I’ve been getting a whole lot of email on this, but I’ve been waiting for an official release date to post about it. I’m In The Band is out Dec.7th : you can preorder on Amazon, and here’s the publisher’s page.
White Zombie’s like a black hole. For most people, it’s like we popped up out of nowhere, and then, a couple of years and a couple of platinum albums later, we disappeared. There’s almost no documentation of the history of the band, and so this is something of a mindfuck for me because it’s all here. I helped out a little while Sean was putting the book together as far as contributing some photos and memorabilia, remembering names and dates, but I just wasn’t prepared to see the entire timeline .. from the earliest days in Brooklyn, to my joining, to getting big, to breaking up .. laid out and illustrated like this.
So, sometimes, if there’s no work, I get restless, I get in the car, and I go. Road trips aren’t for everyone, and I don’t know if I would have gravitated to it had it not been for all the touring I did in my 20s, when we hit all 50 states relentlessly, some more than others – Alaska once, Detroit, I don’t know, 20 times? MiamiAlbuquerqueDesMoinesTacoma. Houston was White Zombie central, the first city that really got the band ( Really. We were like the fucking Beatles there. ) – and if you’re going to play Houston, which we did, again and again, why not play Dallas and Austin and San Antonio and Lubbock and El Paso and, good God, Corpus Christi?
Touring in a van is a grind, and you would imagine that trading up to a nice tour bus and hotel rooms would make things easy, but it’s not true. You’re still tired and disoriented all the time, you’re still always getting sick, but now you’re totally isolated, except for when you get caught — and what I mean by that is, you know what it’s like to wake up in the dark and stumble into the bathroom to brush your teeth, right? Now imagine waking up in the dark, which is humid and diesel-scented, and having to find out where your bathroom is ( this is before cell phones, by the way ) ,opening a door to a blazing hot parking lot, and encountering 20 people who are fascinated by you. You appreciate these people, you really do, and when you’re in a good mood you’re downright fond of them, but you really, really want to brush your teeth. You know from your own experiences of meeting bands you loved – who turned out to be gigantic assholes – that if you don’t sign everything that’s put in front of you and listen to every story about where they were when they first heard your music, you’re going to ruin the show for these kids, and their week, and they will waste no time telling everybody they know, ” That dude’s a DICK! ”
I digress. I drive around a lot, and I think that one of the best things about being an American is that you can drive, and 6-8-10 hours later you’re in a completely different place. No borders, you just watch the scenery change. It’s not like touring, which is work, and it’s not like going to an airport, being processed by harried, surly people, getting sealed in a big metal coffin, then getting spit out at another more confusing airport. One of the things I do on road trips is buy records - it’s not like that’s the focal point of my travels, but I always end up coming home with like 30 LPs. I’m not an analog snob ( yes, if you have a well-pressed jazz LP from the 1960s and an amazing vibration-free belt-drive turntable and a beautiful, expensive tube amp, there IS a delightful, hyper-real thing that happens with the stereo soundstage, but you don’t. And neither do I ), but vinyl’s how I really connect with music right now. Records are cool, and they’re fun. I just got back from a week and a half’s trip with the aforementioned stack and I made myself a little compilation from some of the tunes that popped out at me. These songs are all from old records, 1969-1985, except for the brilliant Swedish band Dungen, who are current – but if you didn’t know that and I told you that Sätt Att Se was recorded on a rainy Stockholm afternoon in 1970, you’d probably believe me. You can download the mix here.
