Music

Elton John was super excited to meet Rob Zombie

by Richard Howard

May 19, 2016

Elton gushed over Zombie during Alice Cooper's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.

Elton John and Rob Zombie aren’t exactly two guys you’d guess would have a ton of mutual respect for each other. Turns out, though, that’s exactly the case.

In what’s actually a pretty adorable interview (I’m getting a whole new view of Rob Zombie today), the former White Zombie frontman explains that, having always been a fan of great performers, the musician he’s been most excited to eventually meet is Elton John. He finally got his chance in 2011 when he was on hand to induct Alice Cooper into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – and the meeting went even better than he could have dreamed.

“I’d just talked to Bette Midler, who’d come up to me and said, ‘I like your pants.’ 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 so cool.'”

It turns out Zombie also picked up some brownie points for bringing up a legendary Alice Cooper moment (his 1972 Hollywood Bowl concert where a helicopter dropped thousands of paper panty “souvenirs” onto the crowd), which Elton (of course) managed to be hilariously involved in:

“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. 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.”