September 26, 2024 • 54 mins
Slow Burn's Leon Neyfakh sits down with Daniel to talk about the art of investigations and the pursuit of a good story.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The True Story of the Fake Zombies is a production
of iHeart Podcasts, Talk House and Nevermind Media. This is
the final bonus episode of the True Story of the
Fake Zombies. Whether you've listened to the show or this
is your introduction, it's a look into how we made it.
(00:22):
I'm host, writer and EP Daniel Ralstone. I sat down
with Leon Nathuk podcaster, writer, radio host to talk about
what it was like to make this podcast while I
was also bartending full time, and I share some crazy
details that were revealed after the podcast came out. One
quick note you'll hear me refer to Anna, Nick and Melissa.
(00:47):
That's Anna McLain, who engineered and co produced the show,
Nick Dawson, who's my editor and co producer, and Melissa Locker,
my co EP. I'd also like to thank Ian Wheeler
from Talkhouse forgetting us all together.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Daniel, I was so delighted you asked me to be
a part of this interview. This sort of debrief is
how I've been thinking of it. Debrief of your tenure
journey to try to get to the bottom of this
story that's been lodged in your soul since you came
across it. In a stray line reading about something else.
(01:26):
Just to set the table here, you made this podcast
because you were obsessed, Is that the right word? With
this forgotten, poorly documented rumor for a full decade, tell
me how you first came across this little tidbit and
how it went from tidbit to story idea to eight
part podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Sure, you mentioned in the one sentence in the book,
and yeah, it said some American guys went around the
country pretending to be this British band the Zombies. Read
it in a biography of the Zombies, and yeah, it
was intriguing enough that my one of my best friends
in the world, Jeff Rickley, and I said we should
write a screenplay about some guys, and we made up
(02:08):
a whole world. It was about a guy who's trying
to break out from his dad's under his dad's thumb,
and his dad owned a furniture store and he ran
the musical instrument section of the furniture store. And we
had a whole backstory. And then Jeff got his old
band Thursday back together, and I moved to Los Angeles.
(02:31):
But yeah, we were just really intrigued by the idea.
The storyline was that one of the guys in the
band's cousin from England was visiting and she sort of
was like the mastermind of the fake zombie. She taught
him how to use fake British accents. We invented this
whole world. And then one day I was googling, and
I was really deep into searching for stuff about imposter
(02:53):
zombie grooves, just trying to get information about what might
have really happened, and I stumbled upon this blog post
called I Was a teenage Zombie by this guy Mark Ramsey,
and it was literally, I mean, those two words fake
and zombie que a lot of different things in the
search results. I was way down, and I think one
(03:14):
of the first things that intrigued me was this guy
had pictures on his blog post that had three comments,
and there were pictures of him and a teenage Dusty
Hill and Frank Beard from zz Top and he's using
their full names, not trying to be secretive about it.
It's a public blog post, and half of the entire
(03:34):
post is about all the different guitars he had on
the tour and his amps, and he was like a
gear head, so he didn't necessarily see the story aspect
of it. He was like, look at this cool guitar
I used on the road in nineteen sixty nine. Oh,
by the way, two of the guys from Zzy Top
worried by high school garage band essentially high school garage man,
and I reached out.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
To him, this is while you're still working on a
screenplay that sort of fictionalizes this scenario based on that
one line you read in.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Then sure, yeah, we were working on the screenplay. I
was also working full time as an office manager at
a international e commerce company in New York City, and
my time at that company, we went from six people
to six hundred. It was a really exciting time. Like
Jeff and I would like go away and write on
the screenplay. This was a fun thing to do on
the side. But I was still really use the word
(04:21):
obsessed with this idea. And once I met Mark Ramsey
and he sent me the photos, everything started to come
into place. And then the real key was that I
met a guy in Michigan named Gary Johnson who's a
rock and roll historian. And one of the pictures that
Mark had in Texas of his fake Zombies band had
(04:42):
an address on it for a management company, and Gary
in Michigan had the same photo with the same address
on it, these promotional photos that had been printed for
the Fake Zombies in nineteen sixty nine, calling themselves the
original Zombies. And then two weeks after I talked to Gary,
I went to see the Replacements play with a friend
(05:03):
of mine and he said, you should write this as
an article. I'm doing stuff for BuzzFeed. And I wrote
the article and it took me about two years, and
it was the first thing I ever wrote.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Wow, what do you think captured your imagination in the
story enough to first turn it into the kernel of
a fictionalized screenplay, but then also kind of take the
more journalistic route and try to find out what actually
happened here? Like, what was it about it that you
feel like activated you?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Well, first of all, like I'm an obsessive music fan,
obsessive specifically like British music fan. When I was sixteen,
me and my best friend decided that Oasis was our
favorite band, and from there it was of course the Beatles,
and the Zombies is a band that I really landed
on as like one of my favorites. I was married
at one point and we you know, walked down the Aisle,
(05:55):
so this will be our year. The Zombies are one
of my favorite bands, and I I've met a lot
of other people who feel that way about them.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
And you were just reading the Zombies biography because you
love the Zombies.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, one PC. And I've always loved liked the stories
behind music, the things where it's like, yeah, I love
this song, but I also love this element of the band, Like,
of course everybody loves Fleetwood Mac, but everybody also loves
the Fleetwood Mac story and the drama and all of
that stuff. And this seemed to be like a really
weird piece of zz Top's history that there was almost
(06:25):
no information about. And since we started the podcast, we
did find out that zz tops Wrodi wrote a book
and he mentioned it in a paragraph, So this was
actually out there for somebody to find out about. And
I feel really lucky that I found Gary in Michigan
and we started to uncover this together.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
What would you say your big questions were about what
happened here? Like you have these little stray bits of
data that you've kind of come across, none of which
treat the story as any big whoop. It's almost like
an aside every time you see someone mention it, right,
what did you want to know?
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Naturally? I wanted to know the sites and smells and
what did the van seats feel like and all that stuff,
But almost nobody had that information, even the people who
were literally there with the fake zombies. It was fifty
five years ago, and I realized this was going to
be a lot more about collecting what people remembered from
the era than about putting that square peg into the
(07:25):
round hole of Like I need this exact information so
that people feel like they're feeling it. I think there
are other ways to do that.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah. No, it feels like from listening to it that
a big part of what drew you to it was
like just the milliu, like the scene. These guys were
part of the circuit. They were touring on the economics
of being a small struggling band during this time in
pop music history, and you seem to just want to
(07:55):
render that with as much texture and specificity as you could.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah. Also like the most covered era in music too,
like the sixties scene, Like what is left of it
at this point to be mined? And it turns out
there's a lot to be mined. But most of these
stories are with people who are in their seventies. And
I think I even told Nick and Annabs at one point,
But I truly do not care about the promotion of
(08:22):
this podcast outside of just telling people just find a
way to share it with, like your parents or your grandparents,
or somebody who might have been around at that era,
because I guarantee you if they were even remotely involved
with music, they're gonna have an amazing story somewhere about
somebody they crossed paths with, somebody they had dinner with.
(08:42):
You know. One thing we ended up cutting out of
the podcast was like Joeanne from the Fake Archies, Like
she said, everybody in the Fake Archies. By the way,
for anybody listening a new listener, there's also a fake
archiese in addition to two fake zombies. That one night
she had like a little fling with the guy who
(09:05):
Jake Lamata is based on his son ran a nightclub
and he was like, you were the most beautiful thing
I've ever seen. We had this romantic nightclub, but everybody
else was like obsessed with the girl who was playing Betty.
And it was every once in a while she'd have
a night where there was like a Veronica guy and
one of those nights was with this guy who was
(09:26):
like a boxer who ran a nightclub. And you know,
to me, that's a better story than like her telling
me maybe like a rote detail about their set list.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
One thing that occurred to me as I was putting
myself in your position and kind of falling in love
with the story that it's just so funny that there
was basically a zombie zombies, like the fact that they
were called the Zombies and this band that formed after
(09:56):
the actual Zombies broke up, like they were the zombie Zombie.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yeah, it's funny. We talked about calling the article the
zombie Zombies, I think way back in the day, and
I was like, it's way too confusing. They're not there
like a playo. She's not there was another possibility. I
was like, no, it's too confusing. You're one hundred percent
right like it is. There's two parts of it. One
the zombie aspect of it is it is really funny.
The band like kind of plays on that a little
(10:23):
bit too. I think. The other thing is like when
you look at these guys like young Frank, Young Dusty Mark,
see all these guys in the opening bands and stuff.
It's like they're really young, good looking, like they were
all going after it. They were dressing the part. They
(10:44):
were like playing in a you know, imposter band and
giving it everything they could. I found that really appealing.
Like talking to Mark Ramsey when he was still with us,
you know, I got the sense to like, it was
hard watching two of your bandmates go on to like
huge fame and his buddy see passed away young and
(11:06):
this wasn't like the cheeriest portrait portion of his life.
But he wanted to tell the story, and I'm glad
he got to.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Did you relate to them as like young men trying
to make it in rock and roll? Was that part
of your life at any point? Like the dream of
making it big as a as a rock star?
Speaker 1 (11:25):
One hundred. When I was nineteen years old, I moved
from the Allentown area to Oakland, California with a girl,
and then I started playing in a punk band that
sounded like at the Drive In, and we all lived together,
played the band together, and worked in a candy store
(11:46):
in Berkeley together. Yeah. It was like the Monkeys, but
insanely dysfunctional, and it lasted about a year.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
I was in a band that tried to sound like
Green Day, It's a little easier.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
I was the singer. I was literally jumping around the
stage like a lunatic with my guitarist. It was insane
when looking back on it. But that year I lived
in Oakland, I started interning for a record label called
Absolutely Kosher, which put out early Mountain Goat stuff. Shushu
and I went on tour with Shushu and Devendra Banhart
(12:18):
on Devendra's first US tour as their tour manager for
three weeks in the summer of two thousand and three,
and that was kind of like the start of all
my life in music. I ended up moving back to Philadelphia,
started a band with my little brother, and Yeah, for
about three or four years, that's what I thought I
was gonna do, and then I started just living a
(12:40):
different kind of life.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah. Could you picture yourself in their place as you
learn more about like the you know, ecosystem that they
were working within and the kinds of people they were,
you know, having to deal with as they looked for
a way to make this their livelihood.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Yeah, I could in a very direct like I know
what it's like to be on the outside looking in
in every conceivable way. I even remember a time when
I was very, very briefly in college when I was
eighteen and I was going to play in a band,
and I thought this one guy was like the coolest
guitarist ever, and I wanted to play with him. And
(13:18):
he's like, why don't you play me something you wrote?
And I played him a Radiohead B side because I
was trying to pass it off as my own, so
I know exactly how they felt. But yeah, it's the
same kind of you know, this guy was so cool,
and I imagine, like when you look at the pictures
of Seed Metter from the Fake Zombies, like coolest guy.
