Former WHITE ZOMBIE Guitarist Talks Band's Split, 'Let Sleeping Corpses Lie' Box Set

James Greene Jr. of Crawdaddy! magazine recently conducted an interview with former WHITE ZOMBIE guitarist Jay Yuenger. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Crawdaddy!: I understand you had no input in "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie", the WHITE ZOMBIE box set, at all?

Yuenger: Not at all.

Crawdaddy!: How did you find out it was happening?

Yuenger: They sent me and [former bassist] Sean [Yseult] mockups, like, two days before the release date. There was such little thought put into it. None of the photos were credited — we were like, "Uh, you know you have to credit photos or people can sue you?" And they were like, "Oh." 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.

Crawdaddy!: Well, that sort of answers the next question, which has to do with the comments Rob Zombie has made in recent years about WHITE ZOMBIE not getting along or communicating all that well post-"Astro-Creep: 2000". Is there anything you'd like to say about that at this point?

Yuenger: Not really. It's inevitable when people live on top each other for so many years that things will go bad, and people will drift apart. It happens with every band.

Crawdaddy!: I'm detecting an acceptance in your tone. Are there no hard feelings on your end?

Yuenger: Oh, sure there are. [Uncomfortable laughter] 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.

Crawdaddy!: [What was the] low point [of your career]?

Yuenger: Oh man, I can tell you exactly. Our first drummer, Ivan de Prume, left us in the middle of an intensive tour, and we got this interim drummer our sound man knew who was very compulsive and had substance abuse issues. We had this giant show in L.A., and the drummer disappeared beforehand and went on a bender. He was totally fucked up, showed up five minutes before show time. So, we play this show knowing we're firing him immediately afterwards. The problem, though, was there were all these record company people backstage who wanted to take all these photos, so we had to stand around smiling for a while, pretending everything was totally cool.

Read the entire interview from Crawdaddy! magazine.