ROAD TRIP RIOT
01. Fleetwood Mac : The City
( Mystery To Me, Warner Bros. MS 2158 )
02. Van Der Graaf Generator : Theme One
( Pawn Hearts, Charisma CAS 1051 )
03. Wire : I Am The Fly
( Chairs Missing, EMI/ Harvest SHSP 4093 )
04. Wire : Outdoor Miner
( Chairs Missing, EMI/ Harvest SHSP 4093 )
05. Keith Moon : Solid Gold
( Two Sides Of The Moon, MCA/ Track MCA-2136 )
06. Micronotz : Proud To Be A Farmer
( The Beast That Devoured Itself, Fresh Sounds FS-211 )
07. Mott The Hoople : Whisky Women
( Wildlife, Atlantic SD 8284 )
08. MX-80 Sound : It’s Not My Fault
( Out Of The Tunnel, Ralph MX-8002 )
09. Nilsson : You’re Breakin’ My Heart
( Son Of Schmilsson, RCA LSP-4717 )
10. The Professionals : Little Boys
( I Didn’t See It Coming, Virgin V-2220 )
11. Mott The Hoople : Original Mixed-Up Kid
( Wildlife, Atlantic SD 8284 )
12. Jeff Beck Group : Spanish Boots
( Beck-Ola, Epic BN 26478 )
13. Dungen : Sätt Att See ( Instrumental )
( Sätt Att See – Musik Av Dungen, Subliminal Sounds XMLP-SUB29 )
Wesley Willis was .. well, if you don’t know, here. I met him once, in Milwaukee at a Rocket From The Crypt show. I’d been hearing about him for years from my friends in Chicago, and he did not disappoint – he walked straight up to me and bellowed ” BUY MY CDS! ” .. which he carried around in a pouch around his neck. I’d heard that he wrote songs ( actually, the same song over and over ) about bands he saw or knew about, and when I saw the title of this one I thought to myself, ” Oh my God, could it be? “. As if headlining the Aragon Ballroom wasn’t enough – I saw many shows there, including Metallica on the Ride The Lightning tour, Ramones, Venom, the list goes on.. – here’s a commemoration of the event.
Wesley Willis : ” White Zombie “
Wesley Willis : ” White Zombie ”
Takumi Suetsugu was my guitar tech for a big chunk of my time in White zombie. Here’s a photo of him with a guitar belonging to a subsequent employer.
Here’s one from the archives : from the first time White Zombie played on Letterman, when we dove into the giant bowl of pudding – here’s me, getting Dave’s desk, coffee cup, and pencil all chocolate-y.
Lovingly handcrafted by Texas genius/madman Pat West and approved by the Young America Horror Club, here’s a real, working White Zombie Astro-Creep 2000 8-track. He made me a La Sexorcisto one too, for which he found the appropriate slime-green cart.
Here’s James Greene’s account of how, in the spirit of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon apparently syncing up perfectly with The Wizard Of OZ, he spent a very long time trying to find a record that would work with Star Wars. The answer? White Zombie. The original story is here.
I think we, the global movie-watching pop culture community at large, can all agree that there is a lot going on in The Wizard of Oz. Deadly tornados, flying monkeys, talking lions, Ray Bolger, regional witches of varying virtue, glittery shoes, singing munchkins—Jesus, there are even birds in the background that look like people trying to kill themselves. It’s really a tour de force of wacky crap, a carnival of Technicolor insanity that’s kept audiences entertained for decades. Few films can match Oz’s density; even the awesome 1978 remake fell flat by comparison (and that one had Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, back when they were still both at the top of their game). Yessir, there’s just no topping some cinematic spectacles.
Of course, in this age of cable television, instant playback, and re-re-re-recordable media, it is possible to desensitize one’s self to such greatness, to make the incredible mundane, the fascinating routine, the amazing boring. Too many TBS/VHS viewings have probably rendered Oz as pedestrian to some people as your average episode of Webster. This (and a heroic amount of pot, I speculate) is probably what led an unknown party sometime in the early ’90s to view The Wizard of Oz while listening to Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon. Why listen to Judy Garland’s warbling when you have a mute button, right? Throw on some Floyd, spark a doob, and let the colorful Land of Oz jack off your brain.
Sounds like a pretty killer way to burn off a few hours late on a Sunday afternoon. What no one in the world expected, though, was that there would be some kind of interstellar connection between these two seemingly unrelated properties. Indeed, it would turn out that, when started at the correct moment, a good majority of Dark Side of the Moon would mirror the events in Oz. Nearly 60 moments of synchronicity occur, just enough to blow the minds of every burned-out classic rocker and rabid Bert Lahr fan on the planet. Mainstream media first picked up on the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” phenomenon in 1995, thanks to a piece by Charles Savage in Indiana’s Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (those guys are always on the cutting edge).
