The legendary keyboardist, vocalist, songwriter, and producer is best known for co-founding The Zombies and later, Argent (“Hold Your Head Up,” “God Gave Rock ‘n’ Roll to You”). His impressive resume also includes session and/or production work on albums by The Who ('Who Are You'), Tanita Tikaram (1988’s worldwide best seller 'Ancient Heart'), The Hollies, Roger Daltrey, Matthew Sweet, Nanci Griffith, Jules Shear, Zombies bandmate Colin Blunstone and others.
Q: Where have I reached you today, Rod?
In the U.K., in Hampshire. I’ve lived here for the last 3 ½ years now. I was in my previous place, North of the river in England, for 38 years. I’m a newcomer to this bit.
Q: This Southern California touring run one of your biggest in a while, right?
Not necessarily in the U.S. But in California, it is. On the West Coast, it’s the longest run, I think. We’ve actually done five tours of the States in the last two years. In March, we did a fairly extensive tour, but it was on the East Coast.
Q: You’re playing a wide range of different sized venues out here. Do you think your music translates better in one type of place or another?
Do you know what? I’ve got to the stage where I enjoy every size venue; I honestly do. From the largest festival to the much more intimate surroundings, I really do enjoy them all. I feel comfortable with our current band in every size venue. There’s nothing that worries me. As long as I feel that we’ve had the proper soundcheck that we always try to get, so we’re in control technically with what’s going on, I’ve got absolute faith in the band to carry out the concert beautifully in any setting.
Q: Your pairing with Arcade Fire at the Greek in L.A. is very intriguing. Any idea whether they're big Zombies fans?
Apparently, they are. I hope I’m not putting words in their mouths when I say that. I don’t know an awful lot about Arcade Fire, but our American management were excited that they got in touch with our management company and said they particularly wanted us to be on the show with them. That’s very nice. It’s fantastic when contemporary stars reach out to us in that sort of way.
We’ve just been to Europe to do a couple big festivals in Berlin and Amsterdam. The day before we were to leave, we had Portugal. The Man, who were doing a big concert in London at the O2, who got in touch with our management and said, ‘would there be any chance of them meeting us on this particular day?’ It happened to be the day before we left. It meant us all stopping our preparations getting ready for going away to Europe, but we were very happy to do it because they’d just had a No. 1 single all over the world with “Feel it Still.” I love that single; I really do…They were absolutely lovely. We had a great hour and a half with them in London. They hired a room in a hotel. We had a drink and long chat with them and it was great. Then we rushed back and got ready the next morning for Europe.
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| photo: Maggie Clarke |
Q: The last time I caught The Zombies in concert was when you played Stagecoach 2017. Do you still thrive on trying to win over crowds that might not consist of your average classic rock listeners?
It’s very strange that wherever we play, and strangely enough, this is true outside Britain, that are obviously a lot of classic rock fans in the audience, people that have followed us all the way through and we adore playing to them. It’s fantastic. But there’s always a young sizable component in the audience and usually several young bands coming along to see us. That’s very energizing as well.
Talking about winning over younger fans: About two years ago, we played in the Philippines. We played there many many years before to 40,000 people a night, a residency for 10 nights in 1967. A lady, a prominent person in society in Manila, came along and she’d been at the original series of concerts. She brought her granddaughter, who was 18 years old. They came backstage and I was speaking to this girl and she said, ‘I was brought here kicking and screaming, but I came to keep my grandmother company. You played a song and I loved it – "A Rose for Emily." She’s never heard it before and she was in tears.
We play "Time of the Season," and the place goes wild. Then we might follow that with a track from our ‘Still Got That Hunger’ album - which against all expectations actually made the Top 200 album sales in Billboard – and the [audience] responds and gives energy back on that with almost the same amount.
Q: Back in the day, The Zombies sometimes performed "Soulville," which Aretha Franklin recorded for a 1964 Dinah Washington tribute album called 'Unforgettable.' Did you ever share a stage with Aretha in the ‘60s?
