It’s Hard Work Being a Zombie : Entertaining the Fans, Not Just Sitting Back, Is Important to the Metal Group

NEW YORK —  It’s a lovely late-spring afternoon in Manhattan, and a visitor from Los Angeles is seated inside a trendy midtown eatery. A perky waitress suggests a visit to the dazzling antipasto bar; the visitor is neither smiling nor eating.

Instead Rob Zombie, leader of the band White Zombie, is nursing a glass of water and soberly putting forth what might be called the theory of negative artistic inspiration.

“My main influence in starting to make music was the fact that I was going to a lot of awful shows, paying money to see bands that were incredibly horrible,” the tall, bearded singer explains. “It had an any-idiot-can-do-this vibe to it, you know? I mean, I wasn’t hating everything I saw, but I wanted to make music that I would really enjoy. To just entertain myself, basically.”

The scenario would seem to put a perverse spin on the stereotype dictating that L.A. denizens are friendly and laid-back compared to folks who live and work in the Big Apple, what with Rob sneering at his cheerful server (“That waitress keeps interrupting us”) and making cynical-sounding remarks.

But actually, White Zombie--whose current lineup also includes guitarist J., bassist Sean Yseult and drummer John Tempesta--spent its formative years on the New York club circuit.

Rob and his former girlfriend Yseult put together the first incarnation of the group in 1985 and quickly developed a following among the post-punk crowd that haunted places like CBGB’s.

White Zombie later graduated to the city’s metal clubs, where its adventurous hard-rock sound fit in just as well, thus widening the range of its audience. After singing with Los Angeles-based Geffen Records in the early ‘90s, the band decided to go west. As Rob tells it, the move was hardly traumatic.

“I hate New York,” he shrugs.

What brought him back for this visit is one of the band’s first gigs on a North American tour. The tour inludes last-week’s well-received appearance at “KROQ Weenie Roast” at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre and shows Thursday and Friday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

The trek is in support of the group’s latest exercise in purposefully warped eclecticism, an album titled “Astro-Creep: 2000 Songs of Love, Destruction, and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head.” Try fitting that onto one of the tiny slots on the Billboard albums chart.

To be specific, try fitting it in at No. 7, where “Astro-Creep,” the group’s second LP on Geffen, peaked recently. Its predecessor, 1992’s “La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. One,” reached No. 25, fueled by the support of tastemakers Beavis & Butt-head, who informed MTV viewers across the nation that White Zombie was, huh huh , cool. (Before that, the group released four independent albums.)

“Our success right now is kind of surprising, because it seems like anything that’s hard or heavy has taken a nose-dive this year,” Rob says. “A lot of bands that were going double platinum last year--anyone from Queensryche to Megadeth to the Black Crowes--are trying to follow up those huge records now, and it’s just not happening.”

White Zombie’s manager, Andy Gould, figures that the popularity of hard rock and heavy metal naturally runs in cycles. “The last really big wave was the hair bands,” he muses. “That was almost a Spinal Taplike thing. Kids got turned off to that kind of poser-rock, and then heavy metal went underground again.”

But bands like White Zombie are bringing it back, Gould says, by preserving the flash and spectacle of yore without seeming bogus.

“When we started out, the metal scene was, like Twisted Sister and that kind of stuff, so the only place to start was [the alternative scene]--which I thought was so pretentious,” Rob says. “The attitude of those bands was, ‘We get on stage, make no effort whatsoever, be completely nondescript, and you guys in the audience are supposed to eat it up. You kids are supposed to just worship our feet.’

“My feeling is, if you’re expecting people to come and pay 20 bucks to see your show, you’d better look up from your . . . shoes once in a while. I like to see a band that gets up there and works hard for my entertainment dollar.”

Rob clearly puts a good deal of effort into entertaining his fans--behind the scenes as well as in the spotlight. Years ago, he was an art student--at Manhattan’s prestigious Parsons Institute of Design, no less--and aspired to a career directing films. The 16-page album booklet and cover for “Astro-Creep” were designed by Rob and the singer directs all of the group’s videos.

Now, with White Zombie’s popularity increasing, Rob has turned his creative attention to putting on shows in larger venues than the band has headlined before.

“I’ve always felt so confined in clubs--like I was trying to watch ‘Star Wars’ on a little TV set,” he says. “I was like, I need room!”

And while he admits that being on the road is a drag (“Try sleeping on a bus while your head’s bouncing off the pillow”), he’s excited about venturing into foreign lands--particularly Australia, where the band has never played before.

Yet for all of Rob’s ambitions, White Zombie’s prospects may ultimately be threatened by, well, by Rob’s ambitions. The singer still would like to direct feature films, and says he wouldn’t want to juggle that sort of endeavor with a music career. And though White Zombie is primarily a vehicle for his creative ideas, he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of recording as a solo artist at some point in the future.

“It might be fun to do something musical that’s 100% mine,” Rob says. “But I’m not thinking or worrying about that now,” he adds, as something actually resembling a grin materializes. “This whole thing just got rollin’, so I’m taking it one step at a time.”

* White Zombie, with Babes in Toyland and the Melvins opening, Thursday and Friday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, 1855 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 458-8551, 7 p.m. $20.