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.
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| Pictured: Travis and Jay @ Toga Party Not Pictured: Sobriety |
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I’m pretty sure that Travis and I didn’t ever really talk about music that much back then, although we knew we both were musicians. I think I once brought up the idea of us playing together. I was jamming with a few guys at the time and I suggested we bringing in Travis as a second guitarist but the guy on lead, a person we’ll refer to as Robot Mike who was a good friend of both of us, wasn’t comfortable with another guy on guitar so it ended up not happening (Also that group went nowhere at all, so I guess it’s just as well). No, music wasn’t what we bonded over.
It was zombies. Obviously.
Travis Stickel is a man of many tastes and has many different interests but I think I would argue that his two favorite things are music and horror films. I’m not sure how it started but somehow he and I would end up having many discussions about zombie movies and the zombie apocalypse in general. Now the concept of zombies freak me the hell out, especially when I was nineteen, but I didn’t really know much about them. Travis is kind of an expert on zombie film tropes and whatnot so I’d often ask him what was the best strategy for surviving such an event. Hypothetically, of course. He’d tell me what were the best weapons, where would be the best places to go, etc. It was fun, maybe kind of silly, but it was a good way to waste hours in the dorm cafeteria. We did a lot of hanging out over the next two years.
Unfortunately all good things come to an end. Travis at the time was undeclared but he had realized that he wanted to try studying Sound Engineering. However WMU apparently didn’t offer it and if he wanted to pursue it he’d need to go elsewhere. He decided to leave Kalamazoo and return to his hometown of North Muskegon to prepare to find a school to help him achieve his new ambition. It would be a while before I saw him again.
Although sometime after Christmas of 2004 Travis gave me a really cool gift: a copy of The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks in order to serve as a sort of replacement for him as my zombie apocalypse advice giver (He also gave me a Cardcaptors board game as a joke, but goddamn it if I don’t still own it).
An interesting side note to all from the fall of 2004 following Travis’ departure: I had just started my first playwriting class and the teacher (A very pretty grad student as I recall) had us do an ice breaker exercise where we had to mention a few things about ourselves. I happened to mention I played bass. After the class some dude ran up to me as I started walking home. He asked me if I really played bass and told me that he was a drummer and that we should jam sometime. And we did with fair regularity for the rest of the semester (Playing a lot of Offspring). The drummer’s name was Darin Bluhm.
Anyway by the beginning of 2005 I had tried to form a band several times since moving to Kalamazoo but either I was asked to depart for whatever reason or the project itself just fizzled out before it began. Around this time my friend Brent realized that he knew a group of musicians and then, despite not being one himself, convinced them all to form a band with him. Now the line-up changed several times over the short period we were all together (Including Darin Bluhm on drums pretty much right before we broke up) but the main group was me on bass and a little bit of back-up vocals, John Maltby on guitar and Black Brent Peterson as the lead singer. The Brent that formed the band to begin with was asked to leave early on partly because he kept skipping practice and partly because he didn’t know how to play the keyboards despite declaring that he would be the keyboardist of the band.
At Black Brent’s suggestion we called ourselves The Janissaries. A bit pretentious, sure, but it was unique and I really liked it (Although a buddy of ours jokingly suggested “Your Parents Having Sex” and I wished to God we had used that instead). One weird thing I always notice about this band is the number of people who claim to have heard of us. Now I’m not saying that this isn’t possible but dude; we played ONE gig ever and it was at a talent show. So unless you happened to be a member of that particular Catholic Church I suspect you may be thinking of a different band.
So I bring up this band mainly because if I never joined the Janissaries Zombie Apocalypse NOW! likely wouldn’t have happened, or at least been much different. During the reign of this band I started writing a few songs. In fact I wrote The Dead Walk Again, Requiem for Detroit (From ZAN’s first demo) and the intro part of Amina for this band. I guess the guys were just not into my song writing skills because aside from Requiem we didn’t really use any of them (Also I should point out that the vocal melody for that song as it appears on that demo was written by Black Brent and he has apparently been very happy that I continued used it).
In retrospect the Janissaries had a ton of problems which is why we failed. For one thing John and I, despite getting along as people, did not have enough in common musically to function together properly as he was an alternative country fan and I was mostly into punk rock. Plus the band’s line-up kept changing and that didn’t help anyone. But the main problem I think was that we were being cowardly as far as playing shows went. We spent months trying to perfect our sound and write music, even turning down shows while we fiddled with things. We dicked around so much that by the next summer we hadn’t done a single damn thing! We were together for literally a year and did NOTHING! As several members were leaving for the summer (2006 by this point) we took a break but we were never all in the same room ever again. It would be another couple of years before I think we ever officially broke-up. The last time I talked to John was several years ago and he asked me if it’d be cool if he used the name for his own project in Chicago, which was fine by me. I don’t know if he ever ended up doing it or not but I hope he did.
Anyway the absolute failure of the Janissaries caused me to become very depressed. This would mark, I think, the fourth failed attempt on my part to start a band in Kalamazoo but this one seemed to be the most likely to do something since it seemed to have all the tools. When it went down I started thinking that perhaps I just wasn’t meant to play in a rock band. Back then I was really into the local West Michigan bands Nice Try and Midnight Radio and I had been hell bent on forming my own group so I could play shows with them but it was looking like it just wasn’t going to ever happen. Also my self-confidence was shot as I had worked hard on song writing but was basically told “DO NOT WANT” by my former band mates. I started thinking that I should concentrate on my true passion, which was writing. I love playing music but at the end of the day I think of myself as a writer before anything else, so I was thinking that perhaps it was time to give up the whole band thing.
Around this time Travis informed me that he had given up on the Sound Engineering thing and had gotten interested in Criminology and therefore would be returning to Kalamazoo to pursue a degree at WMU. Since the house I would be moving into that August was looking for more roommates it was the obvious choice to have him move in. Ultimately that was probably the best decision we ever made.
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| This picture tells you everything you need to know about ZAN |
Next time I’ll talk about the official formation of Zombie Apocalypse NOW! and our insanely terrible and frustrating first thirteen months.
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