DAN WEBSTER:
Of all the songs released in the 1960s, at least three are likely to get music lovers humming. Those songs are “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No” and “Time of the Season.”
It’s remarkable, then, that all three were recorded by the same band, a quintet out of the smallish English city of St. Albans, located some 20 miles northwest of London. That band’s name: The Zombies.
In his film Hung Up on a Dream: The Zombies Documentary, which is streaming on a number of services, director Robert Schwartzman tells the story of the band’s inception, how the members came from humble roots, found early success, went on a whirlwind international tour—and yet how they broke up, basically penniless, before achieving the fame they deserved.
So, yes, Schwartzman gives us yet another story of how a talented group of musicians were taken advantage of by the kind of unscrupulous management so endemic to the music industry, especially at that time. Unlike such groups as The Small Faces, Them and Badfinger, though, The Zombies eventually endured, with some original members reuniting later and even touring. In 2019, The Zombies earned induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
But all that was decades in the future. It was way back in 1962 that five English teenagers —lead singer Colin Blunstone, keyboardist Rod Argent, guitarist Paul Atkinson, drummer Hugh Grundy and bassist Paul Arnold (soon replaced by Chris White)—formed a group initially called The Mustangs.
Other bands were using that name as well, though, so they began to consider others. As he explains in the documentary, Blunstone recalls with embarrassment suggesting they call themselves The Sundowners. But Arnold’s choice of The Zombies is the one that stuck.
At first, they played local clubs, earning as little as 10 pounds a night (which equates to about $28). Their first big break came when they competed in, and won, a best-band contest that earned them 250 pounds (or just a little over $700) and led to their signing a record contract. The result was their first hit, “She’s Not There,” which—somewhat unusually—became more popular in the U.S. than in England, eventually selling more than a million copies.
They also ended up touring the U.S., performing with groups and individual artists that they admired (Dione Warwick was a favorite). They were part of a stage show produced by legendary New York DJ Murray the K, and they appeared on the hit television show Hullabaloo.
As Blunstone said during a 1998 interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “It wasn't terribly glamorous, really, except we were having fun. We were 18 years old. What did we care?”
Yet by 1967 they were back to making by Argent’s recollection only 20 pounds a night, and with most of the money they’d earned through record sales having disappeared, the group broke up. Some, primarily Argent, continued making music (he had a hit with the 1971 song “Hold Your Head Up”). Blunstone, thoroughly burnt out, took a number of menial jobs.
Months after the breakup—at the insistence of the American musician Al Kooper—the group’s final LP, Odessey and Oracle, was released. And while it didn’t sell well, one of the songs (“Time of the Season”) ended up attracting lots of radio play and eventually rose to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. But the original lineup never got back together as an actual band (Atkinson died in 2004).
Director Schwartzman (brother of actor Jason Schwartzman and nephew of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola) fills his film with archival footage, lots of musical numbers and interviews that feature the remaining original members, keying mainly on Blunstone and Argent—both of whom are still active at the mutual age of 80.
Schwartzman, too, recounts the amusing, if hard-to-believe, story of the fake Zombies, bands that toured claiming to be the real band, one of which included two members of what would become ZZ Top. That particular saga adds such a perfect insult to injury that even Blunstone has to laugh at its absurdity. It even allows us to laugh a bit as well.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.