Former WHITE ZOMBIE bassist Sean Yseult has told the Artisan News that a new WHITE ZOMBIE vinyl box set is currently being assembled for a 2016 release. She said (hear audio below): “J. [Yuenger, former WHITE ZOMBIE guitarist] and I —and, actually, Rob [Zombie, former WHITE ZOMBIE frontman] got in on it too — we’ve been working on a box set that’s gonna be with Numero Group. It’s coming out, I believe, this spring or summer. We’ve been working on it for over a year.”
Regarding what fans can expect to see in the upcoming box set, Sean said: “There’s, I think, fifty pages of liner notes. They’ve been interviewing us all for months and months. J. and I sent them all of our WHITE ZOMBIE [material from our personal collections] — from t-shirts to old punk-rock flyers to everything — and they did a beautiful job on the booklet. It’s gonna be a box set — all vinyl, all the early records that we started in 1985. And Rob and I had our own label. So all these things coming back out on vinyl. And some of the extra tracks that I didn’t even remember. When we were in the studio, usually we used everything we recorded, but some of the things we had a couple of extra songs here and there. So there’s gonna be a few surprises. I was surprised. And I was actually surprised how good these records sound, to be honest. That’s a different-sounding band, ‘cause we started off kind of punk and we went through different guitarists every three months. So it changed the sound, but you can really see the path of the band evolving.”
Rob Zombie told England’s RockAAA in a 2011 interview that WHITE ZOMBIE will never reunite. Zombie 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 [drummer] John Tempesta in about 15 years.”
WHITE ZOMBIE broke up in 1997 and Rob Zombie went on to launch a successful solo career in 1998. He 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 the aforementioned 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.”
WHITE ZOMBIE’s 4-CD/1-DVD box set “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie” was released in November 2008 via Geffen/UMe. The CDs brought together for the first time all 64 original studio recordings released by the band led by Rob Zombie during its 1985-1996 career. The DVD offered nine music videos, 10 live performances, and some hidden gems.
Yuenger told Crawdaddy! about “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie”: “They sent me and Sean mockups, like, two days before the release date. There was such little thought put into it. None of the photos were credited. There were no liner notes, which are essential for something like that. I mean, the band had such an interesting story, how could you not have liner notes? I hear about it all the time from fans. They’re happy that the super rare early records are on there, that’s cool for them to hear, but the packaging sucks. Sean’s got all kinds cool shit — photos and flyers and stuff that they could have put in there.”
Source: Blabbermouth
