If you haven't been reading the Melvins' tour diaries from their 51 Shows In 51 Days Tour, you are missing out on some great stories, including gossip on what it was like to tour with two of the biggest bands of the early 90s. The Melvins have seen it all, and been around the block, and they have plenty of stories to share. On a particularly long drive, frontman Buz Osbourne decided to recall two very shitty tour experiences the band hand, opening for Nine Inch Nails and for White Zombie:
Speaking about NIN:
The only other time we ever played in Sioux Falls was in the mid '90s when we were on tour with Nine Inch Nails. After the show, I watched the cast and crew of NIN do, oh, I'd say $30,000 worth of damage to a brand new arena dressing room. It sounds a lot crazier than it really was, and I wish I could write out the sound of shrugging. Like if you asked me, was I involved in the smashing of a brand new arena dressing room I could go, "Eh [shrug], I guess so." I fortunately got all of that adolescent vandal behavior out of my system when I was still a teenager.
At my age, smashing the shit out of large objects just doesn't have the appeal it did for me when I was young. Back then I used to crave destruction like it was sex. I think the only time that kind of hell-raising really works is when you're young and stupid. These NIN guys were all younger than me so maybe it was still a turn-on for them and the only explanation I can think of for behavior such as this is that they must have been brought up as heavily sheltered idiots with helicoptering parents who were up their ass about every minute detail of their stupid little lives during what I would imagine to be an extremely boring childhood in some middle America shit hole. Now unfortunately, as adults, they need to smash the shit out of a wide variety of hotel and dressing rooms and do tons of drugs along the way just to forget that what they really should have done as teenagers was simply kill their overbearing parents….Be that as it may, I can still think of better ways to blow 30 grand.
He went on to say that the band on their crew were super nice to The Melvins, and in NIN's defense, this was 20 years ago, and Reznor is sober now, so he's probably a different person. On the other hand, Buz had only terrible things to say about Rob Zombie:
Easily the worst touring experience of my entire life was the White Zombie tour we did. I could write a whole book about that infernal bullshit. On the first day of the tour, the first person we met from the entire White Zombie cast and crew was a mullet headed road manager who ended up behaving like a mean version of Cotton Mather. He was a "professional" roadie. Now I have never met a group of people who hate music more than professional roadies, and it is clearly obvious that 99.9 percent of them know nothing at all about music. Nothing. I find this to be quite strange really. It's like someone who works in a bakery knowing nothing about baking. Actually this also extends to most of the bands these guys work for as well, but I pretty much lump all of these bands and crew into one big sewage pit. It's fitting.
Mr. Mullet told us straight up that he was going to see to it that we got fucked over every night PA-wise in order to not piss off his boss, the swollen White Zombie dictator Rob Zombie. And it just went from there. He openly told us that Rob acted a prick to him, and that's how life on the road was going to go for us as well. Perfect. One insane thing after another every day for the whole tour. On one of the few times we actually got a soundcheck, Mr. Mullet came on stage and pulled the plug because Rob was eating and that we were to "shut the fuck up" because he didn't like the "noise."
My instant thought was what the fuck is he eating, a Faberge Egg omelet? I'd been to their catering and it was the same swill they always serve at these horrid rock'n'roll extravaganzas which amounts to nothing more than disgusting macaroni and cheese type garbage and an assortment of what appears to be dead things in jelly. You'd think he'd want some kind of booming symphonic distraction to help disguise the fact that he's eating a big plate of steaming dog shit. Or so you would think….
And the idiocy didn't stop there. Rob did this between song speech every night that consisted of unintelligible talking gibberish delivered in a "heavy metal" guttural grunt, and at some point he inevitably started saying "they said we couldn't do it, they said it couldn't be done." Which I'm guessing is in reference to them surprisingly being able to peddle another million records to their highly gullible brainless fans. I'm not sure why he thought his dull minions needed to know this. Their entire thing was just dumb.
Well, I guess I know why White Zombie won't ever reunite, and why it doesn't really matter. Read more Melvins tour diaries here.
