The Zombies at Cityfest 2008: A Short Essay on Lameness

^{Bass guitars without headstocks: Kind of lame}

The headliner for Thursday’s Comerica Cityfest was 60s rock legends The Zombies.

The Cityfest typically schedules at least one classic “Classic Rock” band every year to satisfy the Baby Boomers, and previous acts have included Cheap Trick, Eric Burden, and Ray Davies. I think this is a good practice and I’m happy to have the opportunity to see “oldies” bands for free. But this year, we of the non-Baby Boomer set didn’t get the kind of enjoyment that a free show would usually provide. Maybe it’s because The Zombies weren’t as influential as The Kinks. Maybe it’s because they aren’t an Indie guilty pleasure like Cheap Trick. Either way, they came across to the non-Baby Boomer set as (let me repeat what I heard) “flat,” “terrible,” “boring,” and most of all, “lame.”

In our modern Gen X/Indie/Hipster/whathaveyou parlance of werds to describe stuff we don’t like, “lame” is an interesting and effective choice. “Lame” is how you describe something that 1) is not cool, 2) does not meet expectations, and, most importantly, 3) is something your parents might like. And there were a lot of parents there that liked The Zombies a hell of a lot last night. And no one can deny that Colin Blunstone’s voice was as vivid, expressive, and powerful as any 20-year-old’s. No one can deny that Rod Argent’s keyboard playing was amazing (which he proved exhaustively with 5-minute jam solo after 5-minute jam solo). But in our modern music scene, we expect innovation, we expect guts, we expect muscle, we expect someone in touch with our post-rockist predicament. We don’t expect someone telling us about how big a hit his cover of “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted” was in England in the 80s, or bragging about how legendary they legendary their band is (unless it’s Oasis, which is always hilarious because they’re such assholes). So no matter how virtuosic the band may have been, no matter how many amazing feats of high-note hitting the singer may have acheived, The Zombies were lame.

To this charge, I offer a few responses:

1) I saw a lot of young people mocking Colin Blunstone’s postures. It kind of felt like they were mocking their dads.
2) I wonder how lame our kids are going to think Spiritualized, Greg Dulli, Fiery Furnaces, Jens Lekman, etc, are?
3) It was kind of lame when the keyboardist or guitarist (can’t remember which) worked “O Come All Ye Faithful” into a solo.

I guess I’m not really getting anywhere with this, and I’m running late for Day 3 of Cityfest, so I’ll wrap up by saying that I think we really do need to appreciate where our modern music got its roots, and The Zombies certainly do have a place in rock n’ roll history. But I think it may have been their authenticity, their lack of concern about how to talk to the audience or what we think of them. They were doing their thing without trying to pander to the young kids. They were playing for our moms and dads. I mean, we’re the generation that puts up with artists who never talk to the audience, and often condemn a performer for talking too much unless it’s part of their spiel. Just think about it: How many shows have you been to recently where the band told stories, or even spoke at all other than the requisite “thanks, this is our last song”? The Zombies talked so openly about themselves that it was kind of embarrassing to some of us–perhaps offending our sensibilities. Were they lame because their music is out of style, or because their sentimentality is out of style? I’m not really sure.