I had a pretty good idea what to expect when I hopped in the car last Friday night to catch what was being billed as “The Zombies 50th Anniversary Tour” at Montgomery College’s small performing arts center in Silver Spring. It had all the makings of a mega-Bucket List item for an aging baby boomer like me: See the once-big 1960s rock band one time before you die, but, of more immediate concern, before they die.
Though I felt drawn to the event, I frankly expected the evening to be more depressing than enjoyable. I couldn’t help contextualizing the names of the group’s hits—observing, for example, that if this is the “Time of the Season,” in the Zombies’ case it’s late winter.
“She’s Not There”? Well, maybe she is, blokes, but you can’t see her because your vision is failing. Or perhaps you’re just trying to avoid that conversation where she gently suggests it’s time for adult diapers and you defiantly “Tell Her No,” even though you have to admit the leakage is getting embarrassing.
Throw in the venue size and host—a couple-hundred seats and a community college—and the presumed “crowd” of creaky old suburbanites sporting sad ponytails and resurrected tie-dye T-shirts, and I felt only slightly closer to “pumped” than I might have if I’d been thrown onto a charter bus by the Gray Panthers and forced to see a show at the Andy Williams Theater in Branson, Missouri.
Affirmation of my saddest assumptions began when I pulled into the venue’s small and only half-filled parking lot and continued as I entered a lobby dotted by clusters of the creaky old suburbanites my mind’s eye had described. The only people under 40 were a couple of attractive young women—Montgomery College students, perhaps—who were bartending beer and wine with all the kind solicitousness of high schoolers earning public service credit at an assisted living facility.
A souvenir table offered T-shirts, CDs and posters for depressingly low, low prices. You could buy a poster signed by Zombies headliners Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone for $20, for example. It made me wonder if I could’ve skipped the show and talked the band into performing a house concert in my sunroom and still gotten change back from my hundred.
It turned out that my seat, which I’d purchased online just a few days before, nevertheless was in the second row, stage left. As show time neared, I looked across the orchestra section and up at the balcony and was heartened to see the place starting to fill up. It would be more or less a full house by the time the opening act departed and the Zombies assumed the stage.
A few words about that opening act. Billed as “The Acoustic Strawbs,” they were an unplugged iteration of a band whose name sounded familiar, but who I couldn’t quite place. According to the concert program, they’d “come out of the early days of the British folk movement” and once had counted as a member Sandy Denny—a folk singer of greater fame who later joined the better-known Fairport Convention. Anyway, the trio of white-haired Englishmen walked slowly onto the stage, instruments in hand, and sat themselves down on folding chairs to which they would remain rooted for their entire hour-long set.
While two-thirds of the Strawbs look as though they might be capable of sustained verticality, such could not be said for the ample-gutted lead singer, whose voice mostly held through a series of ballads and protest songs that often seemed perilously close to claiming his last remaining breath. The trio did a creditable job, and I’m always appreciative of any degree of musical talent and singing ability given that I have none of either. But watching the Strawbs soldier through, looking like nothing so much as old friends of the deceased sharing bittersweet memories at an Irish wake, did nothing to dispel my prevalent melancholy. It didn’t help when the lead singer self-effacingly yet pleadingly suggested we all might like to purchase a Strawbs CD, available in the lobby, for placement in our granny’s Christmas stocking.
There was a break between acts, which I will vouch is appreciated by middle-aged concert-goers with bladder-relief issues. I met that need, then milled around in the lobby for a few minutes, eavesdropping on several conversations about past Zombies shows, including one last year in Rockville that had been unknown to me. It seems that even bands whose first teenaged jam sessions occurred when John F. Kennedy was president have groupies. Which nevertheless reminded me of how, pre-show, one guy in the audience had loudly and kiddingly asked his female companion whether she planned to throw her underwear on stage, and how I’d so hoped the gag hadn’t given anyone any ideas.
I reclaimed my seat and was glancing at my program when I became aware of somebody standing nearby, ticket in hand. I looked up and saw what I first took to be a particularly unattractive older woman in a bad wig and comically oversized eyeglasses who was wearing, for some reason, a cheerleaders outfit. But then I quickly realized that she was a he. As was reinforced when the be-skirted man asked me, in a decidedly unfeminine voice, whether he was at the right row.
He gave me his seat information and I confirmed that he was. With that, he picked up the canvas grocery bag he’d temporarily set down, in which I could see a hint of silver pom pom, and made his way to the far end of my aisle. As much as my mind was shouting “WTF?”, I was determined not to outwardly register anything that could be construed as disapproval, bewilderment or surprise. Part of that is because I try to be a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but I also was struck then, as I would be through the remainder of the evening, by the utter lack of attention or interest he drew from anyone in the audience.
