![]() It wasn’t long after that that Ramsey got the call to join the fake Zombies, which at the time featured Beard, Hill, and Meador. Beard was already friends with Dusty Hill, and he took Ramsey to see Hill’s band American Blues. Beard knew everyone in the Dallas music scene and was noted for playing a drum kit with two bass drums, the mark of a badass drummer in 1969. Ramsey remembers meeting Frank Beard later at a spot in Fort Worth called Pizza Inn, where they became fast friends. The Gentlemen had scored a minor hit with their single "It’s a Cry’n Shame" in 1966 when Meador was only 16, and Ramsey couldn’t pass up the opportunity to introduce himself. During his senior year of high school, a Texas blues band called the Gentlemen came to play a school-sponsored rock concert, featuring neighborhood hotshot guitarist - and future fellow fake Zombie - Sebastian “Seab” Meador. He was good-looking, he had a sweet girlfriend named Vicki, and he loved playing guitar. But, in terms of sheer audacity and brazenness, it’s a story that’s still hard to top.īefore he joined Hill and Beard in the Texas band that passed itself off as the Zombies, Mark Ramsey was 18 years old and living on the outskirts of Dallas. Nearly 50 years later, what happened with the Zombies is now more myth than scandal, hazy details further lost to history, with many of its principal players gone or forgotten. As the British Invasion spurred rock's cultural explosion in the '60s, there simply weren't yet enough of these upstart bands touring North America to meet the demand. It was in this climate that Delta Promotions took this exploitation to a new extreme, figuring out a way to tour and sell “the Zombies” and other bands without those bands or their fans even realizing. Over the course of their existence, the Drifters have had somewhere around 60 members. In the doo-wop era, if a member of a popular group pushed back against a manager or label boss, they were simply sent packing, with a new, more compliant candidate brought in to replace them. In the history of the American popular music, artists have often been seen as interchangeable by the industry that promotes and distributes them. 3 on the Billboard chart and the Zombies were suddenly in demand. label, Date Records, decided to release the track “Time of the Season” as a last-ditch effort the song went to No. Almost two years after their breakup, after little fanfare and two failed singles, the band’s U.S. Nobody even saw fit to correct the unintentionally misspelled “Odessey” on the record’s cover, viewed in hindsight as typical psychedelic-era wordplay. The Zombies quietly disbanded when Odessey and Oracle failed to make the charts. The real Zombies would have never worn cowboy hats. Cruz and Chris Page are scrawled over them. ![]() I inform White that the two young men wearing cowboy hats are Dusty Hill and Frank Beard from the legendary Texas blues-rock band ZZ Top, although the names D. There are only four guys pictured despite the fact that the Zombies were a five-piece. I pull up another grainy photo from 1969 on my laptop: a traditional black and white press photo for the Original "Zombies" (in conspicuous scare quotes), autographed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |