Former Rob Zombie guitarist Mike Riggs, who’s known for playing a blood-filled guitar onstage, says he only played the gory instrument because his first choice was vetoed. If he’d had his way, Riggs would have rocked out with a maggot-filled guitar, he says.

“I got the idea when someone told me, ‘There’s nothing new you can do to a guitar. Everything’s already been done to a guitar,’” Riggs says. “So I came up with the idea of a clear guitar you can put different stuff in.” After toying with the idea of putting an albino snake in the instrument, Riggs says he decided to use rotten meat instead so the guitar would “fill up with maggots” – an idea that Rob Zombie quickly quashed. “I had the idea to add rotten meat that would fill up with maggots, and I believe Rob said something like, ‘It’s going to stink up the trailer,’ or something like that. So it ended up being blood, and that worked out best since it gets the audience involved and covered in blood.”

Riggs performed on two of Zombie’s albums, 1998’s Hellbilly Deluxe and 2001’s Sinister Urge. He’s since gone on to form Scum of the Earth.

Would you have been excited or disgusted if you’d had gotten some blood on you at a Rob Zombie show?