Rob Zombie born Rob Straker (Stray-ker) , spent his formative years in Haverhill, Mass.,
a depressed industrial outpost the singer described to the LA Times as and i quote
“a place where nothing ever happens. Some magazine voted it the No. 1 worst place to live a few years
ago. There was just nothing to do there except hang out in cemeteries. They had these old,
New England-style graveyards, and we just used to play around in those all the time. “
Zombie would be pretty anti-social as a kid having different interests from his peerstelling
the LA Times “I grew up with really normal, straight parents, but they let me and my brother
do anything we wanted to do. They took us to see ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Texas Chainsaw
Massacre.’ I remember seeing, like, ‘Phantom of the Opera’ when I was 5 years old.” Zombie
would spend eight hours a day watching TV and it soon became an obsession for the future musician
with him literally watching anything that was broadcast on TV and he would memorize the tv
schedule for the week. This evenvtually led him down the road of making his own super 8 films.
Apart from television, Zombie would develop a taste for larger than life musical acts including
Kiss, Blue Oyster Cult and Alice Cooper. Couple this with his love of the DIY ethos of punk rock
and Rob Zombie had the basic blueprint for White Zombie.
The band would form when bassist Sean Yseult and frontman Rob Zombie both met while attending
the Parsons school of design. The band’s first drummer was also a student at the same school.
Yseult would reveal in the book Louder THan Hell “Rob & I were both oddballs.
I think we were drawn to each other. We started the band within a month of meeting
and basically lived together for seven years. We both had dyed black hair,
he had a stenciled misfits leather jacket and i had a bunch of animal bones tied onto a necklace”
THey would date but break up during the early 90’s with Yseult telling the chicago tribune "The whole
band and the business just got so much bigger than any relationship," The band would have a variety
of drummers during this time and found a guitarist named J (Jay Yuenger) who went by the name J.
White Zombie would be the amalgamation of two scenes the noise rock scene of new york which
included bands like Sonic Youth and th ehardcore scene in DC including minor threat, bad brains
and dave grohl’s pre-nirvana band scream. To Rob he had the goal of not only giving fans a
spectacular music video for there songs, but also be able to give fans an equally as impressive live
show telling the LA Times “When we started out, the metal scene was, like Twisted Sister and that
kind of stuff, so the only place to start was [the alternative scene]--which I thought was so
pretentious, “The attitude of those bands was, ‘We get on stage, make no effort whatsoever,
be completely nondescript, and you guys in the audience are supposed to eat it up.
You kids are supposed to just worship our feet.’ “My feeling is, if you’re expecting people to
come and pay 20 bucks to see your show, you’d better look up from your . . . shoes once in a
while. I like to see a band that gets up there and works hard for my entertainment dollar.
It would result in the band rigging their own pyro using items they bought from industrial stores.
Despite being hailed as an underground band in their early days that wasn’t the group’s
aim as Yseult told greensboro.com `we were an underground band, but not by choice,'
``with Rob adding 'We've always been trying to sell out, it's just that no one's buying.
It was during their early years the members lived on New York's Lower
East Side, where Zombie and Yseult supported themselves doing mechanicals for a magazine,
while guitarist J. delivered pizzas, sometimes with dangerous results telling Greensboro.com
``I got robbed a couple of times, one time with a knife to my throat, one time with a gun,
The band would sign to label Caroline records who put out their first two records 1987’s
soul crusher and 1989’s make them die slowly. But the road to gain recognition was a long one.
The band’s first release 1987’s soul crusher seemed to go unnoticed or wasmisunderstood
with Yseult revealing in louder than hell “when our first record Soul Crusher came out in 1987
people called us art noise//psycho rock . We liked black sabbath and black flag,
but we were also into the Birthday Party and we were trying to mix a lot of those
things together. People didn’t really get it. We would play a lot of those things together.
We would play this really heavy music in clubs in the east village and all these hipsters just
stared at us and scratched their heads. ” The reviews echoed a similar sentiment,
but it was the band’s detractors that drove Rob Zombie to push forward. And while the sales didn’t
reflect what was to happen soon the group’s first album found an audience with some accomplished
musicians at the time including Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
The band soon built up a crowd of post-punk followers at venues including CBGB’s and started
playing metal clubs widening their audience. . By the early 90’s they would soon nab a recording
contract with major label Geffen Records and the band would move out west to Los Angeles.
Given the band’s image, you would have expeed drugs and alcohol to have been
used by it’s members, but they were mostly on the straight and narrow.
With the popularity of alternative music and grunge,
White Zombie carved out it’s niche providing something different with Rob telling LA Times
“When grunge came on the scene, it sucked all the fun out of rock music. “I mean,
when you pay 25 bucks to see a show, do you want to see some artist whining about his problems,
or some crazy show that you’ll be talking about for the next year?
“I see there’s a whole new generation of kids that’s been longing for this stuff. Kids come up
to me all the time after shows to say thanks for not just standing there and staring at my feet.”
The recording of the band’s third record La Sexercisto Devil Music Volume 1
would however get them into trouble with their label Geffen. Guiarist J would tell morning call
"We never really thought about clearing all the samples. Geffen didn't expect us
to be using all the samples, so they said, 'Go ahead and make the record you want to make.'
So we went hog wild and delivered the record to L.A. and they freaked! They had to get the rights
to whatever we sampled. As it turned out, the only things we didn't get to keep were a Vincent Price
quote and a Charlie Manson quote." The group’s first record for
Geffen La Sexercisto which came out in march of 1992 would be a slow burn.
