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| Biloxi, MS Review of Zombie in Concert & Backstage on March 05, 1999. Posted by Brooks Johnson on Sunday, 7 March 1999, at 2:17 p.m. What a hell of a day... Anyways, I arrived at the Gulfcoast Coliseum with my brother Robert to pick up our tickets at the Will-Call Window, and had no problems getting in. The woman at the window seemed kind of surprised, though. She asked me something like, "Did you win yours, or are your tickets from the band?" I said, "From the band". "Which member?", "Rob", I said again. She, and the people behind me were like, "Holy shit, he's got to be kidding." She had a shocking look on her face too, then pulled up the envelope that Rob had given her, and it had my name on it! It was hard to hear, but she was telling me to read the envelope and do exactly what it reads. It stated, "* Come backstage after Zombie's set." Wow, people behind us were still kinda' freaked out. So I said "Okay", and she handed me the envelope to sign, so nobody could claim they were Brooks Johnson, and get the tickets. I let my brother hold the tickets and all, and we waited at the gates for about 2 hours so we could get seats up front. Well, the doors opened, everyone got inside after being searched with a metal detector. Damn, I could have brought a camera in, they didn't pat anybody down! I was extremely angered for a little bit, because I could have taken some really kick ass pictures. Oh well, anyways, many people bought shirts before the concert, and I saw quite a few of them being torn, stretched, and what-not. My cousin lost 2 shirts during the concert, so go figure. This should teach anybody a lesson: Never buy your gear before the concert. As we walked inside the coliseum, we were going to go to our seats, and I noticed that nobody cared where they sat, and nor did I. My brother and I were supposed to sit in Seat V, Row/Box 104. This was towards the back, and I said, "Fuck that shit, let's go somewhere else." So we did, and we were above one of those overhangs for the hallways, we were pretty high-up on the stands, but extremely close to the stage. We were less than halfway up the stands though, but they are very tall. I told Robert (just picking on him by-the-way), "When Zombie comes up, we are going to the mosh pit"... He didn't really look to happy about that, because this is his first "real" concert. Anyways, between stage changes, and before shows came on, they were playing hip-hop/R&B type music... Weird eh? Oh well, it's not like that was a big deal. So anyways, Videodrone, the opening band comes up, and people went crazy for a little while, then calmed down. This has to have been the worst fucking opening band ever. To me, it sounded like the band, "Orgy" with a hardcore rap-tinge to it. What can I say, they totally blew, and I didn't dig it. Anyways, it took about 30 minutes (or an hour, I can't recall) for Zombie's stage to come up, and god damn, everybody was really fucking hyped. Halfway into the stage setup, people starting screaming and yelling like fucking maniacs, I looked on stage, and couldn't tell why they were, but I was thinking because someone from the band may have peeped out the curtain to look. People were just going insane, I'm just so fucking amazed. This was my first Zombie show I've ever been to, and I've been a big fan of Zombie for years and years. I was usually busy or broke, so I couldn't go to them. Well, on with the review. The crowd went quiet for a while, as people were coming back from the bathrooms and what-not. A few minutes later, the lights dimmed, then turned off... Next thing I do, I look around at the audience, and there are lighters every-fucking-where, up and on, at this show of 13,000 people, who sold the motherfucker out. It felt like this was some sort of ritual... Lighters went off, Perversion 99 played, then merging at the end of Perversion 99 was Call Of The Zombie... The oscillating sound at the beginning of Superbeast played (UFO sound, as I call it.), and the crowd began with a big fucking uproar towards the end of the sound. Mother fuck, I was filled with MAX on my adrenaline meter, Johnny T., on drums, banged away, and fucking blew everybody out of their minds while Riggs and Blasko started the song crunching their fucking instruments better than it sounds on the CD. My fucking god, I was extremely surprised, this shit actually sounded better LIVE, than on the CD! Good thing they were recording this. (Cameras and soundboards were in the center of the Coliseum, in the crowd.) I'm DEFINITELY looking forward to the upcoming LIVE CD this year that is to be packaged with Hellbilly Deluxe. Usually it's the other way around, I'm more into the studio recordings, rather than live sounds. But these songs were heavier live, and better live, than on the CD. Also, about More Human Than Human, it sounded better live, and I don't understand why people say it's fucked up now, it sounded excellent. Rob barely ran out of breath as