Many factors came together to make 2016 the happy first year of the Brewsalas, but one significant influence should not be overlooked: namely that of the psychedelic British Invasion band the Zombies.
Probably everyone in the western world has heard “Time of the Season”, the song that at least lately puts the Zombies on the map. And aside a smattering of hit singles in the mid-sixties before that, one could be forgiven for assuming they were a one-hit-wonder. But due as much to my insatiable quest for new-to-me recordings as a truly serendipitous if otherwise unworkable housing configuration in 2012, that year I discovered the profoundly underappreciated 1968 opus of the Zombies: Odessey and Oracle.
A highlight of late-sixties baroque pop, Odessey and Oracle is as much a marvel today as it was when it was new nearly fifty years ago. Having just happened upon a gem of this stature in December 2012, I wasn’t done bragging about the find in March 2013 when Yana and I met. We both fell in love with the album and were overjoyed to see the Zombies perform at Bumbershoot that summer!
Yana considers that show to be among the best she’s ever seen for one important reason: Colin Blunstone, the lead singer, held the audience in the palm of his hand. Rather than just play the hits and collect the check, Colin took us on a journey through the Zombies’ short streak of fame in the sixties as well as his and fellow member and keyboardist Rod Argent’s subsequent solo careers. He told us about how they cut Odessey and Oracle at Abbey Road studios just after the Beatles finished off Sgt. Pepper in 1967 (with many of the same engineers!), and how Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters said that hearing their song “Care of Cell 44” changed his life. Perhaps the best moment was hearing — and dancing to — “This Will Be Our Year,” the song that Yana and I had declared our song earlier that summer.
Another thing Colin mentioned was that he had enjoyed singing with the Alan Parsons Project just before they performed one of his favourites from those days near the end of the show. Until then, my knowledge of the Alan Parsons Project was mainly limited to a one-liner from 1999’s Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me:
But I promptly forgot about the remark when the Zombies closed their set with a rollicking performance of Rod Argent’s most famous solo hit, “Hold Your Head Up.” I didn’t think much about it again for three years.
But earlier this year I was hunting through the bargain LP bin at my favourite Seattle record store, Sonic Boom, when I happened upon a pair of Alan Parsons Project albums. Not knowing which to choose but interested in determining for myself whether they deserved the vague notion I had that they were little more than an over-synthed dad-rock cult band, I picked up the one with the coolest name and cover: I Robot.
It turns out that I Robot, a 1977 theme album about the interplay between man and machine amid the inexorable rise of technology, is probably the Alan Parsons Project’s best. I half expected to hear Colin on the record, but while I didn’t, I thoroughly loved it. It was good enough that I picked up their next most recommended record according to allmusic.com, 1980’s The Turn of a Friendly Card, a theme album about gambling addiction, this fall. That was nearly as good, and frankly I had forgotten again about Colin again.
I decided to round out allmusic’s 4.5-star APP picks with 1982’s Eye in the Sky just this month. The first album in the series to feature a song I knew in advance I’d already heard (the title track), I was also surprised to learn that that goofy and ubiquitous instrumental often played as the theme for sports shows (“Sirius”) was from this album too. This turned out to be the first album in the series that wasn’t a theme album, and to the extent that the Alan Parsons Project elicits an eye roll it’s probably from the success of this sometimes smirk-inducing pop-oriented record.
But I was taken quite by surprise with the last track, “Old and Wise.” I recognized Colin’s voice almost immediately and was elated to remember I had been waiting to hear him! Looking into it, I learned that this was the only song he’d sung for APP that got radio airplay, and it was the very same that he’d sung at Bumbershoot in 2013.
So the great arc of musical discovery had come full circle, and I took this as perhaps some cosmic message that my dive into Alan Parsons Project can probably end here. (There is the matter of the last album rated at or above 4 stars at allmusic, another theme album released between the two mentioned above called Eve; it sounds like a probably dated and sexist take on the feminine wiles that have so beguiled mankind from The Beginning, but curiosity may win out.) I’ll leave you with a playlist of some of the highlights from both the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle — including both songs Yana and I played at our wedding — and the three Alan Parsons Project albums I’ve so far explored. Enjoy!