Why 90's Era group White Zombie Broke Up
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Formed in 1985, White Zombie’s sound would undergo a metamorphosis during their career from Noise Rock to more heavy metal sound achieving a lot of success during the early to mid 90’s. But by the end of the decade the band called it quits. Today, let’s talk about why the band broke up.
Rob Zombie spent his formative years in Hav (hay)erhill, Mass., a depressed industrial outpost where zombie spent most of his time hanging out at cemetirers;
Zombie would be pretty anti-social as a kid having different interests from his peers telling the LA Times “I grew up with really normal, straight parents, but they let me and my brother do anything we wanted to do. They took us to see ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’ I remember seeing, like, ‘Phantom of the Opera’ when I was 5 years old.” He would spend eight hours a day watching TV and it soon became an obsession for the future musician with him literally watching anything that was broadcast on TV and he would memorize the tv schedule for the week. This eventually led him down the road of making his own super 8 films.
Apart from television, Zombie would develop a taste for larger than life musical acts including Kiss, Blue Oyster Cult and Alice Cooper. Couple this with his love of the DIY ethos of punk rock and Rob Zombie had the basic blueprint for White Zombie.
The band would form when bassist Sean Yseult and frontman Rob Zombie both met while attending the Parsons school of design. The band’s first drummer was also a student at the same school. Yseult would reveal in the book Louder THan Hell “Rob & I were both oddballs. I think we were drawn to each other. We started the band within a month of meeting and basically lived together for seven years. We both had dyed black hair, he had a stenciled misfits leather jacket and i had a bunch of animal bones tied onto a necklace” They would date but break up during the early 90’s with Yseult telling the chicago tribune "The whole band and the business just got so much bigger than any relationship," The band would have a variety of drummers during this time and found a guitarist named J (Jay Yuenger) who went by the name J.
White Zombie would be the amalgamation of two scenes the noise rock scene of new york which included bands like Sonic Youth and the hardcore scene in DC including minor threat, bad brains and dave grohl’s pre-nirvana band scream. To Rob he had the goal of not only giving fans a spectacular music video for there songs, but also be able to give fans an equally as impressive live show rigging their own pyro.
The band would sign to label Caroline records who put out their first two album 1987’s soul crusher and 1989’s make them die slowly.
But the road to gain recognition was a long one. The band’s first release 1987’s soul crusher seemed to go unnoticed or was misunderstood with Yseult revealing in louder than hell People didn’t really get it. We would play a lot of those things together. We would play this really heavy music in clubs in the east village and all these hipsters just stared at us and scratched their heads. ” The reviews echoed a similar sentiment, but it was the band’s detractors that drove Rob Zombie to push forward. And while the sales didn’t reflect what was to happen soon the group’s first album found an audience with some accomplished musicians at the time including Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
The band soon built up a crowd of followers at venues including CBGB’s and started playing metal clubs widening their audience. .
By the early 90’s they would soon nab a recording contract with major label Geffen Records and the band would move out west to Los Angeles.
The group’s first record for Geffen La Sexercisto Devil Music Volume 1 which came out in march of 1992 would be a slow burn. Entertainment Weekly would publish an article in October of 1993 that highlighted that the album had moved only about 75,000 copies before one of singles welcome to planet motherfers was featured on the mtv hit show beavis and butthead.
Rob would tell entertainment weekly ”The record immediately started picking up in markets where we never played, like Wyoming and Missouri-places where Bea