well, but what can you say, I'd run out of breath a few times too running around the whole time, ya' know? Anyways, I didn't see much, but shitloads of pyro was used, movies playing in the background, smoke, robots, dancers... You name it, you got it. At moments the pyro lasted for a long time, and lit up the entire crowd. In between songs Rob had the guys aim the lights to the crowd, and stuff like that. Anyways, here are some highlights: During Meet the Creeper, a giant robot on wheels came out and rolled around the stage and danced. Later on backstage, I found out that there were two guys inside of it, controlling it. This is a new Robot, and was my favorite robot that I saw during the show. During More Human Than Human, the Robot from the back of Hellbilly Deluxe also came out and started dancing. During Dragula, some sort of Confetti fell down all over the place. And also, during the last chorus of Dragula, a bunch of big bright red flares went up and lasted through the entire chorus, turning the audience a color of blood red! During many songs, the Go-Go Dancers came out and danced on pedestals. Supposedly a naked chick came out and started dancing right behind Tempesta while he was drumming. I didn't see this, but many of my friends did. All in all, Zombie put on a hell of a show, and I recommend ANYBODY, EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT A ZOMBIE FAN, to go to that damn show, because you'll have a hell of a time. My brother wasn't a fan of Zombie at all, but now he has a deep respect for them. (Especially after talking to them backstage and all.) Play list: Perversion 99 Call Of The Zombie Superbeast Super-Charger Heaven Real Solution #9 Demonoid Phenomenon Electric Head Pt. 2 Meet The Creeper More Human Than Human What Lurks On Channel X? Living Dead Girl Return Of The Phantom Stranger Thunderkiss '65 Dragula That's the play list from what I can remember (Over an hours worth), also, before Dragula, I believe it was Grampa Munster racing his Dragula, or something, I couldn't see, because my vision is pretty bad, but that's what it looked like to me. Most people sang with Thunderkiss '65 as well, and Rob was saying, "I'm gunna do somethin' a little old, somethin' you've probably never heard, maybe your parents have, so ask 'em about it..." Something like that, that's not exactly what he said, but that's basically what he was saying. Anyways, I missed Korn, because Zombie's set was over. So my brother and I left, and went to the back gates for backstage. We put our V.I.P. stickers on, and anxiously waited to get backstage because one of the Coliseum's security guards was a dick, and said, "No, you have to wait here, you can get back.", I bitched at him about it, and told him bullshit, and etc. (What's funny, is that he looked alot like George Romero!) Then as I waited, some nice lady (and quite pretty as well), confronted me a few minutes later and asked me, while she was walking backstage, "Are you Brooks Johnson?", "Yeah" I answered. She told me, "Rob's been lookin' for ya', come with me."... So I was like, "Okay, cool...", and we walked, and people wait Rob Zombie on Tattoos in 1992 Their CD's have titles like "Make Them Die Slowly" and their most recent Geffen Records release, "La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1." The music is straight-ahead heavy, not for the timid or weak in the ear--a refreshing escape to the bizarre end of the spectrum. Remember: The sun also shines on the wicked. And on wicked tattoos, which are the kind White Zombie acquires when they get around sharp objects like tattooing equipment. Rob Zombie, vocalist of White Zombie, is a straightforward person, and his philosophy on tattooing is as solid and practical as a hammer: "You want one, you get one. It hurts. You like it or you don't." Choosing an artist was easy for the dreadlocked singer. "I always liked the idea of them. The only reason I never got one before was that I never saw one that was really great until I saw Guy Aitchison's work. The last thing you want is a bad tattoo." Off-stage, Zombie is an accomplished artist. He designed most of the tattoos on his body, and collaborated with Guy on the others. He spent a short period of time in art school, but ditched it for good after deciding it was "horseshit." Zombie's tattooing is confined to his arms so far, but there's no real unifying theme behind his collection. "I always come up with an idea at the last second and say to myself, 'Gee, I hope I like it tomorrow.'" In the end, Rob plans on being fully sleeved, and it will be Aitchison that does the work. "Every time I go to Chicago, I see Guy." Straker said, "People say, 'Check out so and so, his work is just as good as Guy's.' And I look and say, 'No it's not.'" Thanks to LOKO, for sending us this fabulous article! Zombie 666 Jumpin' Rob Zombie BY KELLY RUSH Note: When I read this, I noticed a few errors in it, so take this interview with a grain of salt. I didn't correct any of the errors, and there