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.

A basement full of friends
Must be their first show

It had been over a year since Zombie Apocalypse NOW! formed and we hadn’t played a single show because we couldn’t find a drummer in all that time.  I’m not sure if I can really express how much this has bothered me over the years.  Yeah sure, I can concede that a lot of this can be contributed to the fact that Travis and I really didn’t know what we were doing as far as recruitment goes but even so what kind of people can dare call themselves a band when all they do is practice songs in their basement?

At this point, late September 2007, we had just gotten back the master CD of our first and not particularly good (And drummer-less) demo and we were giving them out like hot cakes but the primary reason we made it so that potential drummers could have a sense of the type of music we were hoping to make.  People told us the CD was pretty good, though I now suspect they were being nice, and most folk I talked to said they’d like to hear more.  We had to find a drummer, we simply had to.

After a few weeks my other roommate Mr. Kaze, who also design the band’s logo and made the shirts, suggested I try looking at craigslist.com to which I replied “I ain’t looking for a used Xbox, I’m looking for a goddamn drummer, dude.”  So OF COURSE literally twenty-four hours after I posted an ad on the site someone responded.  Awesome.  I GUESS I SHOULD HAVE DONE THAT A FUCKING YEAR AGO!!!

So the guy who responded to the ad was named Mike Zupke, a guy who was a little older than Travis and me.  He apparently had been checking craigslist for a while looking for guys who were in need of a drummer.  These days I now believe the problems we would eventually have with Mike stemmed from an early misunderstanding he and I had when I got into contact with him: I suspect he was looking for guys he could just jam with in his free time as a hobby while we were looking for a guy to play regular gigs, record albums, and eventually tour with.  So yeah, you can see where this might be a problem.  Mind you I don’t actually know for sure what the real problem was but I’m getting head of myself.

So Mike was really interested in playing with us.  He had only been playing drums for five years at that point, a good chunk less than me and bass and much lower than Travis on guitar, but he was pretty good and we weren’t getting any other hits.  Thus Mike became the second official drummer of Zombie Apocalypse NOW!   But obviously that was only half of it.  We had a drummer now so we needed to play shows ASAP.

Um, how do we do that again?

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FUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Back in 2007 we didn’t really know proper procedure for booking gigs and we didn’t really know too many other local bands who would throw us on their shows.  In this kind of situation its best to fall back on DIY ethics.  If you can’t book a show make your own show.  Mr. Kaze was a big fan of throwing house parties so we decided that we would play our first show in the basement while it was going on.   Our friend Brent (As in the founder of the Janissaries) was also helping in the planning stages and I believe coined the name “The Eternal Damnation Cocktail”.  It was a Halloween party but it was in fact the weekend after the holiday (I don’t remember why it was.  I guess it was a timing issue).  Ever since then I’ve dreamed about having an annual Halloween themed concert by that name that would always be the weekend after the holiday and be billed as “your last opportunity to show off that costume” and in theory it wouldn't conflict with other parties and themed shows.  I tried to set up The Eternal Damnation Cocktail II in 2009 but unfortunately the bookers at the two venues I was looking at the most didn’t get back to me until months after I first contacted them.  Par for the course, I’m afraid.   Anyway the problem with doing this party was that we had less than a month before the show to teach Mike the songs I had written.  We had three sessions with him, including his audition, before we played that show so we were obviously not ready to play in front of people.  Also we didn't have proper equipemnt for vocals so no matter what we knew we would sound like shit.  Maybe not the greatest idea but after the large amount of “doing nothing” instead of performing in my last band did I figured we’d be better off at least trying.

Travis had a badass Scarecrow costume by the way.

The Sinister Scarecrow covers for Travis for a few tracks

Here’s a video from our first show ever.  Notice how awkward and terrified I am (I’m no less terrified but I have long since learned to FAKE being confident on stage).  The song is “Marry White” which is not in fact about a girl named Mary White but rather about the race my mother demand I eventually marry.  I wrote this song a while back since I was somewhat offended by my mother’s weird racist attitude against black people (She’s black, what the hell?) as well as some other stuff she’s said over the years.

(Editor's Note: Satan is no longer ZAN's lord and master.  They have since switched allegiance to Xenu, beloved leader of the Galactic Confederacy.  HAIL XENU!!)

Geez, that was somewhat painful to listen to.  We played sort of early into the party and then played  second set later that night when more people showed (Though that one we were a bit drunk and it was at least twice as sloppy) and people seemed to like it though there was a lot of room for improvement.  The important thing was that ZAN had played its first show, ill prepared or not.  Even so it would be damn near a year and a half before things with the band started to pick up.  Between this first gig in 2007 and our first gig of 2009 I had given up on the band and was ready to give up on the whole thing.

Next time we’ll look at 2008 and the disastrous events that made Jay Stuart declare that the band was over before it even began.