In fact, the next day I would Web-search a variety of word combinations—“guy in cheerleader outfit Silver Spring,” “dressed in drag cheerleader Montgomery County,” etc.—to confirm my suspicion that he was some local character whose act by now was so familiar as to be passé. But I found nothing. Had he perhaps come from a rehearsal of a dinner-theater farce? Had he plans later in the evening to wow the boys during Varsity Night at a local gay bar? I guess I’ll never know.
At any rate, it seemed that he, too, was a Zombies groupie. I overheard him exchanging past-show stories with another guy on my row, and speculating on tonight’s play list. Although I was careful not to stare, I could see with additional side glances that he likely was my age or a little older, although there was no gray in his manifestly unflattering brunette rug, which gratuitously included pigtails. He was short and of medium build, and obviously hadn’t received the fashion memo about how a gal never should show five o’clock shadow after Labor Day.
Soon the lights dimmed. Out came the Zombies, who currently consist of founding members Argent and Blunstone (vocals/keyboards and lead vocals, respectively), longtime Kinks bassist Jim Rodford, Rodford’s son Steve on drums, and British session guitarist Tom Toomey.
Argent looked weathered but lean in his jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket. Blunstone was of more indeterminate shape in a dark suit, and looked facially as if he’s had some work done. Both original Zombies retain impressive amounts of hair, although Blunstone’s in particular is suspiciously dark. Rodford looked like Popeye’s dad Pappy in the old cartoons—a wisp of a man, nearly bald, with a jutting chin. His son, obscured by the drum set, had the happy look of a garage-bander enjoying a paying gig. Toomey clearly was the baby of the bunch, looking to be 40-ish.
They started out playing some of the band’s early songs—bluesy numbers with echoes of Motown, recognizable in sound if not specifics to anyone familiar with early ’60s, pre-Beatles rock ’n’ roll. The ensemble was tight from the opening notes. Argent showed great energy and enthusiasm behind the keyboards. Blunstone was considerably less mobile, slightly swaying at the microphone, but in fine voice. And when he spoke between numbers, it was with a poet’s cadence—gentle, unhurried, slightly lisping in the way one might imagine Keats or Shelley would have sounded.
Before long the band started weaving in songs from a new studio album Blunstone announced has been well-reviewed in Britain and is beginning to gain critical notice in the United States. If the new music was hardly groundbreaking, it conversely was far from vanity-lap stuff. The songs were crisp, well written, tuneful, interesting. Anything but lame.
Next came the numbers we all had come to hear—the hits, and other songs from the Zombies’ masterwork album, Odessey (sic) and Oracle. The poignant “A Rose for Emily.” The quirkily buoyant “Care of Cell 44,” about a pending reunion with a jailbird girlfriend. The moody and evocative “Beechwood Park.” “This Will Be Our Year,” which Argent proudly noted the Foo Fighters recently covered on a CD of that band’s favorite songs. Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl, Argent further noted, has cited the Zombies as a huge early influence.
By mid-set, I wasn’t thinking about how old these guys were, or I was, or the audience was. Because the Zombies were genuinely rocking, and because they so clearly and happily were engaged in what, for them, was the timeless pursuit of creating and performing music. Yes, they were honoring their past and our memories of it, but they were perhaps even more proud of their new material. And they reveled in their continuing relevance. Blunstone and Argent noted that Odessey and Oracle, a one-time commercial dud released after the band’s breakup, has gained sales and cache in the decades since, and was named the 80th most important album in rock history by Rolling Stone.
I’d arrived expecting a dog-and-pony show of sorts but had gotten a rousing, full-bodied rock concert in an amazingly intimate setting. How rousing? Rousing enough that Cheerleader Guy on numerous occasions pulled his pom poms out of the bag and shook them high and long, to the appreciative nods of the band, who several times acknowledged his enthusiasm.
One of the final songs the Zombies played was not in fact a Zombies number, although it had been written by original member Chris White and became a huge post-Zombies hit for Argent’s eponymous early ’70s band. The place erupted with the opening thumps of the arena rocker “Hold Your Head Up,” reverberated through Argent’s extended organ solo, shook through the audience-participation chorus and reached a crescendo with the final repetition of the defiant title sentiment.
A little while later, that scene and feeling still were playing in my head as I climbed into my car. Driving home, I thought about how, although aging is a bitch, there’s no law saying any of us has to give in and give up. Yes, life is terminal. We fear the reaper. But take a look around. There’s music to nourish you. A cheer somewhere to lead. Minimal expectations to be proven wrong.
Life will slump your posture. The Zombies’ advice? Try to look past it all. Hold your head up. Hold your head high.
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