Popgala '73, Sporthal de Vliegermolen, Voorburg, Netherlands, 3-10-1973, Part 2: Argent & Colin Blunstone

Next up from the Popgala '73 rock festival is an album containing performances by Argent and Colin Blunstone.

As I mentioned in a previous write-up, I generally don't know the correct order of the performers. However, Rod Argent, the leader of the band Argent, and Colin Blunstone used to be band mates in the Zombies in the 1960s, so I figured it was fitting to put their sets together on one album. 

I don't know if Argent and Blunstone performed together on stage at this concert. I have no evidence this happened. But that's surprising to me, because the two of them continued to musically collaborate during this time period. For instance, Blunstone's most recent album at the time of this concert, "Ennismore," was produced by Argent, and the band Argent played on most of the songs. Blunstone's next album, "Journey," released in 1974, would include two songs written by Argent.

I'm pretty confident these sets are incomplete. (If anyone has anything I'm missing, please let me know!) That's especially the case for Argent, with only three songs here. I put this together from different sources. Even the three Argent songs come from two sources. So I don't know the correct song order, and I just made my best guess, based largely on how the song transitions sounded. I had to make some fixes too. For instance, "Andorra" came to a sudden end with only a second or two of applause at the end, so I patched in more applause from the ends of other songs. Despite all that, the songs ultimately come from the TV broadcast, and the sound quality is consistently excellent.

As an aside, I included two songs from this performance on the Colin Blunstone album I posted, "BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1971-1973." Those songs were "She's Not There" and "Looking for Someone to Love."

This album is 49 minutes long.

066 Keep On Rollin' (Argent)
067 God Gave Rock and Roll to You (Argent)
068 Hold Your Head Up (Argent)
069 I Don't Believe in Miracles (Colin Blunstone)
070 She's Not There (Colin Blunstone)
071 talk (Colin Blunstone)
072 Looking for Someone to Love (Colin Blunstone)
073 Andorra (Colin Blunstone)
074 Time of the Season (Colin Blunstone)
075 talk (Colin Blunstone)
076 I Want Some More (Colin Blunstone)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15645546/Popgla73_05_ArgntClinBlunstne.zip.html

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/WE5hRpTw8iuKUzr/file

The cover photo of Colin Blunstone comes from this exact concert. The original was in black and white. I then used the Palette program to colorize it. However, since they're video footage of this performance, I was able to make sure the colors were correct.

The Zombies - BBC Sessions (1964-1967)

I've already posted five stray tracks albums of the Zombies in the 1960s. In making those, I used songs they played at the BBC that weren't otherwise recorded anywhere. This contains all the other BBC performances the Zombies did from 1964 to 1967. In other words, BBC versions of songs that were on their singles and albums.

All but one of the songs here were officially released, and were on the great "Zombie Heaven" box set. The BBC performances sound great. Admittedly, the Zombies weren't exactly the Allman Brothers Band, doing long solos and playing their studio material differently in concert. These performances hew pretty close to the studio versions. But it's nice to see how tight and on they are, even with their harmonies, and they do show off soloing prowess within the confines of songs that weren't supposed to go over three minutes.

Note that none of the songs from their fantastic "Odessey and Oracle" album are here, except for one, "Friends of Mine." That's because the band broke up by the time that album came out in 1968, so there were no BBC or other live performances. "Friends of Mine" was recorded in 1967, just before the band called it quits.

It's been a long time since I edited these songs. But I recall very few to no instances of BBC DJs talking over the starts and ends of songs. As a result, I made few to no edits. I'm not sure why the Zombies got so lucky, since other BBC recordings from that time period have the DJs talking over a majority of the songs.

Unfortunately, I've discovered next to no live concert recordings of the Zombies in the 1960s. They did appear on TV a fair amount, but they often lip-synced to their records. One song here from "Zombie Heaven" actually was from a concert, "Just a Little Bit," and the one unreleased song, "Summertime," is also from a concert. And that's all I could find to fit here.

01 She's Not There (Zombies)
02 Road Runner (Zombies)
03 You Make Me Feel Good (Zombies)
04 Tell Her No (Zombies)
05 What More Can I Do (Zombies)
06 I'm Going Home (Zombies)
07 Tell Her No [Acoustic Piano Version] (Zombies)
08 Can't Nobody Love You (Zombies)
09 She's Coming Home (Zombies)
10 I Must Move (Zombies)
11 Just Out of Reach (Zombies)
12 If It Don't Work Out (Zombies)
13 Whenever You're Ready (Zombies)
14 Summertime (Zombies)
15 Just a Little Bit (Zombies)
16 Gotta Get a Hold of Myself (Zombies)
17 Goin' Out of My Head (Zombies)
18 Friends of Mine (Zombies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/orT7AX5w 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/fmE0ZXNJBp4lnhD/file

The cover art photo features the Zombies playing the "Top of the Pops" TV show in September 1965. I found the "Zombies" lettering from somewhere else and pasted it on top.

