"Our Fans Were More Metal Than We Were"

Rob Zombie has made a career out of reinventing evreybody else's past, but this month he's taking a look at his own with the release of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, a four CD, one DVD box set that collects all of White Zombie's recordings and videos. The day after he wrapped up his long-in-production The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (an animated horror comedy based on a Zombie-penned comic book series), he talked about his old band's roots, why audiences were always confused and what he hates about being a solo act.

How long have you actually been working on putting together Let Sleeping Corpses Lie?
I haven't really been working on it for very long. I've been talking about it for a long time. A couple of years ago we started compiling tracks and tracking down all the different White Zombie members to get them to sign off on it. Then I made a movie and went on tour, so it's been dragging on for a couple of years. When I finally focused on it, I whipped the whole thing together in a couple of weeks.

Was there anything you came across that you forgot existed?
All the songs on the box set were actually released, but a lot of the early stuff on vinyl I barely remembered. Every time I heard one of those songs I thought, "What is this song?" Back then I was never happy with the records. I'd make it, listen to it once and never listen to it again. I'm sure there are tons of demos lying around too, but I didn't want to get into that.

What was the idea behind the early days of the band, when you sounded more like a noise band?
The band was formed in New York in the '80s, and there were basically two scenes happening at the time. There was the hardcore scene, like the CBGB hardcore matinees, which was always Agnostic Front, Cro Mags, that kind of stuff. We didn?t fit into that kind of world at all. And then the other scene of music that was happening at the time that we felt a little more kinship to was the New York Art Damage scene, like Jim Thurwell and Live Skull and Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore. Musically, we were noisier because we needed to be — we couldn't play very well. But I liked Van Halen as much as I liked Sonic Youth, and I liked Scraping Fetus Off the Wheel as much as Black Sabbath. So it was always kind of a mishmash of everything.

So what happened that made you shift in a more metal direction with La Sexorcisto?
The sound was always evolving. When you first start a band, you can't keep anyone in the band because there's no money and it's pure misery all the time. Our first guitar player was in the band for two months, and one day he showed up and said he sold his guitar. And it's not like it is now, where my guitar player has like 500 guitars. So I got my roommate to be in the band. He was totally into blues music. He wouldn't know Sonic Youth from a hole in the wall. So the sound was always chaos.

So when did it solidify? Around Psycho-Head Blowout?
Yeah, but eventually we got tired of that scene. We all had long hair and wanted to headbang. We found this metal club in Brooklyn and said "Fuck it! Let's just say we're metal, even though we're not!" Because at the time, we weren't. So we played metal shows and were even more out of place, but we still had fun.

When did you start fitting in?
You know what? Right to the end, it never made any sense. When White Zombie signed to Geffen, we toured with every metal band: Megadeth, Testament, Anthrax, Danzig. And at every show, the fans would just stand there and give us the fucking finger the whole show. Like, "Who are these fucking weirdos, man?"