Rob Zombie: ‘The Days of Selling 3 Million Albums Are Over’
(photo: Jason Davis/Getty Images)
“After you hit a certain point in your career, you’re almost not trying to appeal to any group of people,” Rob Zombie tells Yahoo Music a few days before the release of his sixth solo album, The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser. “You’ve done what you’re going to do, and that’s fine, and you’re not worried about selling records anymore.”
With a successful film career and one the most visually appealing live shows in rock, Zombie doesn’t have to think about selling records – which gives him a freedom he didn’t have a decade ago, when record companies were strongly urging him to make commercial music.
“When you make ‘Well, Everybody’s F—ing in a U.F.O.’ you’re first single right out of the gate, you’ve already made the statement that most radio is not going to play this. But who cares – especially now? As soon as I did the song I thought, ‘Well, I know this will be one of the most popular songs we do live, even if it’ll never be on the radio.’ And that’s what really matters.”
While it’s true that the stage is where Zombie comes alive, fans haven’t abandoned his records yet, even if rock radio has. The week of its release, The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser debuted at #6 on the Billboard album chart and was the only rock record in the top 30. It would have been #4, if two previously released Prince albums weren’t near the top of the chart.
Fans who bought The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser were treated to the same sort of artsy carnival metal Zombie has been churning out since he was in White Zombie in the early to mid-‘90s. The difference is that Zombie took the better part of a year writing with guitarist John5 (ex-Marilyn Manson) and didn’t give himself any date by which it had to be finished.
“During that time we’d work, write songs, break down, go on tour, take a break, come back, work on it some more, take a break, come back, go on tour, and work on it some more,” Zombie says. “It was a cool way to do a record, because in the music business you usually have to race into the studio and they go, ‘OK, here’s your five weeks.’ You can’t really come up with good stuff that way. You might come up with one or two things, but you’re going to have a whole lot of junk. By dragging it out over a long period of time you can really live with it.”
Zombie stands by every record in his catalog – even the introspective, largely unappreciated 2006 disc Educated Horses – but he’s especially pleased with The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration. That’s why, when he finished it almost a year before it was released, he held onto it since he knew he wouldn’t have a significant window of time to tour the record until he was done with his latest film “31,” which is scheduled to hit theaters Sept. 16.
“I really believe in this record and I really love it, and that’s why I didn’t want to release it a year ago when we finished it. I just didn’t want it to be overlooked. I figured that the record wasn’t going to get old, so it was fine if I waited to put it out. Records don’t last that long these days anyway. Even if you have a #1 record, it seems like by week two everybody’s already forgotten about it.”
With The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration still fresh in the minds of Zombie’s fans, the theatrical rocker talked about the perverse joy that comes from breaking convention, the obstacles he encountered making the new record, his contempt at how the media sub-compartmentalizes music, and the advantages of keeping records short and simple.
YAHOO MUSIC: Were you shooting for the longest album title of all time with The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration? Couldn’t you just have shortened it to The Electric Warlock Acid Witch or something?
ROB ZOMBIE: Sometimes you look at things and you just question them. You go, “Why do album titles have to be short? Why does it have to be easy?” And when I ask myself why something has to be a certain way, it makes me want to do something that’s the complete opposite. I don’t usually title albums until they’re done. That’s when I look at it and listen to it and go, “OK, what does this feel like?” And that’s the title that summed up the record to me, so I just went with it.
Do you feel like a product of the ‘70s?
I really believe that everyone is, in a major way, a product of the time you were exposed to music and it really mattered to you. Listening to music as a kid in the early ‘70s was so great because nothing seemed outrageous. It was like, “OK, there’s David Bowie. OK, There’s Diana Ross. OK, there’s the Bee Gees. OK, there’s Alice Cooper. There’s Meat Loaf.” Everybody would seem like an individual, an artist. And you didn’t bat an eye at it, you just accepted whatever crazy thing was put in front of you.
What subjects did you want to address in the new album, besides f—ing in a U.F.O.?
The content is always all over the place, and it’s not necessarily about me and it’s not meant to say something concrete. I like music that’s kind of confusing. I get most bored when it’s like, “Here’s a song about ‘this.’” And the lyrics say exact what the song’s about. I’m like, “OK, I kind of got it from the title.” But I think that comes from the love I have for ‘70s music and the vibe they had. You’d listen to [Elton John’s] “Benny and the Jets” or [The Beatles’] “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and you’d be like, “What the f— is this song about?’ I’ve been listening to it for 25 years and I still don’t have clue, but I love it anyway.”
Did spending almost a year on the new album pay off?
