The True Story of the Fake ZombiesWe continue the search for the Fake Zombies in Bay City, Michigan, and uncover the roots of the band’s management company, Delta Promotions, all thanks to a chance encounter with the prom date of one of its founders. Later, we introduce the opening act for the Fake Zombies tour, Gordon Thayer and we speak with Mike Campbell, lead guitarist in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, to follow up on a rumor that he and Tom saw the Fake Zombies as teenagers.
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The True Story of the Fake Zombies is a production of iHeart Podcasts, Talk House and never Mind Media.
Spening.
My fellow Americans, I want to end this war.
The American people want to end this spar The people of South did not want a.
Festival that drew hundreds of thousands of young people to a dairy farm in a white lake, New York of the woodstock music and art there.
Does anyone ever really want to go on strack? We work hard on these cars. We have to stretch.
I'm here in Bay City, Michigan, and we're going back in time nineteen sixty nine to be exactly. I'm looking for the origins of the Fake Zombies. I'm trying to imagine what it was like to be a teenager here back then, the kind of kid who showed up to see the fake Zombies, hoping to see the real zombies, wide eyed and excited to see the perfectly tailored, perfectly British five piece band they love, only to notice that there are only four guys on stage, and the singer isn't the tall and impossibly good looking Colin Blunstone. In fact, it's a short guy from Texas, built like a linebacker, how disappointed those teenagers must have felt as they walked back to their mom or dad's car after the show, knowing they'd spent their money to see a fake version of a band they loved. Finding someone who actually saw the Fake Zombies play has been a challenge. We're talking about hazy nights spending rock clubs almost fifty five years ago. Even if some of the old timers I've met in Bay City saw the Fake Zombies back then, they might.
Not remember it, but I know it happened.
Because on the night of June twenty second, nineteen sixty nine, the first and only time, the Fake Zombies got a review, and not very glowing right up in the Saginaw News. Saginaw, just twenty minutes from Bay City, was an established market for rock and roll bands. By nineteen sixty nine. The newspaper had a column devoted to the genre called Rick on Rock. Rick was on the scene that night in June when the Zombies came to town, sharing the stage with another familiar name from the Delta Promotions roster.
Only two hundred and fifty teens turned out to see question Mark in the Mysterians and the Zombies. Thursday night had the Saginaw Auditorium. Many of those who attended wish they had him. The Zombies were especially disappointing, and the crowd begun to leave during their fourth tune. Most listeners expected to hear the sound the group made a few years ago when they made million Sellar hits.
Rick didn't know it at the time, but what he and those listeners actually heard was four guys from Texas. The Rick on Rock Review paints an odd picture in an erain reel. Bands were regularly giving transcendent, unforgettable performances in Michigan on any given night.
This was not one of those.
We would have known right off the bat that the Delta Zombies bogus and wouldn't have even considered attending a show like that.
Gary Johnson from the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends Museum was a teenager in Bay City in nineteen sixty nine and he attended a lot of shows at the Saginaw Coliseum.
It was a great venue for music at that time. They were booking quite a few rock and roll shows, and I went to see most of the big Detroit bands mc FI, I, Seekers, Sists and Funk Railroad and Boy Duke's star Sinsville station The Frost. I also saw BB Kingmare, as well as the English blues band Savoy Brown.
While Saginaw was a regular stop for big bands back then, the coliseum wasn't exactly made for rock and roll.
There was no alcohol sales and no one had t shirt concessions.
Not that Gary and his friends cared.
Most everyone in my group was high, either from smoking marijuana before the show or dropping acid or mescaline.
By the time the Fake Zombies came to Saginaw, Gary was reading Rolling Stone and Cream magazine. He was aware of the fact that the real Zombies couldn't possibly be playing so close to home.
I knew that Rod Argent had formed a new band and lead singer Colin Blunstone was working on his solo LP.
Gary skipped the Fake Zombie show that night in Saginaw. He knew it wasn't for real music fans anyway.
I would think that almost all of the audience for the Fake Zombies were younger kids who heard Time of the Season on the radio but hadn't yet discovered the music press and were sophisticated enough to realize they were being taken.
Delta promotions wasn't targeting guys like Gary with the fake Zombies. They were after the young and gullible.
I can't imagine anyone who was really into music in nineteen sixty nine being dumb enough to think they were going to see the real zombies.
Gary and his friends were obsessed with music back in nineteen sixty nine. They were the kind of music freaks who knew a real Colin Blunstone from a fake one. They were part of the select group of people who appreciated the Zombies.