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.upload.ee/files/16701166/TZOMBIS1969_RIPAlbum_atse.zip.html

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.

The Zombies - I'll Call You Mine - Non-Album Tracks (1966-1967)

Here's the next in my series of stray tracks albums from the Zombies.

This album is very similar to the last one I posted in that it covers a time period in which the Zombies were failing to have much commercial success. In fact, as time passed and 1966 turned to 1967, their situation got worse and worse. Only one song here was recorded in 1967, a BBC performance of "The Look of Love," because the band pretty much dropped into total obscurity that year.

Luckily, a dramatic turnaround was just about to happen. In 1967, the Zombies changed record companies and scraped together enough money to record one final album, though they had to fund much of it out of their own pockets. That album, "Odessey and Oracle," would come out in early 1968 and would turn out to be an all-time classic. I'm not going to post that here, since any Zombies fan should have it already.

As with the last album in this series, in an alternate universe, the Zombies would have had much more success and at least a couple hit singles during this time. But only six out of the 15 songs here were released in the 1960s, and none of the songs even scraped the bottom of the charts. If you listen to this album and compare it to other albums other groups released at the time, you'll see how unfair their obscurity was. This is another solid album of mostly original material.

Oh, and by the way, although I won't post "Odessey and Oracle" here, I have one more stray tracks album to post that covers what they did after that album and before they broke up near the end of the 1960s.

01 Is This the Dream (Zombies)
02 Going to a Go Go [Live] (Zombies)
03 Gotta Get a Hold of Myself (Zombies)
04 Indication (Zombies)
05 She Does Everything for Me (Zombies)
06 Sitting in the Park (Zombies)
07 I'll Call You Mine (Zombies)
08 One Day I'll Say Goodbye [Home Demo] (Zombies)
09 I Don't Want to Worry [Home Demo] (Zombies)
10 Goin' Out of My Head (Zombies)
11 A Love that Never Was [Demo] (Zombies)
12 This Old Heart of Mine (Zombies)
13 Call of the Night [Girl Help Me] [Demo] (Zombies)
14 Out of the Day [Demo] (Zombies)
15 The Look of Love (Zombies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701167/TZOMBIS1966-1967_IllCllYuMne_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I once again used the cover of a Zombies single from the time, "Gotta Get a Hold of Myself." Unfortunately, that cover had a lot of issues. Frankly, it looked cheap and quickly thrown together. So I made a lot of changes while keeping the overall look, such as totally changing the font and text, and swapping a black and white photo of the band with a color one.

The Zombies - Whenever You're Ready - Non-Album Tracks (1965)

Here's the next in my series of stray tracks albums from the Zombies.

During the 1960s, the Zombies were surprisingly unsuccessful commercially. They had one big hit in Britain - "She's Not There" - and three big hits in the US - "She's Not There" plus "Tell Her No" and "Time of the Season." "She's Not There" and "Tell Her No" came early on for the group, and "Time of the Season" wasn't a hit until 1968, after the group broke up. In between, they had a long series of singles that barely hit the charts or didn't chart at all.

This album covers part of that era of commercial failure. But in retrospect, it's clear that the band should have done much better and there was a failure of promotion as well as poor decision making. After all, Zombies are getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for more than just three songs.

The failure of promotion can be obviously seen by the fact that their record company thought so little of them that they only let them release one album between 1964 and 1967. Mind you, this was at a time when tons of no-hit acts were able to release albums. Here's a clear act of poor decision making as well: the single "Whenever You're Ready" should have been a hit in my opinion. But the B-side, "I Love You," had even more potential. Even though it was only a B-side, it became so popular in the Philippines that the band was able to sell out big arenas there when they couldn't get arrested anywhere else. Then, in early 1968, an obscure group called "People!" did a nearly identical cover version and had a hit with it all over the world, including a number one hit in Japan.

So imagine this album comes from an alternate universe where the Zombies were better managed and promoted, and continued to have hits. Remarkably, only four of the 15 songs on this album were released in the 1960s. Four others were performed by the band at the BBC, and the rest would only come out in the archival box set "Zombie Heaven."

01 Whenever You're Ready (Zombies)
02 Nothing's Changed (Zombies)
03 Come On Time (Zombies)
04 You Must Believe Me (Zombies)
05 Don't Go Away (Zombies)
06 I'll Keep Trying (Zombies)
07 You'll Go from Me [Don't Go Away] [Demo] (Zombies)
08 I Love You (Zombies)
09 How We Were Before (Zombies)
10 I Know She Will (Zombies)
11 Don't Cry for Me (Zombies)
12 If It Don't Work Out (Zombies)
13 When the Lovelight Starts Shining through Her Eyes (Zombies)
14 It's All Right (Zombies)
15 Will You Love Me Tomorrow (Zombies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701162/TZOMBIS1965_WhnevrYureRady_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used the cover art for the "Whenever You're Ready" single. However, I had some problems with that cover, so I made some tweaks. One tweak was that I thought the font used was boring. So I erased the text and replaced, enlarged, and repositioned it.