He was the band leader. Mark was nineteen and wanted
(13:40):
to be cool. Like I sort of get this whole thing.
I get why they did it, and the fact that
they found a second band to do it tells me that, like,
this was just the thing that people didn't know what
it was yet the Zombies were broken up, this kind
of thing would become tribute bands. But we're just in
a small little window where this could happen, right.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
I was curious about that. Listening to the show, I
was like, how does this compare to just a cover
band or a tribute band. It kind of just goes
to intent, right, It's like, do you want people to
think you're the real thing or are you satisfied to
kind of like bringing an audience in that just wants
to hear the songs and there's no illusion that you
are who you are pretending to be.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Right. I tried to write this sort of dey new
moment to the last episode that was like about the
word fake and why it stands out so much. And
you realize that anybody who's considered like an originator in
music has created some kind of persona from the things
that they've cobbled together, from their influences and all of this.
(14:47):
But there's something about using that word fake that just
makes it feel wrong. I think there's value in using
that to figure out who you are when you're nineteen
or twenty out on the road with your friends, Like
I think these guys were really trying to figure out
who they were, and for some of them, they were
(15:07):
one hundred percent right because the fact that they were
fake zombies didn't matter, and they went on to play
in one of the biggest bands of all time, just.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
To zoom out for a second, you said that the
BuzzFeed story that came out in twenty sixteen was the
first thing you'd ever really written. But then I noticed
in your Twitter bio you say trying to tell somewhere
between four and ten of the wildest music stories ever
before I die. When did that become your mo Like?
When did sort of a one off story for BuzzFeed
turn into like a career where you're really like looking
(15:58):
for stories just like this, you know, wild music stories.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
What kind of goes back to the decade log obsession?
Like it was very I'll tell you, Leon, it was
a very strange experience to write the first thing that
you ever wrote. And three days later, the executive producer
of Quentin Tarantino's movies has you in his office and
is saying, we could make this into the greatest movie.
Like that's how it happened.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
That's amazing. I'm not surprised. The interest was there. I
mean it jumps off the page as like make me
a movie, please.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
But they didn't want to give me any money. They
didn't want to do anything. They were just like, we're
gonna be able to market this movie so great. And
I was like, okay, what I wrote an article that
just came out. I don't know what you're talking about,
so that obviously didn't pan out. And then there was
a huge gap of about six years where nobody gave
a shit about this story, like literally no one. I
(16:51):
got all the stuff, I got a lawyer, I got managers,
and nothing happened. Like I mean, the story was option.
But these things have, as I've.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Learned, when you say nothing happened, you mean like you
were hoping that that story would be step one on
like a path to making a for example, a feature
like the one you were writing with your friend from Thursday.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Yeah. But there's a very kind of strange trajectory, which
is that when the story came out, I moved to
Los Angeles and then I worked a bunch of strange
kind of production jobs out here. People who would like
read the story and were like, oh, yeah, we want
you to come in and do this, And I was
actually really bad at it. I was terrible at it.
(17:31):
I had no idea what I was doing. I did
know how to work with people. I didn't go to college.
I have no idea how a writer's room works or anything.
And then I completely crashed out working on a documentary,
and I ended up living in Malibu for one thousand
dollars a month and could not get any work. So
(17:52):
I started working in a surf shop in Malibu, even
though I have never surfed before. And then I got
really good at barts and that became my job. And
then four years ago, Melissa, she's our other partner on
this producer of this, I had heard a story that
somebody told me at a bar, another crazy rock and
roll true crimesh story, and I started working on another story.
(18:18):
And as soon as I found another one, I realized
that I could make a living in Los Angeles bartending,
just like I did office managing in New York, and
maybe there was room for me to work on another story.
It was finding that second one, and then finding a
third story like that about a year later, and then
a fourth one, and now making a documentary about question
(18:42):
Mark so five.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
One thing leads to another. So the piece came out
twenty sixteen. It was sort of sitting there for six years.
What happened that set in motion the production of the podcast,
Like how did that dormant you know, idea that was
sort of in your back pocket, you know, take you know,
find a new life.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yeah. Ian approached me with a production a different production
company than we ended up working with, and the germ
of the idea was there. I think Ian saw this
as like a potential for a narrative podcast based on
reading the BuzzFeed story. And you know, Ian and I
have actually been in each other's worlds for a long time,
like I used to do the original Talk House reading
(19:24):
series back in New York when the site first launched,
and once Ian and I talked, we realized that we
had the same vision for this, and then we took
it out. But there were some real dark jobs during
that time in Malibu. I cleaned rich people's garages for cash.
I built furniture with a bunch of illegal immigrants in
(19:46):
a factory during COVID when I couldn't bartend like it
was a lot. It was some really tough times, and
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact
that I used to be a really bad listener and
being a bartender it will force you to be a
very good listener, like as you know, this fake zombie
story was a collection of people's stories. People between the
(20:07):
ages of seventy and eighty and usually there's about an
hour before the really good stuff starts to happen in
their story, and I'm used to like a drunk old
guy talking to me for two hours. So I've learned
to handle it and keep things moving along and keep
things cordial in a way that I do think has
really improved what I do.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
That's funny. Yeah, it's a whole special art interviewing old
people about things that happened to them fifty years ago.
I feel like this is probably why I seem like
maybe the right person to have this conversation with you,
because that's been my life for the last seven years,
is tracking down people who are involved in things they
maybe they'd rather forget and trying to get them to
open up and remember as much as they can. Sometimes
(20:50):
you got to let them play the hits before you
can intervene and ask them what you really want to know.
The cocktail party stories they've been telling for years, you know,
you got to let them tell those, and then you
can and yet with the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, yeah, I've been listening to your stuff, and I
definitely felt that kinship with going back into finding these things.
You're really good at tying together a piece of tape
or a quote to the context of what's going on
in your story. And when we started doing this, I
was really faced with this challenge of a six thousand
(21:21):
word article becoming a seven hour podcast. That is a
big task, and obviously it required me to go a
little bit deeper and find out more about the story.
But I had no idea how to tie clips to
narrative and button off things for commercial breaks and all that.
And Nick and Anner here, but I literally could not
(21:42):
have done it without them, Nick Tommy, how to put
it together animate it sound perfect? Like there was sort
of a moody vibey vision that I had in my
head for this at the beginning, which was like, maybe
you were going on a six hour road trip with
your friend and he was going to tell you, like
the craziest rock and roll story of all time.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Why wasn't the six thousand words that you wrote for
BuzzFeed enough for you to get this monkey off your back,
this obsession? Why did it feel like you had more
work to do After that story came out.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Gary and I kept talking, and every once in a
while somebody who'd read the article would email me, and
then Leon, I have to tell you. The craziest twist
of the whole thing. I got an urgent Twitter message
about three years ago and at somebody I don't know.
It's a woman in her about forty years old, and
she says, Urgent, I need you to call me right away.
It's about your fake zombie story. I know this is weird.
(22:35):
Call me. So I call her and she tells me
that her husband just found out that Mark Ramsey, my
fake zombie who the story is focused on, had an
illegitimate child, and her husband he found out that Mark
(22:55):
Ramsey was his biological father. Wow, because he had a
falling out with his mother. And she said, by the way,
that guy you thought was your dad is not really
your dad. Your real dad is this guy, Mark Ramsey.
They did the DNA test thing. And I get on
the phone with this guy and he's like, Mark Ramsey's
(23:15):
my dad and the only thing I know about him
is the story you wrote about him. Wow. But here's
the really happy ending. I've never met the guy's in
zz Top, but Mark's one year old grandson has met
zz To, and I haven't really talked to him since
that happened. He's not really been involved. I asked him
(23:37):
if he wanted to be in the podcast. He said no.
I actually even asked his wife if she wanted to
tell me about the Twitter message send me. She said no.
And thankfully Mark's brother, who is actually the executor of
his estate, wanted to come and talk to me. And
I won't spoil it, but we were able to find
(23:58):
a piece of Marx musical history in the story that
kind of hit me when I first heard it, so
hopefully others will feel the same.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Yeah, I definitely felt it. That's a good segue to
something I wanted to put to you, which is like,
having now finished the show, it feels like it's about
this thing that I think I'm generally preoccupied with, which
is that like there's such a thin line between you know,
living out your days like an ordinary person, you know,
(24:28):
relatively anonymous, and becoming a superstar. Like there's all these
sliding door moments that determine who gets to be an artist,
whose work gets discovered, whose work gets remembered. Just feels
like there's so many like arbitrary, little inflection points, and
it can be the difference between you know, becoming famous
(24:49):
and influential and having to give up your dreams, And
I feel like some of those moments you zero in
on in the show where these young guys with big
dreams were sort of taking a crack at it, they
came close.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Yeah, it is a sliding door moment where these other
guys go on to be to live the dream. And
I think hearing Mar's music is just it made me
think that there was some connection to the world that
like he saw at one point in his life. Hearing
his brother talk about how he was like this smart
kid straight a's he had the curse because he was
(25:26):
so good looking, like and then everybody else in his
band kind of takes off in this different direction. It's
different for him. And you know, he became a math
teacher and then stayed in the same town where he
grew up and it was a different life. Here's the
best part, you know. I'm sure you can imagine. I'm
not gonna pat myself on the back or name drop
(25:47):
or anything like that, but like I've had literally a
list directors be like, this is the best story I've
ever heard, had one say to me last week. I've
been eyeing this story like a hot girl at a
party for seven years. But one day when I was
bartending in Malibu. I was really bummed out and one
(26:10):
of my regulars, he's like a deadhead. He lives in
a one bedroom apartment next to the hotel I worked
in Malibu, and I was really bummed out, and he's like,
what's up? And I was like, I'm just so fucking
over it. I can't believe, Like, how the fuck did
I get here? I'm bartending, I don't my family's three
thousand miles away. I live in a one bedroom apartment
(26:31):
with a seventy year old woman. And he's like, dude,
you wrote a music story that people are gonna be
talking about in bars two hundred years from now. And
like at that moment, I was just like okay, Like
that's cool. He's like people are gonna be saying, did
you know the guys through zz top were the zombies
for a long time? Like, don't sweat it, like you're
doing fine, And yeah, that was like a real moment
(26:53):
for me. I was like okay, Like I hadn't seen
the impact of it for a long time, and just
hearing him say.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
That, I can see that being really a big lift
in a moment like that, What have you done for me?
Lately is something I think we all kind of feel
about ourselves. Sometimes it's nice for someone to remind you
that it's not all about what you did lately.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
That's a good point. That's yea sweet.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Your your life changed pretty significantly over the course of
the ten years. This was germinating or gestating, right, I
mean you've alluded just the way your career went. I'm
curious if you could give me a sense like you were,
what thirty five when the BuzzFeed story came out, and
now you're like forty five, right, Yeah, that's about y
You've arrived a destination with this story, so like what
(27:35):
else happened while it was in the oven?
