Craig Heed is a musician from New York who plays in the bands Miracle Sweepstakes and Hit. Hit’s latest record, Bestseller, is out now on One Weird Trick.
(Photo Credit: Sam Blieden)
The US versions of British Invasion albums are hilarious in retrospect. The version of Rubber Soul that Brian Wilson described as blowing his mind because “it was all one thing” — the very template for Pet Sounds — was the Capitol Records hatchet job that omits “Drive My Car” and “Nowhere Man,” and opens with a song off Help!. American listeners didn’t get A Hard Day’s Night, the epochal first Beatles album to exclusively feature brand new Lennon/McCartney tunes, but rather A Hard Day’s Night, the movie soundtrack featuring the instrumental “Ringo’s Theme.”
The Zombies were not immune to such label overreach, as Decca Records issued different versions of their debut album on either side of the pond: The Zombies in America, and Begin Here in the UK.
As lead singer Colin Blunstone explains below, the recently released Begin Here reissue aims to consolidate these two versions, to better document “the full story of our recording history at that point.” At that point, the band was just a few months removed from winning an Evening News-sponsored battle of the bands competition, where the prize included a recording session with Decca. The resulting single, “She’s Not There,” went to #1 in the Cashbox Top 100, and brought with it pressures from Decca to produce a timely follow-up.
As such, the “fast and furious” recording of their first full-length featured last-minute crate digging for cover material and “fierce” tensions with their producer Ken Jones. I think that speaks to a side of the Zombies that’s not often credited, but clearly reflected on this reissue. The group deserve their flowers for bringing a jazzy sophistication to Beat music, as “She’s Not There” and their cover of Gershwin’s “Summertime” both demonstrate. But the raw energy of their rendition of “Road Runner,” early original “It’s Alright with Me,” and the awesomely snotty vocal delivery on “I Got My Mojo Working,” are almost prescient in how they anticipate everything from Nuggets to punk. More importantly, the Rod Argent and Chris White-penned tracks flash the potential they’d realize on their next album. Begin Here isn’t just a great and multifaceted snapshot of what the Zombies were, it’s a signpost toward what they’d become.
Craig Heed: I was reading that the sessions spanned from mid-to-late 1964 and — at least retrospectively — the way people talk about music at that time, that’s at least a year before the album as a format was really being thought of as the main event. It was a more singles-oriented kind of market. I’m curious: going into those sessions, do you remember what your conception of an album was as an art form or how important the album felt to you at that time?
Colin Blunstone: No, I think for most people in the music business, honestly, in 1964, the album was a bit of an afterthought. It was often a collection of singles and B-sides and maybe a few other tracks as well, but the single really dominated the music industry at that time. I think that the success of “She’s Not There” took Decca very much by surprise, and all of a sudden, they put the pressure on for an album. And it was recorded really quickly — remember that we were touring all the time as well at the time. And also that Rod Argent and Chris White were just establishing themselves as writers, so they didn’t have a repertoire of songs hidden away that they could present to the band. They were writing day-by-day. So it was a little bit of a pressured environment getting this first album together.
Craig: Do you think that affected the goals with the album at all? I know the self-titled EP was recorded seemingly over the same span and came out a couple of months before, and some of the songs on The Zombies EP reappear on the album. Did you have a clear notion session to session like, “These songs are going to be on Begin Here,” or “these songs are going to be used for a single,” or anything like that?
Colin: If you [asked] all four of the living Zombies — and I’ve seen this happen, in an interview — you would get four different answers. So I can only answer for myself. But I think we were just following the wishes of Decca and recording as often as they asked us to record. And of course, Rod and Chris were desperately trying to establish themselves as writers as well. But I don’t see in my memory any clear cut aims, you know, “Now we will record an album over the next few months.” It was like, “Decca Records need tracks now, there’s going to be an album, we have to get into the studio.”
And the recording was very, very quick. Rod will still talk about this with a degree of regret, and maybe a tad of anger, that one of the tracks that he sang lead on was “I Got My Mojo Working,” and he wanted to try it in a different way. It was all one-take stuff, so he tried it in a very different way, one take, and he thought, No, no, that doesn’t work. He went into the control room and said to Ken Jones, who was producing us, “No, that didn’t work. Let me do it how I normally do it.” And Ken Jones just said, “No, no, no, that’s fine, that’s fine.” And that’s how it was recorded.
“Tell Her No” — they were recording some backing tracks through the evening. They would probably record four or five backing tracks and it was getting very late and I’d fallen asleep. They woke me up to sing and there’s a line, I think it’s in the middle of the second chorus — it’s completely mumbled. So I was half-asleep and I went back to the control room to Ken Jones, and I said, “Ken, I’m really sorry, but I mumbled a line in the second chorus.” And he just said, “Oh, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” And that single went on, I think it was number six in the charts and sold pretty much a million copies. And I don’t know what that shows you about recording, but people will spend hours and hours, weeks trying to get a performance right. And we would just do one take, and even if there was a mistake in it, generally that’s how it went out. It was very fast and furious.
