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.
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 1st, 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.
