Rob Zombie Talks Hellbilly Deluxe 2

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Rob Zombie's fourth studio album as a solo artist, which hits stores tomorrow, is his first since leaving Geffen Records, the label he'd worked with since White Zombie's La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1, way back in 1992. It's also his most organic; as usual, pretty much every song on Hellbilly Deluxe 2: Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls and the Systematic Dehumanization of Cool starts with sampled dialogue from schlocky horror movies you've probably never seen (and are better off for it), but the techno synths and dance beats of the past are 100 percent gone - this is the sound of a hardened road band (guitarist John 5, bassist Piggy D. and drummer Tommy Clufetos) cranking through amped-up, groove-centered metal in a room together. I was so surprised and impressed by the record, I decided to get Zombie on the phone and ask him about it. So here's a track-by-track run-through, with commentary by the artist himself.

"Jesus Frankenstein"
Is this the heaviest song you've ever recorded? It feels like it.
"I don’t really think of things in terms of ‘the heaviest,’ but it might be one of the heaviest songs we’ve done. We had a song called ‘Lords of Salem’ on the last album that was pretty heavy, too, though."

"Sick Bubblegum"
What's that title mean?
"'Sick bubblegum'" was a phrase I heard my friend Johnny Ramone use on some VH-1 special about the history of punk. They asked him how he’d describe the Ramones' music, and he said ‘bubblegum,’ but then he paused and said, ‘Sick bubblegum.’ I really liked that, so I wrote it down and that’s where the song came from."

"What?"
This is a really garage-rock song; it sounds very '60s influenced, with that organ sound, and the distorted vocals make you sound like Iggy Pop.
I think we played that song once, mistakes and all. I really love that garage-rock sound, those bad-sounding records, and I was using this microphone that really distorted my voice. I love playing that song live, ’cause sometimes you play them and it’s difficult to capture the sound, but you play that one and it sounds just like the record.

"Mars Needs Women"
There's a two-minute acoustic-guitar-and-bongos part that kicks this song off, and it sounds like a completely different thing - is it?
I guess it is two pieces stuck together in a way. John had written that mellow guitar thing and Tommy was playing along – I don’t think he was playing bongos necessarily, but I’m not really sure. We just loved it, but we didn’t know what to do with it. But then we thought it’d be kind of cool to have an intro piece that transitions to the song. It really doesn’t make any sense with it, in a way, but we liked it so we wanted to stick it on there in some fashion. Cause when “Mars Needs Women” kicks in, it’s so obviously its own track.

"Werewolf, Baby!"
Your lyrics are usually pretty nonsensical, but this song tells a whole story. I really like the lyric "I am a monster, can I come over" - was that the genesis of the song, like the line came to you and you built the rest of the song around it?
"I think it may have started with the title. Sometimes I take music home and I’ll work on lyrics, sometimes I’ll make ‘em up standing there in front of the microphone. I don’t have a particular method of working, but we definitely work fast, because I’ve found in the past that no results have ever gotten better by beating something to death. That was never more apparent than when I was doing the first Hellbilly, and we’d been working on a song forever and eventually we just threw it away, and then one day I popped in the cassette and said, ‘That was pretty good; why’d we throw that one away?’ And that was 'Living Dead Girl,' which turned out to be a pretty popular song on the record. That made me think, 'God, it’s so easy to overthink it where you love something and then you work on it to death and then you hate it.' So I don’t do that anymore; we work pretty fast and furious."

"Virgin Witch"
This song has an actual guitar solo - how much input did John 5 have into the songwriting and the sound of this record?
"Me and John 5 work real closely on everything, on this record and the last record too. He’s incredibly involved in everything. He’s there with me in the studio every single day, so he’s invaluable to the process."

"Death and Destiny Inside the Dream Factory"
This song's only two minutes long - it almost sounds like punk rock.
"I don’t know what inspired that. That was one of those ones that we had this vague idea for something and by the end of the day it was completely done. We kind of recorded it in the same fashion that we did 'What?,' leaving it sounding pretty trashy and then we just walked away from it. Truthfully, I would probably rather make the whole record sound like that. Those are my favorite tracks. They’re not the most commercial tracks, I don’t even know if they’re fan-friendly tracks, but they’re my favorites, 'cause it’s the closest to when you first start a band and you just get four people in a basement jamming and everything sounds like that. That was one of the things when I was putting together the White Zombie boxed set and I found all these old cassettes of us jamming. Everything sounded like that, it’s just how you sound when you start out, so it’s kinda fun doing it on purpose."

