Hellbilly Deluxe

Hellbilly Deluxe: 13 Tales of Cadaverous Cavorting Inside the Spookshow International is the debut solo studio album by American musician and filmmaker Rob Zombie. The album serves as his first release outside of the band White Zombie, with whom he released four albums (two of which went multi-platinum). Hellbilly Deluxe was released on August 25, 1998, through Geffen Records. It is a concept album that portrays Zombie's love for classic horror films with heavy metal and electronic music. The album's lyrics speak of murder, chaos, and supernatural forces. The majority of Hellbilly Deluxe was recorded in California, and was produced by both Zombie and Scott Humphrey; Zombie is credited as the sole writer on all of the songs.

Hellbilly Deluxe was released to a generally positive critical reception, with the album's production being praised. The album proved to be a commercial success, reaching the top five of the Billboard 200 and selling over three million copies in the United States. Hellbilly Deluxe outsold all of Zombie's releases with his former band, and established him as a successful solo artist. The project appeared on multiple charts worldwide, though failed to duplicate the success it had in North America. Since its release, the album has garnered the title of a "shock rock classic" by numerous publications.

The album was preceded by the release of Zombie's debut single, "Dragula". The song was a hit in the United States, and appeared on the singles chart in the United Kingdom. "Living Dead Girl" was released as the album's second single, and achieved a similar amount of success as its predecessor. The album's third and final single was "Superbeast", which failed to emulate the commercial performance of the album's first two singles. All three of the songs were used extensively in the media, appearing in various films and video games. "Dragula" is often referred to as Zombie's signature song, and remains his highest selling single worldwide. Hellbilly Deluxe is Zombie's most successful album to date.

Development

Zombie first rose to fame as a founding member of the heavy metal band White Zombie. The band independently released two studio albums, which failed to have commercial success but caught the attention of artists such as Kurt Cobain and Iggy Pop. The group signed with Geffen Records to release their third studio album; the project was a commercial success, selling over two million copies worldwide. Their fourth studio album had a similar success, with sales exceeding two million copies in the United States. Zombie released his first solo recording in 1996, a collaboration with Alice Cooper titled "Hands of Death (Burn Baby Burn)". The song, recorded for Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files, went on to receive a Grammy award nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 39th Annual Grammy Awards. The following year, he contributed the original song "The Great American Nightmare" with Howard Stern to the soundtrack for the film Private Parts (1997).

thumb|left|upright|Musician [[Tommy Lee played drums on two of the album's songs.]]

This album was originally intended as a side project during development in 1997 while White Zombie as on hiatus after excessive touring. Though initially viewed as a novelty record by Geffen, Zombie worked to find a touring band to promote the album only in small venues initially. Mike Riggs was selected to play guitar, Blasko played bass guitar, and John Tempesta played the drums. Tempesta had been a member of White Zombie, while Rob was introduced to Riggs through a mutual friend. On finding the guitar player, Zombie claimed "Danny [Lohner] was just like, 'I know the perfect guy.' He gave me Riggs' phone number and I called him out of nowhere. I trusted Danny, so that was it. Riggs came out and he was great. We didn't have a bass player yet. Riggs and I hung out and talked and I told him everything I wanted to do." The album took an estimated ten months to complete. Zombie and Clouser opted for a more "electronic" sound for the record, using various music software while working on the project. Due to his departure, the only song on the album produced by Clouser is "Superbeast".

Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe played drums on "Meet the Creeper" and "The Ballad of Resurrection Joe and Rosa Whore". Due to various personal and legal struggles, Lee was living in the studio for a time during the recording of the album. Humphrey was a good friend of Lee's, and had previously worked with his band prior to the production of Hellbilly Deluxe. Zombie recorded a song titled "Wish It Away" for the album, though it was not included on the final product.

Musical style

The project was compared to releases from White Zombie by AllMusic, who wrote that the album was "complete with thunderous industrial rhythms, drilling metal guitars, and B-movie obsessions." Entertainment Weekly noted the common usage of horror elements in the lyrics, stating Zombie had "concocted a veritable blood feast of hair-raising guitars, spine-tingling drum loops, and a cast of ghoulish characters who could be refugees from an old William Castle horror flick." Tower Records said that Hellbilly Deluxe "continue[d] to explore Zombie's fascination with psychotic noise, pummeling grooves, campy samples, and all things horrific." Legends Magazine stated that all of the songs on the album "follow the same formula of anger, sex, death, monster, demon, zombie, satanic, drug abuse kinda raw drive a tractor over your neighbor's skull kinda hate the world so I'll burn it all down music."

