See Rob Zombie’s Touching Tale of Meeting Elton John
Rob Zombie may make a heavy-metal racket, but one of his heroes since childhood has been Elton John. He never thought he’d get the chance to meet the “Rocket Man” singer, but his luck changed in 2011 when he was inducting Alice Cooper into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Before Cooper arrived, he found himself in a hall with his idol. “I’d just talked to Bette Midler, who’d come up to me and said, ‘I like your pants,'” Zombie tells Rolling Stone of the fateful day. “And I saw Elton John, like, waving. I was like, ‘Who are you waving at?’ He was waving at me. And he came running over and gave me a hug. And he was, like, super nice. And I was like, ‘This is was so cool.'”
The former White Zombie frontman, who recently put out a new album titled The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser and will be performing his old band’s Astro-Creep 2000 in its entirety at Riot Fest this summer, said that John had been moved by something he’d said in his induction speech. “He was saying he was there, and he remembered being in the front row fighting the crowd, because that was when Alice dropped these panties from a helicopter over the Hollywood Bowl,” Zombie recalled. “Elton said he was punching people and grabbing the panties and going crazy. And then Alice came over and I was like, ‘These are the two guys that are the reason I love music, and I’ve got ’em both right here.’ It was pretty awesome.”