Speaker 1 (27:39):
I know, I've come back to this a few times,
but like I never saw it in myself. I never
saw it, Like I didn't write anything until I was
thirty six. I never saw I always wanted to maybe
be like a journalist or My favorite thing has always
been listening to a song with somebody and they want
to turn it up because they love it, or they
want to turn it down because they want to tell
you a story about it. Like those are my two
(28:00):
your favorite moments with music? And I'd always had that
feeling that I wanted to share that in some way,
I just didn't know how to do it, Like I
never learned had very conservative parents growing up, Like I
wasn't allowed to be in a band in high school.
My mom ripped my eight foot verve subway poster off
(28:21):
the wall when I was seventeen years old because she
was mad at me, like I was not supposed to
be like a person involved in music. I'm like literally
the last person. It was not a cool thing in
my family to be involved in. And then of course
I started a band that sounded like at the Drive
in when I was eighteen. That's as people do. And
when the Zombie story hit, like before I even wrote it,
(28:43):
like people would say to me, I was like, oh,
I'm working on this story, but the zobvious people would say, like, damn,
it sounds like a movie. And I actually think I've
been able to see what it is about certain stories
that has a broad appeal. Not that they're all going
to be made into a fucking movie, obviously, but like
what is the heart of a story and why does
(29:03):
it resonate? Like sometimes it's my job to figure it out.
And with this one, I got to have the article
come out, learn how people felt about it, kind of
see how it progressed. I. First of all, one of
the big lessons was that I knew that zz top
was never going to be a part of it. We
asked and asked and asked, and like, I actually thought
about posting the screenshots of the interactions with their manager
(29:26):
because he's literally like, stop fucking asking me, Hugh and
Lloy idiot, like he's there over it. But I met
him at a Christmas party and he shook my hand
and he was super nice. So I think it's all
just like what they're doing with this, it's just they've
got a legend of their own.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah, right, listening to it, one thing that was really
clear to me, and I think he'll be clear to anyone,
but I think it was clear to me, especially because
I've like been on these journeys before where you're like
trying to get to something and you're t trying to
get lucky with who you can convince to talk to
you and what little detail you're going to find that
(30:06):
can make or break, you, know, your ability to realize
your vision. I'm curious, like what made this story hard
to excavate because you know, like when we make podcasts,
we often pick pretty easy targets like we'll do the
age crisis, you know, and no matter what, like we're
gonna find interesting people to talk to and interesting storylines.
Is to build our show around when that's your topic.
(30:29):
With a story like this, like we really need certain
pieces to fall into place, where you need certain reporting
things to go right, there's some risk, right that you're
not going to get it. There's a possibility that you
just won't harvest enough material to make it work, and
I'm curious how you dealt with that as you move forward.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
I want to be very clear about this. I had
one limitation and it was money. Like, there was no
limitation to where we were going with the story. Nick
is a genius editor who had incredible ideas, and I
put this together. We've never met, and I've never met before.
We made this over zoom like. I recorded huge portions
of this in my car on my break at the bar.
(31:09):
My only limitations on this were money, Like, I'm sure
that everybody would be really thrilled to hear that on
the podcast. But no, like, obviously there was some we
lost a really key figure one of the two managers
died right as we were about to have an interview
lined up. During those six dead years, we were just
(31:31):
gonna talk to him for fun.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
I really felt for you right then, man.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
I mean the guy who literally told his girlfriend, oh yeah,
I'm leaving here to go built the stage for Woodstock,
I'd Brie Hendrix's amps and stuff like. It's crazy, you know,
it's there are moments you miss. But I do feel
like the reason I was so blunt about the money
stuff was just like, it took me a year and
a half. And I've gone on a couple podcasts and
(31:54):
stuff like that, and people are like, you worked on
this for so long, Oh my god, you took forever
to make this. And I'm like, if you feel that way,
you can blame my boss at my bartending job for
scheduling me so much like it is my reality. Hopefully
the balance will be a little bit better going forward.
That's my goal. I actually do love bartending and don't
(32:16):
plan on giving it up anytime soon.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
I don't know. A year and a half. I mean,
listening to the show, I'm like, yeah, this fucking took
a year and a half. I mean, chasing down some
of the leads that you know that ultimately allowed you
to sort of crack it open. Like you had to
get pretty creative about where you were going to find
your witnesses, right, Like you couldn't talk to most of
the primary players. You had to call their prom dates,
(32:40):
you had to call the guys who opened for them. Like,
I found it quite inspiring to see how creative you
got in terms of just you know, hitting a wall
on access and then finding a way around it.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Well, yeah, I mean that's was a huge thing. And
I was really lucky that Bay City is a pretty
small town in Michigan that the place where I was
telling the story. I got lucky that Gary and these
other people. There's another guy by the way named Scott
Baker who I want to shout out, who is incredible,
who helped record some of the stuff in Bay City.
(33:12):
And it's like these guys, you know, wrote for the
local paper, Like these are people who've known a lot
of these people for as neighbors and community members for decades.
So that was obviously very helpful in Bay City. And
I'm actually as I go into this next project on
question Mark, like it's Detroit, it's a little bigger at Saginaw.
I'm thankful that Bay City kind of had its limited options.
(33:33):
Right now, I'm hoping that I won't have too much
to go through taking it to a bigger size city
and artists and all that.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Well, since you brought up question Mark, you know, talk
about finding your way around the wall, like the way
you handled the limitations that were placed on you and
getting that interview with question Mark into the show, I
thought was so funny and so perfectly executed for those
who haven't heard it. Basically, you couldn't get question Mark
to agree to talk on the record, right but you
(34:05):
had all these conversations with him where you were recording
your side of it, if not his, and basically you
just let us hear your side of the conversation and
kind of left the rest up to the imagination. I'm curious,
how did you come up with that?
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I felt like it kind of came pretty organically from
the three of us, from me Anda and Nick, Like
we at one point were like, we can't not have
him in here. This man is talking about how he
was born on Mars and was essentially gender fluid in
the sixties and believes he's reincarnated from a female singer
from ancient Egypt and all these things that you know
(34:41):
are a little out there, but he is the ultimate
example of the older person who, once you wade through
the you know all the conversation they want to have.
He actually has an incredible memory, and I was just
with him last week and he was moved to tears
telling me about how much Dick Clark helped his band
(35:02):
back in the sixties and had him on the show twice.
And then when they made that show American Dreams in
the nineties, it meant so much to question Mark that
they put question Mark in the Mysterians in one of
the scenes because Dick Clark loved them so much, And
obviously I would have loved to have had that for
the podcast, but it literally took me two years to
(35:22):
get him to agree to record a phone call.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
It's crazy because I feel like I have an image
of him in my head based on what you played,
which is almost nothing right. I don't know how you
did it, man, but it really was evocative.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
He's a question Mark.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
What do you think you learned over the past year
and a half making the Fake Zombies podcast that's going
to help you tell the story of another crazy rock
and roll, you know, Taiale.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
As far as story and story impulses and all that,
I'm not worried about that. And I'd say this very proudly.
We learned so much making this on the production side
and the practical bricks and sticks of how to make
an eight episode podcast with two bonus episodes. I had
never done it before. And there are certain things, like
I mentioned recording stuff in my car at the beginning
(36:33):
of this, I probably could have built myself a little
booth in my house and saved myself a lot of
time and money, and I will do that going forward.
But you know, we were figuring it out, so a
lot of it was practical. And then there are a
few things, a few interviews that I would maybe like
to have back at some point, but I promised this
is not a huge teaser. But we did get an
(36:55):
email from a guy I think it was the day
after the podcast came out and said, hey, love the show,
love loved the whole thing. Was wondering if you were
going to mention this, and he had information about a
third fake zombies happened in England at the same time. Wow,
different management company and all that. But I haven't even
written back to him yet, but there are these little
(37:15):
pieces of this out there, and I don't think this
story is ever going to leave me fully.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Did every band, every popular band, have a doppelganger out
on the road pretending to be them or was it
something about the Zombies that made them the perfect target?
Was it that they had their second win sort of
posthumously and therefore there was a vacuum.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
I think that's actually the cool thing too. Very similar
to I was saying about that guy reaching out A
lot of the third fake Zombies is that we have
heard from other people about other fake bands. And there's
a really great podcast about a fake Fleetwood Mac. It
was only like a half hour long or something like that.
There were actually, I think two fake Fleetwood Macs. There
have been a lot of these. There was a fake
James Taylor at one point. Like, we're learning more about
(37:56):
these kinds of things, and now we're like a target
for people to tell us about it too.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Which rules that's awesome. Yeah. I feel like there's something
really kind of poignant and profound about cover bands, and
especially like now that you see over and over again
that the members of you know, particularly successful cover bands
get hired by the real band to replace someone who
quit or died. Like it gets back to that thing
(38:23):
of sliding doors, where the distance between obscurity and you know,
fame is just like so thin. You know, someone who
was playing in a Smashing Pumpkins cover band gets picked
to play guitar in the actual band with Billy Corgan.
It's like so magical, and I feel like there's something,
you know, there's something of that magic here with the
(38:44):
fake Zombies, especially because two of the members did in
fact go on to great acclaim and success. Such a
thin line between toiling and obscurity and like getting everything
you ever wanted.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Yeah, maybe we don't appreciate it until a little bit later,
when it was good and when it was interesting and
when it was something that could be you know, cinematic
or whatever. Like we don't realize we're going through it
at the time. And with this story, it actually took
fifty five years for it to really kind of come
to fruition, you know, and learning that Frank Beard, the
(39:22):
one who's still alive from the Easy Top, learning that
he's a lifelong Buddhist and like, I'm sure he has
some fascinating thoughts on the fake zombies. I'd love to
hear someday. But I'm also somebody who has a certain
level of spirituality to them, and I think if that
were ever gonna happen, it will happen when it's supposed to.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Are there any stories you can tell me from that
year and a half that you guys spent working on
this where you had a big breakthrough that where you
were like, yes, the key fits, I got the door open, Like,
here's the person who's gonna unlock this part of the
story for me, someone who's gonna tell me what happened
and in a way that no one else can. I
feel like listening to the show, I feel like there
(40:03):
must have been a bunch of those.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Yeah, I remember the moment very distinctly, and it's the
kind of thing now that I've learned a little bit,
I probably would have put this in, But Nick and
I had just met, had just started talking, and I
went to Bay City, and I remember I was staying
at the world's worst hotel, like a day's ill illustripmall,
and I was in the stairwell because the people next
to me were fighting in their room, and I was
(40:26):
calling Nick, and I was like, I found Jim Atherton's girlfriend, Like,
I found this guy who says he was on tour
opening for the fake Zombies and he wrote around in
a limousine on the tour. And I remember that conversation
in the stairwell very well. I probably have a recording
of it somewhere. But that was really my breakthrough moment
with it, where all of a sudden, I has somebody
incredible who like gets this story, gets what it is,
(40:49):
because he was as excited as I was, you know,
And that was my big breakthrough in them. From there,
the next move was to go to, Yeah, Jim Atherton's
prom date's house. And you know, you sat down for
this interview. You're sitting in a mic in a booth.