Entertainment Weekly would publish an article in October of 1993 that highlighted that the
album had moved only about 75,000 copies before one of singles welcome to planet motherfers was
featured on the mtv hit show beavis and butthead. Rob would tell entertainment weekly ”The record
immediately started picking up in markets where we never played, like Wyoming and Missouri-places
where Beavis and Butt-head was the only thing happening, where it’s just cows. It always seemed
we needed something to give the album a kick in the butt, and I guess this was the thing.” The
help from beavis and butthead pushed sales to 300,000 copies by the fall of 1993. The album
would also be helped by the single Thunder Kiss 65 and it would move about 2 million copies by
the end of the day. Despite the help from Beavis and Butthead the band resented some
of the news coverage of the tie in with Rob telling Greensboro.com
it's a really cool thing, and it helped,' ``but it's turned into this thing where people think
(Beavis and Butt-head) invented the band. Each article downplays us more - 'They'd only sold
20 records before ``Beavis and Butt-head' ' - where we were actually around 300,000 and had
sold out a headlining tour.' Other press coverage of the band branded the group an overnight success
with Rob telling the batlimore sun "I guess to mainstream press, it will seem
like overnight success, because it's something they never paid any attention to," "Anything
that's even remotely in the world of heavy metal is very much ignored. Alternative acts will get a
lot of press way before they're big, but metal bands always seem to have come out of nowhere.
They're completely ignored, and then next thing you know, they're selling out Madison Square
Garden, and you're like, 'Who . . . is this?' " And the band’s success took the members by
surprise with Zombie admitting that the band’s biggest expectations when they started out
were to play venues like CBGB’s. But not all of the press coverage
showered the band with praise and they soon were being accused of being devil worshippers
with Rob telling the baltimore sun "I don't even know how you would take it literally,". "But you
can take 'Devil Music' a couple ways. Rock and roll or whatever, heavy metal, has always been
devil music. And there's always going to be a little old lady pointing the finger."
Being branded as devil workshippers resulted in the group being banned from performing
in a few places including in Omaha, Neb according to the morning call newspaper
with guitarist J telling publication "There were a couple of places we weren't
supposed to play because some group or another was going to protest," sI don't know how they
even found out about us." He would also go on to reveal that some record store chains initially
refused to carry the album but one thing changed their minds telling the morning call newspaper,
"the almighty dollar won out, and once sales picked up, those chains knuckled under and
decided to carry it. Plus, it's also pretty obvious that we're just messing around." The
tour for La Sexercisto would see them open for Megadeth, Pantera, Anthrax, Testament and Danzig
By 1994 the band headed back into the studio enlisting tour mates Pantera’s producer Terry Date
to make the album that would define their career. New drummer John Tempesta formerly of Exodus and
Testament would join them in the studio., The resulting record Astro-Creep: 2000 – Songs of
Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head would see the band wearing more
industrial influences on their sleeves. The album would prove to be the commercial peak for the band
but their interpersonal relationships were coming apart. Rob would reveal in louder
than hell when we recorded the last record, i don’t think the four of us were in the studio
at any point. I would ride on a separate bus at all times, separate dressing rooms. It was four
people who didn’t work at all…On the outside it looked so f**** great on the inside it sucked.”
Released at just the right time, grunge had largely died the year before as Alice in Chains
was limping along, Pearl Jam was embroiled in a fight with Ticketmaster and Nirvana was done.
The album proved to be the biggest of the group’s career moving 3 million copies
thanks in large part to the smash hit More Human Than Human, which took home mTV’s best hard rock
video. The success took the band by surprise with. Rob telling the LA Times“Our success
right now is kind of surprising, because it seems like anything that’s hard or heavy
has taken a nose-dive this year,” Rob says. “A lot of bands that were going double platinum last
year--anyone from Queensryche to Megadeth to the Black Crowes--are trying to follow up those huge
records now, and it’s just not happening.” While the album proved to be a commerccial and
creative peak, it was also a sonic farewell for the band as their tour for the album would be the
last for White zOmbie. The band would co-headline alongside Pantera and by 1998 Rob Zombie would
release his first solo record Hellbilly Deluxe and many already saw the writing on the wall which was
only confirmed by an official announcement the same year that announced the band’s breakup.
Yseult would reveal the straw that broke the camels back in the book louder than hell
“the end for white zombie came because Rob wanted the band a little more techno.
Rob can be really controlling. Whoever’s on his team, it’s them against the world.
Once Jay and I didn’t want to go along with him creatively, he kind of considered us against them.
Rob Zombie in a lot of the press interviews since the band’s breakup talked about his career
aspirations of being a director of horror films and wanting to pursue other business ventures,
but he also chalked up his split from the band to boredom. His manager Andy
Gould at the time would tell the LA Times “It’s like a marriage,” “Trying to keep two
people together is a tough nut, but trying to keep four people together in extreme circumstances is
very difficult. Rob has a very specific vision of what he wanted to do, and he felt it was
time to do it.” Rob wouldtake some shots at his former bandmates telling the LA Times
“They wanted to,, be taken seriously as musicians,” s. “All of a sudden,
they wanted to be like Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton, and I was like, screw that! I mean, why do I care
what critics think about me? Everything I love has always been hated by the critics.”
In a separate interview, former White Zombie member Sean Yseult callws Zombie’s assertion
“a flat-out lie.” ADDING “Rob wanted to do his own thing, and we were fine with it.
He can tell people as many lies as he wants, but would I be running around in
costume playing surf/garage if I wanted to be taken seriously like Jeff Beck?”
Rob would announce his intentions to dissolve the band during a conference call with his bandmates.
In the years that followed Rob would pursue a solo career and become involved with projects
outside of music, while the other members play in other bands. As to whether we’d see a reunion
Rob has been pretty adament that a White Zombie reunion isn’t in the cards. .