Rob Zombie has always looked back fondly at White Zombie’s 1995 tour with the Melvins. Apparently, though, the feeling isn’t mutual.
Frontman Buzz Osbourne has been chronicling the sludge legends’ 51 Days tour in a blog diary for SPIN. And in his latest entry, Osbourne recalls why the White Zombie tour was his worst touring experience of all time. You can read the entire entry online, where he also recalls the displeasure of opening for Nine Inch Nails, but here’s what Buzz had to say specifically about the White Zombie tour:
“Easily the worst touring experience of my entire life was the White Zombie tour we did. I could write a whole book about that infernal bullshit. On the first day of the tour, the first person we met from the entire White Zombie cast and crew was a mullet headed road manager who ended up behaving like a mean version of Cotton Mather. He was a “professional” roadie. Now I have never met a group of people who hate music more than professional roadies, and it is clearly obvious that 99.9 percent of them know nothing at all about music. Nothing. I find this to be quite strange really. It’s like someone who works in a bakery knowing nothing about baking. Actually this also extends to most of the bands these guys work for as well, but I pretty much lump all of these bands and crew into one big sewage pit. It’s fitting.
Mr. Mullet told us straight up that he was going to see to it that we got fucked over every night PA-wise in order to not piss off his boss, the swollen White Zombie dictator Rob Zombie. And it just went from there. He openly told us that Rob acted a prick to him, and that’s how life on the road was going to go for us as well. Perfect. One insane thing after another every day for the whole tour. On one of the few times we actually got a soundcheck, Mr. Mullet came on stage and pulled the plug because Rob was eating and that we were to ‘shut the fuck up’ because he didn’t like the ‘noise.’
My instant thought was what the fuck is he eating, a Faberge Egg omelet? I’d been to their catering and it was the same swill they always serve at these horrid rock’n’roll extravaganzas which amounts to nothing more than disgusting macaroni and cheese type garbage and an assortment of what appears to be dead things in jelly. You’d think he’d want some kind of booming symphonic distraction to help disguise the fact that he’s eating a big plate of steaming dog shit. Or so you would think….
And the idiocy didn’t stop there. Rob did this between song speech every night that consisted of unintelligible talking gibberish delivered in a ‘heavy metal’ guttural grunt, and at some point he inevitably started saying ‘they said we couldn’t do it, they said it couldn’t be done.’ Which I’m guessing is in reference to them surprisingly being able to peddle another million records to their highly gullible brainless fans. I’m not sure why he thought his dull minions needed to know this. Their entire thing was just dumb.
Don’t get me wrong, it was all our fault for doing a stupid tour like that in the first place and I certainly can’t blame them for that. We accepted the offer! Big mistake on our part but we did learn our lesson as a result of that stupidity. I think it’s a bad idea for us to try to sell our band like that. Actually, we believed that then as well, but it was their idea to have us along and for some reason that remains a mystery to me, they paid us pretty well. But those days are over for us. Now, I would rather eat my own shit then do another tour with people who behave like that. Actually if not my own, then whose shit would I eat? That’s a good question….”
So that would partially explain why you’ll likely never see the Melvins playing an arena anytime soon. Don’t worry though, Buzz, you’re not the only band who didn’t get along with Mr. Zombie on the road.