Craig: I’d read that Ken Jones very early on was very encouraging, specifically to Rod, about songwriting and writing original songs. But I’d also read those stories about “Tell Her No” and “I Got My Mojo Working.” And I think I read an article that maybe later on when you guys did “Is This The Dream” that hearing the playback, you were like, “That’s great.” Then you went out for lunch and came back and felt he just kind of turned it into something completely different. What was your general relationship with Ken Jones like and do you think that informed when you self-produced later on?
Colin: Well, Ken is a lovely guy, absolutely charming. But he could be formidable in the studio. And one thing, he was adamant he didn’t want us in the mixing studio — absolutely not. And Chris and Rod did challenge him, and it got quite fierce in the studio and control room.
The example that you just mentioned, that’s the one I really remember. We recorded it in the evening, and I think Rod and I walked up the road from Decca Studios to the pub on the corner. There’s a gig upstairs called Klooks Kleek, it’s quite a famous pub. And so we had a couple of pints while they were mixing — they didn’t take long to mix it in those days. But when we went back to the studio, I have to say, I didn’t recognize what he was playing to us at all. I couldn’t work out how it could have happened because we just recorded it ourselves. But I thought he was playing another version by another band. It just sounded so strange. And that did go off on and on until we did a cover of a Little Anthony and the Imperials song called “Goin’ Out of My Head,” which was a big hit in America but wasn’t a hit in the UK. And the mix of that, everything got lost. Absolutely everything got lost. And that was the end. I wasn’t in on the conversation; I think by now, Rod and Chris were probably more in the driver’s seat, because they were the writers. It was just established that Ken wasn’t going to produce us anymore. But he was really great.
Craig: I think I heard you say that getting the cover selections for Begin Here was kind of a difficult process. I remember you mentioned that the choice for “Road Runner” came from seeing the Rolling Stones play it live. I’m curious in general, do you remember what the process of picking covers was?
Colin: Well, it was very casual. I mean, it was just sitting around in a room having a conversation. But we were caught out because, as I said before, Rod and Chris hadn’t established themselves as writers. They didn’t have, you know, 20 songs that we could go through. And until that point, we were huge Beatles fans, so we were just playing local gigs and we would play a lot of Beatles songs. Now on our first album, we can’t record Beatles songs. So we’re going through our setlists: There are no Rod and Chris tunes in there, we take all the Beatles songs out, and it started to get a bit difficult.
And I remember for the album, we did a song by Solomon Burke called “Can’t Nobody Love You,” and I don’t think we’d ever played that in concert. I just had a wonderful Solomon Burke album at home and I said, “Have you ever heard this song? This is a really good song.” And I think probably a few hours later, we were recording it. So there was almost a slightly desperate edge about finding material for the first album. But they were talked about in a very casual fashion.
The “Road Runner” one, we went and saw the Stones when they just made their first record, and it was just coming to the bottom of the charts. They were playing a little club called Studio 51, just off Leicester Square in London. Very small club, absolutely packed out. They were fantastic — one of the most exciting, if not the most exciting concert I’ve ever been to. They were playing lots of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and people like that, and Chris White actually went up to them and talked to them afterwards because they were just standing around, and they were talking about where they source their material from. And from that, we got “Road Runner.”
Craig: One thing I’ve always wondered about — and I know you were less involved in the songwriting at this point — but one of your quintessential covers is “Summertime,” and it’s got the lyric, “Your daddy’s rich/And your ma is good looking.” Did that subconsciously seep into, “What’s your name?/Who’s your daddy?/Is he rich like me?” in “Time of the Season”?
Colin: Absolutely, Rod would always say that “What’s your name? Who’s your daddy?” is a nod to “Summertime.” It was sort of a featured song. It’s funny because, you know, “Summertime,” it’s not a rock & roll tune. We were playing rock & roll venues and we played — we would call it a jazz waltz. It’s quite unusual, the way we do it. But it was very much a featured song when we played live. And I think it’s quite a favorite song for people who listen to our recordings as well.
Craig: I was reading about “The Way I Feel Inside” and how originally, there was an instrumental accompaniment through the whole song, but that Rod felt it made the melody feel “mundane.” And so you guys opted to cut out the instrumental track and have it be a cappella until his organ comes in at the end. I was curious, do you remember when you were recording that, was there an instrumental track you were singing to in the beginning, or did you just kind of sing it cold?
Colin: How you would hear it, that’s how I sang it. I think that was just one take. But we did everything in one take, we thought that’s the way it was done. And actually, for most people, that was the way it was done. We just did it. The only thing that was added is the coin at the end. Ken Jones did that and I wasn’t there when that was put on.
Craig: I remember when we talked about Odessey and Oracle, a big part of the impetus for reissuing it was to restore it to its original mono format. Was there any consideration when you were putting together the reissue of Begin Here that it was almost like codifying the definitive version of your debut album?
Colin: Yes, of course. This reissue combines the two albums so that, in a way, you can hear what the band was like at that time. This is the full story of our recording career at that point. So it gives you an overview of what the band was up to in the studio at that time, because obviously the UK audience probably didn’t hear the album in the same way as the US audience did. But now you can hear the whole thing.
