He kind of looks like The Dude after the sheriff hit him with a coffee mug. STAY OUT OF MALIBU, ZOMBIE!

A new album coming out early next year and a new movie just in theaters. This is the Rob Zombie experience these days.

It wasn’t always like that: Zombie pioneered b-movie loving groove-metal behemoth White Zombie from the mid-’80s through 1998 when, instead of releasing a follow-up to 1995′s Astro Creep: 2000 — Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head, Zombie put out the equally verbosely titled solo record Hellbilly Deluxe: 13 Tales Of Cadaverous Cavorting Inside The Spookshow International.

From there, Zombie went on to direct pet project House of 1000 Corpses in 2003 with follow-up The Devil’s Rejects, a relentless blend of horror and action movie iconography with just a soupcon of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, in 2005. Two years later he crossed over to more mainstream audiences with his reimagining of John Carpenter’s classic Halloween, and turned this year to the sequel.

Another sequel, of sorts, Hellbilly Deluxe 2: Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls and the Systematic Dehumanization of Cool, will arrive early in 2010. The first single, “What?” is a bit of a departure, taking things in a Cramps-by-way-of-Zombie direction, but it’ll be on full display Friday night at The Pearl, when Zombie hits the stage with Captain Clegg & The Night Creatures and the Nekromantix ($54, $59, $69) for the second stop on his new tour.

We sat in on a Zombie conference call where he talked about his plans for the tour, what he’ll be doing during the Trinity of Terrors convention at the Palms where his Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) and Otis (Bill Moseley) will be this weekend and why people never like the new album as much as the last one.

What do you have up your sleeve for this tour?

We have a lot of new things this time. We didn’t want to go out and do the same old show. We’ve dug deep and we’ve tried to really mix it up. There’s always the obvious songs you have to play for people that they want to hear. We’re actually going back and grabbing some songs I’ve never actually played live ever. Songs off some of the other records I think people will know. A couple of new songs people may or may not know. It’s real mixed. I want it to be like, since we’re doing this first run kind of smaller places, I assume the people coming out are pretty familiar with the material so you can mix it up a little bit. As far as the stage show, there’s been some pretty incredible advancements in digital technology. We have a pretty high-tech show going on. It’s pretty awesome.

When you’re in Vegas Friday night, do you plan on doing anything with Malcolm McDowell or Bill Moseley?

No, I don’t know what’s going on down there. I know there’s a Fangoria convention and a bunch of people I know are there, but I’m not part of it in any way. I’ll be rolling in and playing the show and rolling out. Hopefully I’ll get to see some of my friends, but I don’t know for sure that I will. Our show isn’t connected to the convention in any way. Hopefully I’ll have some time to see people.

Is anything going to be different about the Halloween-night show in Los Angeles?

The L.A. show is very different for all the other shows we’re doing on the tour. It’s like the extra show. What we’re doing for L.A. is I hired my art director from Halloween, well, from all my movies, and he’s art directing the entire Palladium. What we’re trying to do is there’s a scene in Halloween 2 that’s like a rock concert that the girls go to. We’re basically re-creating that live. Besides me playing, the fake band created for the movie will be there (Captain Clegg), and the fake horror movie host created for the movie will be on stage hosting the event in the same spirit he did in the movie. Believe it or not, L.A. was the one city that granted us a permit to do fire so that’s the one city getting a big pyro display.

I hate the idea of going to a concert on Halloween and they don’t really make it a Halloween event. It’s just like a concert you could see on any day. We wanted to go to great lengths to make it really a Halloween event. It’s a concert, but it’s a giant Halloween party.

What possessed you to go back and do a sequel to Hellbilly Deluxe?

It kind of happened that way. I’ve had the idea for many, many years. I thought oh, that would be cool to go back and do that because people do it with everything else but not really records so much. But I thought well, I’m not just going to call the record that. Unless it seems like it makes sense. Even though the idea had been floating around in my head for three years, it wasn’t until we were completely finished with the record and we kind of listened to it thought about it for a long time. Then I decided to title it that. I didn’t want it to just seem like oh, well they just slapped this title on here. It makes no no sense, it doesn’t tie into the other record. But when we were done it really felt like a perfect companion piece to the first record.

