As I mentioned earlier during the Combined Man series, my time at the Baby Farm was weird.

One positive thing that happened while I was there, however, was getting one of the coolest gigs ever. At the time, my boss was a guy named Chris who was a long-time journalist and a former contributor to now-defunct Knoxville paper the Metro Pulse.

Having this connection was amazing, because the year after I moved back to Tennessee, Rob Zombie — one of my life’s heroes — came to town with rock god Alice Cooper. When I explained how excited I was for the show, Chris asked if I wanted to interview him.

What? OF COURSE I DO!

Chris got in contact with his Metro Pulse buddies and within a day or two, I had press credentials, a PR phone number, a date and a time to interview Mr. Zombie.

My article ran in the print version of the Metro Pulse and it lived on their website for the paper’s last few years. It’s now gone, unfortunately, but I still have the piece. I can’t believe I haven’t shared it here yet, so allow me to fix that.

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God of Thunder
The incredibly strange director and metalhead who stopped living and became Rob Zombie
by Justin Simpson

Vampire lovers in wild bikinis. Satan’s Cheerleaders.  A red planet being in dire need of angry red women.  Head splitting, distorted guitars up against an incredibly groovy rhythm.  Kitschy b-movie samples.  Combined, they can only mean one thing:  Rob Zombie is back from the dead. Again.  Fresh off the release of his new album Hellbilly Deluxe 2:  Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls and the Systematic Dehumanization of Cool, the modern shock rocker is, once again, tearing through the country on a national tour.  It is exactly what we’ve come to expect from zombies.

Known to metalheads as the former leader of Sub-Pop’s token metal band, White Zombie, Zombie has made a name for himself in metallurgy, and continues to carry it out through his solo work. Zombie is now a world-renowned filmmaker, famous for his cult classics House of 1000 Corpses, The Devils Rejects, his remake of John Carpenter’s masterpiece Halloween and his own sequel, putting his name in front of a brand new audience. Blowing minds, scaring children and worrying mothers is just another day at the office for Rob Zombie.  

Fans of Zombie’s will remember 1998’s Hellbilly Deluxe, and some compare it to his new release, almost like a sequel. Zombie doesn’t feel that’s necessary, or even fair.

“I don’t think it’s really fair to compare two of anything,” says Zombie.  “Especially when it comes to what I do.  If I do something that’s a sequel to a record or movie, I always purposely try to make it very different because I don’t want to do the same thing again.  Even on Halloween II, I didn’t want to just do the same thing over again.  That’s why I wanted to make it very different.  To me, that’s boring.  It just becomes assembly line work, ‘oh, crank out another one that’s the same’.  So I feel that they (the albums) become a companion piece to each other, but they’re totally different.  And I think it’s hard when people want to compare a record that they’ve been listening to for 10 years to a record they’ve been listening to for 10 minutes.  Of course the one they’ve had for 10 years is meaningful to them and the one they just got means nothing yet, so it’s almost ridiculous to make that comparison.”

Zombie’s uncommon mix of hard-hitting heavy metal with beat-driven grooves developed during the White Zombie days of the early to mid 1990s continues to be delivered in ways that only he can.  And while Zombie’s work often includes samples from classic, and often obscure, horror flicks (on the new track “What?” you hear the cute devil child from the 1977 cult horror flick The Child, “I don’t have to tell you anything!”) juxtapositioned with horrifying, yet abstract lyrics, he says the songs are not always inspired by the macabre. 

“There’s not one specific thing that I can think of that I will keep going back to, but there’s always something,” says Zombie, on the topic of inspiration.  “And it’s sometimes something that is really very different from what it will inspire me to do… There’s always a book or a movie or something that I’ll see on TV.  It could be the strangest thing that I’ll see that will really inspire me and set me off on a course with something.”

Bouncing between world tours, metal albums and horror films, plenty of inspiration is needed, yet not in short supply for a man as busy as Zombie. The man has a hand in every aspect of his art, from writing and performing the songs, to mixing and editing them, even designing the cover and booklet artwork.

“I have a single vision that I see and it’s not because I’m a control freak or anything, it’s just that I don’t know how else to get ‘there’.  It’s hard to hire other people that can reach into your mind and accomplish what you’re trying to do,” says Zombie, who for this tour has hired former Marilyn Manson guitarist John 5 on guitar, Piggy D, guitarist for the ever shocking horror-punk act Wednesday 13 on bass, and Slipknot’s Joey Jordison behind the drums.  “When you do find people that you feel can do that, it’s great to add them to the team because you can’t literally do it all yourself so you have to find people you can work with to help bring it to life so that’s what I’m always trying to do.”

These visions also come through in his live shows.  This time out, Zombie shares the stage with proto-shock rocker Alice Cooper for the Gruesome Twosome Tour, a tour both say should have happened a long time ago.  Cooper has been a friend of Zombie’s for several years and, obviously, a major influence on (even making a brief cameo via a poster on a bedroom wall in Zombie’s latest film, Halloween II).  Being tight with one of his biggest influences, however, doesn’t change the fact that Zombie is still a big fan of Cooper’s stage persona.

“Everybody transforms into a different person when they get on stage,” says Zombie.   “We’ll be hanging out backstage, laughing, joking or eating dinner or something, but when he goes on stage he becomes such a different person that I react to it differently.  When I watch it as a show, I don’t even think of it as the person I was just joking around with five minutes ago.”

One can’t help but wonder just how many people they’re scaring with their cross-country show.  Zombie is no stranger to scaring folks in Tennessee, once being forced to relocate a concert from Johnson City to Bristol after protesters made their fear known.

“I can’t remember the last time that happened..,” he says. “I think sometimes if there are people out front (protesting) it’s usually one person with a megaphone that is usually a mental patient anyway.  I would hope people have bigger issues to deal with in their lives than that.”

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-jtf

This is post 29 of 30 in my most recent attempt at tackling NaBloPoMo. Funsies and such.