Part 3: The Eternal Damnation Cocktail

Sorry that I haven’t updated recently.  I’ve had some personal hiccups on the road called life lately.  If I can I’ll try to post two uploads this week to somewhat make-up for it.

Let’s talk about “genre” for a bit.  I was chatting with my buddy DJ Muppet not too long ago and when I posed a question about the genre of a certain band (I think it was Asobi Seksu) and she just shrugged and said “There really isn’t such a things as genre these days” or something like that.  I agree with that to a point as even Zombie Apocalypse NOW! doesn’t fall neatly into a category.   Now if you ask the average guy hanging out in the Kalamazoo music scene what type of music ZAN plays they will likely respond “Punk Rock”.   This includes various members of the press and venue bookers who we’ve dealt with before.  This is fair; after all ever since I was seventeen I’ve been all about punk in as much as a kid from Detroit can be.  So it’s not hard to see that, I have a lot of that influencing me when I write music.  Add to the fact that Dave Andrews was actually punk so when he was in the band during our high point he brought us even closer towards that.  But then again Travis is a metal guy and always has been and he writes his guitar parts.  Plus there are a lot of songs we play that don’t fit into Punk Rock.  Bottom line I feel like calling us “punk” isn’t really appropriate; it’s just the closet thing most people can think of.

Originally when people asked me what type of music my band played I would say “Punk Influenced Hard Rock” as that was the best way I could put it without having to answer a lot of offensive follow-up questions (“But what bands do you sound like?”).  Eventually I started thinking that if we were supposed to be a band that opposed zombies then we would n fact be Anti-Zombie Rock.  I liked the sound of it and started using that.  Eventually I started using it was a catch-all term for songwriting outside of the box; song that don’t necessarily fall under typical song tropes.  Theoretically I can write a song about comic book characters, horror films monsters, or how awesome Shingo from King of Fighters is and it could just as valid as any other band writing about their feelings or whatever.  That’s what Anti-Zombie Rock is to me.

Fuck yes, Shingo!

So yeah my point is that if you were to classify us in a genre it must be Anti-Zombie Rock.  Well, I guess Max Brooks-Core works too; that one I’m going to claim as our own (Feel free to become an Anti-Zombie Rock band, though).

Zombie Apocalypse NOW! starts their second year after the jump.

Part 2: ZAN is Born (Kalamazoo Doesn’t Notice)

Hello again, fellow survivors.  Let’s get back to it, shall we?

It’s mid-August in 2006 and Travis Stickel and I have just moved into together along with a few of my other friends.  After several years in self imposed exile Travis was now back in Kalamazoo to study Criminal Justice at Western Michigan University with a semi-long term plan to apply to the police academy (We’ll get into that situation soon enough).   I had just had my Rock & Roll dreams crushed when my band The Janissaries faded away (But didn’t technically break up, as I mentioned last time) but I decided to give it one last shot.  I would form a new band and if that one failed I’d quit music.  Now nothing against Travis, of course; he’s one of my dearest friends and easily one of the major reasons Zombie Apocalypse NOW! had any sort of local success, but at that point I was just desperate.  Don’t forget that I had never heard Travis play guitar before so I had no idea how good he would eventually turn out to be.  He was a convenient guitar player so I asked him to join up.  Had anyone else been living with me at the time who could play guitar I would have asked them as well as I didn’t have to look very far.  Now I know that sounds kind of bad but it all worked out for the best and he was happy to be asked.  It went something like this:

Jay Stuart: Hey Travis, wanna join my band that I just made up?

Travis: Fuck yes I do!

And that was the formation of ZAN.  Not the grandest of stories, I know.

Click below for more.

Part 1: The Before Time

Hello again, fellow survivors.  Logically the place to start this blog is when Zombie Apocalypse NOW! was first formed but really I think we need to go back a bit farther.  While ZAN officially began in the fall of 2006 the seeds were originally planted in the fall of 2002 and the groundwork for the original sound was laid out in 2005.

Pictured: Travis and Jay @ Toga Party
Not Pictured: Sobriety

Travis Stickel and I met fairly early into my first year at Western Michigan University at the local anime club’s weekly viewings.  As I recall he and I both were usually the first two people there, due to the fact that we were both the type of people who consider “on time” to mean “early”, and from there we struck a friendship.   With that said I think two things are apparent: #1) Travis and I to this day tend to be the first to arrive to shows and often far too early and #2) That we met at an anime club makes it clear that we were huge dorks even before we started a band.

Click below for more.

2008-2009

If you haven’t heard of Zombie Apocalypse NOW! before you may be sort of curious of what kind of band we were.  So for you all who wandered onto this blog without prior knowledge of us I figured I’d throw a video at you so you at least have an idea of what this was all about.  Below you’ll find a slideshow of pictures from various sources depicting ZAN from our first public show at the 2008 Fête de la Musique in downtown Kalamazoo up through a year later at the same event in 2009; a full year of adventure.  When I made that video I thought it was a cool way to showcas our past year as well as thank all the people who helped us out.  The music featured here is from our second demo “The Sellout Demo”: Justice Girl and part of Sellout.  I’ll be talking about many of the happenings in these pictures over time, but for now just sit back and enjoy.

The blog will have its proper first blog within the next few days while I continue to finish up a few details.

Intro

Hello, fellow survivors.  My name is Jay Stuart.  I am the founder, bass player, lead vocalist and primary song writer of Zombie Apocalypse NOW!, a rock band from Kalamazoo, MI.  I’m not ashamed (In fact I’m rather proud) to admit that it was an incredibly nerdy band.  Since February of 2010 we have been on an official hiatus.  I formed the band in 2006 when I asked my then roommate Travis Stickel if he would like to join, which he did enthusiastically.  That was around four and a half years ago.  Today ZAN is hanging on by a thread; all current members are living in different cities, we haven’t played a single show since July of 2010, and any hope for a future for us is at best theoretical.  It’s not like we we’re a big deal either.  We released one EP, never got to tour, and certainly weren’t one the top local bands in our area.

Despite that downer note I feel that, had we not fallen apart beginning in December of 2009, Zombie Apocalypse NOW! could have done...something.  Maybe we wouldn’t be famous, but I truly believe that at our best we were as good as any band that is able to make a living in music and that we could do at least that.  We never got a chance to prove that, sadly.  As it is no one knows us and likely will never know us.

Fuck that.

As of this writing ZAN is scheduled to play a show on April 1^st, our first gig in nine months.  I was convinced to do this by the band’s most recent drummer Doug Porter, a young man who is significantly more idealistic about the band than me or Travis.  As we prepare to get together possibly for the final time I began thinking about how pathetic it was that everything we did, all the hard work, all the mistakes and all of the good times ZAN had would be forgotten about in just a few short years; three at the most, I’d wager.  I don’t know if we’ll ever get things going again but I wanted to leave a record of the band, even if it’s just on a tiny blog on the internet.  I want there to be something out there that details our little story so that our name doesn’t completely disappear.  Basically I want proof that we existed.  Yeah, maybe I'm just being arrogant but I went to school for writing so I might as well use all that crap for something that was so important to me during those years.

So what’s going to happen is over the next few weeks is that I’ll be detailing Zombie Apocalypse NOW!’s history as best as I can recall it (I will likely post some journals concerning the current dealings with the band as they happen).  Now I didn’t smoke pot and I didn’t really do any serious drinking so in theory my memory should be decent, but I’m still pretty awful at the whole “remembering things” deal so details may be fuzzy and I apologize in advanced if I mess some things up.  Really I just want me and the rest of the guys and what few fans we had to have an account of what the hell happened with the band, how it started and why it ended.