That Old White Magic

A cold, raw wind is whistling through the Orange Pavilion’s outdoor backstage area two hours before Rob Zombie’s evening performance.

Roadies are hugging themselves for warmth, while various musicians and hangers-on, many wearing T-shirts or miniskirts, crouch over hot cups of coffee in an attempt to fend off the chill.

Rob Zombie, however, seems to pay it no mind. Clad in a fuzzy black sweater, his massive dreadlocks cascading below his shoulders, the imposing heavy-metal singer (about 6-foot-2 in his elevator shoes) is hanging out on a wooden picnic bench.

“I don’t know why we’re playing here,” says Zombie, who’s wearing custom-made contact lenses that turn his pupils into black pinholes. “I think they use this place for hog shows.”

Solicitous, soft-spoken, charming even, Zombie seems to be the diametrical opposite of his ghoulish onstage persona, which has made the 33-year-old Massachusetts native one of rock’s most popular and certainly most colorful provocateurs.

Zombie is that rarity, an unrepentant renegade in a business that encourages and rewards conformity. He controls every aspect of his career, right down to the copy for album advertisements. He prefers the kind of over-the-top theatrics that were popular among arena-rockers in the ‘70s over heartfelt sincerity, and he still believes in the transformative power of meat-and-potatoes heavy metal--the kind that inspires head-shaking, fist-pumping excitement in teenagers and looks of dismay from their parents.

Reviewing Zombie’s new album, “Hellbilly Deluxe,” Rolling Stone magazine said that the songs “will provide explosive, much-needed deliverance as mom and big sis troop off to Lilith Fair and dad cranks up the latest Page and Plant. . . . Zombie knows that adolescence can feel like hell sometimes and that when it does, the only solution is to fan the flames.”

For the past 13 years, Zombie has staked his career on that playfully menacing image, starting with his band White Zombie--which pop culture historians will always remember as Beavis & Butt-head’s favorite group. Just around the time in the early ‘90s that grunge bands were making it de rigueur for pop artists to wallow in somber introspection, White Zombie came on like freak-show exhibitionists, emphasizing such old-school rock virtues as ear-shattering volume, eye-popping spectacle and cheap sex for an audience that clung to them like articles of faith.

White Zombie was richly rewarded for filling that void in the rock landscape. Its 1992 Geffen Records release, “La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1,” sold a million copies, and the 1995 follow-up “Astrocreep 2000” sold three times that.

After recording and releasing “Hellbilly Deluxe” last summer, Zombie unexpectedly dissolved the band to focus on his solo career.

The solo album features Zombie’s trademark metal-techno alchemy and has sold nearly 800,000 copies. Zombie’s tour with rock band Korn set for early next year shapes up as an archetypal hell-raiser.

As a career move, the White Zombie breakup flew in the face of conventional music business wisdom. Bands usually don’t split up two years after making their biggest record.

“It’s like a marriage,” says Zombie’s manager Andy Gould, who also managed White Zombie for eight years. “Trying to keep two people together is a tough nut, but trying to keep four people together in extreme circumstances is very difficult. Rob has a very specific vision of what he wanted to do, and he felt it was time to do it.”

Zombie has always thought of himself as a kind of rock ‘n’ roll populist, working hard to provide cheap thrills for the common fan. So, he says, when his former bandmates expressed a desire to be something more than cartoonish metal musicians, Zombie bailed out.

“They wanted to, quote, be taken seriously as musicians,” says Zombie of his former bandmates. “All of a sudden, they wanted to be like Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton, and I was like, screw that! I mean, why do I care what critics think about me? Everything I love has always been hated by the critics.”

In a separate interview, former White Zombie member Sean Yseult calls Zombie’s assertion “a flat-out lie.” Adds the bassist, who’s now with the trio Famous Monsters, “Rob wanted to do his own thing, and we were fine with it. He can tell people as many lies as he wants, but would I be running around in costume playing surf/garage if I wanted to be taken seriously like Jeff Beck?”

Zombie does concede that boredom was a factor.

“After 13 years together, it just felt like it was done,” he says, while his opening act Fear Factory grinds away inside the Pavilion. “Believe me, Geffen would have given me a lot of money to make another White Zombie record, but the last thing you wanna do is get paid a lot of money for something that isn’t fun. I didn’t want it to be like a job ‘cause the paycheck was nice.”

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For as long he can remember, Zombie has been obsessed with American “junk culture”--comic books, old TV shows, horror films, trashy garage-rock and heavy metal.

Zombie spent his formative years in Haverhill, Mass., a depressed industrial outpost the singer describes as “a place where nothing ever happens. Some magazine voted it the No. 1 worst place to live a few years ago. There was just nothing to do there except hang out in cemeteries. They had these old, New England-style graveyards, and we just used to play around in those all the time.”

During a conversation, Zombie frequently digresses to shed light on some childhood epiphany that occurred while watching an episode of, say, “Star Trek.”

“I grew up with really normal, straight parents, but they let me and my brother do anything we wanted to do,” says Zombie, whose real name is Rob Straker. “They took us to see ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’ I remember seeing, like, ‘Phantom of the Opera’ when I was 5 years old.”

“We were both extremely antisocial, but Rob rebelled differently than I did,” says Zombie’s younger brother Spider, 27, who leads his own band, Powerman 5000. “He turned inwards and didn’t really have a lot of friends. He just went into his own world, and the other kids didn’t understand it, ‘cause his interests were a little different than theirs.”

A preoccupation with TV fueled Zombie’s teenage imagination. “I was totally obsessed with TV, to the point where it was unhealthy,” he says. “It didn’t matter what was on, I would watch it. If there was a storm and the power went out, I would sit there in a state of shock, just freaking out!”

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Straker eventually gravitated to New York, where he formed White Zombie in 1985. The band made two albums for the independent label Caroline--”Soul Crusher” in 1986 and “Make Them Die Slowly” in 1989. Geffen signed the band in 1992.

Zombie’s love of horror movies inevitably found its way into his music. Such Zombie compositions as “Superbeast” and “Dragula” are chock-full of campy B-movie imagery. In fact, Zombie’s decision to go solo was partially predicated on his desire to ratchet up the creepy-crawly factor.

His elaborate stage show features a set that looks like something out of Dante’s “Inferno,” with exploding flash pots, sidemen who look like the living dead, and rear projections of classic horror films. In many ways, it’s reminiscent of the Grand Guignol blood feasts mounted by Zombie’s childhood hero, Alice Cooper, in the mid-’70s.

“When grunge came on the scene, it sucked all the fun out of rock music,” says Zombie. “I mean, when you pay 25 bucks to see a show, do you want to see some artist whining about his problems, or some crazy show that you’ll be talking about for the next year?

“I see there’s a whole new generation of kids that’s been longing for this stuff. Kids come up to me all the time after shows to say thanks for not just standing there and staring at my feet.”

Every move Zombie makes flows from that primal desire to blow his fans away--as if he’s trying to duplicate the impact those horror movies had on him in his youth.

“In some ways, I feel like I’m the ‘let’s cut the B.S.’ guy in rock right now,” he says. “I’m so sick of bands that are, like, ‘We’re so for our fans,’ and you meet them and they’re like the most pretentious guys you ever met. I mean, I lose sleep over everything. . . . I’m so paranoid about everything I do, and so many bands don’t give a crap.

“When I was a kid, when I found out something wasn’t real, I was like, ‘What the hell?’ I’m not Mr. Spooky onstage and something else offstage. The stage set is what my house looks like. Kids know what they’re getting into, and you can’t fool them.”