Time of the...

A story from the olden days

Once upon a long ago in the pre-streaming era, I kept hearing three songs I loved by the Zombies. Not surprisingly, those songs were their three big hits “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No,” and “Time of the Season.” (And all three are good enough that there’s a good chance if you’re a fan that you started singing at least one of those songs in your head just from reading the titles!)

Those three songs were staples of oldies radio (and one or more of them were often played in an “oldies block” on stations playing more recent music). For a long-defunct band, they got a lot of airplay in the 1970s and early 80s.

Because I loved these three songs, at some point I bought a greatest-hits collection called Time of the Zombies. Keep in mind that I was normally opposed to greatest-hits records, but there wasn’t anything else by the Zombies available so I made an exception.

Oddly, this was a two-record set. Even odder, I bought it new and it doesn’t seem to have been a cutout. I’m not sure I would have paid full-price for a double record by a band I didn’t know well (and only knew three tracks from), so maybe it was on sale or otherwise presented itself as a good value.

There’s not a lot of information on the record, although there are undated articles that seem to be from newspapers and magazines in the gatefold.

Aside from song titles and writer credits on the back cover, there’s not much information here about the songs. Since I only knew three of the 28 cuts on this record, that information would have helped.

I played that record a lot and fell in love with many songs I hadn’t heard before. Even without knowing the history of the band or how these songs fit into that history, I could see clear growth and evolution in those songs (which start as fairly simple British-Invasion fare, become grander and more baroque, leading up to the final song on the collection, the sublime “Time of the Season”).

As time went on, I started learning more about the Zombies, who hit a commercial dry spell after “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No” despite many of their songs from 1964 and 1965 being arguably just as good.

I read a couple of articles here and there that talked about how the band made one last-ditch effort to achieve commercial success, recording an album they called Odessey and Oracle [misspelling not mine, for once]. That record was recorded mostly in the summer of 1967 in London. The band’s label, Decca, had dropped them, so they financed the sessions themselves in hopes of landing a new record deal. They eventually signed with CBS, which put the record out in the U.K. in 1968. CBS chief Clive Davis opted not to release it at all in the U.S. Al Kooper, then a CBS staff producer, loved it and got it a release on Date Records, a CBS subsidiary, but the album was pretty much met with indifference on both sides of the Atlantic.

The band recorded some songs for a never-finished album that wasn’t released and the Zombies broke up soon after.

About a year later, radio stations in the U.S. started playing “Time of the Season” and it became a surprise hit even though the band was no more.

As time passed, I started hearing stories about how legendary and amazing Odessey and Oracle was. But I had no way of hearing it. I didn’t know anyone who owned a copy and it was long out of print. The few times I’d see it at used-record stores it was so expensive that I never even bothered looking closely at it.

Oh well, I thought, at least I had Time of the Zombies. But I also thought given how much I loved some of the latter-era songs on that double-album, I’d probably love Odessey and Oracle at least as much. After all, it was almost universally praised as a psychedelic masterpiece and I wished I could at least hear it.

But CBS in its infinite wisdom, kept Odessey and Oracle out of print for decades, until it was finally re-released on Rhino Records in the late 1980s. For some reason, I missed that re-release and kept wondering about the album well into new Millennium.

If you know Time of the Zombies, you probably know where this is all heading. But I was shocked when I finally saw a new copy of the re-released album for sale and turned it over to examine the track listing.

And that’s because Side One of Time of the Zombies contains their British-Invasion singles. And Side Two contains songs recorded for the Odessey and Oracle follow-up tentatively called R.I.P.

Sides Three and Four are Odessey and Oracle. In order. Same songs. Same mixes. Just without the trippy cover.

I literally spent decades wishing I could hear a record that I basically already owned. (Thanks for the lack of liner notes, mid-70s Epic Records!)

But maybe, for a band called the Zombies, this is all oddly appropriate.

And I still love this record.

This piece (like everything I write) was written completely by me without AI.