Part 4: "Somethng, Something" in French

Hello again fellow survivors. It’s been a long while. Sorry. It’s partly because of me being a busy with my current life situation and partly because I had been working on my other blog. I’ll try to resume regular work here.

2008 was yet another non-starter year for Zombie Apocalypse NOW! though compared to the last two years it was the height of success. In a lot of ways it was an extremely frustrating time (As we’ll soon get into) but the silver lining is that I wrote a ton of new songs. Let’s talk a bit about a few of them.

ZAN,  ill-equipped as always.  Possibly playing "Sellout" for the first time

Sellout: Easily one of our most popular and well liked song. It’s the one that people come up to me after shows and compliment me on the most. Toman from our good friends The Common Good loves the song so much that he always tries to get us to let him sing on stage with us whenever our two bands play together. The content of the song is a bit of a mystery due to the no-so-clear lyrics but a lot of people have assumed that it’s a commentary about the state of music these days and bands that have “sold out.” In reality I actually wrote the song about…a girl (WHAAAT?!). And a real girl too, not like Justice Girl where the whole story is obviously fictional. Long story short in early 2008 I met a beautiful girl who I almost immediately fell for but I could never actually pursue her due to many, many hurdles that popped up over the next year not the least of which being that TWO of my best friends “saw her first”. I wrote this song as a way of getting over her, which by the way hasn’t really worked yet. But writing about my “feelings” was lame so as a joke I purposely wrote a bass line that was extremely simple, a repetitive verse and a chorus intentionally poppy and imitable and meant to garner a specific reaction: a catchy tune that is hard to get out of your head, like something you might hear on the radio, that forces you to happily sing along to. Upon hearing the joke Mike Zupke suggested we call it “Sellout” due to its poppy nature. So yeah, no commentary there. Incidentally I laugh every time someone tells me they love the song as it means they fell into my trap (Mwahahaha) but even so it’s one of my favorite songs to play.

More after the jump.



Zombie Apocalypse: I don’t think I ever finished this song while Mike was in the band but I basically wrote this for him as he once drunkenly suggested I write a song titled after our band name like Black Sabbath did (Mike, like Travis, was a big metal guy, though actually I think that that Sabbath was named after the song). Truthfully I had been thinking about doing something like that anyway so I did it.  I wrote a very Black Sabbath-like tune and was very proud of it. I then forgot what I wrote two days later. D’oh! I re-wrote the song later that week but it was completely different. But if you were wondering why that song sounded more metal than what we usually write it was because I was trying my best to write a Sabbath song and failed. By the way the song is just about a dude in his final moments of a zombie story, right up to his death. Again, nothing here about the state of the music industry. While all songs are open to interpretation the only deeper meaning I was thinking about as I wrote it s the feeling of muted shock, terror and loss as one watches their loved one die in front of them and then the hubris of trying to die in order to stay with them forever. As Anti-Zombie Rock says such a thing is valid.


What’s Up With Dave?: Unlike our other songs I wrote this one years ago when I was seventeen during the time after I graduated high school but before I started college, hence all the swearing. I wrote it about some dude I used to know back in the day, NOT future guitarist Dave. The original version of the sounded much different from what ZAN now plays. Basically I went so long without playing it I forgot much of the tune but when I jokingly told the lyrics to Travis and Mike they responded very favorably and convinced me to re-write it. The song currently sounds better than ever thanks to Travis’ good ear for backing vocals and his tasty double tapping.

In the likely chance I didn’t really talk about who Mike Zupke was allow me to rectify that now. Mike was older than me and Travis by a small bit. He was already graduated from college when me met him in 2007, lived in alone in house he basically owned, and by 2008 had a real honest to God career-like job.  In short, unlike the rest of ZAN at the time, he was an actual factual adult. That’s fine, of course, but as I went on to realize when you’re at that point in your life your priorities aren’t really the same as, say, a couple of screw-ups who didn’t even really know what they wanted to do with their lives.

Top of 2008 ZAN was not in the best position but we were making the best of it. Any time we performed it was in our basement in front of our friends and various students from Western Michigan University’s Comparative Religion grad program (FYI those guys knew how to drink). But we were constantly practicing, constantly writing new songs and refining old ones. Here’s a few videos from this time.





