Ever since Rob Zombie left the Uptown's stage a few minutes after midnight this past Saturday, I've wondered whether I should unburden myself of a decades-old secret in this review. Maybe it was the way Zombie's show itself was sort of confusing -- one minute burning as fast and clean as the hot-rods he sings about, another watching Zombie shrug through a cover of a cover of a Eurythmics song for no discernible reason. Maybe it was all the porn. Rob Zombie has a lot of porn, and he wants to share it with you.
I struggled, but yes, the time has come to admit something. It is a horrible truth.
I made Rob Zombie. I stitched him together in my basement in the late '80s. It's all my fault. And I am not ashamed.
My reasons should be obvious. As a troubled 8 year old, I could not relate to the pop music scene in 1989. You could take the covers from most of the decade's top selling albums, stitch them together and sell them as a magazine titled "Non-Threatening Boys Quarterly." I wanted a rock star who would sing about hot women, fast cars, horror shows, Nazi werewolves... all that is worth singing about.
Luckily as industrious and brilliant as I was, I became alienated from my peers. It's better that you don't know exactly how, but without arousing my parent's suspicion I managed to build Zombie from the spare parts of former Gwar guitarists, bits of Andy Warhol's fontal lobe, and Alice Cooper's left ventricle. I filled in the blanks with hobo corpses.
It was supposed to be a thing of beauty. But I fucked up. It turned out one of my hobo corpses was a one-time member of the Moody Blues. Uncertain of how this would affect my beast, I stuffed the body in a dumpster and left him for dead. I assumed the business was done until he resurfaced in White Zombie years later. Since then I've followed him with that mix of pride and resignation only a father can know. Last Saturday at the Uptown was the first time I'd seen him in over a decade.
Oh, Zombie, what are you looking for here, after so many years in the wild and unknowable?
For the first 30 minutes, my creation made me happy. He did everything I ever wanted from a rock star. He commanded a stage presence, he worked the crowd, he dug Famous Monsters of Filmland, and the band sounded tight. I didn't even mind that his pants kept falling down around his bare ass. Who is so coldhearted they didn't love it when that giant robot man came out and danced with the band on "More Human than Human"?
And it must be said that Rob Zombie has a special set of underrated skills when it comes to being a frontman. He knows the value of a well-timed pause, a little build in anticipation. It's been said that sax players know something instinctively guitar players have to learn, because sax players have to take a second to breathe. That's applicable here. Not only that, but when things were really cooking Zombie knew how to highlight some real primal rock concert shit while still stepping back from the spotlight. Maybe I'm going to the wrong shows, but it's been a long time since I've seen the band leave the drummer on stage alone for 10 minutes to rock shit out. Like the breathe, the drum solo is an underutilized, underappreciated art form.
The problem came when Zombie started taking longer and longer between songs to breathe. For some reason, the pause between songs got to be as long as two minutes, but without anything happening to keep the momentum going. Just Rob pulling his pants up over his crack. "How can he be a director and have no sense of pacing?" said my friend Jason Harper, who was less generous to Zombie than me. It was even more infuriating when he took time to cover "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)" -- the Marilyn Manson version -- instead of using his own perfectly good material. I love that Zombie chases his obsessions so heedlessly, cocooning himself in all that weirdness... but sometimes I feel left out.
Still he gives me hope. Sometime after Zombie played "Living Dead Girl," I looked over and saw a boy who couldn't have been older than 12 riding on the shoulders of someone hidden in the crowd. This kid was rocking out. He had the devil horns up, he was constantly pumping his arms up and down in time with the music. That a kid was there wasn't a huge surprise. The crowd was an interesting cross-section of aging metal-heads who probably went to Motley Crue shows when Theater of Pain came out and now bring their families; people who likely bought Limp Bizkit albums at some point; pro-wrestling fans; bikers; and at least one girl who told me "I've never been to a rock show, I like country. Will I get hurt?"
But I digress.. anyway the point is that there were naked women on screen behind Rob every two minutes, there was lots of encouraged profanity, there were giant robot monsters dancing on stage... and I thought, "This kid is probably having the best night ever." Maybe someday he'll look around at the musical landscape, at people who trust Pitchfork to be a tastemaker or read Vice magazine.. and he'll say this is bullshit and he'll build his own monster.
On that special day he will look to the sky and shout, "Look upon my works, the Killers, and despair!" And America will be saved.
Set list:
What Lurks on Channel X?
Superbeast
Super-Charger Heaven
Living Dead Girl
Demon Speeding
More Human Than Human
Sick Bubblegum
House of 1,000 Corpses
Never Gonna Stop
Scum of the Earth
What?
American Witch
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
Thunder Kiss '65
Encore:
Werewolf Women of the S.S.
The Lords of Salem
Dragula
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If you made Rob Zombie, Peter, that makes you God! And, boy, does God work in mysterious ways!
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