Rip October 1995

White Zombie Monster Cars & Monster Music

by Murray Engleheart

THE DREAM: The top is down, and White Zombie vocalist Rob Zombie -- street urchin and doppelganger for Ministry's Al Jourgensen on a bad dreadlock day -- is in the driver's seat. The car stereo is, naturally, fully cranked with WZ's truly monstrous metallic hi-fi sci-fi album, Astro-Creep: 2000, Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head. But the speakers aren't your normal auto cone-shredders. The hell with that! For the bottom end alone, we're talking the sort of mountainous rig that someone like Soundgarden's Ben Shepherd uses. The back of the car has been restabilized to counterbalance the weight of the huge speaker bins, the front of which are covered in cyclone wire. But it's all worth it. The road shudders several minutes in advance of Rob's approach.

THE REALITY: The mechanic told Rob that the vehicle probably wouldn't survive the anesthetic, let alone the operation.

"I have this horrible '75 black four-door Nova," he says from his home in Hollywood. "You start it up, and black smoke pours out the back of it. I don't know how it's still running. I never do anything to it. I don't have the patience to mess with cars. I just crash them into stuff, and I don't care -- I just keep driving them. It's all beat up and scummy, and there's about two year's worth of bird shit on it."

The rumble and hot metallic smell of big engines are almost as indivisible from what White Zombie are as their splintered drum sticks and smoldering guitar picks. In fact, if White Zombie were a car, Rob reckons it probably would be Frankenstein's car out of Death Race 2000. Bass player Sean Yseult counters that it would be a monster truck like "Bigfoot."

"We're definitely out to, like, crush and destroy everything in our path," she laughs good-naturedly.

"That's been another great thing about living in L.A. In New York you can't really have a car. But in L.A. you see so many killer cars! J [Yuenger, guitarist] and I have both got old cars from the '60s. I've got a '63 Falcon Sprint, and he's got, I think, a '67 Mustang that he's totally hot- rodded out. Both our cars came with V-8 302s in them, so every once in a while we'll leave rehearsal and race a little!"

The street-rod connection aside, WZ's Astro-Creep strikes me as a musical backdrop to Kenneth Anger's marvelously sordid trash tome Hollywood Babylon. Rob likes to touch base with that "A Star Is Dead" ethos every now and then by dropping by gravesites like that of classic horror movie star Bela Lugosi. "There's a lot of good graves here," Rob says admiringly about his current hometown. "Everybody dies in Hollywood," he concludes sagely, as if thumbing approvingly through Anger's book.

At one point in time, White Zombie could have taken the same road as the Cramps; B-grade movies and skin turned blue and gray by too much late-night/ early-morning trash TV in a small, low-rent apartment in the bowels of NYC. But the Cramps were on their journey on the Rockabilly-Trash-Greyhound-bus, while Zombie opted for a trip latched onto the underbelly of Black Sabbath; convincingly displayed with a spookily heavy version of "Children of the Grave" on the Sabbath tribute album, Nativity in Black.

The Cramps analogy pleases Sean, who has been a huge fan of the band for some 12 years, along with the similarly theatrical Birthday Party, featuring singer Nick Cave. "The Cramps were one of the first bands I got into. Actually, I just saw them in London, and they were as great as ever. The Cramps are definiely all about American trash culture, but they also have this garagey twang thing going on. We're both about the same thing, only musically different."

Astro-Creep took three months to write and another three to record, with the band in the studio everyday for an exhausting 12 hours per stretch. The result has been one of the few recordings in the broad "metal" realm (along with Pantera's Far Beyond Driven) that actually lives up to the raving in their record company bio. Their last effort, '92s La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1, had a great "title thing" going, but these lugs felt that it fell short of nailing the full glory of the White Zombie tribal stomp, even with Iggy Pop's messianic presence on "Black Sunshine" and the album's double platinum-plus status.

"I was never that happy with it," Rob reveals. "In some respects, it was probably the best thing we could do at the time under the circumstances. But it wasn't what I was trying to do. The new record, when it was done, I was like, "This is exactly what I wanted it to sound like."

"Everything just finally came together -- and it felt like it too -- as we were making it. I was waiting for the big tragedy to hit. I thought, This can't be working this smoothly; something has to go wrong."

Nothing did. At least nothing major. The band's world tour for Astro-Creep kicked off in Phoenix with a stage set that Rob was, at first, a little concerned about. "It's probably too elaborate. I don't know if we can afford it anymore. It's everything. We built this huge set that looks like something from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre farmhouse crossed with Blade Runner, with these huge explosions and pyro and an incredible high-tech light show. It's so much shit."

Their last tour looked like it would never end. La Sexorcisto suddenly took off mid-tour, and the band found their touring schedule getting longer and longer every week. Not that Rob doesn't have some great memories of it -- like playing with Danzig the night the Dark Elvis and team recorded the ThrallDemonsweatlive EP at Irvine Meadows, California, as the masses broke the stage barriers.

"That was pretty much a legendary show," he recalls. "There was about 12,000 people, and because it was also Halloween, there were people in costume wearing skull makeup... There was a grass area, and the kids lit it and were moshing around these bonfires, smashing pumpkins. It was pretty nuts."

Then there was the trip to Japan with Pantera, when they bought a stack of Godzilla toys and ate and drank their fill of sushi and sake. On a subsequent visit, they met up with Cheap Trick.

Rob fires off another diary entry: "When we were touring with Anthrax, Al Jourgnesen was hanging out, and a couple of times we went on stage with Anthrax and played. Al came onstage with us once and played 'Thunder Kiss '65' when we played San Diego."

It was awhile before Jourgensen's musical perversions really clarified in Ministry. At what point did Rob find the idea of culture mutation attractive?

"It was always attractive to me. I never understood people who weren't attracted to it. Ever since I was a little kid I was totally into horror movies and comics. That was all I cared about. Other kids wanted to play baseball and stuff, and I was like, 'Fuck that bullshit!' That's boring!"

Given that sort of background, it would seem that the highest honor for White Zombie would be to be immortalized in comic book form.

"We might do one," admits the man who was a big KISS fan as a kid. "We've got one that we'e been slowly working on for Marvel, so one of these days... I don't know if I'd really want to do a comic so much like that, like the KISS [comics from the '70s]. It might be too... ridiculous for me."

The conversation returns to the subject of graves.

"All the graves out here are surprisingly low-key. Marilyn Monroe's is just like a plaque on a wall," Rob observes of the Hollywood burials. "Nothing spectacular."

And for the head Zombie's own final resting place?

Rob cackles wickedly. "I'm going to build a huge monument! A giant statue of myself, with speakers that constantly play tapes of me talking!" And that's a sure bet to end up on the Graveline tour! *