Advertisement
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?"
Advertisement
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.