were probably even more than I noticed. When one watches Rob Zombie on-stage displaying all his frenetic energy, jumping around, flinging his wildly dreadlocked hair in a tribal frenzy, it's not hard to imagine he'd need to channel that energy offstage as well. When doing the White Zombie thing, the band and music is his focus, but during the band's much-needed downtime, Rob never sits idle among his Ultraman memorabilia, Kiss videos and pop culture artifacts in his Los Angeles mansion. Though with his band's success these days - with two multi-platinum Geffen albums and a Grammy nomination in 1995 for their bouncy industrial single "More Than Human" and winning the Best Hard Rock Video category for the same song at the MTV Video Music Awards - Zombie could afford to lay low in his house, if he wanted to. It's been a long way to the top for Massachusetts-born Zombie and the other co-founding member, bassist Sean Yseult (whom Zombie met at New York's East Village landmark club CBGB's and became his girlfriend). Formed in 1985, the fledgling quartet took their fright-music/heavy metal sound to many New York City clubs like East Village's CBGB's and Brooklyn's now-defunct L'Amour's. They eventually landed a contract with independent label Silent Explosion and recorded two low-budget yet buzz-generating EP's, Psycho-Head Blowout (1986) and Soul-Crusher (1987). After performing and recording two other EP's (one of which, 1989's God of Thunder, was an all-covers tribute to a favorite bands, Kiss), the group signed onto Geffen and moved to Los Angeles - happily because of their disillusionment with New York's heavy metal scene. Their major-label debut, La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume 1 (1991) didn't take off until one of their videos were lauded by none other than the two of the most influential heavy-metal critics around, MTV's Beavis and Butthead. By the 1995 release of their follow-up, Astro-Creep: 2000 Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head, White Zombie has gained enough impact in the music biz to embark on a national tour with costly pyrotechnics and an elaborate stage-setup. After a major profile tour with other heavy metal rockers like Pantera, the band took off for a while and released the remix album Supersexy Swingin' Sounds (with their moderately-successful single, a cover of KC and the Sunshine Band's I'm Your Boogie Man") in the interim. Each member - currently including guitarist J., and drummer John Tempesta (who's two seat warmers after the first skin-basher Ivan de Prume) - contribute to the band's bizarre metal sound, but Rob told one interviewer that it's his "vision" that carries the final product. His perception by no means follows a normal path; as a youngster, Zombie (and his younger brother, Spyder who formed a similarly cartoonish-oriented metal band, Powerman 5000) spent countless hours of his childhood watching cult horror films like "Faster Pussycat" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" on TV. It was fittingly enough that when he moved to New York in the mid-80's, Zombie (born Robert Straker in 1966) became a production assistant for the wacky children's show, Pee Wee's Playhouse. With the unfortunate habit many people have of stereotyping others, few realize just how diverse and multi-talented Rob Zombie really is. You may have already realized that Rob does all the band's artwork, and you may even know he directs all their videos, but did you know his biggest, lifelong ambition is to make movies? It is, and amazingly enough, he's doing just that - in a big way! What are working on right now? I'm working on quite a few things. The main thing I'm working on is a movie. It's kind of the whole deal. It's for the next installment of The Crow series. I wrote the script and I'm just waiting to start shooting in August or early September. It came about in a really weird way. Towards the end of our last tour, I directed a video for "I'm Your Boogie Man" which was from The Crow: City of Angels. I gave it to the people who did the movie and I got a phone call, like, the next day, literally, going, "Oh wow, this video's fantastic. How do you feel about directing the next movie?? So I was like, "Great, I guess." I went in and I had a meeting with them and they said, "What's your idea for the movie?," and I pitched them my idea for the movie and they had 50 or 60 other people pitching them ideas but they seemed to like mine the best. I've been working on that for about the last six months or so. Can you divulge any of the direction that it's going to take? I don't want to give anything away, but I do want people to know that it's going to be really different, because I felt the first movie was pretty cool, but then I thought the second movie was just a remake of the first movie. It was the first one again, but not as good. This new one is going to be completely different. It's not going to try to look like Brandon Lee or act like him. The story is different, the