This woman has not had a microphone in her face,
probably since she was singing in school when she was
(41:09):
like twelve years old or something. It's different, you know.
And Yeah, showing up there, putting my nervousness aside, putting
my anxiety aside, and being like I'm here to get
this woman's thoughts about her old boyfriend. Like I got
to go in here really chill it, just like let
her talk at her pace, like, I'm not going to
extract anything from her, like, and she wanted to teach
(41:33):
me a card game that she had played and do
this other stuff and that's fine. And she played in
a woodwind ensemble for in her twenties and had her
own little musical history and that's what she wanted to
tell me about. So that's what we talked about.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, one breakthrough in the show that well, that doesn't
end up panning out, but that you again, as with
the question Mark tape, you end up making, you know,
something really special out of is of course the video
that maybe was Nick that or Anna who tracked down
this interview clip right where the fake zombies are being
(42:11):
interviewed while on tour, and as far as I could tell,
this was like the only real documentation anywhere of these
guys in action.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
I know, you tell the story in the podcast, but
tell me here, like, what was it like discovering that
piece of footage existed, and tell me about the quest
to get your hands on it and ultimately how you
decided to handle it in the show.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Yeah, I think actually you're the perfect person who we
asked in that question because this has probably happened to
you a million times. This is a new experience for
me to have somebody want to charge you an arm
and a leg for a clip that you feel like
is basically worthless.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, man, it's rough. I just had to tell ABC
thanks but no thanks to paying one thousand dollars for
ten seconds of a Nightline episode. Yeah, it's sad, but
I can only imagine it was heartbreaking in your case,
because it really is just like kind of a holy grail. Right,
Maybe you didn't even know you were looking for it,
but once you found it, it's like here they are
and you can hear them talking, and you can see
(43:08):
them talking. It must have just been amazing to just
sit there and watch it.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
The way you pull it off in the end in
the show with this video that you couldn't license is
by essentially recreating it. Right, How did you go about
doing that?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Well? I live in Los Angeles and some of my
friends here are actors, and my friend Josh makes the
best hogies in Los Angeles at his pop up shop,
and he's also an actor who does a really good
British accent. We talked to each other British accent sometimes,
like when we're goofy or out playing music or whatever,
and I was like, I think he could. He has
kind of the same tone as this guy. His roommate
(43:44):
is also an actor. And then I called my friend Joey,
who's a comedian, to do the kind of goofy guy's voice,
and we basically made a fake fake zombies, a fake
fake fake zombies to do this version of it, and
we thought it was kind of a fun way to
work around it, and yeah, it kind of came out
(44:05):
of fun. I was happy with it. I was.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
I found it delightful.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
And there is actually a happy ending to this story,
which is the Zombies have a documentary coming out next year,
directed by Robert Schwartzmann, and they licensed it for the documentary,
so you'll be able to see them when you go
see the Zombies documentary, which will I think will be
streaming soon. Actually hell yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
As a podcaster, I was very intrigued by this archivist's
apparent hostility towards the medium. From what you said, it
sounded like as soon as you said the word podcast,
this guy who held the keys to this video is
like click not talking to you. If you're a podcaster,
what's up with that?
Speaker 1 (44:42):
My guess is it's probably just experience of being like
a seventy year old guy who probably licenses stuff for
like Warner Brothers and all these huge studios all the.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Time, and he knows that podcasters have no money.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I think he was not interested. And we were trying
not to just be like drop iheart's name, you know,
thinking that if they did want to work with us,
that would mean they thought we had deeper pockets. But
I offered to negotiate a price for this clip of
a minute and a half of the audio and they
were not having it.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
Well, you made the best of it. Really, It ends
up being a very memorable, I think moment in the show.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Speaking of licensing, did you end up having to license
the Zombies music that you used?
Speaker 1 (45:26):
It was the first thing we did, really, first thing
we did with the first thing we did with the
budget was licensed our ten phase And yeah, that was
a decision between Ian and I and we felt like
we needed to because, yeah, the Zombies are very well
respected and appreciated, but they are actually until about a
(45:46):
month ago, they were still a touring band who played
more shows than bands I know were in their early twenties.
They're definitely still a working band. They still sound great,
and I wanted to remind people that, you know, like
I have a real bell Weather litmus test thing where
when people are like, oh, yeah, the zombies are one
hit wonder. I had a director say that to me
(46:07):
at one point recently, and I was like, well, if
you really listen to the podcast, I think you would
come away taking away that they actually have a handful
of truly classic songs and then ten to twenty that
are like as good as any band from their era. Yeah,
which is a pretty high batting average.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
So I really liked how you guys used the songs.
And there's one lovely transition. I noticed you're talking about
Jim Atherton's prom date and trying to find her, and
then we hear she's not there. And I assume that
was like a deliberate choice to be like, let's have
the song kind of speak to the narration a little bit.
And I'm curious if A if that was in fact deliberate,
(46:47):
and b if you like had other jokes like that
that I missed.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
That was definitely deliberate. That one was intentional. And then
there's one at the end, the last song in the
podcast is like kind of a Zombies deep cut. It's
called Friends of Mine, and the song about all these
different people who've come to their world and how cool
it is to see them in love. And it's like
such an interesting, innocent perspective for a rock and roll
song to have, And I think it kind of keys
(47:12):
in on the fact that almost every band, at some point,
every big band, has like tried to be a little
bit tougher or tried to be a little bit cooler
than they are. And I feel like the Zombies have
always just been themselves and they were probably called soft
and all these things when they were coming up and
the Rolling Stones were starting to, you know, come up
(47:33):
at the same time. They would cross paths as teenagers,
and the Zombies have maintained like a very sweet innocence,
and the fact that they're kind of the quote unquote
victims of this story ties into that innocence really well totally.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
I remember. I mean, so you obviously get into this.
In the show. The Zombies were sort of like underappreciated
for a long time, right, Like they had these couple
of hits, maybe like the guy you just referred to,
like people wrote them off as a one hit under.
I was in high school, so probably around two thousand
and one, thousand and two when I remember probably Pitchfork
(48:08):
writing about the Zombies and suddenly like they were in
the cannon and people were talking about Odyssey and Oracle
alongside pet sounds, and I think at the time I
didn't know that they were had previously been kind of
an obscurity, But I think that adds to what is
magical about your story in a way, like you could
only have pulled this taper on a band that was underappreciated,
(48:32):
and people might actually believe that they were seeing the
real thing because the real thing wasn't all that famous
to begin with.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
You're hitting on something there, and it's like it is
the power of a great song. This is I think
the importance of, you know, musicians with good taste and
an understanding of the history of music. I think a
lot of the stuff with the Zombies in the nineties
happened because of people like Beck was a big Zombies
sent Paul Weller, huge Zombies fan. Paul Weller would do
(49:02):
interviews where he would say, Odyssee an Oracles the greatest
album ever made, and you know, as a Angli file
kid obsessed with Oasis and later The Jam and later
The Clash and everybody else. When I saw that kind
of statement about the Zombies, I was like, oh, I
got to check out this album, and I do think
it was that very prominent. I miss it. I think
(49:22):
everybody misses it. Like print magazine long features on bands
like coming out of England mostly, and the Zombies are
like the perfect band for that because they are a
little bit obscure. You know, time of the season, but
did you know this or whatever. The deeper you go,
the better the catalog gets. I think I say that
in the podcast, but yeah, they've got some truly magical music,
(49:44):
and Colin, in my opinion, is the best singer of
all time.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
I loved hearing his speaking voice because you can hear
his singing voice in it, but it's like obviously happening
in a different register. Give me a little shiver to
hear that gorgeous voice just saying words like people.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
So many people have come to me and said I
love his voice so much. I could listen to him
read the phone book. It's it's really cool totally.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
When we talked before on the phone, you said that
you want to inspire other people to make podcasts about
crazy music stories. And that caught my ear because I
was curious, as someone who's just made a podcast for
the first time, what did you like about the medium
and what do you think makes a podcast a good
vehicle for, you know, a crazy music story.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Obviously, the accessibility is there as somebody who made this
as like a working class writer, Like podcasts are possible
to make in your free time. I think that's really important.
And obviously documentaries and movies are too, but you're at
a different level. I'm in production, and it helps have
a genius editor, which not everybody's going to have making
a podcast, But for me, it's it really keys in
(50:54):
on people who are maybe where I was, like thirty
five and working in office job but still loving this thing.
And like, you know, it was surprises me that people
spend thousands of dollars on concert tickets all this stuff
on loving music, Like there's a lot of different ways
to love music, and my way just happens to be
(51:15):
like getting as deep into these weird stories as possible.
But I just hope there's somebody out there who's like
forty years old and thinks that like their life is
one way and they have convinced themselves that they can't
do it. Because I was in that spot and I
felt exactly that way, and I hope, yeah, I hope
people remember that, like life is long, and yeah, this
(51:35):
the medium is really fun, like it's cool, and you know,
I remember at the beginning of this, like obviously, licensing
clip lengths and stuff like that made this not entirely possible.
But I was like, let's play a whole zombie song
at the beginning of the first episode, like you know,
and people weren't like, get the fuck out of here,
Like I actually want people to sit with the music,
(51:57):
and like, not everything has to be rushed and hit
this same beats that everybody wants you to hit. It's
okay to take your time with it. And when you're
dealing with people, you know who are maybe in the
what was like the back nine of their life, like
it's going to go a little slower than you wanted to.
Speaker 2 (52:13):
Yeah, but it's also my experience like talking to people
like that, you often get stuff that they wouldn't have
told you back when you know the events and question
were happening. It's only forty fifty years later. That they're like,
all right, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what really happened.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
You know, we had a few of those yeah people
who probably wouldn't have in the past.
Speaker 2 (52:33):
And then we're like, sure, yeah, all right, Daniel, thank
you so much for giving us the behind the scenes look.
As someone who really loved the show and could tell
there was all kinds of sweat and angst that went
into making this thing, it was great to be able
to ask you about it. And I hope the podcast
gives the story a third life still and if not,
(52:53):
you got to just, I think, make a sequel about
the Third Zombies. So that's just your fate. I'm afraid
that's okay.
Speaker 1 (52:59):
I love it. I love it as long as we
can keep the band together. This episode of the True
Story of the Fake Zombies features original music by Robin Hatch.
Robin did the score for the podcast and you can
find her music everywhere. It was produced by Nick Dawson,
(53:21):
Anna McClain and myself, Thanks again to Leon Nafach and
executive producers Melissa Locker and Ian Wheeler. The True Story
of the Fake Zombies is a production of iHeart Podcasts,
Talk House and never Mind Media. For more podcasts from
iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts for wherever
(53:42):
you get your podcasts,
The True Story of the Fake Zombies is a production
of iHeart Podcasts, Talk House and Nevermind Media. This is
the final bonus episode of the True Story of the
Fake Zombies. Whether you've listened to the show or this
is your introduction, it's a look into how we made it.
