The rise and fall of the band White Zombie.
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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 take a look at the rise and fall of White Zombie.
Rob Zombie born Rob Straker (Stray-ker) , spent his formative years in Haverhill, Mass., a depressed industrial outpost the singer described to the LA Times as and i quote “a place where nothing ever happens. Some magazine voted it the No. 1 worst place to live a few years ago. There was just nothing to do there except hang out in cemeteries. They had these old, New England-style graveyards, and we just used to play around in those all the time. “
Zombie would be pretty anti-social as a kid having different interests from his peerstelling 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.” Zombie 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 evenvtually 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 th ehardcore 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 telling the LA Times “When we started out, the metal scene was, like Twisted Sister and that kind of stuff, so the only place to start was [the alternative scene]--which I thought was so pretentious, “The attitude of those bands was, ‘We get on stage, make no effort whatsoever, be completely nondescript, and you guys in the audience are supposed to eat it up. You kids are supposed to just worship our feet.’
“My feeling is, if you’re expecting people to come and pay 20 bucks to see your show, you’d better look up from your . . . shoes once in a while. I like to see a band that gets up there and works hard for my entertainment dollar. It would result in the band rigging their own pyro using items they bought from industrial stores.
Despite being hailed as an underground band in their early days that wasn’t the group’s aim as Yseult told greensboro.com `we were an underground band, but not by choice,' ``with Rob adding 'We've always been trying to sell out, it's just that no one's buying.
It was during their early years the members lived on New York's Lower East Side, where Zombie and Yseult supported themselves doing mechanicals for a magazine, while guitarist J. delivered pizzas, sometimes with dangerous results telling Greensboro.com ``I got robbed a couple of times, one time with a knife to my throat, on