There’s a reason Rob Zombie has been so successful as a horror-movie
director: He knows how to build suspense and how to keep a secret until
it’s time to spring it on fans. When interviewed for this story a few
weeks ago and asked why his forthcoming album Hellbilly Deluxe 2:
Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls and the Systematic Dehumanization of
Cool was being delayed from a mid-November release to early 2010,
he said nothing about switching labels.
“We pushed it back a couple of weeks because we had run into
scheduling conflicts,” he says. “I tried to plan the ending of the
press on Halloween II and leading into the tour and the record
perfectly, but it just became too crunched. We looked at it one day and
said, ‘We need a couple of extra weeks to get this done.’ We had no
time to make a video, no time for anything and it just became a fiasco.
So as much as I hate moving things, because I’m excited to get it out
there, I was like ‘Ah, screw it.’ Because the single’s out there, we’re
going on tour, it’s kind of the same. So we just bumped the record a
couple of weeks.”
It’s going to be a couple of months, actually, and there will be a
major change. After nearly 20 years (White Zombie’s debut, La
Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1, was released in 1992), he’s left
Geffen Records for Roadrunner’s new Loud & Proud imprint, also home
to Sammy Hagar, Ratt, Tommy Lee’s rap-metal nightmare Methods of Mayhem
and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The shift may surprise fans, not only because
Zombie remains more creatively relevant than most of his new labelmates
(with Hagar the sole possible exception), but also because he recently
made a statement many misread as his retirement from music.
“I’ll keep making records,” he explains. “I mean, l love it. The
problem is, I posted something online, and no matter how clearly you
word something, everyone misinterprets it. What I said was, this could
most likely be the last CD. You know, like a packaged CD. Because a lot
of people were saying, ‘Ah, by this time next year we won’t even be
manufacturing these damn things!’ Which maybe was ringing the death
bell too early. But that’s what I meant. I was just saying that I
wanted to make the packaging and presentation of this album as
elaborate as possible, for fear that by the time I go to make my
next record, people would be like, ‘Oh, we don’t even press
those things anymore.'”
Two HB2 songs, “What?” and “Sick Bubble-Gum,” have already
been released, and they indeed sound more like Zombie’s 1998 solo debut
than his last studio album, 2006’s Educated Horses. “I had the
idea of making Hellbilly Deluxe 2 because I always thought that
would be cool, but I wasn’t gonna force that title on any record that
we made.” Once the album was in the can, he lived with it for a few
months before deciding that it deserved the title of sequel.
In addition to being his first record on a new label, Hellbilly
Deluxe 2 is a landmark in another way. It’s the first album Zombie
recorded with his longtime road band: guitarist John 5, bassist Piggy
D. and drummer Tommy Clufetos. He’s extremely happy about that: “It
finally feels like the situation you always hope for that never seems
to materialize — a band of guys that are all friends and they’re
all musically on the same page, working together.”
Having that sort of tight-knit group will make it easier to get back
on the road for the first time since a co-headlining tour with Ozzy
Osbourne in 2007. With the exception of a bare-bones turn headlining
the second stage of Ozzfest in 2005, Zombie’s concerts have always been
visual spectacles as much as musical events, and this year’s outing
promises to live up to that legacy. The one thing that will be missing
is the huge jets of flame that have been frowned upon since the tragic
2003 Great White concert inferno.
“I gotta tell you, man, it’s almost impossible to get a pyro license
these days,” he says. “I wanted to do pyro, and we kept going through
the list of places, and it was like, no, no, no, no. And these were
places I’d done pyro every time I’ve gone there. It’s so rare that
someone will grant you a license to do it. And they’ll come up with the
most ridiculous excuses like, ‘You can’t use propane in the venue.’ I’m
like, what are you talking about? Every forklift, every vendor that’s
cooking the hot dogs is using propane. We’re the only people that have
licensed people doing it. Our people are more qualified than the people
in the venue. And they’re like, ‘Well, we don’t care.'”
Zombie’s solution is to replace flame with video projections, lasers
and LCD screens. “It’s a pretty mind-blowing show, it just doesn’t
revolve around fire in your face,” he says. “But no one’s gonna miss it
because this other stuff more than makes up for it.”
While the two new songs will almost certainly make it into the live
set, fans shouldn’t expect a big dose of unfamiliar material. “I do not
go out on tour and say, ‘Here’s five new songs off the new record that
nobody gives a shit about yet,'” laughs Zombie. “We’ll play the single
and maybe one other song, but you want to play all the songs from all
the other records that people love. ‘Cause nothing’s worse than an
entire night of new stuff. I hate that, and I think most people
do.”
Once he gets off the road, Zombie will get back to his other career
as a movie director. What may surprise fans is that — like horror
heroes John Carpenter and Wes Craven before him — he’s hoping to
expand beyond the genre that made his name. “I don’t know what the next
movie is,” he says, “But if it’s the movie I want it to be, it’s not
gonna be a horror movie. I find that the horror genre can be actually
too limiting, because it comes with its own set of baggage and rules
and clichés that I don’t want to deal with. And you can break
away from that more in other genres.”
This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2009.
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