Tom Petty (photo: Mark Seliger)
IN BLOOM…. Think about it, there’s likely no other artist in the rock and roll canon in the past forty years who has delivered as consistently as Tom Petty. A songwriter’s songwriter, Petty always strove for excellence with all his releases with no filler in sight and the result lies in the grooves. For Tom, he often cited the Wildflowers album, expertly produced by Rick Rubin, as his favorite among his work. It’s a robust, deeply personal collection of songs, intimate, emotional and revelatory, which capture an artist with a wide open channel to his muse. From perennials “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” “You Wreck Me” and the title track to stunning new previously unreleased originals like “Leave Virginia Alone” and “There Goes Angela (Dream Away)” among countless others, Wildflowers & All The Rest is a magnificent must-have collection for any fan of the Gainesville rocker. Like manna from heaven for Petty fans, Wildflowers & All The Rest is available in various multiple CD and vinyl configurations spotlighting this newly remastered album via a whopping 54 tracks, 8 unreleased songs, 24 unreleased alternate versions, 15 solo demos and a live disc culling live renditions of Wildflowers songs circa 1995 – 2017.
Retro-Active’s Ken Sharp spoke recently with Heartbreakers guitarist/collaborator Mike Campbell who was a major part of the Wildflowers recording sessions and offers his impressions.
With the release of the Wildflowers & All The Rest deluxe edition, you had such an integral part, playing on the record but in terms of helping to oversee this expansive multi-disc collection. What have been the most rewarding discoveries for you of things that you hadn’t heard for a long time or perhaps never had heard on this collection?
Mike Campbell: Wow, there was a lot and it was quite a process, first of all, sitting and hearing Tom while he was gone and hearing these tracks; some of them I didn’t remember until maybe halfway through the song and then it would come back to me. But there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s just really good. There’s a lot of Tom’s home demos, which is how he worked on the songs before he showed them to us and he rarely made demos. Usually he’d just come in and play the band the song on the guitar, but he had a handful of demos that we discovered that were done on an ADAT machine and I think that there’s a real intimacy there where you can hear the songwriting process of Tom in the very early stages. But, you know, it was hard. It was nice to hear all that stuff and relive it, but it was also emotionally kind of sad to know that he wasn’t with us anymore.
Of course… Is it still hard for you to hear the music you did with Tom and The Heartbreakers now, or is there more joy for you to hear it?
Well, both, but mostly joy. I mean, I listen to our channel on SiriusXM Radio when I drive around. That’s normally when I go to that station and I’m always pleased and proud to hear how good the songs hold up. I can’t put on a record and listen to it just yet. I’m still grieving, but when I hear the song now and then, in different places, it’s usually a positive experience. But there’s always it’s a bittersweet moment.
Tom loved Wildflowers and would cite it as his favorite. But when speaking about it, he expressed being fearful of it because its legacy and power and how everything came together so seamlessly, loomed large in a sense to live up to it.
Yeah, I can totally understand that because songwriting especially is such a mysterious thing. You know, it comes from the ether and appears in front of you. And sometimes you’re a little in awe of that energy like, wow, where did that come from? You know, how do I keep it coming? I don’t want to spoil it, I don’t want to lose it. And I don’t know where it comes from. But you just go with the flow. You know, all writers go through that. And I know that Tom has said what you said. He felt really close to those songs. Personally, I have a feeling about all the albums. You know, they all have their own devotion to me. I love Wildflowers and I’m proud of it but to my own particular taste, it doesn’t stand head and shoulders above the rest of our catalog. Although for some people, they really connect with that record and that’s to Tom’s credit; he could write songs that really move people.
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ZOMBIES RETURN…. The Zombies were one of the most underrated bands to emerge from the British Invasion, Decades after their emergence, the band is rightfully receiving long over due props for their beautiful and enduring legacy of music. Available now for Zombies fans through Craft Recordings are three essential new vinyl reissues of three important albums in their canon: I Love You, The Zombies, and R.I.P., a compendium of latter day Zombies tracks and rarities. Counting such luminaries as fans, from Elvis Presley to Tom Petty to Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles, the band’s crafty synthesis of jazz, rock and pop created topped off by the extraordinary voice of lead singer Colin Blunstone created a magical combination, heralding such timeless hits as “She’s Not There,” “Time Of The Season” and “Tell Her No.