The Zombies - Tell Her No - Non-Album Tracks (1964-1965)

Here's the second album from an alternate universe where the Zombies weren't treated like crap by their record company. As I mentioned in my previous Zombies post, the band was only allowed to release one album from 1964 to 1967, a time when many other bands of their caliber were releasing two albums a year.

It turns out the Zombies had enough material to keep up with those other bands. But they were relegated to releasing singles only (aside from that one album, "Begin Here"). The time covered with this album was arguably the band's commercial peak, after having hits with "She's Not There" and "Tell Her No," so nearly all of the songs were actually released at the time, on that album or as singles.

The exception are three songs performed only on the BBC. But the recording of these songs sounds just as good as any studio recording of the time, with no crowd noise and no annoying DJ talking over the music. So for this album and the rest of this series, if the Zombies did a song where there's a BBC recording and nothing else, I'm treating that like just any other studio track.

01 Tell Her No (Zombies)
02 The Way I Feel Inside (Zombies)
03 I Can't Make Up My Mind (Zombies)
04 You've Really Got a Hold on Me - Bring It On Home to Me (Zombies)
05 Can't Nobody Love You (Zombies)
06 I Got My Mojo Working (Zombies)
07 Work 'N' Play [Instrumental] (Zombies)
08 Soulville (Zombies)
09 For You My Love (Zombies)
10 She's Coming Home (Zombies)
11 I Must Move (Zombies)
12 Remember You (Zombies)
13 I Want You Back Again (Zombies)
14 Rip It Up (Zombies)
15 Just Out of Reach (Zombies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701161/TZOMBIS1964-1965_TllHrNo_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I found a cover of a "Tell Her No" EP. But the titles of the four songs on it were written in small print at the bottom. I didn't like that, so I erased those and replaced it with just "Tell Her No" in a much larger font size.

The Zombies - She's Not There - Non-Album Tracks (1964)

A while back, I was asked to fix the discographies of the Zombies and the Yardbirds. The Yardbirds are still coming, but here's the start to the Zombies.

It's understandable to ask for a reorganization of the Zombies' music, because they've been treated very badly over the years. Basically, they never were popular enough for their record company to treat them seriously. They only issues two albums and a bunch of singles while they were together in the 1960s, and one of those albums, the classic "Odessey and Oracle," came out after the band broke up.

What I've discovered is that the Zombies recorded enough music for six albums, not two! That's an amazing difference! And they had a high consistency, so it's pretty much all good stuff. I'm getting nearly all of their music from the 1997 box set "Zombie Heaven." This has to be one of the best and most influential of all box sets, and probably was the key factor for critics to reassess their legacy, ultimately resulting in them getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But while that box set did a big service in putting all of the Zombies' music in one place, including lots of previously unreleased material, I think it can be organized better. For one thing, it's four CDs of about 70 minutes each. I think the Zombies are better served by albums less than 40 minutes each. That's how their music was meant to be heard back in the day. For instance, their two albums released in the 1960s were 33 and 35 minutes long respectively.

Also, the box set organizes their music thematically, for instance by songs that were officially released at the time and those that weren't, and those that were played at the BBC. I think it makes much more sense to organize the songs chronologically. So, using the box set's extensive liner notes, I figured out which month and year each song was recorded, and used that. (I've included that info in the album field of the mp3 tags to help me keep things straight.)

So here's the first of the six albums I've made. These albums include all the song they recorded minus the "Odessey and Oracle" album. There's no need for me to post that here because it's perfect the way it is. After I post all that, I may also post alternate versions of some of the songs done in the studio or at the BBC.

Naturally, I'm titling this "She's Not There" for one of their biggest hits, and I'm putting that song first. It also happens to be one of the first things they recorded. The Zombies were great from the very start.

01 She's Not There (Zombies)
02 Summertime (Zombies)
03 It's Alright with Me (Zombies)
04 You Make Me Feel Good (Zombies)
05 Leave Me Be (Zombies)
06 Woman (Zombies)
07 Kind of Girl (Zombies)
08 Sometimes (Zombies)
09 Early One Morning (Zombies)
10 Road Runner (Zombies)
11 Sticks and Stones (Zombies)
12 I Don't Want to Know (Zombies)
13 I Remember When I Loved Her (Zombies)
14 What More Can I Do (Zombies)
15 Walking in the Sun (Zombies)
16 I'm Going Home (Zombies)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701158/TZOMBIS1964_ShesNtThre_atse.zip.html

The cover comes from one of the many cover variants of the "She's Not There" single.