Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Part 5: Countdown to Corner Bar

The logo of Zombie Apocalypse NOW!, the Transformers-like jack-o'-lantern, was not chosen at random.  While I guess you’d assume our logo would be something zombie-themed I actually wanted to avoid that. I really wanted an image that was unique and be something that would eventually be synonymous with the band but without being completely obvious.  That said I still would like to have a “Z-Buster” image as a secondary logo but that day hasn’t happened yet.

Anyway the seeds were originally planted while I was on the Saturday Morning Cartoon Show and we happened to be playing It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.  I joked with my co-host DJ Muppet that it’d be funny if the Great Pumpkin was real and went on a violent rampage across the world (This was prior to Robot Chicken doing that very skit, I should mention).  I ended naming it the “Doomsday Pumpkin” as a combination of “Doomsday Clock” and “Smashing Pumpkins” (The album Zeitgeist had recently come out and I kept hearing about the song everywhere).   It wasn’t until later that I even thought about using it as a band logo. That we can thank the Moped Army for.  Kind of.

So for those of you who don’t know the Moped Army are basically a nationwide group of moped enthusiasts which started out in Kalamazoo years ago but now has chapters all over the US.  The Kalamazoo chapter call themselves “the Decepticons”.  Now I’m the kind of guy that gets pretty frustrated when I get caught behind mopeds while driving and I was always pretty disappointed when (As a big time Transformers fan) I saw stickers all over town of the Decepticon logo and got really excited until someone told me that was actually for the Moped Army and not the toyline.  A buddy once joked that we should become “Autobots”, put the appropriate logo on our cars, and become a rival gang.  That kind of stuck in my head; not the part about being a rival gang but about having a Transformers logo.    I soon got the idea that Zombie Apocalypse NOW! could have such a image to promote ourselves and that whenever I saw a Decepticon sticker somewhere in Kalamazoo I would put my own sticker right next to it as a counterpoint. I’m not sure why I eventually decided to use the Doomsday Pumpkin character to do this but I do know is that I really, really wanted a Transformers grinning pumpkin to represent the band.  Probably because I’m a nerd.

My buddy Mr. Kaze, who also made a lot of out T-shirts, offered to design the logo based on my specifications.  Here’s the original proof of concept.

Th earliest Doomsday Pumpkin logo
I thought it was pretty good, but Travis didn’t really like it and suggested the image needed to be wider to invoke a scarier picture. Mr. Kaze went back to the drawing board and came up with what we decided would be the final product.

Pumpkins in Disguise!
We loved it and almost immediately began making shirts of it.   These days most of our fans know that logo pretty well. Per Mr. Kaze’s suggestion I (Eventually) wrote an accompanying song to make a stronger link between that picture and the band, appropriately titled “Doomsday Pumpkin”; a story of the Great Pumpkin declaring humanity to be too corrupt and thus bringing about the end of the world as punishment.

The disaster at the Corner Bar after the jump.


Looking back we put a lot of work into playing a place that was "under construction"

On the last part Mike Zupke unexpected left the band and even to this day we have no idea why as we haven’t seen or heard from him since the summer of 2008.  So after a lot of trying to contact him and a lot of waiting for him to get back ot us fnlly in October of that year I wrote him a very nice e-mail (Because he wouldn’t answer his phone) kicking his ass out of the band.  Literally the same day I did this I received an e-mail from The Plurals asking us to play a show with them at The Corner Bar a month from then.

A word about The Plurals, if I may.

The Plurals are a Lansing, MI based band who also are possibly the most DIY band I personally know.  It’s a bit hard to describe their sound, although they are clearly punk-influenced without being a punk band.  The term I most like to use for them  is “fucking awesome”.  On top of that they are some of the nicest bunch of guys we’ve ever played with.  I became friends with them before ZAN was really doing anything, so during the days when I was just one of the local kids going to shows.  Because I’m almost always the lone black dude at the venues I tend to stick out in a crowd and I love interacting with bands I think are cool so a lot of bands who came through to places like Kraftbrau Brewery and The Corner Bar tended to know who I was.  The Plurals were one of these bands, of course, and I got on really well with their lead singer Tommy McCord and drummer (And singer) Hattie Danby (Although based on what I heard from other Lansing bands Hattie is basically the nicest person in the world).  Anyway even though I haven’t seen or talked to these guys in years they are still active so please, please, please check them out.

