This 1968 Zombies Classic Came Out Over a Year After They Broke Out and Became Their Signature Non-Hit Hit

In 1968, The Zombies truly lived up to their name, coming back from the dead (read: band breakup) with a sleeper hit that would end up defining both their musical legacy and the entire psychedelia canon of the 1960s. The song’s ascent on the Billboard Hot 100 was slow, arriving at its No. 3 peak over a year after the band had already called it quits in mid-December 1967.

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The Zombies’ resurrection story is a testament to one of the music industry’s greatest ironies: the moments just before your big break can often feel like the biggest slumps you’ve ever experienced. (It’s this picture, personified.) And to add to the strange turn of events, The Zombies didn’t even use the success of this slow-burning track to reunite, leaving the world with a new favorite song and no one to play it but cheap Zombie knock-off bands.

“Time of the Season” Came Out After the Band Called It Quits

The Zombies achieved success early in their careers with mid-60s hits like “She’s Not There” and “Tell Her No”. But by the final years of the decade, business was slowing down. As keyboardist Rod Argent recalled in Claes Johansen’s Zombies: Hung Up On A Dream, Colin Blunstone, the band’s vocalist, had “become very disillusioned with the fact that things weren’t happening anywhere, and I think he just got fed up with everything. Paul Atkinson felt the same, too. Chris [White, bassist] and I wouldn’t break the band up. But we felt we couldn’t carry on without Colin.”

So, after a mid-December gig at Keele University in Keele, England, The Zombies decided to hang it up for good. Their last album, Odyssey & Oracle, would be their swansong until a 1991 reunion brought forth The Return Of The Zombies and New World. The album garnered four singles, the third of which was the final track on the album, “Time Of The Season”. 

The Zombies had Columbia A&R representative Al Kooper to thank for his insistence on putting out “Time Of The Season” as a single on Date Records, a rock subsidiary of Columbia. At first, poor commercial performance seemed to confirm what The Zombies already knew. Their popularity and, consequently, time as a band, had waned past the point of return. Until, suddenly, it returned.

How The Zombies Came Back From the Dead in 1968

Though it took some time to get there, The Zombies’ “Time Of The Season” eventually made it to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Cashbox chart in the U.S. The song became synonymous with the psychedelic movement that was dominating mainstream culture in the late 1960s. It quickly became one of The Zombies’ signature tracks, despite the fact that the band had already broken up over a year before the single came out.

Surprisingly, the band opted not to reunite following the success of “Time Of The Season”. Instead, concert promoters began putting together fake Zombie bands to capitalize on the track’s immense popularity. The Zombies wouldn’t officially get back together until the 1990s, proving yet again how capable they were of living up to their supernatural name.

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