In their time.
Remember, it wasn't until decades later that the Zombies masterpiece album Odyssey and Oracle started making best Albums of All Time lists. The people who did love the Zombies back in the sixties really love them, and they still do. A lot of them even started their own bands, and there was no band other musicians loved more than the Zombies. They loved Colin's high, vulnerable voice and the tasteful, perfectly placed keyboards courtesy of Rod Argent, and one of those lifelong Zombies fans happened to become the lead guitarist of what is, in my opinion, the greatest American rock and roll band of all time.
Hello.
My name is Mike Campbell from Tom Pitty and the Heartbreakers, and I'm here talking about one of my favorite bands of all time, The Zombies.
Mike Campbell seeing the Fake Zombies was a long shot, but I had to ask.
We had heard maybe that it was possible.
Somewhere in Florida there was a live show at some backyard or something like that.
Maybe that was possible.
Maybe if I dig deep, I can remember hearing somebody say, oh, there's a band, not really the Zombies, but they said to the Zombie.
I might have heard a rumor maybe, but that's really a stretch.
The Stars as a good Bay City's number one hit music station.
So it's back to digging up what I can in Bay City. I've been to the local museum, learning what I can about how and why the Fake Zombies came together. Here, of all places, a town with a rough and tumble history. Here's Bay City historian SANM. Fitzpatrick. Back in these days, it was a red light district, a very violent red light districts.
It was given the name Hell's half Mile.
I've been digging through library stacks and ancient newspapers looking for the Fake Zombies.
I know that had happened.
Four guys from Texas, including Dusty Hill and Frank Beard from zz Top, toured as the zombies and they were assembled and managed by Delta Promotions here in Bay City, Michigan. I just don't know exactly what happened. This is the true story of the Fake Zombies. I'm Daniel Ralston. I've learned the hard way that digging up a fifty five year old mystery comes with some difficulties. First off, out of the four Texas Zombies, only one is still alive, Frank Beard, Drummer and Zizi Top. We've asked him for an interview a few times. No luck as of yet. I can feel parts of this story fading away. For almost a decade, it looked like the closest I would ever get to experiencing the Fake Zombies tour was the conversation I had with a guy named Tom Hocott. Tom and I spent an afternoon together in twenty sixteen over a bowl of chili. Tom told me about his time working for Delta Promotions. He didn't tour with the Texas Zombies, but he remembered them coming into town. He shared everything he could about the fake Zombies operation. When I reach back out now that I'm in Bay City again, I don't hear back from him. I get in touch with a friend of Tom's who lets me know that Tom suffered a stroke and can't really communicate the way he used to. Those early conversations with Tom Hocott helped me understand what Delta Promotions was doing and how Bill Kehoe and Jim Atherton evolved from guys running a teen dance club called Band Canyon into rock and roll hustlers managing fake bands. Tom told me about Keyho, the local businessman who ran the club and passed away in nineteen ninety. Digging through the archives of the Bay City Times, Keyho seems like a model citizen. He's actually in the paper a lot, a local businessman involved in city politics when he wasn't running the teen nightclub where Base City's adults dropped off their kids.
On Friday nights.
All Tom could tell me about Jim Atherton, the other half of Delta, was a rumor he'd heard that Jim had been shot dead in a mob related hit in Grand Rapids. I tried to find some record of Atherton's death. An article about the shooting or an obituary. Nothing, and there's a good reason for that. Until twenty twenty one, Jim Atherton was still alive and Gary actually talked to him. They talked on the phone briefly about setting up an interview.
And of course at that point I had a load of questions. I was going to ask him about Delta promotions, the fake Zombies, the other fake bands.
We were that close. He was going to hear the whole story straight from the guy who helped mastermind it.
But sadly, it was like two days after I had talked to Jim that he passed away.
I know Jim Atherton is the guy. Kehill may have been the straight lace, respectable one with his name on the deed at Band Canyon, but somehow four psychedelic, hard rocking teenagers from Texas end up in Bay City. Jim Atherton has to be the connection, and I still want to know something anything about him. He never married, he has no children, and Gary just missed him. This is a rock and roll story, and they say rock and roll never dies. So we're going back in time because Jim Atherton may be gone, but I found his prom dings. The thing that started all this, the thing that had Keyho and Atherton seeing dollar signs can be traced back to one single moment.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Beatles.