"Burn"
This song is the closest to your older material - was it something you'd had around for a while?
"Everything was brand new. Nothing ever sits around. When we finish a record there’s never any extra tracks, really, because we usually go, 'Okay, here’s eleven songs, done.' We don’t record thirty songs and pick through ’em, we just sort of finish the ones that we finish. I don’t remember much about that song. I remember we had the bass line kicking around for a while and John had some idea, he was basing it around something and was real keen on it but I don’t remember what anymore. I was just real big on trying to fit the 'Papa-oo-mow-mow' chorus into something, because I thought it would be absurd.

"Cease to Exist"
This isn't a cover of the Charles Manson song, but is that him talking at the beginning?
"No; there's lots of samples of people talking, but they're just these weird clips of science fiction writers, of all things. It’s a bunch of old science fiction writers being interviewed in the early ’70s, talking about their theories on things, and we had ‘em all playing at once, talking over each other so it just became gibberish. And I just always liked that title, 'Cease to Exist.' If I’m not mistaken, the Beach Boys did a cover of that song [by Charles Manson], but they changed the title. I always thought, “Damn, why’d they change the title? That was the best thing about it.” So if they didn’t want the title, I’ll use it."

"Werewolf Women of the SS"
So you have a male werewolf song and a female werewolf song on the same record...
"It was kind of funny how that happened. Kind of ridiculous to have two werewolf songs on one record, but it just happened that way. I was really kinda bummed at what happened with Grindhouse, where it didn’t turn out to be the big hit everyone was hoping for, but even beyond that, the trailers that had been made for Grindhouse, once they split the movies for DVD, they just disappeared. And I’d put a lot of work into the Werewolf Women of the SS trailer, and I hate the idea of things disappearing. It’s such a disposable time for things that I’m always trying to bring it back and keep it alive. So that’s why I thought it’d be kinda funny to write a song based on the trailer for a nonexistent movie."

"The Man Who Laughs"
This song has a five-minute drum solo in the middle, and an orchestra at the end. How'd that all come about?
"I was listening to a bunch of different music for other reasons, working on a different project, and I had been listening to Iron Butterfly in the car and the drum solo [from 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida'] came on while I was driving. Everyone always makes fun of that like it’s a joke or something, but I was stuck in traffic listening to the whole thing and I was really digging it. So it was fresh in my mind when I went into the studio that day, and I said to Tommy, 'Let’s put a drum solo on this song.' And he thought I was kidding, I think, at first, but then he went in and did it and the only thing was, he kept – I could hear that he was starting to wind down the drum solo after a minute, two minutes, three minutes, like he was thinking, how much does he want? And I just kept screaming out there, 'Keep going! Keep going!' So he went for about five minutes or whatever it turns out to be, and then he came in and he thought for sure I was gonna chop it down or not even use it and I just left it as is. It’s in the song."

It really surprised me the first time I listened to it, because the album was kinda powering along and I was thinking, "Wow, this album's pretty short," and then this five-minute drum solo just comes out of nowhere.
"It’s actually the longest record I’ve ever made as a solo artist. It’s more than ten minutes longer than any record I’ve ever made. We were just in a groove, crankin’ out songs. But I figured, how many kids these days have ever picked up a record and had a drum solo on it? Probably none. So what the hell. That one, in contrast to some of the other songs that are so stripped-down, that one has a 100-piece orchestra playing and a drum solo, we decided, let’s just pile it all into the last track. Tyler Bates, the composer who had done music for some of my films and Watchmen and 300, he composed the string section and we went into a different studio with a full orchestra and recorded it. They sat there and played along with the song."

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Awesome interview!

I love hearing commentary by artists about songs on albums.

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"Virgin Witch"
This song has an actual guitar solo - how much input did John 5 have into the songwriting and the sound of this record?
"Me and John 5 work real closely on everything, on this record and the last record too. He’s incredibly involved in everything. He’s there with me in the studio every single day, so he’s invaluable to the process."

I hope he meant valuable instead of invaluable I feel like John brings a lot to the table. So I guess I'm calling a typo on this.

Besides that great to see all the songs broken down like it is.