Rob Zombie Speaks to Revolver About New Album, White Zombie

Super-bearded ROB ZOMBIE gave REVOLVER a chance to pick his brains about the upcoming WHITE ZOMBIE box set Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, as well as his next solo endeavor. Read the interview right here and check an excerpt out below:

What were your influences when White Zombie started up?

I grew up on arena rock back in the ’70s. I loved Alice Cooper, KISS, Blue Öyster Cult, Queen. But then later, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I discovered punk rock, the Ramones and all of that. So White Zombie was always a conflict of both worlds-a DIY punk-rock mentality while trying to create an arena-rock band. We loved Black Sabbath, the Birthday Party, the Cramps, the Misfits, Van Halen. Back when we started, we got a lot of ‘What’s with you guys? What’s the deal?’ ‘Cause we had long hair and were playing with bands that didn’t, because we weren’t playing in the heavy-metal scene, we were playing in this New York Sonic Youth underground, and everyone was very college-y, and we…weren’t! [Laughs]

That might’ve led to the gigging problem.

Yeah, well, we didn’t really fit in anywhere. Everything was very much a scene, and we weren’t-I mean, at that point, New York hardcore was very much Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, and we obviously weren’t that. And then the art-rock scene, Sonic Youth, Live Skull, we didn’t really fit into that either, so we sort of just got lost in between them.

I think it was really Make Them Die Slowly when you guys really focused more on metal. Why did you take that direction?

Well, it was that thing of being trapped between two worlds. We couldn’t play here, couldn’t play there. But in Brooklyn-it’s amazing what happens when you cross the bridge-there was a club called L’Amour, and it was like a whole new world. We would rehearse in Brooklyn ’cause our drummer lived there, and he was big into going to L’Amour, and we started going there. And I was like, Fuck it, this is where it’s at! In Manhattan, you’d maybe play one or two shows, and also, that art scene was just so pretentious. It was very fanzine- and critic-driven, which always bothered me. And then when we went out to the metal scene, there’d be 2,000 kids at a show going ape-shit, and I thought, Fuck yeah! You guys’re having fun while everyone else is staring at their shoes back in Manhattan. So we thought, Fuck it, let’s just declare ourselves a metal band, even though we really weren’t, musically. We never knew what to call ourselves, so we decided to just call ourselves that.

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