The cultural shift of the sixties kicked off in America when the Beatles played Ed Sullivan in nineteen sixty four, in the time when Americans were first putting TV sets in their living room, Seeing four British guys with objectively odd haircuts being screamed at by girls with a ravenous look in their eyes did something to this country. Suddenly, teenagers were quitting the football team and asking their parents for Gibson guitars and Vox amplifiers. The boys tried to mimic those bowl cuts, but this is America, so they grew their hair out even longer. Eventually, four or five of these formerly straight laced youths with shaggy hair and various instruments would have something. They called it a garage band. The British invasion came, it saw it conquered, It created rock and roll animals, and Band Canyon was ground zero for garage bands in the Greater Bay City area. Obviously, Delta Promotions couldn't put together a fake Beatles everybody knew what John, Paul George and Ringo looked like by nineteen sixty nine, but the then recent breakup of the Zombies provided an opportunity. Unless you were a hardcore music fan or fellow musician Colin Blunstone, Rod Argent and the rest of the Zombies faces were virtually unknown, so why not borrow.
Them for a while.
Overse and f.
But how does a small town like Bay City birth of scheme this audacious? How did Keyho and Atherton get talented musicians like two of the guys in It's Easy Top to pretend to be the Zombies from their offices in rural Michigan. It turns out Jim Atherton had something every teenage musician in America was looking for.
In nineteen sixty nine.
Jim worked for Sun Amplifiers, a legendary name in the world of extremely loud music. With the roots of punk taking shape in Michigan, loud bands like the MC five and The Stooges needed loud amps, and nobody makes them louder than Sun. Atherton was twenty five in nineteen sixty nine, only a few years older than the bands he recruited. Unlike his Delta partner Bill Keyho, who was a decade older.
Jim Antherton was well known in Michigan as a band manager, and in the late sixties he partnered up with Keyho in Delta Promotions.
Atherton could give upstart musicians, cutting edge amps, and management contracts with Delta, an offer a young rocker couldn't refuse.
The fact that.
Atherton was six foot six and over three hundred pounds probably.
Didn't hurt.
A rumored mob killing six six, three hundred pounds. Jim Atherton sounds like a tough guy. He had to be the muscle behind Delta Promotions. But with Atherton gone, Gary and I were unsure we'd ever get the real story. But this one always seems to have a twist. Gary ran into somebody he used to teach with, and I'll let.
Him tell you, okay.
I had mentioned earlier that I might have a connection with a friend of Annas, and when I spoke to him just prior to his death, he had mentioned that he was friends with a guy by the name of Jim Thompson.
That's the thing about a fifty five year old mystery. You never know where you're going to find what you're looking for. Gary and Jim Thompson are old friends. Gary was a teacher and Jim Thompson helped build sets for theater productions at Gary School. All that time the two were friends. Gary never knew that Jim's wife, Rhea had a lifelong connection to Jim Atherton, a guy we've been trying to learn about for almost a decade. Ria knew Atherton before, during, and after.
The Delta Promotions days.
She revealed that when she was dating Jim Antherton, they never kissed. I mean it was truly a platonic relationship.
I make a few phone calls from my hotel room, and later that day Gary and I drive to Essexville, just across the river from Bay City. We've been waiting to be at the right place, at the right time. In this case, the right place to hear the story of Jim Atherton, the man behind this rock and roll con is the doily covered living room table of Ria Thompson, Atherton's longtime platonic girlfriend, Riha invited me over to her house to play cards with her and her husband and aid of their friends, and agreed to let me ask her some questions about her old boyfriend. Never let it be said, the Michigan people aren't welcoming. As Gary and I pull up to the home of Ria and Jim Thompson, with its manicured front yard and decorative law and ornaments, it strikes me as funny the fifty five years later, the story of Jim Atherton's rock and roll pass will be found in a place like this, not in some grimy rock club or with some rock and roll lifer. The people in this old rock and roll story grew up and settled into adult lives. Why don't we just start at the beginning. Where did you first meet Jim Atherton?
My aunt invited me to come down to their place in Gaines, Michigan. I was fifteen and her son, my cousin, was having a little party and he invited some friends and they were playing Elvis Presley songs. Gail invited Jim along with a couple other people, and at fifteen, I hadn't quite found myself yet, and he paid attention to me, and I was flattered.
Riha shows me pictures of her and Jim Atherton as teenagers.
Okay, here we go.
I've always pictured Atherton as this intimidating figure. Getting to hear about Jim from someone who actually knew him changes that.
Immediately.
