[Obviously, the videos in this Track by Track series were all filmed the same day, but for easier indexing, I'm putting them under the dates they were posted.]
Rod: This is, uh, Rod Argent here from the Zombies.
Colin: It's Colin Blunstone from the Zombies, and this is Track by Track at Gibson, and we're on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
"She's Not There"
Colin: This is the track that changed our lives completely, and I- as I remember it, we were talking to our then-producer called Ken Jones, and he was giving us a pep talk before our first session in Decca Studios, West Hampstead in London, and he said, 'You know, you could always write something for this session.' Rod picked up on it, and he went away and wrote this song. I didn't know he could write songs, and he came back with this song, and it was 'She's Not There,' and we all knew it was a special song, immediately.
Rod: And the extraordinary thing is, our very first session, um, and because we had absolutely no knowledge of all the pitfalls that can happen, you know: the engineer couldn't get the right sound maybe or, um, maybe on the day, the band wasn't gelling, you know, when things were recorded. We didn't know any of that. We just thought, 'Yeah!' I thought, 'Colin's gonna sound great singing it, and, uh, the harmonies are gonna be brilliant, and the band's gonna sound exciting, and it's gonna come out, and it's gonna be a huge hit,' and it was.
Colin: But it wasn't all smooth going. I'll just sort of say about the session for 'She's Not There': it was considered the, the, the cool thing to do to record in the evening and into the night, so we started at about seven o'clock, and the engineer, who was a great engineer, but he'd been at a wedding all day, and he was extremely drunk when we got there, but worse than that, he was very aggressive as well, and I kind of thought- it just makes me laugh: we've been in the business for fifty years [but] after twenty minutes in the studio, I thought, 'This is not for me.' This guy was screaming at us, really screaming at us, but then we had a bit of luck, and he collapsed, and we carried the engineer out of the studio, up three flights of stairs, and we put him in a London taxi, and we never saw him again, and his assistant took over, and he was called Gus Dudgeon, and he went on to be one of the most successful producers in the world ever. He did all of Elton [John]'s early stuff, David Bowie, many, many huge records, and that was Gus Dudgeon's first session, and it was our first session, and he never forgot that. Uh, so 'She's Not There,' it had its moments.
Rod: Had its moments, and everything was done very quickly, and that, all that drama was compressed into a short space of time, but it was dramatic, and, you know, we ended up with a hit after a day's recording.
