The Fab Four's first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was on February 9, 1964. The Zombies were in what is sometimes called "the second wave of the British Invasion," not making their Billboard Magazine Hot 100 debut until eight months later on October 17, 1964 with the single She's Not There. That song stayed on the charts for fifteen weeks, peaking at # 2 on December 12, 1964, where it resided for one week (behind Bobby Vinton's Mr. Lonely). It turned out to be the Zombies' biggest hit. They quickly followed that up with Tell Her No, which debuted on the charts on January 9, 1965. That song peaked at # 6 on February 27, 1965 and stayed there for two weeks. Tell Her No had a chart life span of eleven weeks.
This was the heyday for the Zombies, as their two top ten hits were getting tons of radio airplay. They appeared on Sullivan and other popular U.S. shows like Hullabaloo. With their dark suits and thick, lustrous, wavy hair, the musicians fit the part of a band that might bear the name "Zombies." A couple of the lads also sported black horn-rimmed glasses, not a customary accessory for bands of the day. As an entity the Zombies were different, and so was their genre-defying music, bordering on baroque. They had all the live gigs they could handle, especially along the East Coast. For a six to nine month period they were receiving as much screaming adulation from teen audiences as any other band outside of the Beatles and Stones. Then, they hit a wall. Why?
Ironically, the Zombies were never as successful in their native Great Britain as they were in the States. For example, She's Not There did not reach the top ten in the U.K., and Tell Her No failed to breach the top forty there. Even in the U.S., their third single, She's Coming Home, was not a lucky charm, managing to top out only at # 58. They seemed to run out of juice, and without a new hit to promote, their label, Decca, dropped them. Four of the five original band members hung in there for a couple more years, but as far as commercial success, the well had run dry. The Zombies signed with another label, CBS, and recorded an album on the cheap called Odessey and Oracle (the first word of the title having been unintentionally misspelled) during the summer of 1967. When singles from Odessey generated little buzz, the band broke up that December.
What makes the Zombies' story unique is what transpired after the break up. Four months after the disintegration, CBS released Odessey and Oracle in the U.K. with uninspiring results. The album would have been buried, never to be heard again, except American musician Al Kooper, fresh from having an instrumental part in forming the jazz-rock hit maker Blood, Sweat & Tears, convinced Columbia records to give Odessey a shot in the States. The twofold result was (i) Time Of The Season, a single from Odessey, became the Zombies' second biggest hit, reaching # 3 on March 29, 1969, reclaiming that position the following week and staying on the Billboard charts for thirteen weeks, and (ii) Odessey is now internationally considered a masterpiece. In 2003 Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Odessey as the one hundredth best album of all time. By the time that late-blooming and originally under-appreciated album had become famous, the band members were off working on other projects or in careers unrelated to music, and therefore declined the chance to re-form. Had the Zombies re-formed, with Odessey having confirmed their legitimacy as true craftsmen, there is no telling how different their legacy might have been.
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Ever since I first heard She's Not There when I was a senior in high school, I have been a Zombies fan. A few of my random thoughts about the band follow.
One lyric from She's Not There goes like this:
Her voice was soft and cool,
Her eyes were clear and bright.
The four adjectives contained in those lines describe Colin Blunstone's voice, which was atypical for a rocker. Just like the Dave Clark Five, where one might expect to hear a guitar break the Zombies chose keyboards. And similar to the Beatles' second U.S. hit, She Loves You, the Zombies' second hit, Tell Her No, is about a girl but is directed to a boy who has a relationship with her. (The Beatles returned to that theme in 1965 with You're Going To Lose That Girl.)
Eight or nine years ago I took Momma Cuan to First Ave to hear Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone. They had a backup band but were touring as a duo, not as the Zombies. The show was tremendous and it was interesting to see so many Zombies fans here in Minnesota. Naturally, most of them were of my vintage. In preparation for attending that show I bought a Zombies compilation album titled The Singles Collection, As & Bs, 1964-1969 (on the Big Beat label). With twenty-eight tracks it is one of my favorite records in my collection.
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So, why am I writing about the Zombies in a Quarterly Cinema Scan post? The connection is the film Eddie And The Cruisers. When I saw the trailer for that 1983 movie, I was immediately reminded of the Zombies' story. The Zombies relished their moment in the sun, but had the misfortune of disbanding before the promise of their seminal record, Odessey And Oracle, was fulfilled. The Cruisers' story has a somewhat similar, but not identical, bent. I simply had to see the movie as soon as it was released.
