As it’s the scariest time of year, what a good time to talk about a band called the Zombies. This week’s story is about how a bunch of Texans went to take fame from the British rock band. It’s about how easy it was in the first 25 years of the rock and roll era to manipulate the system and screw talented performers out of money. This week the Beat Marches On to March 29th, 1969.
The Zombies had some success before 1969. Around the British invasion period in 1964, they had a hit with She’s Not There. The single even broke America with the hysteria around anything British at that period. They failed to reproduce the success of their first hit and by 1967 they were thinking about splitting up. In fact, if they didn’t have to fulfil their recording contract then they probably would’ve split.
So, in 1967, the band went to the famed music studio Abbey Road to record their final album Odessey and Oracle. By the spelling of Odyssey, it was clear that the band was checking out before the recordings started. They finished the album in late 1967 and went on their separate ways.
What helped the psychedelic inspiration of this album was the band recording in Abbey Road before The Zombies. The world’s biggest band The Beatles were recording a little album called Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Fab Four left a lot of the instruments they used to record their ground-breaking album in the studio, so the Zombies helped themselves to the stuff left behind.
What was unexpected on the Odessey and Oracle is that there was a bona fide hit on the album. You had to wait until the last track but the song blew up once it was found by Columbia Records new A+R man Al Kooper of Blood Sweat and Tears fame. It was the song Time of the Season. Weirdly the song never charted in the UK but by early 1969 the song was getting airplay in America.
The song peaked in March 1969 reaching number three on the Billboard Hot 100. This became a problem for promoters as they couldn’t make any money from live performances, which the public wanted to see, but they couldn’t. The band had been apart for two years and they didn’t want to get back together.
Delta Promotions was a music management company that had insisted they owned the rights to publish songs by bands they didn’t own. They would exploit the lack of coverage of the smaller up-and-coming bands of the time and hire imposters that didn’t look anything or sound anything like them.
Taking advantage of the Zombies break up Delta took advantage of the situation and formed not one but two versions of the band. One was from Massachusetts who tried to put on English accents for the crowd and the other one was from Texas who was Southern by the grace of God. This wasn’t the only band they exploited, Eric Burdon, singer for the Animals once confronted the fake Animals run by the company when they played the Whiskey a Go-Go in Los Angeles although he cannot remember the incident. Cartoon band The Archies among others were exploited too. It was easy they were a cartoon; you could put any Tom, Dick and Harry on stage and say there were a cartoon band.
The Archies were the beginning of the end for the Delta company. As the brains behind the real Archies, Don Kirshner whose other accolade was The Monkees, sued the company and won. The jig was up and not long after Delta went out of business. Not just because of the lawsuit but the concert promoters were getting savvy to the exploits.
The weirdest part of the two fake Zombies is that the Texas band proved to be more popular than the Massachusetts band. Most of them would go back to normality after the demise of Delta. A few went off to other bands or to teach music. Turns out some of them would become successful in their right.
In 1970 the rhythm section of the fake Texas Zombies, bass player Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard joined a new band in Texas. They would join guitarist Billy Gibbons in his band ZZ Top. As of 2020, the band has sold over 50 million albums and won Grammys and even music video awards. Famous for the long beards, other than Beard ironically, and self-proclaimed boogie-rock have been releasing material and touring non-stop since their inception.
Most of The Zombies have reformed since their breakup in 1967. A thirtieth-anniversary one-off tour in 1997 and a more permanent reformation in the early 2000s saw them touring and producing new material. In 2019 they co-headlined a tour with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys performing the Odessey and Oracle album from start to finish. The album was ranked in the top 500 albums by Rolling Stone magazine. They were inducted into the 2019 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The fake Zombies incident wasn’t the first time a company screwed a band over to make more money and wouldn’t be the last. It may not be as extreme as impersonating the band, but managers will try to take more than they are entitled to. There are countless stories of bands/artists suing for loss of royalties or damaging credibility. Not to say that all managers are that way inclined, but we tend to only hear the stories of the crooks that try to get away with it. Probably because that’s interesting viewing/reading.
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If anyone reading this would like to read more about this story, the sites used for research were:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/danielralston/the-true-story-of-the-fake-zombies-the-strangest-con-in-rock
Also, I would like to suggest the podcast Between the Linear Notes which has an episode about the whole incident which was also used in the research of the article.
If you want to request a story for The Beat Goes On blog, then you can contact jwhiteheadjournalism@gmail.com. We cannot guarantee that the story will be published but will be considered.
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