The album opens with "Call of the Zombie", a short introduction that features Sheri Moon Zombie reading a nursery rhyme of sorts that speaks of children hiding under their beds "for fear that the devil would chop off their heads." The ending features sound clips from the film Madhouse (1974). The song lyrically speaks of "a Sunday drive with the Devil", according to USgamer. "Living Dead Girl" is named after the French film La Morte Vivante (1982), which roughly translates to "the living dead girl." The song opens with a musical intro taken from a trailer for the exploitation-horror film The Last House on the Left (1972). It features elements of industrial metal and has been described as "seductive and mesmerizing." "Demonoid Phenomenon" has been described as the "heaviest" song on the record, and makes much use of the electronic elements used for the project. The chorus to the song has been described as a "metal blitzkrieg".

"The Ballad of Resurrection Joe and Rosa Whore" has been described as "experimental", featuring elements of techno music along with metal. Prior to the release of the album, numerous songs were performed by Zombie during tours throughout North America. He signed with Geffen Records to release the album; the label had previously released White Zombie's final two studio albums. The album's cover art features an image of Zombie with an "x" engraved on his forehead, as well as skulls and crossbones on the side and a pentagram. Basil Gogos painted the album's artwork after being approached by Zombie. On the painting, Gogos said "Rob sent me a photograph and he described himself to me visually. He suggested some colors I could use, which was unusual for me; I like to pick my own colors. But it was helpful."

The album's booklet is twenty-four pages long, consisting of song lyrics and comics drawn by Zombie. Gene Colan and Dan Brereton, of Marvel Comics, contributed numerous drawings for the booklet. The replica was created by Wayne Toth, and stood ten feet tall. Zombie would continue to use it for numerous live performances and appearances, including the music video for his single "Dead City Radio and the New Gods of Supertown" (2013). Zombie said of the booklet, "It's a welcome relief from the less-is-more school of thought [...] I grew up in the heyday of cool record packaging. I would stare at the record for hours. Now, you open a record and you get nothing. I always feel cheated." The disc itself is either white or yellow depending on the version, and features images of various monsters and ghouls also designed by Zombie. The edited version of the album removes the skull and crossbones, pentagram, and "x" from the album artwork; multiple pages are removed from the booklet, as are the album's lyrics. The DVD included a music video for all thirteen of the album's songs, with Zombie being credited as the director for all of them. The project was officially released on November 22, 2005.

| rev3 = The Encyclopedia of Popular Music

| rev3Score =

| rev4 = Entertainment Weekly

| rev4Score = C+

| rev6 = NME

| rev6Score = 3/10

| rev7 = Pitchfork

| rev7Score = 4.7/10

| rev8 = Rolling Stone

| rev8Score =

| rev9 = The Rolling Stone Album Guide

| rev9score =

| rev10 = Wall of Sound

| rev10score = 71/100

Hellbilly Deluxe received a generally positive reception from music critics upon its initial release. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic gave the album four and a half out of five stars, writing "For most listeners, it doesn't matter if Hellbilly Deluxe is technically a White Zombie or Rob Zombie album, since it delivers the goods, arguably even better than Astro-Creep: 2000. To outsiders, the entire schlock enterprise may seem ridiculous or sound monotonous, but even the weak cuts here hit hard and give fans exactly what they want." They closed the review by calling the album a "lo-tech, high-impact multimedia experience." Yahoo! Music wrote that the release was "an excessively heavy (the best kind), meticulously produced piece of parodic gore-flick metal. The kind of stuff that would be proud to call itself crap with a capital C."

The A.V. Club called the album a "guilty pleasure" in their mixed review, adding "When you get down to it, the samples and interludes on Zombie's solo debut, Hellbilly Deluxe, are merely window dressing for compact, overdriven, anthemic money shots like 'Superbeast', 'Demonoid Phenomenon', and 'Living Dead Girl'." In their 2010 review of the album, Bloody Disgusting wrote "Putting aside the futuristic sounds and crisp production, everything about the album screamed out vintage horror. I imagined creepy black and white laboratories where glass vials and tubes bubbled with menacing liquids. I pictured a dark night where clouds slowly moved past a full moon. I envisioned foggy forests where tree branches looked like skeleton arms. With that kind of atmosphere, the album already felt like a fine wine: aged and more enjoyable for it." They later criticized the length of the album, and claimed that some songs felt like "filler" tracks. The album sold an estimated 121,000 copies during its first week of release. The project's first week sales were noted as the highest of Zombie's career at the time, outselling the first week sales of all four White Zombie studio albums. The album fell to number twelve on the chart the following week, and to number sixteen the week after. Hellbilly Deluxe had shipped over 500,000 copies by September 29, earning it a gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The album was certified triple platinum on January 11, 2000, for shipments of three million albums. It spent the following nine weeks in the top ten of the albums chart, and a total of twelve weeks on the weekly chart. The album debuted at number forty-eight on the ARIA Charts, before rising to a new peak of thirty-seven. It remained on the country's chart for a total of four weeks. Hellbilly Deluxe made its debut at number forty-eight on the Official New Zealand Music Chart. The album spent a total of fourteen weeks on the chart, rising to a new peak of number nineteen. In its second week, the project fell to number fifty-seven, before falling off the chart entirely the week after. Hellbilly Deluxe fell to number sixty in its second week, and ninety-eight in its third and final week on the chart.