(00:22):
I'm host, writer and EP Daniel Ralstone. I sat down
with Leon Nathuk podcaster, writer, radio host to talk about
what it was like to make this podcast while I
was also bartending full time, and I share some crazy
details that were revealed after the podcast came out. One
quick note you'll hear me refer to Anna, Nick and Melissa.
(00:47):
That's Anna McLain, who engineered and co produced the show,
Nick Dawson, who's my editor and co producer, and Melissa Locker,
my co EP. I'd also like to thank Ian Wheeler
from Talkhouse forgetting us all together.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Daniel, I was so delighted you asked me to be
a part of this interview. This sort of debrief is
how I've been thinking of it. Debrief of your tenure
journey to try to get to the bottom of this
story that's been lodged in your soul since you came
across it. In a stray line reading about something else.
(01:26):
Just to set the table here, you made this podcast
because you were obsessed, Is that the right word? With
this forgotten, poorly documented rumor for a full decade, tell
me how you first came across this little tidbit and
how it went from tidbit to story idea to eight
part podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Sure, you mentioned in the one sentence in the book,
and yeah, it said some American guys went around the
country pretending to be this British band the Zombies. Read
it in a biography of the Zombies, and yeah, it
was intriguing enough that my one of my best friends
in the world, Jeff Rickley, and I said we should
write a screenplay about some guys, and we made up
(02:08):
a whole world. It was about a guy who's trying
to break out from his dad's under his dad's thumb,
and his dad owned a furniture store and he ran
the musical instrument section of the furniture store. And we
had a whole backstory. And then Jeff got his old
band Thursday back together, and I moved to Los Angeles.
(02:31):
But yeah, we were just really intrigued by the idea.
The storyline was that one of the guys in the
band's cousin from England was visiting and she sort of
was like the mastermind of the fake zombie. She taught
him how to use fake British accents. We invented this
whole world. And then one day I was googling, and
I was really deep into searching for stuff about imposter
(02:53):
zombie grooves, just trying to get information about what might
have really happened, and I stumbled upon this blog post
called I Was a teenage Zombie by this guy Mark Ramsey,
and it was literally, I mean, those two words fake
and zombie que a lot of different things in the
search results. I was way down, and I think one
(03:14):
of the first things that intrigued me was this guy
had pictures on his blog post that had three comments,
and there were pictures of him and a teenage Dusty
Hill and Frank Beard from zz Top and he's using
their full names, not trying to be secretive about it.
It's a public blog post, and half of the entire
(03:34):
post is about all the different guitars he had on
the tour and his amps, and he was like a
gear head, so he didn't necessarily see the story aspect
of it. He was like, look at this cool guitar
I used on the road in nineteen sixty nine. Oh,
by the way, two of the guys from Zzy Top
worried by high school garage band essentially high school garage man,
and I reached out.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
To him, this is while you're still working on a
screenplay that sort of fictionalizes this scenario based on that
one line you read in.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Then sure, yeah, we were working on the screenplay. I
was also working full time as an office manager at
a international e commerce company in New York City, and
my time at that company, we went from six people
to six hundred. It was a really exciting time. Like
Jeff and I would like go away and write on
the screenplay. This was a fun thing to do on
the side. But I was still really use the word
(04:21):
obsessed with this idea. And once I met Mark Ramsey
and he sent me the photos, everything started to come
into place. And then the real key was that I
met a guy in Michigan named Gary Johnson who's a
rock and roll historian. And one of the pictures that
Mark had in Texas of his fake Zombies band had
(04:42):
an address on it for a management company, and Gary
in Michigan had the same photo with the same address
on it, these promotional photos that had been printed for
the Fake Zombies in nineteen sixty nine, calling themselves the
original Zombies. And then two weeks after I talked to Gary,
I went to see the Replacements play with a friend
(05:03):
of mine and he said, you should write this as
an article. I'm doing stuff for BuzzFeed. And I wrote
the article and it took me about two years, and
it was the first thing I ever wrote.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Wow, what do you think captured your imagination in the
story enough to first turn it into the kernel of
a fictionalized screenplay, but then also kind of take the
more journalistic route and try to find out what actually
happened here? Like, what was it about it that you
feel like activated you?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Well, first of all, like I'm an obsessive music fan,
obsessive specifically like British music fan. When I was sixteen,
me and my best friend decided that Oasis was our
favorite band, and from there it was of course the Beatles,
and the Zombies is a band that I really landed
on as like one of my favorites. I was married
at one point and we you know, walked down the Aisle,
(05:55):
so this will be our year. The Zombies are one
of my favorite bands, and I I've met a lot
of other people who feel that way about them.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
And you were just reading the Zombies biography because you
love the Zombies.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, one PC. And I've always loved liked the stories
behind music, the things where it's like, yeah, I love
this song, but I also love this element of the band, Like,
of course everybody loves Fleetwood Mac, but everybody also loves
the Fleetwood Mac story and the drama and all of
that stuff. And this seemed to be like a really
weird piece of zz Top's history that there was almost
(06:25):
no information about. And since we started the podcast, we
did find out that zz tops Wrodi wrote a book
and he mentioned it in a paragraph, So this was
actually out there for somebody to find out about. And
I feel really lucky that I found Gary in Michigan
and we started to uncover this together.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
What would you say your big questions were about what
happened here? Like you have these little stray bits of
data that you've kind of come across, none of which
treat the story as any big whoop. It's almost like
an aside every time you see someone mention it, right,
what did you want to know?
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Naturally? I wanted to know the sites and smells and
what did the van seats feel like and all that stuff,
But almost nobody had that information, even the people who
were literally there with the fake zombies. It was fifty
five years ago, and I realized this was going to
be a lot more about collecting what people remembered from
the era than about putting that square peg into the
(07:25):
round hole of Like I need this exact information so
that people feel like they're feeling it. I think there
are other ways to do that.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah. No, it feels like from listening to it that
a big part of what drew you to it was
like just the milliu, like the scene. These guys were
part of the circuit. They were touring on the economics
of being a small struggling band during this time in
pop music history, and you seem to just want to
(07:55):
render that with as much texture and specificity as you could.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah. Also like the most covered era in music too,
like the sixties scene, Like what is left of it
at this point to be mined? And it turns out
there's a lot to be mined. But most of these
stories are with people who are in their seventies. And
I think I even told Nick and Annabs at one point,
But I truly do not care about the promotion of
(08:22):
this podcast outside of just telling people just find a
way to share it with, like your parents or your grandparents,
or somebody who might have been around at that era,
because I guarantee you if they were even remotely involved
with music, they're gonna have an amazing story somewhere about
somebody they crossed paths with, somebody they had dinner with.
(08:42):
You know. One thing we ended up cutting out of
the podcast was like Joeanne from the Fake Archies, Like
she said, everybody in the Fake Archies. By the way,
for anybody listening a new listener, there's also a fake
archiese in addition to two fake zombies. That one night
she had like a little fling with the guy who
(09:05):
Jake Lamata is based on his son ran a nightclub
and he was like, you were the most beautiful thing
I've ever seen. We had this romantic nightclub, but everybody
else was like obsessed with the girl who was playing Betty.
And it was every once in a while she'd have
a night where there was like a Veronica guy and
one of those nights was with this guy who was
(09:26):
like a boxer who ran a nightclub. And you know,
to me, that's a better story than like her telling
me maybe like a rote detail about their set list.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
One thing that occurred to me as I was putting
myself in your position and kind of falling in love
with the story that it's just so funny that there
was basically a zombie zombies, like the fact that they
were called the Zombies and this band that formed after
(09:56):
the actual Zombies broke up, like they were the zombie Zombie.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yeah, it's funny. We talked about calling the article the
zombie Zombies, I think way back in the day, and
I was like, it's way too confusing. They're not there
like a playo. She's not there was another possibility. I
was like, no, it's too confusing. You're one hundred percent
right like it is. There's two parts of it. One
the zombie aspect of it is it is really funny.
The band like kind of plays on that a little
(10:23):
bit too. I think. The other thing is like when
you look at these guys like young Frank, Young Dusty Mark,
see all these guys in the opening bands and stuff.
It's like they're really young, good looking, like they were
all going after it. They were dressing the part. They
(10:44):
were like playing in a you know, imposter band and
giving it everything they could. I found that really appealing.
Like talking to Mark Ramsey when he was still with us,
you know, I got the sense to like, it was
hard watching two of your bandmates go on to like
huge fame and his buddy see passed away young and
(11:06):
this wasn't like the cheeriest portrait portion of his life.
But he wanted to tell the story, and I'm glad
he got to.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Did you relate to them as like young men trying
to make it in rock and roll? Was that part
of your life at any point? Like the dream of
making it big as a as a rock star?
Speaker 1 (11:25):
One hundred. When I was nineteen years old, I moved
from the Allentown area to Oakland, California with a girl,
and then I started playing in a punk band that
sounded like at the Drive In, and we all lived together,
played the band together, and worked in a candy store
(11:46):
in Berkeley together. Yeah. It was like the Monkeys, but
insanely dysfunctional, and it lasted about a year.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
I was in a band that tried to sound like
Green Day, It's a little easier.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
I was the singer. I was literally jumping around the
stage like a lunatic with my guitarist. It was insane
when looking back on it. But that year I lived
in Oakland, I started interning for a record label called
Absolutely Kosher, which put out early Mountain Goat stuff. Shushu
and I went on tour with Shushu and Devendra Banhart
(12:18):
on Devendra's first US tour as their tour manager for
three weeks in the summer of two thousand and three,
and that was kind of like the start of all
my life in music. I ended up moving back to Philadelphia,
started a band with my little brother, and Yeah, for
about three or four years, that's what I thought I
was gonna do, and then I started just living a
(12:40):
different kind of life.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah. Could you picture yourself in their place as you
learn more about like the you know, ecosystem that they
were working within and the kinds of people they were,
you know, having to deal with as they looked for
a way to make this their livelihood.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Yeah, I could in a very direct like I know
what it's like to be on the outside looking in
in every conceivable way. I even remember a time when
I was very, very briefly in college when I was
eighteen and I was going to play in a band,
and I thought this one guy was like the coolest
guitarist ever, and I wanted to play with him. And
(13:18):
he's like, why don't you play me something you wrote?
And I played him a Radiohead B side because I
was trying to pass it off as my own, so
I know exactly how they felt. But yeah, it's the
same kind of you know, this guy was so cool,
and I imagine, like when you look at the pictures
of Seed Metter from the Fake Zombies, like coolest guy.
He was the band leader. Mark was nineteen and wanted
(13:40):
to be cool. Like I sort of get this whole thing.
