odd name for a band in the early 1960s. George Romero’s classic movie ‘Night of the Living Dead’ was still in the future, released in 1968. Blunstone recalled: “Every young band wants an original name. We were just in our teens. We tried the Mustangs. To be honest, I didn’t really know what a zombie was”. Argent was a little more knowledgeable of the lineage of Zombies: “I knew vaguely what they were: the Walking Dead from Haiti”. Ironically, the name was suggested by original bassist Paul Arnold, who soon left the band he christened. Luckily, the name survived.
The Zombies’ break came in May 1964 when they participated in a musical contest at Watford Town Hall, outside of their hometown of St. Albans. The competition, labeled ‘Herts Beat’, was sponsored by the London Evening News, advertised to seek the “top beat group in the country”. The Zombies participated in the first heat, one of 10 bands vying for a chance to win and compete in a final heat. Colin Blunstone remembers: “It was a bit like a football crowd. Everybody had banners and bells and rattles, and it was a wild place to play. And we won our heat. I think there were sort of 10 weeks of 10 bands, and the winner got through to the final. And then we won the final. It was a magical evening. I’ll never forget it.” The Zombies performed a cover of the Beates’ hit ‘You Can’t Do That’, released only a couple of months earlier as the B-side of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.
Winning the final heat earned The Zombies a prize of £250. More importantly, it brought with it an interest from Decca Records, who made an offer for a recording contract with the band. A month after the contest the Zombies showed up at Decca’s recording studios in West Hampstead to record four songs. One of them became their first No. 1 hit and a classic to this day. Bass player Chris White remembers when he was first introduced to the song when Rod Argent, who wrote it, played it to the band at his mother’s house: “It was absolutely fascinating. The song was breathtaking in its approach. We worked on some ideas and found out what to play on the bass. That was Rod’s first real experience of songwriting.” That song was ‘She’s Not There’.
A fantastic achievement indeed for such an early attempt at songwriting. Rod Argent recalled its inspiration: “There was a John Lee Hooker song called ‘No One Told Me’, which doesn’t sound anything like ‘She’s Not There’, but it has ‘no one told me’ as its first line. That just suggested the meter of the first line.” Colin Blunstone also thought the song was special, and he later recalled how compatible it was with his singing style: “I tend to sing sad songs better than happy-go-lucky songs, so often songs would have a sort of a haunting quality about them. ‘She’s Not There’ is probably a good example.”
Argent wrote the music with Colin Blunstone’s unique voice in mind, making sure it fits the range of the vocalist’s high voice. He said this about the inspiration for the melody: “The chord sequence, which started off as just being Am to D, was used in two or three songs that I liked. There was a Betty Carter song, and also an old Brian Hyland song which used that chord sequence. After that I just had it in my head to build it to a climax.” The song is a standout among its peers in the British Invasion for its clever structure and arrangement. Argent elaborated: “It’s really quite an unusually constructed song. It’s in three little sections. I wanted to use the meter of the actual lyrics to propel it towards that final section just on one note with chords changing underneath it, but with displaced rhythms.” Argent later said that the accents Blunstone puts on the words ‘way’, ‘acted’ and ‘color’, are displaced accents to the rhythm.
Shortly after the song was recorded, it came in front of a panel of guest musicians on the TV show Jukebox Jury. One of them was George Harrison. Colin Blunstone: “At that time a word from the Beatles was like something from Mount Olympus. Three previous records that came on before ours, George was saying things like ‘I don’t see that’, ‘That’s not a hit’, ‘I don’t really think much of it’. I thought ‘oh my god, if they actually get around to playing our record and he doesn’t like it, I am going to give up.’ She’s Not There came on and at the end of it he said ‘Well done, Zombies. That’s a hit.’ Then he said about the piano solo, ‘If that’s their real piano player, he’s really good.’”
The song was released in the UK on July 24, 1964 and a week later The Zombies appeared on the popular TV show Ready Steady Go. Blunstone remembers the experience of live performances in the band’s early days: “We carried our own PA: it was two T60 bass cabinets with the speakers, with an AC-100 Vox PA amp. Certainly, it gave us an edge in the early days because it meant we had a very good vocal sound. Our road manager hurt his back, he couldn’t lift anything, so often at gigs we had to lift all the gear out. And early on, girls would be trying to cut our hair. I’d see these scissors going past my eyes while I’ve got an amp in my arms, and I’d think ‘Oh dear, someone’s going to get maimed here!”