The tale is told mainly in flashbacks, which take us to early '60's New Jersey. Eddie Wilson (Michael Pare), a dynamic singer with matinee idol looks, fronts a band, the Cruisers, with four musicians and a backup singer, Joann (Helen Schneider), who is Eddie's girl. They play mostly lounges up and down the Jersey Shore. They have one extremely well received album, Tender Years, to their credit, but there is trouble brewing in the making of their sophomore effort. The band is not a democracy; it's Eddie's way or no way. Eddie insists, over his bandmates' reservations, on using dark depressing moods throughout their second album, thus thoroughly contrasting with their first. When the finished product, A Season In Hell, is presented to their label, it is flat out rejected, just as the other Cruisers had feared. Within hours, Eddie has driven his car at a high speed over a bridge railing and into the river below. His body is never found. That was the end of the Cruisers as we knew them. (Bass player Sal (Matthew Laurance) later forms a Cruisers tribute band.)
Flash ahead to present day 1983. It is the twentieth anniversary of Tender Years, and disc jockeys are championing a rebirth of interest in the band. A documentary film producer, Maggie Foley (Ellen Barkin), takes on an investigation of the strange sequence of events from two decades ago. Is Eddie dead? If so, was his deep plunge into the river an accident or suicide? What happened to the master tapes of A Season In Hell, which inexplicably disappeared from the recording studio within twenty-four hours after Eddie's tragedy? The band's sax player, Wendell Newton ("Tunes" Antunes), died in a motel room the same year as Eddie's passing, 1963. Was that coincidence, or are the two fatalities connected in some nefarious way? When Maggie attempts to interview the surviving members of the band, some are less than forthcoming. Have they merely "turned the page" or are they hiding something?
In the interest of fairness and integrity, I am saddened to report that the movie, Eddie And The Cruisers, was not all that it could have and should have been. The story falls apart in the last act, which is most disappointing because, up until then, it had the makings of a superb motion picture. The premise and the potential were there, but it's almost as if the filmmakers changed writers for the finish. I watched the movie again last month on TV. I remembered my reaction to my initial viewing thirty-six years ago, but was hoping for a different personal outcome this time. No such luck.
In a departure from my own grading rationale which I set out in my post dated January 12, 2012, I've decided to give this film a B+ instead of the B- which my system calls for. Rules, especially self-imposed ones, are made to be broken. I'll try not to make a habit of doing so. I'm going to lay the blame this time on the outstanding sound track laid down by John Cafferty And The Beaver Brown Band, a Rhode Island group hired by director Martin Davidson for the project.
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Here are the movies I watched on the small screen during the first quarter of 2019.
1. Eddie And The Cruisers (1983 drama; Ellen Barkin is a journalist who investigates the death of a hot band's lead singer, Michael Pare, twenty years ago, and the mysterious disappearance of the band's recording tapes from the studio the following day.) B+
2. The High And The Mighty (1954 drama; co-pilot John Wayne, a seasoned flyer with a tragic past, coaches younger pilot Robert Stack when their commercial jet is imperiled on a flight from Honolulu to San Francisco.) D
3. James Stewart, Robert Mitchum: The Two Faces Of America (2017 documentary about two premier actors during Hollywood's Golden Age.) B-
4. Roma (2018 drama; Yalitza Aparicio is an indispensable, much loved but still under-appreciated maid for a middle class Mexico City family which the mother, Marina de Tavira, tries to sustain when her husband deserts them.) B-
5. The Seven Ups (1973 police drama; Roy Scheider is the leader of a small contingent of cops who bend the law and resort to dirty tactics to put the gangster wise guys behind bars.) B-
6. Sleeping With The Enemy (1991 drama; Julia Roberts fakes her own drowning in Cape Cod to escape abusive husband Patrick Bergen, then changes her appearance and her name to make a new life in Cedar Falls, Iowa.) C
7. Snowcoming (2019 romance; Trevor Donovan, a star NFL quarterback, returns to his home town for the retirement party of his former high school coach, Ed Marinaro, who also happens to be the father of Trevor's old crush, Lindy Booth.) C+
8. Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970 war drama; Colonel E.G. Marshall is one of the very few American military brass to take the threat of a December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor seriously, while Harvard educated So Yamamura, the Japanese fleet commander, is not thoroughly convinced an attack is in his country's best long-term interests.) B-
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