Rod Argent, who plays with The Zombies at Bilheimer Capitol Theatre in Clearwater, Florida on April 12, 2024. Credit: Photo by Josh Bradley

If you play a track from The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle and a track from their new album Different Game back-to-back, it’s not irrational to think how crazy it is that the same guy composed both songs.

Founding keyboardist and main creative force Rod Argent is continually picking up on new sounds and melodies, and never works off nostalgia or what he’s done before.

“If you do something for real, you stand a chance that it will last longer than other things we’ve seen to date,” he told Creative Loafing Tampa during a recent phone call from across the pond. Argent added that he takes a lot of pride in being able to bring his own visions to life through song, rather than relying on other producers for ideas.

“We’ve always just tried to do things that turned us on and try to make them successful. And I don’t think that that’s the quickest and easiest way to success, but it means that if you can actually move people that way, then it does stand a chance of living for very much longer.”
Along with the lead vocals of fellow founding member Colin Blunstone, Argent—along with the current lineup of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted psych-rock outfit, which wraps up its U.S. tour at downtown Clearwater’s Bilheimer Capitol Theatre on Friday, April 12—wrote all but one song on Different Game.

He also insisted on recording the album the way bands had to in the 1960s: Completely live, with Blunstone providing a guide vocal track to play alongside. And unless it was absolutely necessary, minimal editing came into play during production.

“Maybe a couple of notes were out of tune, or maybe I didn’t like one phrase I played on a solo, or [guitarist] Tom [Toomey] didn’t, and we just tended to that. But that was it,” he explained, also pointing out how easy it would be to replicate each song onstage using the live recording method. “You haven’t got multi-layers of tracks. You might double-track the occasional harmony, but that’s just about it,” he added.

Bits and pieces of Different Game were even dreamt up before COVID-19 hit. In 2019, The Zombies co-headlined a tour with Beach Boy Brian Wilson, in which both acts would play songs that emerged in 1968 (in The Zombies’ case, Odessey and Oracle in its entirety). One night, Argent heard Wilson’s impeccable backing band members warming up their vocal cords in a hallway one night, by harmonizing their way through certain arrangements, a cappella. “They used to sound so brilliant,” he recalled.

Inspiration struck like lightning, and on his next off day, Argent went to his hotel room and wrote an a cappella intro for the band to sing at the beginning of “Rediscover,” an at-the-time newly-penned song that already had Blunstone’s approval.

“It wasn’t copied in any way from anything of The Beach Boys, but it was just that initial inspiration of something a cappella being lovely to do,” Argent clarified. “It was something with a little dissonance in it, where I could have a little bit of fun writing the intervals.”

While the production aspect of Different Game was “a ball,” according to Argent, the record’s album cover depicted a major hiccup in The Zombies’ recent history. On their way to a gig in Phoenix, Arizona, the air conditioning in the band’s van died, and not long after, the engine caught on fire, leaving everyone stranded for four hours with minimal cell service, but luckily, plenty of water to chug in the 107-degree heat.

“We were on the side of the road, where Colin was saying ‘I wonder what all those holes there are. I’ve walked amongst a lot of holes.’” Argent laughed. “And our tour manager said, ‘Don’t do that, they’re snake holes!’”

That’s the kind of looking back that Argent likes doing: The kind that doesn’t define who you are as a musician. But then again, the idea of looking back is what resurrected The Zombies in the first place.

Blunstone was doing some solo gigs in the 1990s, and very humbly asked his old pal Rod (who he had remained good friends with since the band’s split in the late 1960s) to play some gigs with him after a well-received reunion encore. The keyboardist was skeptical to do so, following some negative touring experiences while fronting his eponymous band in the 1970s.

“Anything could go wrong with all the analog instruments, like the Hammond organ and the electric pianos and everything,” Argent told CL. “The actual performance seemed to be almost the last thing you were doing.” But his cousin Jim Rodford (who had played bass with The Kinks and would later join him in The Zombies) explained that the concert industry had changed, in terms of safely schlepping things across the country.

So Rod agreed to jump in. During the first few years of getting back together with Blunstone, not a lick of Zombies material was dusted off. That is, until Argent heard a recording of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers—whose frontman thought the absolute world of The Zombies—covering “I Want You Back Again” at a concert.

“He recorded it on a vinyl album, and that was a very old Zombies song I had written right at the beginning. I had totally forgotten about it,” Argent remembered. He went to Blunstone and explained that when the original band was on the road, there was so much material it never got to perform, and there was no better time to give it a try.

“It suddenly started to feel genuine to immerse ourselves in a bit of The Zombies’ music,” he added.

It has been 20 years since the Zombies moniker officially returned. The boys—despite a few lineup changes—continue to hold strong, and they’ve even spread their promotions over to TikTok, where clips of King Crimson’s ever-contradictory Robert Fripp dancing to a live version of “She’s Not There,” and Argent speaking in an American accent about his excitement over Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” movie have emerged.

“I remember when ‘Barbie’ came out, I said ‘We can’t do anything about ‘Barbie,’ for God’s sake,’” he laughed, remembering how he and the whole band partook in last summer’s “Hi, Barbie! Hi, Ken!” trend.

Talk about something you never thought the guy who gave us Odessey & Oracle would be a part of.

Tickets to see The Zombies with Bruce Sudano play Clearwater’s Bilheimer Capitol Theatre on Friday, April 12 are still available and start at $44.50.

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