He asked if he could come and see me. And he had a nineteen fifty six Buick blue and white, and he came up all the way up to Essexville, Michigan, and we visited.
And this would have been the late fifties, and it sounds like teenage. Jim was a big softie.
I had permission to go to a movie and then he came home, and I probably mom and dad served them a little food and they went home. And then he got my address and he wrote to me for two and a half years. I wrote to him every week, a little you know, friendly friendly letters, and he would come in once a month to take me out to a movie. Mom was strict, strict, but fair. He asked me to go to the prom. Oh, I know, thrilled to death, and I was fifteen or sixteen, and she agreed. I went down to my aunt's and he came over and we went to the prom together. And I have pictures which I will not show.
Ria pulls out two photos of her and athletes who together they're real jewels, at two different proms.
Anyway, for about a year and a half. That went on in my junior year. He's a senior and he is coming over more often. But you know, I'm sure he had rules and regulations too. But about once a month I would see him and we would go on a date.
In those teenage dance days, going to the dances, was the music a big thing for him.
Well, he wasn't a good dancer. He was young. Jim at that time carried an enormous amount of weight. He's six ' six and little feet.
She shows me a picture of Jim in his high school football uniform.
Played football, but he is in fact huge.
He got a scholarship when he went to Central Michigan. He didn't stay and he got hurt. Also, sports was not interest at all.
Ria shows me another photo of her and Jim. He looks happy, she looks beautiful and address she's clearly proud of you.
Look incredible.
I should show you. That's the second problem we went to. The first problem was I hadn't blossomed yet, but I was finding myself at that time. And interestingly enough, that's when Jim came into the picture. Yeah, about that time, but he probably came to that problem that year because Jim was not in the picture yet had too many Jims.
Her Jim is her husband, Jim Thompson, who's been sitting quietly across from us at the table this whole time while his wife reminisces about her old boyfriend with a man half her age. This Jim is basically a saint.
I had three gyms, to be perfectly honest, and I got teased about it, and I said, it makes it real easy and there's no mistake when you're out with them.
So Rhea picked her Jim became of her and Atherton.
I'm pleased to say that Jim and I remain good friends. And when I told him I had met somebody real special, of course he was hurt. He's angry, but we remade friends, and both my husband and Jim they became good friends.
As interested as Gary and I are in the dynamics between Rhea and her Jim's I remember to ask her about Atherton's rock and roll past and if she remembers the fake zombies. So you mentioned on the phone that you know Jim had this rock and roll life that you didn't know too much about.
No, I think his interest in music evolved I think music came into his life later in his late teens.
By the late sixties, Rhea was seeing less of Jim Atherton. She stayed close to home. He was out on the road working for Sun Amps and managing Delta Promotions.
Bands as he got older, and he was real involved, and he had some business out here to the east of US, and I'm not sure exactly where or what, but he would come into town and I'd have dinner for him, and Jim was my gym. Was comfortable with that. Like I say, they got to know each other and they liked each other.
That's very progressive.
Well, well, not only that, Jim was real respectful. And when Jim my gym wasn't around, he wasn't playing games or flirting or anything like that. He was just appropriate appropriate. So I felt comfortable enough.
So Atherton would come over for a nice dinner with Rhea and her Jim at their place when he wasn't out selling fake bands and loud amps to teenagers. I asked her if Jim Atherton was involved in any illegal bit business.
Are we telling secrets? Maybe we can tell a secret. He got involved in pot with his men, which eventually in basically caused him some grief.
That grief Rhea is referring to was on the front page of the Bay City Times on February eighteenth, nineteen sixty nine. It's one of the stories I found while researching Delta Promotions.
In the library.
It details a drug bust and a house operated by Delta Promotions. The headline reads.
Pot raid bags eight in west Side dwelling.
The Delta crew is pictured front and center with their names listed underneath. I recognize one of them, Tom Hocott, the Delta employee first told me about the fake zandies. In the photo, the Delta guys standing in a semicircle around a table bags of weed piled up.
In front of them. They look really fucking cool.
The police lined them up for this newspaper photo op unwittingly taking a photo of the crew behind the fake zombies operation.
But the picture only.
Has seven Delta employees in it. The caption list the seven guys pictures and ends with missing from the photo is James Atherton, twenty five, a local rock music promoter. I actually, do you want to see the heat the front page of all paper.
I'd love to I've seen it, but butt great bed eight and was ide dwelling.
I ask Rio what happened to Jim after the Delta pot bust?