The Plurals from Lansing, MI

Anyway I got an e-mail from these guys asking  if ZAN would be down for a show but of course we had been officially drummer-less of several hours by that point so it would be tricky.  Ultimately we decided that a month was enough time to find a drummer and teach him enough songs to get through one show.  With a little over four weeks until D-Day we agreed to play despite the handicap.  Luckily, for the only time, we actually got a fair amount of takers once we started advertising our need for a drumme.  We eventually settled on a dude named Mark Horner.  Mark was awesome; he was a punk drummer, though a little rusty with punk speed as he had been in reggae bands the last few years, and he came off like an easy going guy but was very enthusiastic about playing with us and seemed to really like what he was hearing from the band.  In general he was a better fit than Mike was.

So over the next two weeks we jammed as much as we could trying to teaching Mark enough so that our show, a show that I should probably mention would be our first performance in an honest to God music venue, wouldn’t be a complete train wreck.  I was feeling very optimistic about our chances.  Just a month ago we weren’t even sure if our drummer was alive or dead but now we had a guy who seemed like a serious musician on our side and a big show coming up in a few weeks.   I literally thought that this would be the first step to ZAN becoming a relevant force in Kalamazoo.  But because optimism is for pussies you can probably guess that things fell apart pretty soon.

Two week until D-Day Mark told us that he’d have to not only step away from the band for a few weeks but he’d have to also miss the show.  He had really good a good reason; he needed overtime at his job in order for his family (Including a kid) to be able to afford to move into a larger house and simply was not able to commit to the band as he thought he’d be able to.  He told me it should only be for a few weeks and that I should give him a call after that (He seemed like he still wanted to be in the band but understood if he wouldn’t be invited back) but I never bothered with doing that and to this day I regret it.  I was pretty angry at the time since I specifically told Mark at his first audition that we needed a drummer who could play that specific date and that was the most important thing but really I shouldn’t have been.  I did understand that his priorities couldn’t be the same as mine and Travis' as he had a family to take care of and realistically speaking he was making the correct decision but I guess I still felt hurt over it and couldn’t bring myself to getting back in contact with him.  Looking back I wish I has at least kept in touch with him because out of all the former members of Zombie Apocalypse NOW! Mark is one of the coolest guys and the only one whose reasons for leaving I fully respect.  Even if the timing was horrifyingly bad it was still a very amicable departure, unlike practically every other time.   I’m not sure what he’s up to these days but I know a while back he was in a reggae band called Item 9.   Regardless by that point ZAN had lost three drummers in less than two years.

With only two weeks left we were going crazy over how in the hell we’d be able to play that show.  We didn’t want to back out because we didn’t want to start our relationship with the Kzoo Music scene with a cancellation.  Luckily after a few desperate rants on MySpace our buddy Tony Dipiazza, who if you’re from Grand Rapids you might recognize as the sound guy from the Mixtape, gave us a call.  Tony was a buddy of ours who we knew from Midnight Radio (Because he was the replacement of another good friend of ours also named “Tony”) and when he heard of our bind he offered to fill in on drums, something he would do again months later.  Unfortunately he could only make it up for one practice but luckily Tony is one of the best goddamn drummers we ever played with and he picked it all up shockingly fast.  It wasn’t perfect but all things considered it was pretty good.

So the day of the show and it was fairly dead at the Corner Bar, as it often is.  ZAN was limping but we had made good on our commitments and that’s was the important part.  So OF COURSE as we were setting up for our set my beloved bass Olivia (My Ibanez SR 300) broke right there on stage before the sound check had even started.  The whole output jack and  attached wiring fell the fuck out of the shell making it completely unusable.  I had to borrow a Fender from Nicolas of The Plurals (Because their nice dudes, as I said) but unfortunately I hate Fenders because they’re fucking hard to play (i.e. “heavy”) so I blew every song we performed making us look like even bigger amateurs than we were. The show was a disaster and the only saving grace was that there was hardly anyone there to see how much we sucked.

Pictured: ZAN + Tony Dipiazza
Also Pictured: Jay Stuart's laughable inability to play bass

My bass my broken, we had no drummer (AGAIN!!) and we I (Because Travis is always awesome) had just fucked up our debut show.  I was already feeling like this was my “last chance” band beforehand but after the fall of 2008 I was exhausted.  We’d been a band for over two years and had nothing to show for it in all that time.  Zombie Apocalypse NOW! was a failure and I was certain it would never get any better.  I was done.  In December of 2008 I decided that ZAN was over, lest we embarrass ourselves further.

Next time we’ll talk about how ZAN ended up not being over after all.

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