I get why they did it, and the fact that
they found a second band to do it tells me that, like,
this was just the thing that people didn't know what
it was yet the Zombies were broken up, this kind
of thing would become tribute bands. But we're just in
a small little window where this could happen, right.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
I was curious about that. Listening to the show, I
was like, how does this compare to just a cover
band or a tribute band. It kind of just goes
to intent, right, It's like, do you want people to
think you're the real thing or are you satisfied to
kind of like bringing an audience in that just wants
to hear the songs and there's no illusion that you
are who you are pretending to be.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Right. I tried to write this sort of dey new
moment to the last episode that was like about the
word fake and why it stands out so much. And
you realize that anybody who's considered like an originator in
music has created some kind of persona from the things
that they've cobbled together, from their influences and all of this.
(14:47):
But there's something about using that word fake that just
makes it feel wrong. I think there's value in using
that to figure out who you are when you're nineteen
or twenty out on the road with your friends, Like
I think these guys were really trying to figure out
who they were, and for some of them, they were
(15:07):
one hundred percent right because the fact that they were
fake zombies didn't matter, and they went on to play
in one of the biggest bands of all time, just.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
To zoom out for a second, you said that the
BuzzFeed story that came out in twenty sixteen was the
first thing you'd ever really written. But then I noticed
in your Twitter bio you say trying to tell somewhere
between four and ten of the wildest music stories ever
before I die. When did that become your mo Like?
When did sort of a one off story for BuzzFeed
turn into like a career where you're really like looking
(15:58):
for stories just like this, you know, wild music stories.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
What kind of goes back to the decade log obsession?
Like it was very I'll tell you, Leon, it was
a very strange experience to write the first thing that
you ever wrote. And three days later, the executive producer
of Quentin Tarantino's movies has you in his office and
is saying, we could make this into the greatest movie.
Like that's how it happened.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
That's amazing. I'm not surprised. The interest was there. I
mean it jumps off the page as like make me
a movie, please.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
But they didn't want to give me any money. They
didn't want to do anything. They were just like, we're
gonna be able to market this movie so great. And
I was like, okay, what I wrote an article that
just came out. I don't know what you're talking about,
so that obviously didn't pan out. And then there was
a huge gap of about six years where nobody gave
a shit about this story, like literally no one. I
(16:51):
got all the stuff, I got a lawyer, I got managers,
and nothing happened. Like I mean, the story was option.
But these things have, as I've.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Learned, when you say nothing happened, you mean like you
were hoping that that story would be step one on
like a path to making a for example, a feature
like the one you were writing with your friend from Thursday.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Yeah. But there's a very kind of strange trajectory, which
is that when the story came out, I moved to
Los Angeles and then I worked a bunch of strange
kind of production jobs out here. People who would like
read the story and were like, oh, yeah, we want
you to come in and do this, And I was
actually really bad at it. I was terrible at it.
(17:31):
I had no idea what I was doing. I did
know how to work with people. I didn't go to college.
I have no idea how a writer's room works or anything.
And then I completely crashed out working on a documentary,
and I ended up living in Malibu for one thousand
dollars a month and could not get any work. So
(17:52):
I started working in a surf shop in Malibu, even
though I have never surfed before. And then I got
really good at barts and that became my job. And
then four years ago, Melissa, she's our other partner on
this producer of this, I had heard a story that
somebody told me at a bar, another crazy rock and
roll true crimesh story, and I started working on another story.
(18:18):
And as soon as I found another one, I realized
that I could make a living in Los Angeles bartending,
just like I did office managing in New York, and
maybe there was room for me to work on another story.
It was finding that second one, and then finding a
third story like that about a year later, and then
a fourth one, and now making a documentary about question
(18:42):
Mark so five.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
One thing leads to another. So the piece came out
twenty sixteen. It was sort of sitting there for six years.
What happened that set in motion the production of the podcast,
Like how did that dormant you know, idea that was
sort of in your back pocket, you know, take you know,
find a new life.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yeah. Ian approached me with a production a different production
company than we ended up working with, and the germ
of the idea was there. I think Ian saw this
as like a potential for a narrative podcast based on
reading the BuzzFeed story. And you know, Ian and I
have actually been in each other's worlds for a long time,
like I used to do the original Talk House reading
(19:24):
series back in New York when the site first launched,
and once Ian and I talked, we realized that we
had the same vision for this, and then we took
it out. But there were some real dark jobs during
that time in Malibu. I cleaned rich people's garages for cash.
I built furniture with a bunch of illegal immigrants in
(19:46):
a factory during COVID when I couldn't bartend like it
was a lot. It was some really tough times, and
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact
that I used to be a really bad listener and
being a bartender it will force you to be a
very good listener, like as you know, this fake zombie
story was a collection of people's stories. People between the
(20:07):
ages of seventy and eighty and usually there's about an
hour before the really good stuff starts to happen in
their story, and I'm used to like a drunk old
guy talking to me for two hours. So I've learned
to handle it and keep things moving along and keep
things cordial in a way that I do think has
really improved what I do.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
That's funny. Yeah, it's a whole special art interviewing old
people about things that happened to them fifty years ago.
I feel like this is probably why I seem like
maybe the right person to have this conversation with you,
because that's been my life for the last seven years,
is tracking down people who are involved in things they
maybe they'd rather forget and trying to get them to
open up and remember as much as they can. Sometimes
(20:50):
you got to let them play the hits before you
can intervene and ask them what you really want to know.
The cocktail party stories they've been telling for years, you know,
you got to let them tell those, and then you
can and yet with the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, yeah, I've been listening to your stuff, and I
definitely felt that kinship with going back into finding these things.
You're really good at tying together a piece of tape
or a quote to the context of what's going on
in your story. And when we started doing this, I
was really faced with this challenge of a six thousand
(21:21):
word article becoming a seven hour podcast. That is a
big task, and obviously it required me to go a
little bit deeper and find out more about the story.
But I had no idea how to tie clips to
narrative and button off things for commercial breaks and all that.
And Nick and Anner here, but I literally could not
(21:42):
have done it without them, Nick Tommy, how to put
it together animate it sound perfect? Like there was sort
of a moody vibey vision that I had in my
head for this at the beginning, which was like, maybe
you were going on a six hour road trip with
your friend and he was going to tell you, like
the craziest rock and roll story of all time.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Why wasn't the six thousand words that you wrote for
BuzzFeed enough for you to get this monkey off your back,
this obsession? Why did it feel like you had more
work to do After that story came out.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Gary and I kept talking, and every once in a
while somebody who'd read the article would email me, and
then Leon, I have to tell you. The craziest twist
of the whole thing. I got an urgent Twitter message
about three years ago and at somebody I don't know.
It's a woman in her about forty years old, and
she says, Urgent, I need you to call me right away.
It's about your fake zombie story. I know this is weird.
(22:35):
Call me. So I call her and she tells me
that her husband just found out that Mark Ramsey, my
fake zombie who the story is focused on, had an
illegitimate child, and her husband he found out that Mark
(22:55):
Ramsey was his biological father. Wow, because he had a
falling out with his mother. And she said, by the way,
that guy you thought was your dad is not really
your dad. Your real dad is this guy, Mark Ramsey.
They did the DNA test thing. And I get on
the phone with this guy and he's like, Mark Ramsey's
(23:15):
my dad and the only thing I know about him
is the story you wrote about him. Wow. But here's
the really happy ending. I've never met the guy's in
zz Top, but Mark's one year old grandson has met
zz To, and I haven't really talked to him since
that happened. He's not really been involved. I asked him
(23:37):
if he wanted to be in the podcast. He said no.
I actually even asked his wife if she wanted to
tell me about the Twitter message send me. She said no.
And thankfully Mark's brother, who is actually the executor of
his estate, wanted to come and talk to me. And
I won't spoil it, but we were able to find
(23:58):
a piece of Marx musical history in the story that
kind of hit me when I first heard it, so
hopefully others will feel the same.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Yeah, I definitely felt it. That's a good segue to
something I wanted to put to you, which is like,
having now finished the show, it feels like it's about
this thing that I think I'm generally preoccupied with, which
is that like there's such a thin line between you know,
living out your days like an ordinary person, you know,
(24:28):
relatively anonymous, and becoming a superstar. Like there's all these
sliding door moments that determine who gets to be an artist,
whose work gets discovered, whose work gets remembered. Just feels
like there's so many like arbitrary, little inflection points, and
it can be the difference between you know, becoming famous
(24:49):
and influential and having to give up your dreams, And
I feel like some of those moments you zero in
on in the show where these young guys with big
dreams were sort of taking a crack at it, they
came close.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Yeah, it is a sliding door moment where these other
guys go on to be to live the dream. And
I think hearing Mar's music is just it made me
think that there was some connection to the world that
like he saw at one point in his life. Hearing
his brother talk about how he was like this smart
kid straight a's he had the curse because he was
(25:26):
so good looking, like and then everybody else in his
band kind of takes off in this different direction. It's
different for him. And you know, he became a math
teacher and then stayed in the same town where he
grew up and it was a different life. Here's the
best part, you know. I'm sure you can imagine. I'm
not gonna pat myself on the back or name drop
(25:47):
or anything like that, but like I've had literally a
list directors be like, this is the best story I've
ever heard, had one say to me last week. I've
been eyeing this story like a hot girl at a
party for seven years. But one day when I was
bartending in Malibu. I was really bummed out and one
(26:10):
of my regulars, he's like a deadhead. He lives in
a one bedroom apartment next to the hotel I worked
in Malibu, and I was really bummed out, and he's like,
what's up? And I was like, I'm just so fucking
over it. I can't believe, Like, how the fuck did
I get here? I'm bartending, I don't my family's three
thousand miles away. I live in a one bedroom apartment
(26:31):
with a seventy year old woman. And he's like, dude,
you wrote a music story that people are gonna be
talking about in bars two hundred years from now. And
like at that moment, I was just like okay, Like
that's cool. He's like people are gonna be saying, did
you know the guys through zz top were the zombies
for a long time? Like, don't sweat it, like you're
doing fine, And yeah, that was like a real moment
(26:53):
for me. I was like okay, Like I hadn't seen
the impact of it for a long time, and just
hearing him say.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
That, I can see that being really a big lift
in a moment like that, What have you done for me?
Lately is something I think we all kind of feel
about ourselves. Sometimes it's nice for someone to remind you
that it's not all about what you did lately.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
That's a good point. That's yea sweet.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Your your life changed pretty significantly over the course of
the ten years. This was germinating or gestating, right, I
mean you've alluded just the way your career went. I'm
curious if you could give me a sense like you were,
what thirty five when the BuzzFeed story came out, and
now you're like forty five, right, Yeah, that's about y
You've arrived a destination with this story, so like what
(27:35):
else happened while it was in the oven?