You can always find something to complain about, but this is the happiest I’ve been with an album in a long, long time. By living with these songs for a while, we were really able to hone them down and shorten them and get to the point where there was really no filler. When we felt like we were at a crossroads where we weren’t feeling productive, we just stopped for a while. And then when we’d get back in and I’d go, “Oh my God, that song I couldn’t figure out last month, I can totally figure out now.” So that was actually a really good way to work.
The Electric Warlock… is a fairly short album. It’s 30 minutes of dense, surging music and then, boom – you’re out.
Those are the types of records I love. I like short, concise records where you don’t feel like people just threw in a bunch of stuff just to fill up space. I listen to some of my favorite records and I can’t believe they’re just 30 minutes long, because they present such a complete listening experience. And that’s probably why I played them from front to back again and again and again.
You have directed many successful horror movies. Is the song “Hideous Exhibitions of a Dedicated Gore Whore” about your film catalog?
No, not really. All the songs involve characters I’ve made up. I don’t know what that one is. Maybe it this year’s “Living Dead Girl.” I really don’t consider myself a gore whore. I don’t even use the term “gore” about my films, because I feel like that cheapens them. Nobody says, “Oh, the gore in Taxi Driver is so great.” In both horror movies and heavy metal, you’re always fighting against the box that everyone’s always trying to put you in. Gore or special effects or blood are all useless unless there’s characters and situations that you care about. There are movies that are a thousand times more bloody and gory than the s— I do.
Since you’re not a conventional metal band, people have categorized you as B-horror groove metal or even schlock-metal.
I hate that more than anything. I never think of what I’m doing as some kind of schlocky B-movie thing. I never think of what I’m doing as campy at all. The biggest problem I see today with music is it has become so compartmentalized. Satellite radio had played into that because they’ve categorized everything so much that you can literally go, “I only like this type of music, and that’s all I’m ever listening to.” As a kid, I’d listen to Allman Brothers one minute and the next I’d listen to ABBA. And that was cool, because it made me appreciate a wide range of music. I didn’t love everything, but it exposed me to a wide range of things and they were in my mind. I’d hear songs that were heavy, then I’d hear songs that were Southern rock or country. Then something would be disco-ish. And today I love pieces of all of that, and that’s why when we go to make records or write songs I’m happy to include all of that because I like it all. It’s not about, “Oh, this is the only way we ever tune our guitars and this is all we ever do forever.”
Does being a film director allow you to look at your music from a different perspective?
I think it’s almost vice-versa. I bring musical things into the movie world because there’s such a rhythm and a pace to music that if you can incorporate that vibe into a movie, it can create a really strong moment. Music is super-important to me so it’s super-important to my movies, and I’m really conscious of timing and pacing and feeling. Sometimes I’ll watch a movie and I’ll go, “Goddamn, man, this scene should have ended a long time ago, but it’s still going on. They didn’t know when to get to the chorus.”
You have said you want to shoot a cinematic video for each song on the new record.
I’m working on that right now. It’s sort of like a musical movie that goes with the album. You could look at it like 12 separate videos, but there’ll be other content where it really fits all together. I really love that movie Head that the Monkees did. So I was thinking it would be cool to do some psychedelic, crazy musical movie that goes along with the record. The CD had to come out on its own because the movie wouldn’t have been done in time. I don’t even know what I’m going to do with the movie. I may just put it out there for free. I’m not necessarily going to put it out on DVD. I’m not really sure yet.
These days, I’m just excited about making things and getting them out there. The endless battle about how you sell things and what you do, especially with music, becomes mind-numbing after a while.
Whenever you’re not making a record or a movie, it seems like you’re on tour.
For me, it has always been about playing live, but that’s the case more now than ever. That’s how we live or die. If you deliver live, that’s how you have a career; if you don’t deliver live, you better keep writing hits. But the way records are now you’re not like, “Oh, this is my touring cycle. These are the months I have to tour.” You can tour whenever, all the time, at a certain point in your career.
Do you plan to incorporate the new songs into your set?
You want a couple new songs to pop and be a part of your setlist just so you don’t get tired. You can just go out there every night and play the same songs every night that you know people love, but that gets boring. So I’m really hoping to get a couple new songs into the repertoire. I’m not thinking, “Oh, everybody’s going to embrace every song like they did 20 years ago.” That’s just unrealistic, because I’m just not going to sell 3 million copies of this record and have videos on MTV all day long the way I did back then. Those days are just over. Music’s different now.
Is it harder for you to perform today than it was 20 years ago?
This type of music is taxing. It’s physical and it’s hard to play. It’s one thing when you’re 20 and it’s another thing when you’re 50. But I haven’t slowed down because I haven’t had to yet. I don’t feel any side effects of aging. I figure that will happen at some point, or maybe it won’t. I don’t know. I saw the Stones not so long ago, and Mick Jagger didn’t seem that much different. He looks older, but he doesn’t seem older. So I’ll keep doing it as long as I can and as long as it’s fun.