Join us for a conversation with Zombies founding members Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone for a look back at a golden career.
Growing up a fan of music during the vinyl age, can you take us back to the first time you saw a Zombies record in a record shop?
Colin Blunstone: I don’t have a vivid memory of that. My vivid memory is of “She’s Not There” when it was first released. We hadn’t had a hit at that point. It was on a TV program on national television which was called Jukebox Jury and there were four panelists who would listen to 20 seconds and say whether they though it was a hit or not; they would take a vote. It was a very important tastemaker program because it was national TV and the week that “She’s Not There” came out, George Harrison was on the show. I was watching television and our record came on [laughs] and George Harrison said he really liked it. I couldn’t have been any happier or more euphoric than I was then. I remember he said with a Liverpool accent [imitates George Harrison], “Well done Zombies!” and I thought, “Wow, that was George Harrison, I can’t believe it!”
Rod, had I gone through your record collection back in the ’60s, what album would have been the ones that spent the most time on your turntable?
Rod Argent: At that time it was huge eclectic mix. Certainly the Beatles without any question. They were like an earthquake. It was a revolution. They were different to whatever else was going on. They were completely honest. They said and created and played exactly what they thought. I was a fortunate to have them play live a couple of times. I was still paying my early rock and roll records. I’d discovered two or three years before that and fell completely in love with the early Ray Charles music when he was really into his rhythm and blues period. I was also listening to loads of Miles Davis and people like Jimmy Smith. I was really hungry for anything that I could find that would really turn me on and that often included jazz things like that. I remember buying an early album by the guitarist Charlie Byrd called Blues For Night People that I played a lot. I was also in love with the discovery of the back music I was finding at the time, which of course The Beatles were too. It was through that conduit of The Beatles talking about Motown in particular. I had quite a few early blues LPs, stuff by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and the less fashionable blues players like Memphis Slim. In fact the very first phrase of “She’s Not There,” the word, “no one told me,” in writing that song I just started spinning a song around those first four words like a blues artist would do.
I also was listening to some of the early English bands who I adored like the Kinks. When I heard The Kinks’ first record, “You Really Got Me,” I thought that was really exciting. The first time I heard Stevie Winwood was pretty cataclysmic. I can’t tell you the influence that Stevie at 17-years-old with The Spencer Davis Band particularly their second album, on which he played the Ray Charles song “Georgia” had on me. It wasn’t just me but all the bands were blown away by this guy. I remember Paul Jones saying, “My God, I’ve been a blues aficionado for the last few years and I’ve been trying to sound like a black man and this 17-year-old comes along and he’s got it down completely and sounds just wonderful.” He was a just soulful Hammond organ player as well so that was on turntable at the time too. Some early Georgie Fame and also the Motown stuff as well. Having been blown away with Elvis singing “Hound Dog,” that black music by proxy to me because it led me to listen to some of the originals of some of Elvis’ early stuff like Big Mama Thornton doing “Hound Dog” and Arthur Crudup.
During the band’s first wave of success in the mid ’60s, in what ways do you feel The Zombies stand apart from your contemporaries?
Colin Blunstone: I think I sensed we stood out from the other bands at the time but I might not have been able to put it into words. But looking back, one of the big differences was we had two blossoming writers in the band, Rod Argent and Chris White, so that meant our material was always gonna be different. Until the summer of ’64 when we recorded “She’s Not There,” our repertoire was mostly rhythm and blues so we would have been similar to a lot of the other bands coming out like The Yardbirds and The [Rolling] Stones. We would have been trying to play like them but then with Rod Argent and Chris White showing that they were writers, everything changed so that was the big difference I think. I always think that their writing really it the spot in 1967 when we recorded Odessey and Oracle. There were good songs along the way but those 12 songs on that are on Odessey and Oracle I think to some extent are the end result of three years of playing on the road and Rod and Chris learning their craft. The other thing is we were a keyboard based band and not many other bands were in those days; I can think of Manfred Mann, a little bit later perhaps Traffic and maybe The Animals too. But we were one of the few keyboard-based bands. We were also a harmony band as well. When we started in 1961 harmonies were not particularly popular, certainly in Britain there were very few bands who did harmonies. But we always did write from the beginning. So I’d say the big thing was Rod Argent and Chris White’s writing and then the fact that we were a keyboard based band and our vocal harmonies. I think the other thing is we took our inspiration from such a wide spectrum of music. There’s a classical element in the writing and the playing that we did, modern jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, it’s all there. I think that made us a bit different. I’m not saying we were good and I’m not saying we were better than anyone else but I think that contributed towards us being different.