Never met her. The song "New York" mentions Patti Labelle turning us onto the music of Aretha and Nina Simone, who we’d never heard of either at Christmas 1964. I did meet Nina Simone when we were 18 years old…two or three years layer I was backstage at a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London and Nina was walking through the door. It might have been Janis Joplin and Yes…I had a few words with her and she was the sweetest person…I bought all of Nina’s albums after Patti turned us onto her.
Q: Through the years, The Zombies have covered several Motown and R&B songs. Were you and Colin big followers of that music when it first came out?
Huge, absolutely huge! So many of the English bands around that period were…One reason was that Liverpool became a conduit for the introduction of so much black music from America because of the merchant seamen. It is a major seaport, Liverpool. So, the merchant seamen ships coming back from sailing from New York, they would bring [things] back. There wasn’t this segregation of race stations that there was very much at that time in the US. So, a lot of white kids never heard the great black music because they were listening to so-called white stations.
We didn’t think in those terms at that time over here. All this mix of great Motown and early rural blues, people like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, the black artists that were considered at the time by the hip black population of America as being from the past, it was a rediscovery for them. Also, the Motown stuff as it was coming through, The Beatles loved it and it was a real melting pot.
I still have a huge love for early Ray Charles and still play it now…We loved Nina’s more jazz approach. The wonderful places she would take her music and the early Motown stuff. I just feel that was a fantastic time for music and jazz too. I was knocked sideways by the Miles Davis Group of around 1958-59 with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly.
The first modern jazz record I bought was ‘Milestones.’ That turned out to be his first modal experiments before ‘Kind of Blue.’ It was just an explosion of wonderful music. For me, that was a vintage black period of invention. It seemed like a magical time in every form of music. Even classical music. It was a great time to be around. A lot of that black music came via Liverpool. Jazz, R&B, early country blues, urban blues – all that came though one conduit, it all got mixed up together. I think that was one reason why a lot of the English bands had the multitude of influences they did.
Q: As you initially started doing the ‘Odessey and Oracle’ 40th (and then 50th) anniversary tours, did you rediscover anything about the album? Maybe reconfirming you really did create something that rivaled the Beatles and Beach Boys' more innovative efforts?
Like everyone else at the time, we were absolutely in love with The Beatles. You had to be there at that time to realize how revolutionary it seemed. And musically, how honest and revolutionary it felt. When we made records, we just thought we were being The Beatles in a way. We were putting our own musical ideas in there. We didn’t really realize how much originality there was there.
Looking back on it, I really think it was pretty original because there were all these unconscious influences flying around indirectly that we never thought of ourselves as incorporating. I loved the Miles Davis stuff. I didn’t imagine that any of that was finding its way into our records.
When I first met Pat Metheny, he said "She’s Not There" was the record that made it feel there was a way ahead for him. He said all the modal stuff. I thought, ‘there’s no modal stuff.’ I played the opening chords again and what I thought was a very simple two chord sequence, I realized I’d superimposed a modal series of chords over that without even thinking about it. It was purely intuitive. Even classical music, which I love now and loved then, some of those things found their way indirectly. We just thought we were playing rock and roll. In the end, I do feel there was a lot of originality there.
[There’s] a book that has recently come out that our management and BMG put together. We had nothing to do with it. It’s a fantastic book; beautifully produced. When I saw, unbeknown to us completely, all those endorsements from artists we adored like Brian Wilson, who said he loved our harmonies, I thought, ‘what!?’ Unbelievable. Then some nice words from Susanna Hoffs, Carlos Santana, Graham Nash. I didn’t know any of those things.
Q: During the last decade or two, "Time of the Season" has been a very popular song for rappers and DJs to sample. Do you make an effort to hear their final results?
We do try. When Eminem did "Rhyme or Reason" on his album, my publisher phoned up and said, ‘Eminem has used a huge sample including vocals and everything from "Time of the Season." I thought that was amazing. It’s not like I’m particularly conversant with Eminem’s stuff because rap to me was the point in modern music where I did start to betray my age because it started to feel I was losing touch with things a bit.