“The result is astonishing,” wrote Savage, who tried the experiment himself. “It’s as if the movie were one long art-film music video for the album. Song lyrics and titles match the action and plot. The music swells and falls with characters’ movements.”
Savage chalked the whole thing up to the “Infinite Monkeys, Infinite Typewriters, Shakespeare” thing, igniting fierce debate over whether Roger Waters and his pals planned this elaborate, impressive joke or whether it was just the will of the cosmos. The members of Pink Floyd deny they intentionally created an alternate soundtrack for MGM’s most beloved film of all time and generally seem disgusted at the very notion they’d waste their time with such nonsense. This is the same band, though, that gave the world that Pulse CD with the stupid little blinking light in it. They also, at one point, relied on giant inflatable pigs to get their musical message across. So, you know, they could be full of it.
Like any other urban legend-obsessed member of Generation Y, I was quite intrigued by this “Dark Side of the Rainbow” business. In 2005, during a rather severe employment drought, it was on my mind constantly. How is something like this even possible? Is David Gilmour a Highlander? How does the KGB factor into this? I began to wonder about other likely film/music synchronicities. One night, as I lay in bed not making money and getting fatter by the minute, an exciting thought hit me:
Whoa, wait a minute—I bet that one White Zombie album totally synchs up with Star Wars!
White Zombie’s landmark 1992 album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1 certainly seemed like the type of sample-heavy rock freak-out that would align perfectly with a wild, outer space adventure starring Mark Hamill. Also, I figured it would be pretty cool watching Darth Vader parade around to all those bad-ass metal riffs. That alone might keep me from dozing off in the middle of said experiment. The following evening, I popped Star Wars into my VCR—that’s right, I only rock the original Star Wars trilogy, sans all that goofy CGI crap Lucas added two decades after the fact; this was a year before those “original unaltered” trilogy DVDs (which were sort of lousy anyway) came out. So anyway, I popped Star Wars into my VCR, hit “PLAY” on White Zombie immediately after the second 20th Century Fox drumroll, and hoped I wouldn’t fall asleep.
Oh, I would not be drifting off during this experiment, dear reader. Strange things started happening from the get-go. The first explosion soundclip in “Welcome to Planet Motherfucker” occurred at the same exact moment the Star Wars title burst onto the screen. Wow. A short time later, Darth Vader made his first appearance as the “Get up and kill!” soundclip from Dawn of the Dead was heard in “Psychoholic Slag.” Something was happening here. C-3PO’s stiff movements through the Tatooine desert matched up with the creaking at the start of “Black Sunshine.” I heard Rob Zombie sing “Take me away!” in “Soul Crusher” as C-3PO tried to convince Uncle Owen to buy him. This was getting weird.
I found this Road To Ruin cart at a thrift store while White Zombie was on the road with the Ramones in 1995, and the band graciously signed it for me. There was much eye-rolling, especially by Johnny. Everybody hates 8-tracks.
Richard Hell: “I felt an immediate affinity with the Ramones. I dug them and didn’t have any reservations about them. They were just the way they always were. Lisa Robinson hired me to write about them in Hit Parader – the first article about them that was ever published nationally. All their songs were two minutes long, and I asked them the names of all their songs. They had maybe five or six at the time: ‘I Don’t Wanna Go Down In The Basement’, ‘I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You’, ‘I Don’t Wanna Be Learned, I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed’, and ‘I Don’t Wanna’ something else. And Dee Dee said, ‘We didn’t write a positive song until ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’.’ They were just perfect, you know?”
Here’s a photo taken by Dave Dude, who was a roadie for Reverend Horton Heat – it’s a cool shot, either infrared ( that was fun stuff, I miss it ), or he used normal film and pushed the hell out of it. Somewhere in America, that’s all I can tell you.