Rod Argent: I’ve often thought about this. We all loved music and I was completely in love with many kinds of music. I thought that particular time in music leading up to when the Zombies put out our first record was a fantastic time for music I thought it was a wonderful time for jazz, that wonderful Miles Davis band from ’58 with [John] Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. The first Hammond organ thing I heard was Jimmy Smith and that seemed like a wonderful explosion of invention and energy.
I thought it was just a fantastic time and I was heavily involved in all of those things. But when we were onstage and playing we just thought of ourselves as a rock and roll group. From 1962 onwards The Beatles had been very big in the UK, two years before the U.S. And when we were knocking off to make our first record I thought of us as being a band like The Beatles. It wasn’t until years later when Pat Metheny spoke to me about the modal influences in “She’s Not There” and I thought, “Really?” But when I went back and played it and plated the voicings I’d done went, “My God, he’s right!” A lot of those influences came through unconsciously. Maybe that was one bit of a difference between us and other bands, just the fact it had some jazz influences. While I was passionately in love with rock and roll. I was also just as passionate about Milestones, the very first EP I bought of Miles Davis and I can still sing those solos on that record. So all of that was in the back of my head. All of that became ingredients that somehow came through into The Zombies music. The other thing I would say and this is true to this day, we never tried to sound like anybody else. We never thought, “Listen, we have to be really commercial here so we’ve got to get to a hook in 30 or 40 seconds.” We just thought, “Oh, this really works” or “What about if we did this? Yeah, doesn’t that sound good?” So in the short term I think it made record companies dismissive a bit and what they had form us was not commercial but I think in the long term it’s meant that some of us stuff hasn’t dated as much as some of our contemporaries, not all of our contemporaries. But it still manages to relate to people of this current generation. We have 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds come up to us all of the time and say, “Oh man, I’m just discovering your music and I absolutely adore it.” If we can relate to people of that age and if it still means something to them, then how good is that? If people of all ages can relate to us it’s because we did it all for the right reasons, not thinking we have to do this because this is what’s really commercial at the moment. We’ve never done that and we still don’t.
The Zombies have been reborn in past 20 years with sold out tours and strong new albums, what do you attribute this charge of creative energy, positivity and continued popularity?
Colin Blunstone: To me there’s an element of mystery about this. It’s something I don’t fully understand. But I think it’s a combination of facts that has led us to the position we’re in at the moment. I think one is the late discovery by the media and the public of Odessey and Oracle. I think it’s a unique situation in that album was commercially completely ignored at the time and it was discovered ten or 15 years after it was released. Of course, the band had long finished by that point. So there’s an air of mystery about the band from the beginning. And then we’re just fortunate that Rod and I got together in 1999 to originally play six concerts, even though there was an element of chance. But we just enjoyed it so much that we just kept going and started recording new material. So we’re in an interesting situation where we’re actually originally a band from the ‘60s but we’re still writing and recording new material, which I hope people will think has got a contemporary edge to it. I’m not sure there are many other bands that are in that kind of a situation where they have an album that was discovered years after the band was finished and then by chance they get back together again, not to reform The Zombies. We spent seven or eight years touring as Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent. When we first got together we played very few Zombies tunes. We both have solo careers and of course Rod has got the Argent catalog and he’s played with many other people. We weren’t playing that many Zombies tunes and it was wonderful but total surprise the interest there was in the Zombies repertoire and bit by bit we started adding Zombie tunes the concert set.
Retro-Active is written by Ken Sharp, who can be reached directly at sharpk@aol.com or 818-986-9715. ©2020. All rights reserved.
