Aaron Williams and the Hoodoo

Prepare for the next wave of dizzying rattle of drums and intoxicating hum of blues guitars.

A mystical hoodoo spell drifts among Midwest bars and clubs; one of funk, blues and rock and roll. AARON WILLIAMS AND THE HOODOO, born of the Madison blues scene, plan to keep it that way with shows around Wisconsin (including a stop at Maximum Ink’s 13th anniversary party March 20) and the rest of the Midwest.

“We like to say that we lack subtleness,” says Williams, of the band’s blues-rock music.  “I think it’s the idea of just going balls to the wall. A lot of bands out there are a little more laid back, especially in our field of music, and we really go at it from start to end of our shows and we keep up that high energy.”

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Madison World Music Festival 2008

Spread over two consecutive weekends in mid-September, Madison’s global gathering touches every point on the compass across Madison in every creative fashion imaginable. Syrian singer GAIDA, Indian guitarist PRASANNA and the psychedelic dub of Turkey’s BABA ZULA perform, dance, lead workshops and colorfully flavor UW’s campus, the Annex and the Willy Street Fair.

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White Zombie

Formed in the mid-80’s in New York City, White Zombie would become one of the most popular metal acts through the 90’s. Their sound was heavy but with a groove and songs inspired from horror authors like Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) to classic muscle cars and cult films like Blade Runner and Night of the Living Dead. Their most visible member, Rob Zombie (Robert Cummings, Jr.), was not only a musician, but a filmmaker as well, who over the course of the past two decades would go from directing the band’s videos to being a sought-after horror movie director in Hollywood. Even though the band has been broken up for over a decade, Rob went through the entirety of their old recordings and came up with a new boxed set called Let Sleeping Corpses Lie which is a five-disc collection of everything the band recorded.

You can tell Rob Zombie gets asked about a White Zombie reunion all the time because the first thing he says is how the set has a perfect title, “it’s pretty self-explanatory because I didn’t want everybody to think the box set was the beginning of something. I wanted everyone to realize it was the end of something… I am not big on revisiting the past. I like to move forward all the time. So whenever anything else would come up, this would go in the backburner. I had a little bit of window, and just knocked it out. And I also figured that, if not now, when? By waiting longer, CDs aren’t even going to exist, so there will be no box sets.”

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