Time Of The Season

Time of the Season: How a Zombie Came Back to Life Two Years Late

The story of Time of the Season is one of the more unusual success narratives in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. The song was recorded by The Zombies in 1967 for the concept album Odessey and Oracle, released in April 1968 in the United Kingdom on CBS Records. By that time, the band had already broken up. When the track finally climbed to number three on the Hot 100 in early 1969, the group that had made it no longer existed in any functional sense. It was, in a quite literal way, a hit without a band.

The Zombies formed in St Albans, Hertfordshire in 1961, originally coming together as a group of grammar school students with a shared enthusiasm for rhythm and blues, jazz, and the early sounds of rock and roll. By the time they entered the Abbey Road Studios to record Odessey and Oracle in the summer of 1967, they were a refined and technically accomplished unit, but one whose commercial fortunes had declined sharply since their 1964 debut single She's Not There had reached number two on the Hot 100 and number twelve in the UK. Time of the Season was written by the band's keyboardist and primary songwriter, Rod Argent, who had a gift for constructing melodies of unusual sophistication within the apparent confines of the pop song format.

The recording of Odessey and Oracle was funded in part by CBS Records, though the label was not particularly enthusiastic about the project and allocated only a modest budget. The sessions at Abbey Road, which overlapped in time with the recording of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in adjacent studios, were conducted with meticulous care. Producer Chris White, who also served as the band's bassist, worked alongside Argent to create arrangements that made imaginative use of the studio's resources. Time of the Season was constructed with notable sparseness. The track opens with Colin Blunstone's distinctive breathy tenor vocal and a hand-clap rhythm that creates an intimate, almost hypnotic atmosphere before the full band arrangement enters.

The production choices on the track were unconventional for 1967. The bass line, played by White, has a chromatic descending character that gives the track its distinctive propulsive quality. Argent's organ work is restrained, appearing primarily in fills between vocal phrases rather than dominating the arrangement. The result is a track that breathes in an era when many recordings packed every available space with sound. CBS in the United States initially declined to release Odessey and Oracle at all, considering it uncommercial. It was only after the band had formally disbanded in late 1967 that the American arm of the label, under pressure from disc jockeys who had obtained promotional copies, agreed to release Time of the Season as a single.

The single entered the Hot 100 in late 1968 and climbed steadily through the winter, reaching its peak position of number three in February 1969. This made it the highest-charting single of the band's career, surpassing even She's Not There. The irony was not lost on anyone involved. Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone were approached repeatedly during this period by promoters eager to assemble a touring version of the Zombies to capitalize on the hit. Both men declined to participate in what they regarded as an inauthentic exercise, though a number of ersatz Zombies lineups did perform under variations of the band name during this period, a phenomenon that generated some legal complications.

The album Odessey and Oracle, despite the success of the single, did not chart particularly well in its initial release. It was reissued in 1969 by Date Records in the United States, reaching a modest position on the Billboard 200. The album's reputation, however, has grown continuously in the decades since, to the point where it is now routinely included on lists of the finest pop-rock albums of the 1960s. Time Out magazine named it among the greatest British albums ever recorded, and Rolling Stone has consistently cited it among the top fifty albums of the rock era.

The Zombies reunited periodically over subsequent decades, most significantly for a full reunion that produced new recordings and extensive touring from 2004 onward. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, with Time of the Season cited prominently in the induction materials as evidence of the group's lasting influence. At the induction ceremony, Argent and Blunstone performed the song together for the first time in decades to a substantial audience, a moment that underscored how thoroughly the song had outlasted the context of its creation.

The track has appeared in numerous films and television programs over the decades, each appearance introducing it to a new generation of listeners. Its use in period pieces set in the late 1960s has become almost obligatory, reflecting the degree to which the song's sonic character has come to represent an idealized version of that moment in popular culture. The hand-clap rhythm, the breathy vocal, and the chromatic bass line are immediately identifiable signifiers of a particular cultural moment, even to listeners who have never heard the original recording in its album context.