Part 2: ZAN is Born (Kalamazoo Doesn’t Notice)

Hello again, fellow survivors.  Let’s get back to it, shall we?

It’s mid-August in 2006 and Travis Stickel and I have just moved into together along with a few of my other friends.  After several years in self imposed exile Travis was now back in Kalamazoo to study Criminal Justice at Western Michigan University with a semi-long term plan to apply to the police academy (We’ll get into that situation soon enough).   I had just had my Rock & Roll dreams crushed when my band The Janissaries faded away (But didn’t technically break up, as I mentioned last time) but I decided to give it one last shot.  I would form a new band and if that one failed I’d quit music.  Now nothing against Travis, of course; he’s one of my dearest friends and easily one of the major reasons Zombie Apocalypse NOW! had any sort of local success, but at that point I was just desperate.  Don’t forget that I had never heard Travis play guitar before so I had no idea how good he would eventually turn out to be.  He was a convenient guitar player so I asked him to join up.  Had anyone else been living with me at the time who could play guitar I would have asked them as well as I didn’t have to look very far.  Now I know that sounds kind of bad but it all worked out for the best and he was happy to be asked.  It went something like this:

Jay Stuart: Hey Travis, wanna join my band that I just made up?

Travis: Fuck yes I do!

And that was the formation of ZAN.  Not the grandest of stories, I know.

Click below for more.

Before I asked Travis to join up with my so-called “band” I debated what I would call it.  Unlike the Janissaries this was going to be my project and I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, which as you can probably guess makes a man feel like a MAN when presented with that much control.   My number one pick for a name was The 7 Gold Shovels.  That might sound kind of random but it’s actually a reference to one of my favorite poems “We Real Cool” (From the opening line of “THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVELS”) by Gwendolyn Brooks.  However now that I had Travis on board I decided to go with something that felt more like it belonged to both of us rather than just myself.  As we became friends while discussing what to do and what not to do during a zombie outbreak the logical answer was to reference the undead in some way.  The obvious thing was to call the group Zombie Apocalypse Now, the reference clearly being the film Apocalypse Now.

BUT that was not the whole reason I picked that specific name!  The “Now” being written in all capitals and with the exclamation point was influenced by a completely different source and to this day only one person has ever figured it out without any hints or clues.  It is a tribute to the Nickelodeon cartoon and KaBlam! spin-off Action League Now!, of which I was a huge fan of as a kid.

To clarify: Neither Travis nor myself are super strong or super naked

So really when you’re reading our name I’m hoping you read it like this: “Zombie Apocalypse…NOW!”  I warned you this was a nerdy band.

Anyway I asked Travis what he thought of the name and of course he loved it and we’ve been calling ourselves that ever since.  So we had a band name and we had a few songs (That I had previously tried to get the Janissaries to play) so really all we needed was a drummer to play shows, and after the debacle with the last band I had decided to go the punk rock route and try to play as many shows as early as possible regardless of how prepared we were.  A drummer was the least we needed to do this but in the early days we actually had agreed that we needed a rhythm guitarist and a lead singer as well.  Back then I could not sing and play bass.  Hell, an argument could be made that I still can’t, but in 2006 my ability to stand there, play an instrument and sing was pretty much non-existent so I felt we needed a singer badly (Travis refused when I asked him to sing.  He later got over that, thankfully).  Finding a drummer, however, was the priority; we could play a show without a singer but not without a drummer.

Allow me to move off-track for a little to talk about The Dead Walk Again, ZAN’s first zombie tune and as Travis often put it in the early days “Our signature song.”   I technically like our name but one of my biggest pet peeves in this band is how much people tend to judge us by the fact that we have “zombie” in our title.  The average person who has heard of us usually refers to us as “that zombie band”.  It’s this belief that we mostly only play songs about zombies.  In reality we, by a wide margin, play mostly non-zombie related music.  Hell, our EP doesn’t have a single song about the undead on it at all!  We have TWO songs about zombies (I recently wrote a new song actually that may also count but it isn’t actually about zombies in the long run).  The Dead Walk Again was the first one and for a while our only one.

There was one point during Travis’ several years out of town where he came back to Kzoo for a visit.  This was so he, myself and our friend Courtney could all head to Grand Rapids to see a cKy.  During the car ride Travis and Courtney got into an argument about whether the song “Escape from Hellview” was about zombies or about a town full of slashers.  In the end Travis, as he usually does when he’s in an argument, calmly proved with citation and evidence that the song was indeed about slashers, not zombies.  Afterwards there was an awkward silence in the car for a long while until I spoke up some time later and said “You know what?  There SHOULD be a song about zombies.”  Obviously there are plenty of songs about zombies but twenty-year old Jay Stuart either didn’t know or didn’t care (I don’t recall which).  For the next week I spent literally all my free time trying to write this song, even bringing my bass to campus and playing in-between classes.  I was trying to write a song about the undead while also trying to emulate cKy’s style.  Now if you’ve ever The Dead Walk Again you know that at eats part of that was a complete failure.  Ultimately the Janissaries played it a bit before tossing it aside.  One fo them even said he didn't like it becuase it would be a "gateway song" to other dumb ideas such as a vampire song.  The obious retort was to form my own band.