While in the UK the song was only a moderate hit, peaking at No. 12 in the singles chart, it hit the big time across the pond. After its release in the US in August 1964, it was picked up by a number of radio stations, including the influential New York City rock radio station WINS. It eventually reached the top of the Cashbox chart in December that year, becoming the first British Invasion non-Beatles original single to top a US chart.
Over the years the song influenced musicians of all sides of the music spectrum. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds said that after hearing the solo on ‘She’s Not There,’ it made him believe that it was possible to use scales like that in rock and roll. He added that without hearing that song that ‘Eight Miles High’ would not have been written and recorded the way that it was. Indeed, there is a lot to appreciate about ‘She’s Not There’. Argent: “There are a couple of chord sequences I liked very much. Particularly what attracted me was the bit that goes, ‘it’s too late to say you’re sorry’, when the chord changes from a major chord to a minor chord, but the bass doesn’t play the root of the chord.”
Even more impressive is the unexpected influence the song had on one of the best modern jazz guitarists. Rod Ardent tells an interesting story: “I met Pat Metheny for the first time when he was just becoming known in America. There was a jazz bass player named Jeff Berlin who said ‘You got to come and check out this guy’. So we went to Joe’s Pub in New York, and we saw a very small gig with Pat Metheny. After the show we all went back and Jeff Berlin introduced the group to me and said ‘This is Rod Argent.’ Pat Metheny said ‘Rod Argent? You wrote She’s Not There’? I said ‘yes’! I couldn’t believe he knew who I was! He said that it was the recording of ‘She’s Not There’ that showed him the way ahead of what he wanted to do musically. He mentioned all the modal stuff in the song. I thought ‘Bloody hell! There’s no modal stuff on ‘She’s Not There.’”
But Pat Metheny’s comment made Argent curious. He went back and started playing through the chords of She’s Not There. He continues: “I realized that what was in my head at the time was an A Minor to a D sequence in the verse. I actually tied it together by writing a bit of modal phrasing over that. I didn’t even know what I did because I was listening to so much Miles Davis at the time. I was always very into what was called modern jazz. It indirectly rubbed off on me without me realizing that I was trying to put anything like that in the song.”
You will be hard-pressed to find this level of sophistication in music that early in the British popular music scene. The Beatles and their contemporaries became more and more complex as the 1960s rolled along, and The Zombies were at the fore front of that movement. Rod Argent’s influences are perhaps the best indication of what led to creating this music as early as 1964: “I’ve always loved classical music – even in the early ‘60s when the Zombies were the center of my life, I saw nothing awry in listening to Bartok string quartets while adoring The Beatles’ Revolver or Rubber Soul. While listening endlessly to Cream’s Disraeli Gears, I was simultaneously discovering Stravinsky’s ‘Symphony of Psalms’ and finding that Tippett’s ‘Child of Our Time’ would make all the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. And I’ve always loved Bach.”
The Zombies – Tell Her No
The Zombies next major hit did not take long to follow. In November 1964 they recorded the song ‘Tell Her No’ – ‘No’ being the main point of the song, the word repeated 63 times. This time Rod Argent took the influence from another brilliant writer of sophisticated pop songs. Like many artists of the British Invasion, the songwriters of the Brill Building in New York City provided great material for British singers and bands to cover. The Zombies kept to original songs, but the influence is clear. Rod Argent: “Burt Bacharach was writing a lot of stuff around that time, and there were 9th and 13th chords on that which were quite unusual in pop music, but Bacharach was using them. I seem to remember having heard the Dionne Warwick stuff, and it was colored chords, and at least some of it was drinking in that atmosphere.” The Zombies had the chance to experience the music of Burt Bacharach up close when they toured with one of his best interpreters, singer Dionne Warwick. The packaged tour of Britain took place in October and November 1964 and also included The Searchers and The Isley Brothers.
You may be curious what is Colin Blunstone singing on one of the lines in the second refrain of the song, something that sounds like, ‘Don’t love this love from my arms’. The singer has a funny story to tell: “We would record probably three or four, maybe five backing tracks in an evening at Decca recording studios. And then we would put vocals on, and it would probably be 12 o’clock or 1 o’clock at night before I got round to singing. On this session I was fast asleep when they finished, and they woke me up to sing ‘Tell Her No.’ And in fact, there’s a mumbled line in the middle of it because I was half asleep when I was singing it. And I said, listen, guys, I better just do that again because there’s this mumbled line. And they said, oh, no, no, that’s fine. Don’t worry about that. And I’ve heard stories of people who – in bands who have been trying to copy our version of ‘Tell Her No,’ and they’ve been desperately trying to work out what the lyric is.“
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