"Our Fans Were More Metal Than We Were"

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie also contains all the White Zombie videos, which really made you guys into stars.
Back then MTV was still powerful. We were on tour for La Sexorcisto for two years, and we only sold 100,000 records. We released "Thunderkiss '65" as a single for the third time, because I really believed in it. MTV finally played the video and things just exploded. We were on tour with Anthrax when the record finally broke, and we got so big so fast that we had to leave the tour because it was getting too weird. The guys from Danzig came down to see us play shortly after that at a huge place, and they were like, "When the fuck did this happen?"

There's something really interesting about that era of music, because it seems like weird bands could make it big. I find it incredible that Astro-Creep 2000 spent something like four months in the Top Ten. What do you think it was about the mid-'90s?
I don't know what it was. I think something changed when Jane's Addiction broke through, but I guess that was earlier. It's strange to think about, though. We would play shitty clubs with Soundgarden and Primus and Faith No More, and we were all on MTV at the same time. It was especially weird for us because we were being played on Headbanger's Ball and 120 Minutes at the same time.

That lead to weird shows. I saw you guys on tour for Astro-Creep 2000, and I wore a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt and stood next to a bunch of guys in Slayer shirts.
That was our crowd: Alternative kids and dudes in Slayer shirts going apeshit. What a great mishmash of people. The bands we took on tour didn't always go down great, though. A lot of times our crowd was more metal than we were, so we'd take bands we liked — Babes in Toyland, the Melvins, Reverend Horton Heat — and the metal guys were like "What the fuck are those rockabilly guys doing up there?"

So with the box set done, are you working on a new movie or a new record?"
I just finished the sound mix on The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. After three and a half years, it's finally done.

What sort of release will that get?
We're trying to figure that out. It's the Astro Creep of animated films. I look at it and say "This could be fucking huge!" But everybody else could say, "Who the fuck is going to get this?" So in the meantime, I'm in the studio making a new record.

Do you know when it might be ready?
It's almost done. We're hoping to finish by the end of December, but it's probably too early to talk about a release date.

Are you trying anything new?
It's the first full-fledged band I've had since White Zombie. I've always had a revolving roster of studio and touring musicians, but the three guys in my band now have been on tour with me for years. So we're making it as a band. It's called Rob Zombie, but we're treating it like a band.

Is it weird getting back into the band mentality?
I never liked being solo. I just did that because White Zombie became an unworkable situation. But you want to be in a band. The comaraderie is what's fun about it. There's nothing fun about a guy by himself in a studio.