Zombies to Swamp Stores With ‘Guerrilla’ Rock Blitz

On the face of it, the Swamp Zombies seem like uncommonly stable citizens in the notoriously precarious world of small-label, independent-alternative rock ‘n’ roll.

The band from Orange County has been a model of productive consistency, recording four albums over a four-year span (to mark the release of the latest one,--”A Frenzy of Music And Action!”--the band plans to scramble around the county Sunday afternoon, playing free mini-concerts at eight different music stores in five hours).

The Swamp Zombies say they are ready to punch out a fifth album without much further ado: They have eight tracks left over from the “Frenzy” sessions, plus six more studio-ready songs they’ve come up with since.

True, the group has had some personnel turnover since 1986, when it began as an all-acoustic street band. But drummer Dave Warren, who arrived three years ago, and guitarist T-Ray Vogelzang, who has been in the band 18 months, were easily made into Zombies without slowing the recording process, or substantially changing the band’s overall sound.

With founding members Steve Jacobs on bass and Josh Agle on guitar, the Swamp Zombies have begun weaving some electric instruments into the mix since Vogelzang’s arrival. But they have brought only new shadings, not a radical departure in style. In fact, no departure was needed: The Swamp Zombies never have required electric guitars to raise a raucous, aggressive clatter, which they occasionally offset with airy vocal harmony numbers. Like past albums, “Frenzy” finds the band bringing together a collage of styles, from folk balladry to psychedelia, from calypso to punk rock.

When the band gathered recently at the offices of Doctor Dream Records, the Orange-based label that has issued all four Swamp Zombies albums, Jacobs mused that “we’ve been around longer than all the (label’s) employees except Dave Hayes,” Doctor Dream’s founder and president (one label employee is guitarist Agle, who was hired as Doctor Dream’s art director on the strength of his design work on the first two Swamp Zombies albums).

Still, for all those signs of steady-flowing consistency, the Swamp Zombies’ career has definitely had its bumps and odd twists. The songs eagerly embrace strange experience, and the Zombies haven’t always had to rely strictly on their imaginations for material.

Along with more innocent fare about childhood fancies, satires on college rock trends and the occasional political song, the band’s catalogue includes: three tunes (two of them on the new album) about psychotic killers, an ode to Hieronymus Bosch, strange imaginings about rats and a ditty inspired by a bizarre encounter with a witch.

Jacobs, a 27-year-old punked-out Burl Ives, with Vandyke beard and husky frame, is the one behind the mass-murder musings, the rats and the witch. “I’m fairly obsessive, impulsive,” he said. “I have wide mood swings.”

Last year, during a long streak of unemployment, he turned into an obsessive student of serial killers. He said he “went through quite a stack” of books on the subject, enough to figure out the typical profile of the breed: “White male, late 20s or 30s, grudge against humanity. I could really relate. What made them go that extra step? That was kind of an intriguing thing.”

In fact, Jacobs said, he once felt like knocking off a few people himself--namely his band mates. But the witch was to blame for that.

The episode is alluded to in the song “Cat’s Meow” from the Swamp Zombies’ 1990 album, “Scratch and Sniff Car Crash.” After a gig in Oregon, Jacobs said, he went off with a fan who turned out to be a practicing witch. She served him tea that, he suspects, was spiked with LSD.

“It was one of the scariest experiences of my life,” he recalled. “I got home to some cheesy motel we were staying at. Later, I woke up, and I didn’t know I was tripping. I heard people chanting my name outside the motel room door. I felt like I was going to kill the rest of the members of the band, so I locked myself in the bathroom” and slept off the effects.

After the band got back to Orange County, the witch started sending Jacobs “weird stuff--strange drawings of monsters, and this crucifix on a braid she had made out of her own hair. She wanted me to hang it on my door.”

“Steve went to the library to read up on how to counteract the spells she put on him,” Agle said, picking up the story’s thread (the Swamp Zombies tend to amplify upon each other’s comments, usually to crack jokes. None of them seems to mind the ribbing).

“I just read about what I had to do, and did it, just for my own peace of mind,” Jacobs said, declining to get more specific.

The Swamp Zombies have been known to brew up some rank potions of their own. A few years ago, both Agle and Jacobs got into car wrecks (Agle’s was the more serious: The lanky guitarist suffered a concussion and briefly lost his eyesight). That inspired a great deal of songwriting using “crash” as a metaphor. As an extra grace note and gift to its fans, the band decided to plaster each first-run copy of the resulting album, “Scratch and Sniff Car Crash,” with a scented sticker evocative of a smoldering wreck.

“We hired this company, a scent engineer,” recalled Agle, 29. “We told them all the smells we wanted in there: burning rubber, burning plastic and burning oil. That was back when we had this ‘spare no expense’ feeling.”

The Swamp Zombies have survived one figurative crash--in 1989, when they were in the midst of the longest tour of their career.

“I was having trouble coping,” Jacobs said, “so I got up in the middle of the night in New York City and got a taxi, and flew home. We’d been on the road for 2 1/2 months and still had a month to go. So they woke up one morning, and I wasn’t there. The band kind of broke up for three months after that, because I basically quit. We do this because it is fun, and I wasn’t having fun.”

Jacobs said he still got along well with the other band members, but career and personal pressures made him want to bail out. Eventually, he came back. “It’s what I enjoy doing, and it’s something I think I can do well. There’s no point in letting these outside factors make me quit.”

The Swamp Zombies have not gone back to extensive touring since. They’ve limited themselves to playing in the West, going out for no more than a week at a time. It’s not a recommended policy for independent-label bands trying to build up a national following. Realizing that, the band anticipates more roadwork than usual to promote “Frenzy.” Although tours haven’t been booked yet, plans call for two one-month treks during 1992 that will take them across the country.

The Swamp Zombies say they are reasonably comfortable with the level they’re at. Warren jokes that the band’s album sales are “somewhere in the tin or bronze range” (label chief Hayes says the band has come close with previous albums to selling 10,000 copies, a benchmark of moderate success for a group on a small independent label. “When you’re out around the country and people ask what bands are on the label, Swamp Zombies is one everybody knows,” Hayes said).

All four Swamp Zombies have day jobs. Agle, the Doctor Dream employee, is recently married and pursuing a fine-arts degree at Cal State Long Beach. Warren, also married and the father of a 2-year-old boy, tends bar at a South Coast Plaza establishment. Vogelzang is employed in Disneyland’s art department, and Jacobs is technical director at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse.

Agle said he’s happy with the band’s independent status. “The thing I like most is making records and writing songs and playing,” he said. “The thing I don’t like is all the promotional stuff that goes along with being in a band, and that would only increase if we were to get on a major label and be more famous.”

The Swamp Zombies will play eight brief “guerrilla performances” Sunday afternoon. The itinerary, with times subject to change: Black Hole Records, 108 N. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton, at noon; Tower Records, 2881 El Camino Real, Tustin, at 12:45; Moby Disc Records, 1835 Newport Blvd., Costa Mesa, at 1:30; Music Surplus, 1743 Newport Blvd., Costa Mesa, at 1:50; Music Market, 2701 Harbor Blvd., Costa Mesa, at 2:20; the gazebo at Balboa Pier, Newport Beach, at 3:15; Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway, Huntington Beach, at 4; Vinyl Solution Records, 18822 Beach Blvd., Huntington Beach, at 4:30. Information: (714) 997-9387.