The first video is obviously a cover of Weezer’s We Are All On Drugs. The second is an early version of The Dead Walk Again. These videos make me want to hide in a dark hole, by the way.

Things weren’t going really well but at least we were working on technique which is certainly a good thing. Still it’s not enough; playing shows regularly is what being in a band is all about. The previous summer my buddy Mr. Kaze and I ended up going to the Fête de la Musique in downtown Kalamazoo. If you don’t know about the Fête it’s a cool celebration of summer, that started in Paris and has since become an international event, where various musical acts play on street corners and cafés on a large scale. All around Kalamazoo bands of every genre were playing outdoors. In fact that was the first time I heard the Hex Bombs. But what always stuck out to me was the show Nice Try put on as it was a really awesome time all around. Being as in love with that band as I was (and am) I was determined to do what they did. On Kaze’s suggestion the next year I signed our band up for the event.

My plan at the time was that, since our name would be plastered all over the place in fliers and maps, this would be our coming out party. No one would have heard of us before this show but we could walk out with a hell of a lot of people at least knowing we existed, which is a lot better than my last band. We were scheduled to play outside the Arcus Foundation. Not only did we play the show but we had a great turnout, better than a lot of other groups that day (Even attracting a crowd of little children who happily rocked out). It was a blast and easily the most fun we had had up to that point. Better yet my plan, in theory, had worked; Kalamazoo knew there was a band called “Zombie Apocalypse NOW!” and bands that were previously unaware of us were suddenly now open to playing shows with us.

Kids fucking love us!

Actually it wasn’t all good news. The maps called us “Zombie Apocolypse Now”. Lame. Here’s another video.



The problem was that the day of the Fête (June 21st) was the last day Travis and I saw Mike for a whole month.

Now when we did see him again Mike’s explanation was that he had to quickly leave town for a while because, if I recall, his grandmother had taken ill and as a coincidence he had broken his phone right before he left (Hence why he didn’t return any of our calls). Okay. Sure. I have no reason to believe that this isn’t 100% true and rather was just a bad bit of luck and timing. That kind of shit happens from time to time. But unfortunately when we got back together in August I felt a lot of our momentum from the Fête had cooled down.

New plan: WIDR, the local college radio station that I myself had a show on (Saturday Morning Cartoon Show?), had a annual battle of the bands in September where the winner got to open up their big music show in October Barking Tuna Fest which has hosted some pretty goddamn big indie bands. If we could just be accepted into the battle, even if we came in dead last, we would still get a lot of local attention. I mentioned that I was about to send our (Noticeably awful) demo to the station. And I think that was the last time we ever saw Mike Zupke again.

I assume he didn’t die or anything like that, but I suppose it’s possible that he did and really we would never know. So as far as I can tell what happened was that Mike makes the decision to not answer his phone, to not return our calls, to not return our e-mails, to keep out of contact with us. For a month we tried to get a hold of him and it resulted in nothing. There was no fight, there was no “Hey guys, I ‘m unhappy with the band so I’m going to quit”. One day he was in the band, the next day he was gone. To this day I don’t know why he decided to leave though I assume it has to do mostly with the fact that he wasn’t looking to be in a serious band. I guess he just wanted to casually play music with buddies. He never really seemed comfortable with playing shows and, unlike the two of us, he seemed to be developing an actual life. In a “best case scenario” ZAN would turn into a working band that travels a lot and play shows round the clock, but even if we never became that successful it still wouldn’t fit in a cozy 9-5 lifestyle. Maybe he just wasn’t interested in that life. Maybe he hated us and seeing as I’m a really hard guy to like that’s not impossible, though I always thought he and Travis were good buddies. Maybe he hated our music; again, not impossible. But regardless he never told us so I don’t know the reason. Eventually, because he wasn’t retuning phone calls, I had to write him a very nice e-mail that told him he was fired though if he got back to us then we could still work things out. When it was all said and done, however, ZAN was again drummer-less.

On the bright side that gig was pretty sweet

As it happened the day I sent that e-mail I received one of my own; from the Lansing based band The Plurals.

Next time we’ll talk about the fall of 2008 and ZAN finally playing an honest to goodness venue…with no drummer on board.