Speaker 1 (27:39):
I know, I've come back to this a few times,
but like I never saw it in myself. I never
saw it, Like I didn't write anything until I was
thirty six. I never saw I always wanted to maybe
be like a journalist or My favorite thing has always
been listening to a song with somebody and they want
to turn it up because they love it, or they
want to turn it down because they want to tell
you a story about it. Like those are my two
(28:00):
your favorite moments with music? And I'd always had that
feeling that I wanted to share that in some way,
I just didn't know how to do it, Like I
never learned had very conservative parents growing up, Like I
wasn't allowed to be in a band in high school.
My mom ripped my eight foot verve subway poster off
(28:21):
the wall when I was seventeen years old because she
was mad at me, like I was not supposed to
be like a person involved in music. I'm like literally
the last person. It was not a cool thing in
my family to be involved in. And then of course
I started a band that sounded like at the Drive
in when I was eighteen. That's as people do. And
when the Zombie story hit, like before I even wrote it,
(28:43):
like people would say to me, I was like, oh,
I'm working on this story, but the zobvious people would say, like, damn,
it sounds like a movie. And I actually think I've
been able to see what it is about certain stories
that has a broad appeal. Not that they're all going
to be made into a fucking movie, obviously, but like
what is the heart of a story and why does
(29:03):
it resonate? Like sometimes it's my job to figure it out.
And with this one, I got to have the article
come out, learn how people felt about it, kind of
see how it progressed. I. First of all, one of
the big lessons was that I knew that zz top
was never going to be a part of it. We
asked and asked and asked, and like, I actually thought
about posting the screenshots of the interactions with their manager
(29:26):
because he's literally like, stop fucking asking me, Hugh and
Lloy idiot, like he's there over it. But I met
him at a Christmas party and he shook my hand
and he was super nice. So I think it's all
just like what they're doing with this, it's just they've
got a legend of their own.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah, right, listening to it, one thing that was really
clear to me, and I think he'll be clear to anyone,
but I think it was clear to me, especially because
I've like been on these journeys before where you're like
trying to get to something and you're t trying to
get lucky with who you can convince to talk to
you and what little detail you're going to find that
(30:06):
can make or break, you, know, your ability to realize
your vision. I'm curious, like what made this story hard
to excavate because you know, like when we make podcasts,
we often pick pretty easy targets like we'll do the
age crisis, you know, and no matter what, like we're
gonna find interesting people to talk to and interesting storylines.
Is to build our show around when that's your topic.
(30:29):
With a story like this, like we really need certain
pieces to fall into place, where you need certain reporting
things to go right, there's some risk, right that you're
not going to get it. There's a possibility that you
just won't harvest enough material to make it work, and
I'm curious how you dealt with that as you move forward.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
I want to be very clear about this. I had
one limitation and it was money. Like, there was no
limitation to where we were going with the story. Nick
is a genius editor who had incredible ideas, and I
put this together. We've never met, and I've never met before.
We made this over zoom like. I recorded huge portions
of this in my car on my break at the bar.
(31:09):
My only limitations on this were money, Like, I'm sure
that everybody would be really thrilled to hear that on
the podcast. But no, like, obviously there was some we
lost a really key figure one of the two managers
died right as we were about to have an interview
lined up. During those six dead years, we were just
(31:31):
gonna talk to him for fun.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
I really felt for you right then, man.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
I mean the guy who literally told his girlfriend, oh yeah,
I'm leaving here to go built the stage for Woodstock,
I'd Brie Hendrix's amps and stuff like. It's crazy, you know,
it's there are moments you miss. But I do feel
like the reason I was so blunt about the money
stuff was just like, it took me a year and
a half. And I've gone on a couple podcasts and
(31:54):
stuff like that, and people are like, you worked on
this for so long, Oh my god, you took forever
to make this. And I'm like, if you feel that way,
you can blame my boss at my bartending job for
scheduling me so much like it is my reality. Hopefully
the balance will be a little bit better going forward.
That's my goal. I actually do love bartending and don't
(32:16):
plan on giving it up anytime soon.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
I don't know. A year and a half. I mean,
listening to the show, I'm like, yeah, this fucking took
a year and a half. I mean, chasing down some
of the leads that you know that ultimately allowed you
to sort of crack it open. Like you had to
get pretty creative about where you were going to find
your witnesses, right, Like you couldn't talk to most of
the primary players. You had to call their prom dates,
(32:40):
you had to call the guys who opened for them. Like,
I found it quite inspiring to see how creative you
got in terms of just you know, hitting a wall
on access and then finding a way around it.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Well, yeah, I mean that's was a huge thing. And
I was really lucky that Bay City is a pretty
small town in Michigan that the place where I was
telling the story. I got lucky that Gary and these
other people. There's another guy by the way named Scott
Baker who I want to shout out, who is incredible,
who helped record some of the stuff in Bay City.
(33:12):
And it's like these guys, you know, wrote for the
local paper, Like these are people who've known a lot
of these people for as neighbors and community members for decades.
So that was obviously very helpful in Bay City. And
I'm actually as I go into this next project on
question Mark, like it's Detroit, it's a little bigger at Saginaw.
I'm thankful that Bay City kind of had its limited options.
(33:33):
Right now, I'm hoping that I won't have too much
to go through taking it to a bigger size city
and artists and all that.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Well, since you brought up question Mark, you know, talk
about finding your way around the wall, like the way
you handled the limitations that were placed on you and
getting that interview with question Mark into the show, I
thought was so funny and so perfectly executed for those
who haven't heard it. Basically, you couldn't get question Mark
to agree to talk on the record, right but you
(34:05):
had all these conversations with him where you were recording
your side of it, if not his, and basically you
just let us hear your side of the conversation and
kind of left the rest up to the imagination. I'm curious,
how did you come up with that?
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I felt like it kind of came pretty organically from
the three of us, from me Anda and Nick, Like
we at one point were like, we can't not have
him in here. This man is talking about how he
was born on Mars and was essentially gender fluid in
the sixties and believes he's reincarnated from a female singer
from ancient Egypt and all these things that you know
(34:41):
are a little out there, but he is the ultimate
example of the older person who, once you wade through
the you know all the conversation they want to have.
He actually has an incredible memory, and I was just
with him last week and he was moved to tears
telling me about how much Dick Clark helped his band
(35:02):
back in the sixties and had him on the show twice.
And then when they made that show American Dreams in
the nineties, it meant so much to question Mark that
they put question Mark in the Mysterians in one of
the scenes because Dick Clark loved them so much, And
obviously I would have loved to have had that for
the podcast, but it literally took me two years to
(35:22):
get him to agree to record a phone call.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
It's crazy because I feel like I have an image
of him in my head based on what you played,
which is almost nothing right. I don't know how you
did it, man, but it really was evocative.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
He's a question Mark.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
What do you think you learned over the past year
and a half making the Fake Zombies podcast that's going
to help you tell the story of another crazy rock
and roll, you know, Taiale.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
As far as story and story impulses and all that,
I'm not worried about that. And I'd say this very proudly.
We learned so much making this on the production side
and the practical bricks and sticks of how to make
an eight episode podcast with two bonus episodes. I had
never done it before. And there are certain things, like
I mentioned recording stuff in my car at the beginning
(36:33):
of this, I probably could have built myself a little
booth in my house and saved myself a lot of
time and money, and I will do that going forward.
But you know, we were figuring it out, so a
lot of it was practical. And then there are a
few things, a few interviews that I would maybe like
to have back at some point, but I promised this
is not a huge teaser. But we did get an
(36:55):
email from a guy I think it was the day
after the podcast came out and said, hey, love the show,
love loved the whole thing. Was wondering if you were
going to mention this, and he had information about a
third fake zombies happened in England at the same time. Wow,
different management company and all that. But I haven't even
written back to him yet, but there are these little
(37:15):
pieces of this out there, and I don't think this
story is ever going to leave me fully.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Did every band, every popular band, have a doppelganger out
on the road pretending to be them or was it
something about the Zombies that made them the perfect target?
Was it that they had their second win sort of
posthumously and therefore there was a vacuum.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
I think that's actually the cool thing too. Very similar
to I was saying about that guy reaching out A
lot of the third fake Zombies is that we have
heard from other people about other fake bands. And there's
a really great podcast about a fake Fleetwood Mac. It
was only like a half hour long or something like that.
There were actually, I think two fake Fleetwood Macs. There
have been a lot of these. There was a fake
James Taylor at one point. Like, we're learning more about
(37:56):
these kinds of things, and now we're like a target
for people to tell us about it too.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Which rules that's awesome. Yeah. I feel like there's something
really kind of poignant and profound about cover bands, and
especially like now that you see over and over again
that the members of you know, particularly successful cover bands
get hired by the real band to replace someone who
quit or died. Like it gets back to that thing
(38:23):
of sliding doors, where the distance between obscurity and you know,
fame is just like so thin. You know, someone who
was playing in a Smashing Pumpkins cover band gets picked
to play guitar in the actual band with Billy Corgan.
It's like so magical, and I feel like there's something,
you know, there's something of that magic here with the
(38:44):
fake Zombies, especially because two of the members did in
fact go on to great acclaim and success. Such a
thin line between toiling and obscurity and like getting everything
you ever wanted.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Yeah, maybe we don't appreciate it until a little bit later,
when it was good and when it was interesting and
when it was something that could be you know, cinematic
or whatever. Like we don't realize we're going through it
at the time. And with this story, it actually took
fifty five years for it to really kind of come
to fruition, you know, and learning that Frank Beard, the
(39:22):
one who's still alive from the Easy Top, learning that
he's a lifelong Buddhist and like, I'm sure he has
some fascinating thoughts on the fake zombies. I'd love to
hear someday. But I'm also somebody who has a certain
level of spirituality to them, and I think if that
were ever gonna happen, it will happen when it's supposed to.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Are there any stories you can tell me from that
year and a half that you guys spent working on
this where you had a big breakthrough that where you
were like, yes, the key fits, I got the door open, Like,
here's the person who's gonna unlock this part of the
story for me, someone who's gonna tell me what happened
and in a way that no one else can. I
feel like listening to the show, I feel like there
(40:03):
must have been a bunch of those.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Yeah, I remember the moment very distinctly, and it's the
kind of thing now that I've learned a little bit,
I probably would have put this in, But Nick and
I had just met, had just started talking, and I
went to Bay City, and I remember I was staying
at the world's worst hotel, like a day's ill illustripmall,
and I was in the stairwell because the people next
to me were fighting in their room, and I was
(40:26):
calling Nick, and I was like, I found Jim Atherton's girlfriend, Like,
I found this guy who says he was on tour
opening for the fake Zombies and he wrote around in
a limousine on the tour. And I remember that conversation
in the stairwell very well. I probably have a recording
of it somewhere. But that was really my breakthrough moment
with it, where all of a sudden, I has somebody
incredible who like gets this story, gets what it is,
(40:49):
because he was as excited as I was, you know,
And that was my big breakthrough in them. From there,
the next move was to go to, Yeah, Jim Atherton's
prom date's house. And you know, you sat down for
this interview. You're sitting in a mic in a booth.
