BLABBERMOUTH.NET
In a new interview with Ireland's
Overdrive, former
WHITE ZOMBIE bassist
Sean Yseult was asked if working on
"It Came From N.Y.C.", the 2016 box set collection of the band's early output, brought up a lot of old buried memories for her and whether she got any kind of closure from working on that project. She replied: "Yes and no... and yes and no. As you mentioned, it was mostly [guitarist]
J. [
Yuenger] and I and past members.
Rob [
Zombie] edited a lot of it out, and we let him out of respect. Some of it I understood, some I did not. In the end, I think there was enough new information and imagery in there for it to be something exciting for our fans."
WHITE ZOMBIE broke up in 1997 and
Rob Zombie went on to launch a successful solo career in 1998. Asked if she feels that the band's split was the right thing to do or if she ever wonders, "What if we had just worked through it and kept going,"
Sean said: "No. We were burnt out and for various reasons, and with other people involved besides bandmembers, one in particular,
Rob was in no way going to do
WHITE ZOMBIE any further.
J. and I had both agreed to do one more."
Pressed about whether she would be open to performing with
Rob,
J. and drummer
John Tempesta again for a special occasion, like a hypothetical
Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction,
Sean told
Overdrive: "I would."
Renowned music journalist
Grayson Haver Currin, who wrote the liner notes to
"It Came From N.Y.C.", told
Observer in a 2016 interview that
Rob waited until the very last minute to actually sit down and get interviewed for the project.
"
Rob had initially agreed to it, and over the course of several months he did not fulfill his obligation,"
Currin explained. "And it looked like I was going to write the liner notes without
Rob. But he got in touch at the 11th hour, and we had two talks. They were good. He was a little non-committal. The other members were very open about those days, but he wanted to play it a little cooler, because he's
Rob Zombie."
According to
Currin,
Zombie pushed the project beyond its deadline, particularly when it came to fact-checking of the liner notes.
"So I finally put together the liner notes, and he had a fair deal of changes,”
Currin explained. "It was mainly in reference to things that made him look bad, which was pretty much everything everyone else had to say about him. In fact, I have no idea how the final version of the liner notes read, because I gave up control at one point. It was clear
Rob Zombie was not going to compromise on his points. The liner notes were totally approved and in production and he pulled them back, basically."
Rob Zombie told England's
RockAAA in a 2011 interview that
WHITE ZOMBIE will never reunite. He explained, "I don't see the point. I think as with most things people have a memory of something like, 'I saw them when I was 14 years old and it was the greatest thing ever,' but if they saw us now they'd probably go, 'I wish I hadn't seen that reunion; it was awful.' The singer added, "It is better to leave it alone. And I haven't talked to anyone from the band except
John Tempesta [since the late 1990s]."
Rob later told
The Pulse Of Radio that nowadays a lot of his audience isn't even familiar with the old
WHITE ZOMBIE songs. "The crowds are really, really young and I've been noticing that with the set list too, because, you know, as the time has gone on, we've really worked the
WHITE ZOMBIE material more out of the set, because we've been finding that it's not working like it used to," he said. "It seems like that those songs just seem now old to people and it's very strange."
The history of
WHITE ZOMBIE came up when
Rob Zombie was asked to comment on the publication of
"I'm In The Band", a memoir from
Yseult, who is also
Rob's former girlfriend. In the book,
Yseult claimed that the departure of drummer
Ivan DePrume led to the eventual disintegration of the group.
Zombie said, "I have not seen it [the book] so I can't comment. I can barely remember those days, so I'm glad somebody can."
He added, "Everybody likes to make up stories which aren't true. I don't think that's fair.
Ivan left the band,
John Tempesta came in and the band sounded better than ever, we kept playing and made bigger records and did more tours so I don't see how that had anything to do with it."
In a 2015
Artisan News interview,
Sean confirmed that
Rob "hasn't spoken to any of [the other former members of
WHITE ZOMBIE] since the band broke up."
Yuenger admitted to
Crawdaddy! back in 2010 that he still harbored some resentment over
WHITE ZOMBIE's demise. He said: "I would have liked to make another record, but it wasn't in the cards. On
Rob's solo albums, you can see what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go. I always wanted to be in a rock 'n' roll band, where the primary instruments are guitar, bass, and drums, you know? We were living in New York City for all those years, hearing all the rap and techno coming out — my favorite bands back then were
SLAYER and
PUBLIC ENEMY. I was really all about sampling, and we put out
'La Sexorcisto' with all those samples, and it blew people away. We were like, the first rock band to do that. And it was great, I loved it. But as time went on, the sampling and techno stuff started to dominate everything, and I really hated it. Now you can hear how little humanity is in
Rob's stuff."
Photo credit:
Chris Cuffaro (1995
Geffen Records promotional photo)