She said, ‘I think we should approve it.’ I said, ‘Fine, send it through.’ She said, ‘The trouble is he doesn’t like his stuff to be on the Internet at all before it comes out.’ I said, ‘How am I gonna approve it if I can’t hear it?’
[They put it on an email that he and Colin could only access for 2 hours].
Do you know what? I loved it because it wasn’t just a rip-off. He used a huge amount of it. Where our chorus is ‘It’s the time of the season for loving,’ he wrote ‘There’s no rhyme of no reason for nothing.’ It was a soundalike with all the vowels and the rhythm was the same, but it was totally turned upside down. I thought that was really clever. He had all the rhythm of the original and the feeling, but completely inverted.
That’s the opposite of a rip-off. I honestly did love that. I haven’t heard the Post Malone one. I do fear that I might not like it.
[Rod was at a BMI Awards ceremony to receive a 7 million airplay award for "Time of the Season" and a rap group also getting an award had one member who told Rod how much he liked the Zombies' song].
They have hit on that, which is brilliant.
Q: How about actual Zombies covers? Do you take time to listen to those? Last year Ronnie Spector released an interesting take on "Tell Her No," for example.
I enjoyed it. Ronnie was an idol of mine when we were young. It feels fantastic that people like that are actually covering us. Colin and I did an acoustic set at the Cutting Room in New York a few years ago. I later found out she was there for the whole set. Art Garfunkel too. The trouble with being 73, onstage without my glasses, I can’t recognize facial characteristics of people offstage.
[Art was next to the stage, clapping enthusiastically.]
Q: The Zombies are among a handful of acts from the British Invasion that are still going strong today. Does that give you a sense of pride?
What makes me proud is honestly we’re not doing it to try and make a quick buck. When Colin and I got back together again in the early 2000s and first came over to America again, we didn’t expect to make any money. In fact, we [funded] those first 2-3 tours ourselves. It was just through the buzz of playing. We hadn’t expected that. To be playing live again and feeling we had a great band behind us, it felt brilliant. That honestly was the reason we did it then are why we are doing it now. We’re very happy to play any or all of the old stuff, that’s great. But only in the context of feeling that we can energize ourselves by creating new stuff as well and playing it to people and getting a response to it.
We’re out there now for the same reasons that we were when we were 18. Through the enthusiasm of playing and still getting enthusiastic about music we’re creating and making. That’s what makes me proud - the fact we can go out there with that in mind. Which would include a few new songs and getting a great reaction on those too. I’m not putting down anyone who just goes back and recycles their hits. That’s great too. That’s not why we’re doing it. To be able to make a success of this reincarnation by taking this course makes Colin and I very proud.
Q: I thought your 2015 studio album ‘Still Got That Hunger’ was very strong. Were you satisfied with how it turned out and was received overall?
We were very satisfied. Before we recorded that, we’d done a series of 'Odessey and Oracle' concerts. Half of that album we’d never played through with the current band. You need the extra overdubs on the original to make some songs work. We had to expand the band to do that. We had such a ball hitting all those new old songs in terms of live performance we thought, 'Why don’t we do the next album by going back to the way we used to record in 1964?’
We had no choice then - all being in the room together, not using a click track or sync code to overdub synths, to make it as organic and honest as possible. We thought we’ll do this by getting Colin to sing guide vocals and replace those the following week, do it all over a 2-week period, and the producer has another week to mix it so the whole thing will be done in three weeks…we enjoyed the process so much in the opening 5 days, where we finished all the tracks, we recorded a song in three hours the way we used to do in the ‘60s.
In essence, the lead vocals were the guide ones Colin put down and we didn’t replace any of the solos. It became about recapturing a performance the way things were done in the ‘60s…There was no alternative then. It was very organic which meant we could do anything onstage. That’s one of the reasons we all felt it was very strong because it had that essence of feeling.
Q: Is there any new music ahead in the future?
Definitely. I’ve started to work with 2-3 new ideas of new songs. We’ve got 3-week [American] tour. Then we go to Europe. After that, I hope we can put our minds to a new album. I think it will get put out on BMG [which] put out a coffee table book with amazing photos, including rare ones and not the awful ones that always seem to make the rounds.