Is there any truth to the rumor you’re remaking The Blob?

There’s some truth to it. I don’t know. It’s one of the movies that has come to me and we’ve talked about it. I don’t know for sure if I’m doing that, and if I am I don’t know when I’m doing that. There is truth to it, but as far as when and where it would happen I have no idea. That’s the thing about movies. They take a long time to get made and you never know. Something completely unexpected could come up in the meantime. So there’s truth to it, but I don’t know how much truth to it.

How would you feel about House of 1000 Corpses or The Devil’s Rejects getting remade?

I have no doubt that’s going to happen. I think it could be pretty wild. I would probably be excited. I think it would be cool. I’m predicting maybe in about 10 years someone will remake House of 1000 Corpses, because that seems to be the amount of time that goes by and they’re chewing up the remakes so fast, they’re running out of material. House of 1000 Corpses actually has more name recognition than Sorority Row, a lot of the things they’re running to. It’s kind of interesting. It’s kind of like when you hear someone cover your song. Even if you don’t like it, it’s kind of fun just to hear it. I don’t know how I’ll feel. Hopefully I’ll feel good about it.

Were any of the songs from the record inspired by your filmmaking?

Yeah, definitely. The lines are always kind of blurring back and forth. You come up with concepts, you go that could be a cool movie or something, but you know you’ll never get around to doing it. Probably the most obvious one on the record is we wrote a song called “Werewolf Women of the SS,” kind of this old-style, trashy, Dick Dale style song. I really love the Werewolf Women of the SS trailer I did (for Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse), and all the work I did for that, most of which no one’s ever seen, because the trailer was chopped down so short. I can’t get it out of my system. I don’t know that it will ever actually be a movie one day. It would be kind of cool, but now it is a song, so it lives on in another way. We actually are going to play that live even though most people won’t know it yet, but with the visuals on stage it really is one of the highlights of the show I think.

Are you going to do any more Halloween movies and why do you think the second movie wasn’t as well received?

No, I don’t have any more in my future. At first I really just thought it was one, and then I could see it as two. But then enough is enough.

And why was it? The way things are received to me always seems, unfortunately, the same old story. Whatever is the new thing is never as well-received as the last thing. It’s really weird like that. Because with this movie, everyone was like, ‘Oh man, what you did with the first Halloween is what I really loved.’ But when we put out the first Halloween it was like, ‘Oh man, Devil’s Rejects is really what I loved, what happened here?’ And when I put out Devil’s Rejects everyone was like, ‘What happened? House of 1000 Corpses was so cool.’ I don’t know. I think it’s because now especially people see a movie, they buy the DVD, they watch it 100 times. When they go see the new one they’re always disappointed because the other one is like this tried and true old friend that they’ve memorized every line. With every movie, and it’s even already happening with this one, it’s so funny, people see it a couple times. Once the DVD comes out they watch it a bunch more and they suddenly say, ‘Oh man, when I first saw it in the theater I didn’t really like it that much, but now it fucking kicks ass.’

Every record, same story. Whatever record I put out people tell me why it’s not as good as the last record. Until there’s the next record, then the last record they weren’t so thrilled with, now that’s the record everyone loves. It’s been going on 25 years. It started when we were pressing White Zombie records in our basement and selling them. It didn’t even matter. It’s such a weird thing, but I understand it. I do the same thing. If you sit home and listen to a record over and over and you memorize every little thing, or a movie, when the new one comes, of course you can’t love it as much as the last one. It takes a minute. I think that’s always the case, but I feel really strong about Halloween 2, especially the director’s cut because that’s really the movie that unfortunately, most people didn’t get to see right away. Once that’s out and about, it’s going to be all good.

By Jason Scavone

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