[link to original on tumblr]
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They're Not There
Honestly, I think BuzzFeed is kind of a waste of time (I know it only by the inane quizzes), but this is actually decent. I was aware that there had been fake Zombies bands touring after "Time of the Season" was a hit, but I didn't know a lot of the specifics.There are some errors in this that - Zombies pedant that I am - I feel I have to correct:
Ralston calls the Zombies a "reunited British psych-rock band," which... maybe? In context, no, because White and Grundy were along only for the recent U.S. tours of Odessey and Oracle, but I suppose you could call the Blunstone, Argent, Rodford, Rodford, and Toomey incarnation a "reunited" band.
"Nobody even saw fit to correct the unintentionally misspelled 'Odessey' on the record's cover, viewed in hindsight as typical psychedelic-era wordplay." In relatively recent interviews, Argent's explained that he caught the error, but not in time to fix it before the album went off to print. He passed it off as wordplay when the album came out, not "in hindsight."
"She's Not There" and "Tell Her No" are "their early, more raucous hits"!? This might be subjective, but I don't think there's anything "raucous" about either.
Not Zombies-related, but claiming that Don Kirshner "created the Monkees" is completely false. The Monkees were created by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider. Don Kirshner acted as a music director for the Monkees, choosing some of the songs they recorded and that sort of thing.*
I'm surprised that New World isn't mentioned at all. From what I remember from Russo's Collector's Guide (which, admittedly, I haven't read for a few years), some of the original Zombies (Blunstone, White, and Grundy) wanted to do a tour to clear their name, but they needed an album to tour with. They recorded New World in order to tour with it, but the tour never actually happened.
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*I've been reading Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees: The Day-by-Day Story of the 60s TV Pop Sensation (I'm at the end of 1966), and it seems that Kirshner was most heavily involved with More of the Monkees. There was friction between him and the other Monkees (Mike Nesmith in particular), and I think he was gone by the Headquarters album.