Right there is when he got into his problem. They was smoking pot and they got arrested for it and they got hauled off to jail, and it made it made the news here in Bay City. And his father was like a lot of people that generation, didn't know anything about it, and he thought that, you know, it was like doing cocaine or shooting up or whatever. And he came to the jail, he said, you know what's happened, and he was ready to get all the help for Jim. And Jim said, Dad, don't worry about this is no big deal. Well, it was a big deal to Dad. Probably the next time I see him might have been a year and a half or so. Every time he was in town, he'd give us a call and we always had a good visit. But he's always.
Rhea's friends are starting to filter into the house for her weekly card game. Gary and I joined her guests at the kitchen table, and it becomes apparent that it's time to turn off the microphone.
No, you're all good, Come on.
I'm.
For the next two hours ten of us play a card game called Oh Shit, which is apparently popular in Michigan, even though Gary's never heard of it. I can only make assumptions, but it feels intentional that Atherton managed to keep his face out of the Bay City Times. Did Bill Keyhoe work his city hall connections to make it all go away? For his partner? Bill Keyho and Jim Atherton are both gone. Rhea helped me get closer to the answers. But we need to talk to somebody who knew Keyho and Atherton, somebody to help me put this whole fake zombies thing together. And there's an old adage that comes to mind. If you want to know about a band, talk to their opening act. In the article about the Delta pot Bus, it says that three of the guys arrested were in a local underground rock and roll band called Dick Rabbit. It turns out Dick Rabbit were really good. They were also siblings, Richard, Philip and Gordon, the Thayer brothers. This is their song, you Come On Like a Train, recorded in nineteen sixty six. It's about as heavy a record as you'll find from that year. And you can bet your ass those are Jim Atherton's supplied sun amplifiers. They start looking for Dick Rabbit, a real band in the middle of a bunch of fakes. Maybe Gary and I shook some old spirits loose. Maybe talking about Atherton and Keyho and Delta in Bay City brought something back to life, because just two days after playing cards with Rhea, I find myself on the phone with Gordon Thayer, the singer and guitarist for Dick Rabbit. About thirty seconds into our conversation, all I can think is I wish I was recording this call on a better microphone. All I know about Gordon is that he was in Dick Rabbit with his brothers, and Dick Rabbit was signed to Delta Promotions, so that's where we start.
We were with them from about sixty seven through sixty nine, so a couple of years. We were there during that time when the Delta Promotions was actively putting together bands, there really weren't the bands.
Finally, someone who was actually there when Atherton and Keijo were assembling their fake bands.
I'm caught a little lot guard.
What do you remember about how that came together?
And I think they were kind of hurting for finances, So they were trying to come up with ways to make money and they're just having to be a connection. I don't really know the full connection with how they knew or felt that they could get away with the zombie thing.
I've been trying to find answers about the details of this for almost a decade. So it's funny to hear Gordon call it the zombie thing.
They just put together musicians, put them in the where Allison told him we were in the songs, and then start booking them on the road.
But Gordon didn't just watch from the sidelines as Keyho and Atherton assembled the Texas Zombies and sent them on tour. He was actually on the tour with Frank, Dusty, Siebe and Mark with.
Their band for them on the road up and down the East Coast US three months.
On the next episode of the podcast, we go on tour with the Texas Zombies, Dusty.
And Frank Beard knew him well. Dusty was in there, We partied with him, they sent him out on tour, and then they send us with him to be the front bat.
Follow the fake Zombies on TikTok if you'd like to see all the photos flyers and e Femera we've collected in our research for this podcast. At the very least, you should see how good looking the Texas Zombies are. You can also follow us on the iHeart app, and there's one more way to connect with us. This podcast is made up of stories from people who were around for the Fake Zombies. There are memories of this rock and roll caper are the reason we're here fifty five years later. We're lucky to have them. We also know there are more stories out there. My hope is that you heard this podcast and talk to someone about it. I rarely give advice, but I would encourage you to ask your favorite seventy year old what they were doing in the summer of nineteen sixty nine. Chances are it'll be a good story. If you found somebody who was there and cross paths with the Fake Zombies, the Real Zombies, Delta Promotions, or anyone mentioned in this podcast, email us at Fake Zombies pod at gmail dot com. This podcast was written by Daniel Ralston. Executive produced by Ian Wheeler, Melissa Locker and Daniel Ralston. Produced by Anna McClain and Nick Dawson. Score, original music and additional audio engineering by Robin Hatch, additional production support from Cooper mal in Los Angeles. 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, or wherever you get your podcasts.
