The Zombies - R.I.P. - Non-Album Tracks (1969)

The Zombies are still going strong, and just a few days ago they were inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In celebration of that, I've been rush releasing the stray tracks albums I've made of their 1960s career.

That career ended very strangely. Their classic album "Odessey and Oracle" was released in April 1968, but very few people paid attention, since the Zombies had pretty much faded into obscurity by then. The first two singles flopped. In March 1968, a third single, "Time of the Season," was released, and it too flopped. But then somehow in early 1969 it caught fire in the Us and Canada, going all the way to number one! (Strangely, it didn't make the charts in Britain at all).

The success of the song caused a lot of people to take a look at the album it was on, and realize how great that was too. Seemingly overnight, the Zombies became very popular. But unfortunately, the album was all recorded in 1967, and the band had broken up shortly thereafter. All the band members moved on to other things. As a result, there was no real band to tour, so a fake one went on the road pretending to be them for a while.

More importantly, there was a demand for a new Zombies album. Even though the band had broken up, they got back together just long enough to record a few songs. In addition, they took some unreleased songs from the 1964 to 1966 period and overdubbed more instruments on them to make them sound more up to date. I'm ignoring all of these overdubbed versions, because I generally prefer the originals, and the songs aren't changed that much anyway. They planned to call the album "R.I.P.", meaning "Rest in Peace," a reference to the fact the group was effectively dead and gone already.

Around the same time, Zombies lead singer Colin Blunstone was trying to get a solo career going. Starting out, he relied on the help of some of his former Zombies band mates. He even had a minor hit with a new version of the 1964 Zombies hit "She's Not There." I have included that, because I think it's different and interesting. Arguably, these Blunstone tracks were just as much Zombies songs as the other new songs the band was recording around the same time. So this album is a mix of both of those things.

As it so happened, record companies screwed with the Zombies again. The last album they had ready to go never did get released. (A version of it did come out in Japan, but decades later.) That version would have been very different to this one, since half of it would have been the overdubbed unreleased songs, which I didn't include at all. Personally, I think this is a much stronger album, and a worthy successor to "Odessey and Oracle."

It's also rather short, at 33 minutes. So I've added my three favorite Argent songs at the end as quasi-bonus tracks. Argent was the successor to the Zombies, because it was headed by Zombies keyboardist Rod Argent, while Zombies bassist Chris White didn't join the band, but he co-write a majority of their songs with Argent. The three extra songs make the album 45 minutes long in total.

This concludes all my albums of the 1960s Zombies. But note that I didn't post "Odessey and Oracle," and that's their best material of all, so if you like these, please get that one too.

01 She Loves the Way They Love Her (Zombies)
02 Imagine the Swan (Zombies)
03 Smokey Day (Zombies)
04 Girl Help Me (Zombies)
05 I Could Spend the Day (Zombies)
06 Conversation Off Floral Street [Instrumental] (Zombies)
07 She's Not There [1969 Version] (Zombies)
08 Without Her (Zombies)
09 Twelve Twenty Nine (Zombies)
10 It Never Fails to Please Me (Zombies)
11 Telescope [Mr. Galileo] (Zombies)
12 World of Glass (Zombies)
13 Liar (Argent)
14 Pleasure (Argent)
15 Hold Your Head Up (Argent)

https://www.imagenetz.de/jRR9c

The album cover here was designed by someone named "idesignalbumcovers." It's not what the cover was supposed to look like at all, but a recent creative invention. Still, I thought it looks pretty cool, so I decided to use it.