[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.
"Is This the Dream"
Rod: 'Is This the Dream' was perhaps of all those tracks that we did was the one that at the time disappointed us the most because before it was mixed, we heard the monitor playback and we thought, 'This sounds great! Really steaming, really stonking' and we were made to go away to the pub while it was mixed, and it was all mixed very quickly in those days, wasn't it?
Colin: Yeah.
Rod: Everything was mixed in a couple of hours.
Colin: Well, um, Rod and I just went and had a couple of pints
Rod: Yeah.
Colin: at the top of the road in a pub.
Rod: Yeah.
Colin: And then we came back.
Rod: And we thought, 'Where's our track gone?' bec-
Colin: Uh, and he [presumably Ken Jones, the Zombies' producer] played it, and I thought maybe- in my mind's eye, I thought maybe he got someone else in to play an alternative version. I couldn't work out what we were listening to. It bare- it had no relationship to, uh, what we'd done.
Rod: Because when we did it, it had a bit of a, a rough edge to it, which we really liked. Colin sang it great. Um, it was a very uncharacteristic [electric] piano solo. I mean all, all the solos were always improvised, you know?* I, I, I never constructed them. If you listen to different, um, takes of our songs, you'll hear a completely different solo on each one, and this was no exception, and I started hitting a little contrapuntal thing, two-handed thing, and I- it was just on the spur on the moment. I loved the way it came out. It sounded quite rough, but in a good way, quite biting, and when we came back to listen to it, everything was really smoothed out, and, and for the whole band, it actually lost some of the excitement. We, we've never done this on stage, have we?
Colin: No.
Rod: I mean we did it- I remember we played with the Who, and Pete Townshend liked it very much, and he, he went out front to listen, and, at the time, and he, he said, 'Oh, I couldn't hear what you were doing in the, in, in the solo' 'cause he, he liked the, the quirkiness, you know, of, of, of, of what happened in that solo, um, but I was fond of the track at the time, and we all thought it sounded great before the mix. We, we were probably a little bit too hung up on all of this because we knew the track so well, um, and sometimes we wanted it to, um, in our mind's eye, to be as good as it could be, and, and so we tended to discount what we ended up with, and, and actually sometimes going back and listening to them, it's much more attractive than we thought at the time, you know? What was in our head. So I still think it's worth listening to, but I think this was the, you know, one of the tracks that we thought had lost again.
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*The solo in "I'll Keep Trying" seems to be an exception to this. There's very little difference between the solo in the demo version (available as a bonus track on Begin Here) and the solo in the final version. Obviously, there was some degree of planning since the electric piano and electric guitar play basically the same notes (with slight differences in articulation).