whole situation is way out there. Did you ever think you'd get to the point of making a movie? Were you shocked? Getting offered to do a movie was shocking. I knew I'd get to the movie-making point on some level, because I said, "When this tour stops, I'm going to make a movie this year. I don't care on what level, if I pay for it myself." I didn't care what it was, but enough talking about it, I was going to do it. Having someone offer me this is way more than I thought. I just thought I'd do some weird, independent movie. I never expected anything like this, and I still don't know quite what to make of it. It's still very much an uphill battle. There's a very big difference between making a movie just to make a movie and dealing with a whole studio system. Were you into the comic books that spawned the original Crow story? You know, I never really read them. I knew all about them because I collect comics, and I had looked at them, but I really kind of got into the whole thing on the first movie because I was on tour and we were in North Carolina where they shot the first movie. I went down and visited the set and I got to hang out with [Brandon Lee]. It was really weird. It was about two weeks before he died and I hung out with him, then went on with the rest of the tour and when I got home, I heard about it so it was pretty freaky. How did you feel? I don't know. It was just really...freaky. And when I got to hang out with him, he was in full costume and make-up, so it was kind of surreal. It was kind of like I'd hung out with the guy from the movie, the character, not Brandon Lee. Then hearing that he died, and I finally got to see the movie a year later and he gets killed, it was very odd. It's amazing that you're doing all of these different things. Do you think people are really aware of how varied your talent is? I don't know what people are aware of, for the most part. I've noticed that with the band in general, people are unaware of the band's success. People ask me questions like, "Don't you wish that someday you could be as successful as so-and-so?? and I'm like, "So-and-so is opening up for us on our tour. We've sold ten times the records they have." There are certain bands where people, like, know. Then there's certain cases where people think they've sold tons more records than they've really sold. We're just one of those bands, and I'm just one of those people where others are strangely unaware of what's really going on. Which doesn't bother me. It kind of leaves you as being the underdog, rather than this overhyped sensation. What was it like touring with Pantera again? The summer tour was real good, but it was hard. It was a hard tour. It was tough because Pantera was just starting the tour and we were just ending our tour. For me it was hard, because I was pretty burnt. It was probably a tour I shouldn't have done. I was already exhausted. We had been touring for that album for two years and I thought we were done. Then someone proposed the idea and I didn't want to do it. It was just, you don't want to start sitting around for awhile, going "Jeez, maybe I do want to tour." This just seemed kind of cool because if it didn't happen then, it was never going to happen any other time, so I figured, "What the hell." It was kind of good at the moment of when people were like, "Hard rock is dead, it sucks," to go out as two bands selling out arenas. Respond to that statement - "Metal is dead." I think things just change. Everyone's sitting around saying, "Oh, heavy metal is dead," and they're waiting for some new wave so these bands that aren't popular anymore can get popular again. I just don't think that's going to happen. The term "metal" just got outdated. Marilyn Manson, Soundgarden, Tool, Korn, there are a million bands that fit that mold, but the term has just gone out of date because everybody thinks of the Scorpions. I don't think the music went anywhere, I just think the term became outdated. Are you sick of the whole White Zombie tourmongering thing where you go out for two years at a time? Would you rather do shorter tours and more other projects? Yeah. I like playing, so it doesn't bother me. Bands used to put out a lot of albums, but there seems to be a thing now where there are three years between albums. It seems so long. It seems so long to me being a fan of other bands. It takes so long to see new records that everybody figures the band broke up. But even with our last tour, in two years, we barely even scratched the surface. We didn't get to Japan. We only got to places like Australia once. We hardly got through Europe. It's just takes forever. Is it hard on you personally? Do you get sick of being out there? I find it really hard after awhile because your whole life is in limbo. It's hard, because you're gone for so long it's like you moved away. You lose all your friends. Not because they don't like you, but you're gone for two years at a time a |
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