For those not in the know, fan albums are the attempts of me and many others to take songs and put them on an album, typically they’re made to improve upon something, such as an existing album or to take non-album tracks and put them on an album.
We’re almost at the end of our trip through Zombie lane. Here’s one of the two post-Zombies efforts I’d like to cover. This one’s for Rod Argent. My knowledge of this material was initially more limited, simply that six of these songs were on a “lost” Zombies album called R.I.P., which is no longer lost as of the 90’s. My hope was that the classic line-up was present on every track. The Wikipedia page credits a “Jim Rodford” on bass and “Rick Birkett” on guitar in addition to the original bass and guitar player. Hopefully they were barely involved, so as to have as much classic Zombies as possible. The truth wasn’t what I was hoping for. Six of the songs on R.I.P. were recorded after the band broke up with Birkett, Rodford, two classic members playing; Hugh Grundy and Argent, and another classic member producing and possibly adding backing vocals, Chris White, so basically two and a half original members. The other six songs were classic line-up songs from as early as 1964 with overdubs. Upon listening to the album, my opinion was mostly in agreement with most people’s, the songs aren’t bad, but the different styles and line-ups flow poorly together and the early songs didn’t need the overdubs. The no-overdub versions were on other Zombies fan albums and the overdub versions were bonus features on those albums. Fanedits of R.I.P. usually maintain that title, the name, “The Zombies”, and try to incorporate Colin Blunstone, the original band’s lead singer.
- Albums That Never Were’s version has some classic songs and Colin Blunstone solo songs
- FuzzDandy’s version features relatively few R.I.P. songs and has many solo-era songs for Argent and Blunstone
- Albums That Should Exist’s version features Colin songs when he went by Neil McArthur
It seemed unnecessary to take these half-Zombies songs and try to force them to be Zombies songs, so here I only allowed material by Rod Argent from 1967-1969, as sessions for the first album by Rod’s next band, Argent, were in 1969. Sadly, this was not very fruitful. The only songs that could be found are the six R.I.P. songs and four songs from the Into The Afterlife compilation. Interestingly, the line-up on the ten songs is the same with the possible exception of Rick Birkett on two tracks. More songs were badly wanted as these ten total the painfully short 27 minutes. It would’ve been nice to have some heft. I was not afraid of Rod songs without the other members, but there didn’t appear to be any. Hopefully there’ll be another comprehensive box set that covers his solo era. It’s not hard to think that Argent would record some demos that could be used that are now obscure. Any potential songs might only exist in a closet or really obscure bootlegs that another box set could unearth. I considered using a few other weird choices, such as the song “Telescope” sung by Chris White in addition to the Rod-sung version. The two were too similar. Chris White also produced a song in 1968 for a group called “Free Ferry”. Sadly, the only person involved that was related to this line-up is Chris, so its inclusion wouldn’t make sense. Those two Chris songs are included as bonus tracks.
Despite the shortness of these songs, they are pretty good. It would’ve been nice to see them released in 1969, preferably with four other songs so it’d have a standard album’s length. The actual first Argent album is about 40 minutes long. The name of this album, Floral Street, is one of the track’s title shortened. The original title in mind was “The Morning”, which I don’t really like. The picture is a poster for a modern Zombies show cropped. I made a few versions of it which I’ll include as bonuses. Finally, I was considering crediting this album to “Argent”, but seeing as two of the members hadn’t joined yet, it seemed inaccurate, so this will be credited to Rod Argent. The word “Rod” on the cover is small, so one could ignore it if they’d like. I wanted to take individual pictures of the band, put them on the same photo and make that the cover, but the potential pictures weren’t that good. The last planned fan album featuring Zombies is a Colin Blunstone one, so stay tuned!
I like suggestions on what artist to cover next, so if you know of one you’d like me to look at, feel free to suggest ‘em!
ROD ARGENT – FLORAL STREET
SIDE A
- “She Loves The Way They Love Her” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
- “Imagine The Swan” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
- “Smokey Day” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
- “Girl, Help Me” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
- “Conversation Off Floral Street” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
SIDE B
- “Telescope” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
- “Unhappy Girl” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
- “It Never Fails To Please Me” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
- “To Julia (For When She Smiles)” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
- “I Could Spend The Day” (Rod Argent, Chris White)
BONUS TRACKS
- “She Loves The Way They Love Her (Demo)”
- “She Loves The Way They Love Her (No Live Overdubs)”
- “Telescope (Mr Galileo) (Chris White Lead Vocal)”
- “I Could Spend The Day (Demo)”
- “Magic Carpet Ride (Chris White Produced Track From 1968)”
PERSONNEL
- Rod Argent – keyboard (tracks 1-10), lead vocals (tracks 1-10), production (tracks 1-10)
- Hugh Grundy – drums (tracks 1-10)
- Jim Rodford – bass (tracks 1-10), backing vocals
- Rick Birkett – lead guitar (tracks 1-5, 7, 9-10, possibly 8), rhythm guitar (possibly 6, possibly 8)
- Chris White – production (tracks 1-10), backing vocals
- Mac MacLeod – lead guitar (track 6, possibly 8)
Floral Street (1969) – Archive.org
And for the next Rod album…
Argent (1970) – YouTube, Spotify, Archive.org
The Filme Diary 