This woman has not had a microphone in her face,
probably since she was singing in school when she was
(41:09):
like twelve years old or something. It's different, you know.
And Yeah, showing up there, putting my nervousness aside, putting
my anxiety aside, and being like I'm here to get
this woman's thoughts about her old boyfriend. Like I got
to go in here really chill it, just like let
her talk at her pace, like, I'm not going to
extract anything from her, like, and she wanted to teach
(41:33):
me a card game that she had played and do
this other stuff and that's fine. And she played in
a woodwind ensemble for in her twenties and had her
own little musical history and that's what she wanted to
tell me about. So that's what we talked about.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, one breakthrough in the show that well, that doesn't
end up panning out, but that you again, as with
the question Mark tape, you end up making, you know,
something really special out of is of course the video
that maybe was Nick that or Anna who tracked down
this interview clip right where the fake zombies are being
(42:11):
interviewed while on tour, and as far as I could tell,
this was like the only real documentation anywhere of these
guys in action.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
I know, you tell the story in the podcast, but
tell me here, like, what was it like discovering that
piece of footage existed, and tell me about the quest
to get your hands on it and ultimately how you
decided to handle it in the show.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Yeah, I think actually you're the perfect person who we
asked in that question because this has probably happened to
you a million times. This is a new experience for
me to have somebody want to charge you an arm
and a leg for a clip that you feel like
is basically worthless.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, man, it's rough. I just had to tell ABC
thanks but no thanks to paying one thousand dollars for
ten seconds of a Nightline episode. Yeah, it's sad, but
I can only imagine it was heartbreaking in your case,
because it really is just like kind of a holy grail. Right,
Maybe you didn't even know you were looking for it,
but once you found it, it's like here they are
and you can hear them talking, and you can see
(43:08):
them talking. It must have just been amazing to just
sit there and watch it.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
The way you pull it off in the end in
the show with this video that you couldn't license is
by essentially recreating it. Right, How did you go about
doing that?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Well? I live in Los Angeles and some of my
friends here are actors, and my friend Josh makes the
best hogies in Los Angeles at his pop up shop,
and he's also an actor who does a really good
British accent. We talked to each other British accent sometimes,
like when we're goofy or out playing music or whatever,
and I was like, I think he could. He has
kind of the same tone as this guy. His roommate
(43:44):
is also an actor. And then I called my friend Joey,
who's a comedian, to do the kind of goofy guy's voice,
and we basically made a fake fake zombies, a fake
fake fake zombies to do this version of it, and
we thought it was kind of a fun way to
work around it, and yeah, it kind of came out
(44:05):
of fun. I was happy with it. I was.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
I found it delightful.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
And there is actually a happy ending to this story,
which is the Zombies have a documentary coming out next year,
directed by Robert Schwartzmann, and they licensed it for the documentary,
so you'll be able to see them when you go
see the Zombies documentary, which will I think will be
streaming soon. Actually hell yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
As a podcaster, I was very intrigued by this archivist's
apparent hostility towards the medium. From what you said, it
sounded like as soon as you said the word podcast,
this guy who held the keys to this video is
like click not talking to you. If you're a podcaster,
what's up with that?
Speaker 1 (44:42):
My guess is it's probably just experience of being like
a seventy year old guy who probably licenses stuff for
like Warner Brothers and all these huge studios all the.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Time, and he knows that podcasters have no money.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I think he was not interested. And we were trying
not to just be like drop iheart's name, you know,
thinking that if they did want to work with us,
that would mean they thought we had deeper pockets. But
I offered to negotiate a price for this clip of
a minute and a half of the audio and they
were not having it.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
Well, you made the best of it. Really, It ends
up being a very memorable, I think moment in the show.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Speaking of licensing, did you end up having to license
the Zombies music that you used?
Speaker 1 (45:26):
It was the first thing we did, really, first thing
we did with the first thing we did with the
budget was licensed our ten phase And yeah, that was
a decision between Ian and I and we felt like
we needed to because, yeah, the Zombies are very well
respected and appreciated, but they are actually until about a
(45:46):
month ago, they were still a touring band who played
more shows than bands I know were in their early twenties.
They're definitely still a working band. They still sound great,
and I wanted to remind people that, you know, like
I have a real bell Weather litmus test thing where
when people are like, oh, yeah, the zombies are one
hit wonder. I had a director say that to me
(46:07):
at one point recently, and I was like, well, if
you really listen to the podcast, I think you would
come away taking away that they actually have a handful
of truly classic songs and then ten to twenty that
are like as good as any band from their era. Yeah,
which is a pretty high batting average.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
So I really liked how you guys used the songs.
And there's one lovely transition. I noticed you're talking about
Jim Atherton's prom date and trying to find her, and
then we hear she's not there. And I assume that
was like a deliberate choice to be like, let's have
the song kind of speak to the narration a little bit.
And I'm curious if A if that was in fact deliberate,
(46:47):
and b if you like had other jokes like that
that I missed.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
That was definitely deliberate. That one was intentional. And then
there's one at the end, the last song in the
podcast is like kind of a Zombies deep cut. It's
called Friends of Mine, and the song about all these
different people who've come to their world and how cool
it is to see them in love. And it's like
such an interesting, innocent perspective for a rock and roll
song to have, And I think it kind of keys
(47:12):
in on the fact that almost every band, at some point,
every big band, has like tried to be a little
bit tougher or tried to be a little bit cooler
than they are. And I feel like the Zombies have
always just been themselves and they were probably called soft
and all these things when they were coming up and
the Rolling Stones were starting to, you know, come up
(47:33):
at the same time. They would cross paths as teenagers,
and the Zombies have maintained like a very sweet innocence,
and the fact that they're kind of the quote unquote
victims of this story ties into that innocence really well totally.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
I remember. I mean, so you obviously get into this.
In the show. The Zombies were sort of like underappreciated
for a long time, right, Like they had these couple
of hits, maybe like the guy you just referred to,
like people wrote them off as a one hit under.
I was in high school, so probably around two thousand
and one, thousand and two when I remember probably Pitchfork
(48:08):
writing about the Zombies and suddenly like they were in
the cannon and people were talking about Odyssey and Oracle
alongside pet sounds, and I think at the time I
didn't know that they were had previously been kind of
an obscurity, But I think that adds to what is
magical about your story in a way, like you could
only have pulled this taper on a band that was underappreciated,
(48:32):
and people might actually believe that they were seeing the
real thing because the real thing wasn't all that famous
to begin with.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
You're hitting on something there, and it's like it is
the power of a great song. This is I think
the importance of, you know, musicians with good taste and
an understanding of the history of music. I think a
lot of the stuff with the Zombies in the nineties
happened because of people like Beck was a big Zombies
sent Paul Weller, huge Zombies fan. Paul Weller would do
(49:02):
interviews where he would say, Odyssee an Oracles the greatest
album ever made, and you know, as a Angli file
kid obsessed with Oasis and later The Jam and later
The Clash and everybody else. When I saw that kind
of statement about the Zombies, I was like, oh, I
got to check out this album, and I do think
it was that very prominent. I miss it. I think
(49:22):
everybody misses it. Like print magazine long features on bands
like coming out of England mostly, and the Zombies are
like the perfect band for that because they are a
little bit obscure. You know, time of the season, but
did you know this or whatever. The deeper you go,
the better the catalog gets. I think I say that
in the podcast, but yeah, they've got some truly magical music,
(49:44):
and Colin, in my opinion, is the best singer of
all time.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
I loved hearing his speaking voice because you can hear
his singing voice in it, but it's like obviously happening
in a different register. Give me a little shiver to
hear that gorgeous voice just saying words like people.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
So many people have come to me and said I
love his voice so much. I could listen to him
read the phone book. It's it's really cool totally.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
When we talked before on the phone, you said that
you want to inspire other people to make podcasts about
crazy music stories. And that caught my ear because I
was curious, as someone who's just made a podcast for
the first time, what did you like about the medium
and what do you think makes a podcast a good
vehicle for, you know, a crazy music story.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
Obviously, the accessibility is there as somebody who made this
as like a working class writer, Like podcasts are possible
to make in your free time. I think that's really important.
And obviously documentaries and movies are too, but you're at
a different level. I'm in production, and it helps have
a genius editor, which not everybody's going to have making
a podcast, But for me, it's it really keys in
(50:54):
on people who are maybe where I was, like thirty
five and working in office job but still loving this thing.
And like, you know, it was surprises me that people
spend thousands of dollars on concert tickets all this stuff
on loving music, Like there's a lot of different ways
to love music, and my way just happens to be
(51:15):
like getting as deep into these weird stories as possible.
But I just hope there's somebody out there who's like
forty years old and thinks that like their life is
one way and they have convinced themselves that they can't
do it. Because I was in that spot and I
felt exactly that way, and I hope, yeah, I hope
people remember that, like life is long, and yeah, this
(51:35):
the medium is really fun, like it's cool, and you know,
I remember at the beginning of this, like obviously, licensing
clip lengths and stuff like that made this not entirely possible.
But I was like, let's play a whole zombie song
at the beginning of the first episode, like you know,
and people weren't like, get the fuck out of here,
Like I actually want people to sit with the music,
(51:57):
and like, not everything has to be rushed and hit
this same beats that everybody wants you to hit. It's
okay to take your time with it. And when you're
dealing with people, you know who are maybe in the
what was like the back nine of their life, like
it's going to go a little slower than you wanted to.
Speaker 2 (52:13):
Yeah, but it's also my experience like talking to people
like that, you often get stuff that they wouldn't have
told you back when you know the events and question
were happening. It's only forty fifty years later. That they're like,
all right, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what really happened.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
You know, we had a few of those yeah people
who probably wouldn't have in the past.
Speaker 2 (52:33):
And then we're like, sure, yeah, all right, Daniel, thank
you so much for giving us the behind the scenes look.
As someone who really loved the show and could tell
there was all kinds of sweat and angst that went
into making this thing, it was great to be able
to ask you about it. And I hope the podcast
gives the story a third life still and if not,
(52:53):
you got to just, I think, make a sequel about
the Third Zombies. So that's just your fate. I'm afraid
that's okay.
Speaker 1 (52:59):
I love it. I love it as long as we
can keep the band together. This episode of the True
Story of the Fake Zombies features original music by Robin Hatch.
Robin did the score for the podcast and you can
find her music everywhere. It was produced by Nick Dawson,
(53:21):
Anna McClain and myself, Thanks again to Leon Nafach and
executive producers Melissa Locker and Ian Wheeler. The True Story
of the Fake Zombies is a production of iHeart Podcasts,
Talk House and never Mind Media. For more podcasts from
iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts for wherever
(53:42):
you get your podcasts,
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