I’ll jump ahead briefly to 2008 and share a very early video of ZAN performing The Dead Walk Again.  On drums is Mike Zupke, our first long time (But second official) drummer whom we’ll get into in more detail next time.

(Note that Jay Stuart eventually got better at singing)

Back in 2006, as I said, a drummer was the priority but a problem soon arose that I either hadn’t counted on or simply tried to downplay at first: neither Travis nor myself knew anything about being in a band or how to recruit members.  Travis had never been in a band before and most of my bands fizzled out before we even played a proper gig.   So with that hanging over our heads we basically were doing a lot of things incorrectly as far as recruitment goes.  Another issue was that I think these days (The Age of Digital Music!!!!) most musicians would be hesitant to audition for a band they’ve never heard of who have no music samples available somewhere.   Thus for the next thirteen months we couldn’t find a permanent drummer at all.  Meaning we couldn’t have shows our entire first year.  I swear to God we must be the only band I’ve ever heard of that formed and then played their first show over a year later.  This was so disgraceful that even now I’m still pretty sore about it.  A whole fucking year wasted.

Well not wasted I suppose.  During that year I spent so much time writing music and singing lyrics in our basement I eventually learned how to sing and play at the same time, which negated our need for a lead singer.  Had we found a drummer soon after we formed we may have then recruited a singer and Zombie Apocalypse NOW! would likely be a very different band. What really sucks is that back then I was obsessed over the idea of the band playing shows with local outfit Nice Try.  I LOVED Nice Try and to this day I feel that no band present or dead from West Michigan was nearly as good as they were at their best.  Not us, not your favorite band, no one.  The only band that came close was Wow! Laserbeams who I also loved.  But back in 2006/2007 I was slowly going insane over this.  The guys in Nice Try, who knew me very well as that black dude Jay who ALWAYS showed up at their gigs, had told me that whenever I got my band figured out I could open for them and I was convinced that when that happened our bands would become best friends and tour the world together and get signed to major labels and all that other good shit.  Naïve?  Fuck yes, but what can I say?  Being young and being wide eyed and foolish go hand in hand. 

Anyway I was getting desperate to uphold my end of the deal with Nice Try.  By the summer of 2007 I had managed to convince my buddy Christopher Bell, who I had jammed with before, to try-out with the band but only if we could get him a drum kit since he didn’t have his own.  These days if a drummer asked me that I’d tell him to hit the road but as I said I really, really wanted to play shows with Nice Try.  So I managed to borrow the drum kit of my friend Tony who was the former drummer of another band I really liked at the time from Grand Rapids called Midnight Radio (He was replaced in Midnight Radio by another drummer named “Tony” who we’ll get into eventually).  Drums provided Chris did a decent enough job for me and Travis to wholeheartedly agree to let him join right there and then.  The next day he stopped talking to us for at least six months, maybe a whole year.  Our first official drummer had one practice with us before bailing without notice.  Eventually I ran into him and he apologized but this would set the precedent for our luck with drummers.  If you are a fan of ZAN you know we go through drummers fairly quickly and usually if we’re on hiatus it’s because we’re in-between drummers.  What a sad state.

By August I had had enough.  I had a buddy, Zack Webb, who recorded bands pretty regularly and mentioned to me that he could theoretically fake drums should ZAN ever want to record with his studio (Ill Tempered Studios, located in his apartment).  After thinking about it for a bit I declared “Fuck it, let’s do it.”  I had convinced myself that lack of recorded music was hindering our search for a drummer and f we could create a demo that gave an indication of the type of music we played then they would be more inclined to respond to our flyers and ads.  Thus we recorded “The Amina Demo”.

Jay Stuart desperately trying to avoid sneezing on Ill Tempered Studios

It wasn’t good.  Obviously we did it without a drummer, but it was also our first experience in a studio of any kind (And also the studio was an apartment) and to make matters even worse I for some reason was allergic to all of Zack’s cats that he had running around so my voice was even more fucked than usual.  That said with all that in mind I think it could have been much worse.  Unlike The Sellout Demo in 2009 this recording wasn’t really meant to be given out; just to give a sample of what we theoretically sounded like and in that regard I think it was successful.

Travis' infamous reputation for finishing in three takes or less began here

Anyway after about a month Zack sent us the finished results and I then opened our myspace page with the tracks.  This was late September.  By mid-October, a day after a put an ad on Craigslist, we got an email from a guy who seemed very interested in playing with us.  By the end of that month we finally played our first show.

Next I’ll talk about ZAN’s less frustrating and terrible, but still pretty frustrating and terrible, second year or as I now refer to it “ZAN Version 1.0”.