Swamp Zombies Hitch Wagon to Debut Album

When the Swamp Zombies started out three years ago, the band’s founding principle was to travel light.

No amplifiers, no drum sets, no stacks of sound equipment or any of the other usual rock band accouterments. Just a couple of acoustic guitars, some basic percussion, including bongo drums, and a big upright bass. The Swamp Zombies didn’t need a plug or a wall socket; all they needed was a patch of pavement.

“We wanted something we could just play anywhere, kind of like urban musician guerrillas who could just show up on a street corner and play,” recalled Steve Jacobs, the bass player with the bristly blond butch haircut and the build of a football lineman.

Now, with the recent release of its debut album, “Chicken Vulture Crow,” the Irvine-based band is still traveling light, but with new hopes of going far. The record has had an encouraging early reaction from college radio, according to the Swamp Zombies’ manager, Jim Palmer, and he is booking a two- or three-month tour that will take the band up the West Coast and then into the nation’s heartland starting in September. That is when college students, the core audience that the Swamp Zombies are aiming for, will be back at school.

The Swamp Zombies’ approach is broadly comparable to that of the Violent Femmes, the Wisconsin band that is one of the more popular acts on the college and alternative rock circuit. Both offer a raw, stripped-down instrumental attack, emphasizing impact over virtuosity, and songs that alternate barbed political commentary with offbeat humor. Mostly, though, the Swamp Zombies’ sound is based on a sampling of an assortment of folksy, rootsy styles that they employ for their own irreverent purposes.

To go with the music, the band has developed a kitschy voodoo iconography. The Swamp Zombies’ garret-size practice studio at Jacobs’ parents’ house is adorned with tribal shields, a shrunken head, a carved, totemlike tiki pole and other artifacts and toys including the chicken, vulture and crow images that gave rise to the album title.

Jacobs has painted his bass the slimy green shade of stagnant swamp water. The most impressive bits of imagery are tattooed on his forearms: on the right arm, a tattoo of a bass being played by disembodied green arms; on the left, a masterpiece of detailed needlework depicting a large, ghoulish, comic-book figure toting a shrunken head in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other.

The first encounter that led eventually to this flowering of ghoulish, tongue-in-cheek symbols, comically surrealistic lyrical scenarios and forthrightly leftist politics took place in a setting that could have been painted by Norman Rockwell.

Around Christmas of 1983, Jacobs’ parents, in a family tradition, invited other members of their church over for a reading of yuletide tales. Brothers Travis and Josh Agle came with their parents. The story was about a forlorn Christmas tree that nobody wanted to buy. The Agles, two lanky, fair-skinned fans of punk rock, found it far less interesting than the rock ‘n’ roll riffs they heard coming from another part of the house.

“Steve was playing electric bass over in the other room, basically saying, ‘I don’t want any part of this,’ and we didn’t want any part of it either, so we went and talked with him,” recalled Josh Agle, at 22 the youngest member of a band that ranges in age from 22 to 24.

That led to informal jam sessions with the Agles playing guitars. Early on, the group abandoned the usual electric instruments in favor of the stripped-down acoustic approach. Jacobs looked for musical models by rifling through his parents’ collection of folk albums. Among his finds was a Kingston Trio song, “Zombie Jamboree,” that became a feature of the Swamp Zombies’ repertoire. During the band’s first year together, Jacobs also played in an electric rock band. But as that group turned toward heavy metal, Jacobs dropped out and focused entirely on his acoustic group with the Agles.

Their first public performance came early in 1985, Jacobs said, when “one afternoon we learned about three songs, then we went over to Balboa (Peninsula’s Fun Zone) and played ‘em.” The Swamp Zombies gradually moved into clubs, but they kept up their mobile busking approach with street shows in places where they knew they could find a crowd.

“If there’s a cool film festival at the Variety Arts Center, it’s fun to go and play outside,” Josh Agle said. “You hope you’ll meet interesting people, and maybe they’ll be simpatico with what we’re doing.”

Among those who became a fan was Gary McNeice, a transplanted Oklahoman who heard the Swamp Zombies at one of the band’s favorite gigs, the annual Laguna Beach Sawdust Festival, where, as Jacobs put it, “there are a lot of burned-out hippies selling macrame, and then there’s us playing.”

McNeice was interested in managing the Swamp Zombies. Instead, when Jacobs’ older brother, Mike, quit as percussionist, they invited McNeice to try out for the open spot--even though he didn’t play drums. McNeice had enough rhythmic sense to pass the audition, and he joined the band two years ago.

The Swamp Zombies’ first attempt to make an album ended badly. Inexperienced with recording, they gave free rein to the engineers in the Venice studio they had booked. The result was a tape in which their sound was bolstered by the usual rock band studio electronic effects, instead of the unadorned, completely acoustic feel they wanted.

“We didn’t know too much about what we were doing,” Jacobs said. “We had some money and we went and recorded. We lived with it for a while, then we trashed it.” With their recording budget spent and nothing to show for it, the band started over again.

The would-be “urban musician guerrillas” say they replenished their coffers largely by landing gigs last fall in some of Orange County’s upscale back yards. One well-to-do fan hired them for a party and that led to other engagements at social events far from any street corners.

“For a while we were the Andy Warhol of bands,” Travis Agle said. “Rich people wanted us to play their parties to show how hip they were.”

Earnings from the party circuit paid for a second round of recording sessions that yielded what the Swamp Zombies wanted: a basic, acoustic album that kept the raw edges in their playing and in their four-part vocal harmonies.

They found a manager in Palmer, a local concert promoter who had become a fan of the band, and he swung a deal with the Orange-based rock record label, Dr. Dream, to manufacture and promote their album. “Chicken Vulture Crow” is a joint release between Dr. Dream and Palmer’s own label, Out There Records.

For now, the Swamp Zombies can only wait and hope that the flood of promotional copies being sent to radio stations and reviewers will create a buzz. By late September, they plan to be on the road creating their own buzz with their first dates outside Southern California.

Meanwhile, the Swamp Zombies can be heard in occasional club shows and at their usual summer haunts at the Sawdust Festival, where they are scheduled to appear July 6, 16, 26 and 31, and on Aug. 4 and 10 at the festival grounds, 935 Laguna Canyon Road in Laguna Beach.

“Every spare moment, I think about what I should be doing to promote the record,” said Jacobs, who works a day job delivering airline tickets for a travel agency. McNeice is a gardener, Josh Agle a picture framer and Travis Agle is an economics major at Cal State Long Beach. His part-time job is fixing, restoring and selling old Volkswagens--a sideline that began when a used Volkswagen van the Swamp Zombies bought to travel to gigs broke down on the way back from the dealership.

Travis Agle sees no need to tinker with the Swamp Zombies’ all-acoustic musical drive shaft.

“With electric instruments, bands have a tendency to rely on this grunge that covers up their mistakes,” he said. “They pile on all this reverb and then play sloppy.”

The Swamp Zombies, on the other hand, “just play sloppy without any effects,” his younger brother added with a laugh. The band has been incorporating more exotic acoustic instruments, such as dulcimer, mandolin and banjo, Jacobs said, and “the more bizarre percussion instruments we can find, the better.” If they were to add electric guitars and bass, he said, “it wouldn’t be the Swamp Zombies.”

With his band-inspired tattoos, Jacobs already has, in a sense, made a lifelong commitment to the Swamp Zombies.

“I put a heck of a lot more thought into getting the tattoos than ‘It’ll look cool on stage,’ ” he said. “I really wanted to have ‘em. I’ll be able to look back when I’m old and say, ‘I had fun when I was young. Here’s proof.’ ”