Beowülf was a band from Venice, CA. White Zombie had an odd connection to them because we were both signed to Caroline Records, who also released albums by two other Suicidal Tendencies-affiliated punk-skate-thrash-metal groups, Uncle Slam and Excel, who we shared bills with several times. We did, in fact, play a show with Beowülf on my first WZ tour, which was during Summer 1989, a few months after I joined the band. It was in a garage in Albuquerque, NM and I don’t remember much about it ( it’s hard to remember much about this period at all except that I was very excited to be in a cool NYC band, have my own Marshall stack, and be on a nationwide tour, which meant that, for the time being, I was not homeless ) except that we were well-received ( Albuquerque is one of those American cities, like Phoenix, Houston, and Detroit, which is not the least bit glamorous but where the people are fanatical about heavy music. If you have a rock band, these are the very best places to play ) — I’d been a little apprehensive about these guys because of their Suicidal/ Venice gang image, but they were friendly if, as was usually the case at the time, unsure as to what to make of us. I remember also that they went on a beer run and got into a semi-serious accident.
Anyway, I always liked this song, which is from their 1988 LP ” Lost My Head… But I’m On The Right Track ” — they get a perfect double-bass Motörhead kind of tempo going and just blaze away, with a cool, rolling feel that’s at once aggressive and laid-back.
Beowülf : ” Muy Bonita “
Beowülf : ” Muy Bonita ”
I like this photo, looks like some rock power’s going on. Here’s me onstage, somewhere, sometime. 1993, most likely, because Sean’s still playing her Epiphone bass, and I’m still playing my Jackson ” devil head ” strat, a handsome and fantastic-sounding guitar that I never should have sold. Also in this shot, the slime-green and black STP shirt I made in a rooming house bathroom in Brooklyn. Additionally, there’s this.
It’s hard to remember much about this period. We didn’t live anywhere and we didn’t stop touring, hitting most towns twice, as an opening act and then again as a headliner, every couple of months. If you took this picture, let me know and I’ll credit you.
This here’s about as close as you’re ever going to get to a White Zombie reunion, not that Sean and I are actually playing together on this record – well, I probably did play a little tambourine or something, but it’s hard to remember. Here’s 3 songs from the brand new Rock City Morgue LP, ” The Boy Who Cried Werewolf “, which we recorded over a bunch of different sessions at Piety Street and some other places in New Orleans. Rik Slave sang ” Carry It With You ” in an abandoned pre-civil war building, in 90º heat, in the dark, lit only by the glowing tubes in an antique radio. That sounds so made-up, doesn’t it? It’s not — if you listen closely you can hear the extra-spooky sound.
Rock City Morgue : ” Creeping In The Dark “
Rock City Morgue : ” Creeping In The Dark ”
Rock City Morgue : ” Burn “
Rock City Morgue : ” Burn ”
Rock City Morgue : ” Carry It With You “
Rock City Morgue : ” Carry It With You ”
I’m continuing my struggle to organize and consolidate the mountain of crap I’ve got and today saw me starting to open boxes of stuff from my White Zombie years. This was a bittersweet experience for a couple of different reasons, one being that I have a great collection of unique photographs, zines, demo tapes, and souvenirs of every kind — and when the recently released WZ box set was being put together, nobody saw fit to ask me – or Sean, or Ivan, or John T. , or anybody else who was involved with the group – about what we might have.
I’ve already stated my dissatisfaction with the box’s poor design and lack of written content, liner notes and credits, but looking at all this good stuff made me feel shittier about the whole thing.
The other thing, and if you live in New Orleans everything goes back to this, is Hurricane Katrina .. part of the roof of my storage space blew off in the storm and my junk didn’t get rained on directly, but it did get wet. The WZ boxes were on top and got the wettest, and then baked – mostly everything is okay, but some photos got ruined — you can see some damage on the lower right hand corner of the pic below.
This picture was taken by Michael Lavine almost exactly 20 years ago. I know because I met Rob and Sean the day after MLK day, 1989, and almost right after that they called me to come and do this photo session with them – before I had played a note – in fact, this night was when I first met their drummer Ivan. I like to kid myself that I was so cool that they started to integrate me into the band before I even tried out, but the truth is more along the lines of them desperately trying to find anyone with a pulse and some hair to play guitar – and Michael wanting to try out some new lights and needing a subject. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I’d followed the band closely in the year and a half since I’d moved to New York City and that I sort of ” got it ” … and I certainly did put everything I had into the band from that point on. Anyway, check this out — I’m just 22 years old and I’m trying to figure out how to look tough without a beard. Cute!!