Impact

With the release of Hellbilly Deluxe, Zombie established himself as a successful solo artist outside of his prior band. The album itself went on to sell over three million copies worldwide, and spawned three singles that each achieved commercial success. The album's third and final single, "Superbeast", went on to receive a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards. Loudwire listed "Meet the Creeper", "Superbeast", "Living Dead Girl", and "Dragula" on their list of Zombie's ten best songs. The same post claimed that "Dragula" "introduced the world to Rob Zombie's unique sound as a solo artist and is one of his most recognizable songs." The production techniques used for Helbilly Deluxe were praised by critics, with Premier Guitar writing in 2010 that "Humphrey had pushed the boundaries of primitive DAW and was instrumental in the development of Pro Tools features like Beat Detective and batch cross fade processing. So that same inventive mentality went into Hellbillys' production." Hellbilly Deluxe was ranked among the top two-hundred selling albums in the United States in both 1998 and 1999.

Due in part to the success of Hellbilly Deluxe, Zombie released American Made Music to Strip By in October 1999. The album was composed solely of remixes of songs featured on Hellbilly Deluxe, featuring contributions from Charlie Clouser and Rammstein, among others. The album was a commercial success in the United States, entering the top forty of the Billboard 200. When asked about the album's title, Zombie was quoted as stating "Well, it was around the ten-year anniversary of the first record, and the idea just popped into my head. It really wasn't this big master plan by any means, I just knew I wanted to return to the old ways of doing things, and I thought that that would be a good starting point." Songs taken from Hellbilly Deluxe were featured in Zombie's retrospective album Past, Present & Future (2003). The album featured songs from both Zombie's work with White Zombie as well as his solo career, along with some new material. Songs from Hellbilly Deluxe would later appear in Zombie's greatest hits collections The Best of Rob Zombie: 20th Century Masters The Millennium Collection (2006) and Icon (2010). Zombie has included songs taken from the album on all of his subsequent tours, including his Hellbilly Deluxe 2 World Tour (2009–12). The music found on the album has been used extensively in the media, including films, video games, and television. "Dragula" and "Superbeast" have been covered by acts such as Motionless in White and Suicide Silence, respectively. The songs "Superbeast", "Dragula", "Living Dead Girl", "Meet the Creeper", "How to Make a Monster", and "Demonoid Phenomenon" were all covered on the tribute album The Electro-Industrial Tribute to Rob Zombie (2002).

The album is rated R16 in New Zealand for violence, offensive language and sex scenes.

Track listing

All lyrics written by Rob Zombie; all music composed by Rob Zombie & Scott Humphrey.

Rob Zombie – vocals, lyrics, producer, music, production, all other art, additional photos, art direction
Riggs – guitars
Blasko – bass
Tempesta – drums
Danny Lohner – additional guitars & bass
Mark Matcho – additional guitars & bass
Tommy Lee – drums on "Meet the Creeper" and "The Ballad of Resurrection Joe and Rosa Whore"
Scott Humphrey – music, producer, mixing, engineering, programming
Chris Lord-Alge – additional mixing
Frank Gryner – additional engineering
Paul DeCarli – additional programming
Tom Baker – mastering
Basil Gogos – cover art
Dan "The Man" Brereton – 1313 painting
Gene "The Mean Machine" Colan – comic pages
Kitty Moon – living dead girl
Norman Cabrera – monster manipulations
Myriam Santos-Kayda – photography
Chapman Baehler – additional photos
Nika/Lucky Ninja House of Graphics – art direction
Andy Gould/Jodie Wilson – management
John Dittmar – booking
Jeffrey Light – legal affairs
Scott Adair – business affairs
Ray Farrell – A&R

Charts

Weekly charts

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! scope="col"| Chart (1998)

! scope="col"| Peak<br>position

Year-end charts

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

! scope="col"| Chart (1998)

! scope="col"| Position

! scope="row"| US Billboard 200

| 103

! scope="col"| Chart (1999)