My story begins late one night in 1993. The erstwhile Spooky Kids have packed up their toys after a Plus Five gig and gone home. Marilyn Manson himself, at this point still mostly called Brian Warner by his friends, has adjourned to the nearest Denny's. He pulls up in his red Honda Civic hatchback and stalks past the serried ranks of Mother Butler pies. Pallid and rapier-thin, his lank black hair still damp with sweat, Brian glides over to the big round table in the corner, where his assembled sycophants cede unto him the seat of honor on a curved Naugahyde banquette.
Well, that's not true. We're not all sycophants. A couple of people here are actually his pals. And although I'm not within that tight circle, I'm friends with his actual friends. I've also interviewed him for a couple of local-music articles, and Brian and I have gotten along pretty well when we've talked. Acquaintances, I guess. There's one other nonfawner at the table, a guy named Mike, who just loves local bands and goes to shows all the time. This night he's drunker than usual and amuses himself by unscrewing the top of the salt shaker, pouring the salt into his mouth, and spewing puffs of it at passing busboys.
But the other dozen clustered around Brian in some unintended parody of the Last Supper? Unabashed toadies, gussied up in black, with splashes of fuchsia or lime-green hair dye. A couple of them are carrying lunchboxes, an homage to the Marilyn Manson song of that name. And all are hanging on Brian's every word.
He doesn't have that much to say. Although he looks like Alice Cooper, his onstage energy is more reminiscent of Iggy Pop. And he seems to have really overdone it tonight. He does manage to order a grilled cheese sandwich and fries from the waitress (who does a good job of keeping a straight face before this freak show). The waitress hasn't been gone five minutes when Brian's color shifts from pale to translucent. "Oh, man," he groans. "I'm going to puke."
With that he ducks under the table, slithers around the shins of his acolytes, and darts to the restroom. A couple of minutes later the waitress plunks down his sandwich, just in time for Brian to emerge from the loo, crawl back to his seat, and tear into his food.
"What is this, a Roman vomitorium?" I jest. "Maybe you should have that in your contract. Wherever you play, they have to set up a trough backstage."
Manson turns his angular face toward me as he chews a seasoned fry. "I've been thinking about what kind of riders we should get," he says, referring to the perks concert venues provide for bands. "How about four live chickens, five black candles, a pickled fetus ..." He chuckles softly.
Funny thing about this guy: The harder he tries to shock, the more tedious he becomes. Still, the kids seem to like it. They titter dutifully, each and every one of them.
The longest conversations I ever had with Mr. M. Brian Warner-Manson were during our interviews for a 1994 cover story in XS magazine. My previous and subsequent contacts with him were mostly a by-product of his mentoring relationship with my then-girlfriend's band, Jack Off Jill. We'd see each other at now-defunct Broward County clubs like Squeeze and the Edge, or I'd run into him while the band was rehearsing at its warehouse in Pompano Beach. And I'd give him a call when I needed a snappy quote to liven up my music column.
Opinions about him varied among the locals in those early years. The effect he'd had on the wardrobe of area teens had begun to engender the kind of parental outrage that would eventually become a nationwide phenomenon. (Especially controversial was one Marilyn Manson T-shirt that exhorted followers to "Kill Your Parents ... Kill God ... Kill Yourself." Loads of fun at parties!) Many of his peers in the music scene had, by the time of his band's signing to a major label in 1994, decried their success as a victory of style over substance. And the band's style, almost without exception, sprang from the mind of Brian, a sickly, skinny kid who got beat up a lot at the Christian school he attended in Canton. He listened to Kiss, read Anton LaVey and Friedrich Nietzsche, watched talk shows all day, and kept striving to create a band whose entire existence was a work of commercially viable performance art.
I harbored my own rock and roll fantasies at one point, though my goals were more modest (signing with an indie label, touring in a van, visions of Minutemen and Meat Puppets dancing in my head). I even tried to seek Manson's help in promoting my remarkably unpopular postpunk outfit.
My earliest interactions with Manson, I'm afraid to admit, consisted of me foisting my band's demos, fliers, and stickers on him, trying to turn a cordial acquaintance into a "connection." Fortunately for all concerned I dropped the Earnest Underground Rocker thing in mid-1993, concentrating instead on the Cub Reporter thing.
I'm trying to remember if I called him Brian back then. You know, in the dozens of conversations we've had over the years, I usually didn't call him anything. Maybe "Manson" a couple of times, and "Brian" at least once: I introduced him to a friend as "Brian" before a 1995 show at the Edge.
How did I greet him when I'd run into him in the cramped, black-light intimacy of Squeeze, his usual haunt? I can't recall. Thing was, if I called him "Brian," I felt as if I were trying to make myself seem cool. But every time I called him "Manson" I felt silly, an accomplice in this big-ass hoax he was pulling on everybody.
As it happens that hoax has become reality, so I'll stick with Manson from here on out. Besides, now that I don't have any kind of personal relationship with him anymore--his publicist verily scoffed at the notion of an interview for this story--I tend to think of him as Marilyn Manson anyway.
If there's any sort of distinction I can claim in the arc of Manson's career, it's that I was the first writer to convince an editor that Marilyn Manson was poised to explode into the nation's pop-culture consciousness. Back in June 1994 I argued that Manson's melange of alt-metal crunch, '70s kitsch, and "dimestore Satanism" (as I called it) would strike a power chord with disaffected youth far beyond South Florida. It wasn't such a stroke of genius. Anyone who'd seen the rapt adoration in the mascara-caked eyes of the "Lunchbox Girls" at Denny's could have figured it out, too.
At the time I wrote the piece, Marilyn Manson had just become the first band to sign to Nothing Records, the company started by Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor. The band's debut record on Nothing didn't sell too well, but Manson's friendship with Reznor led to a slew of Manson/Nails double bills. Manson had already bewitched thousands of sickly, Gothic teens nationwide by the time the band scored its breakthrough hit with a 1995 cover of the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams."
Catapulted to the top of the charts by a remake, Marilyn Manson made the most of the opportunity. "'Sweet Dreams' was like the cheese that lured the mouse into the trap, and now we're going to snap its neck," he told me shortly after the release of the 1996 album Antichrist Superstar.
That record's strong performance (it debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts) finally proved his thesis: If you dumb down LaVey and Nietzsche and smear them with enough ghoulish greasepaint, they'll speak to something deep within the soul of alienated suburban white kids.
Parents recoiled, rock critics deconstructed Manson's hellish vision as derivative dreck, and the kids just kept on buying. The cover of Rolling Stone, a succession of MTV buzz clips ("The Beautiful People," "Tourniquet," "Man That You Fear"), a book deal, and massive record sales followed.
I, meanwhile, toiled in relative obscurity as an ink-stained wretch. To be honest, I didn't give much thought to Marilyn Manson (or Brian Warner, for that matter). I felt a quiet smugness in having recognized his potential early on. And we had friends in common. But that was about it.
This past October a reporter for the online music magazine SonicNet called me for a comment about Marilyn Manson's evolution. It was the first time I'd given Manson or his band any serious thought in at least a year. I offered my cyberpeer a couple of quotes, which came off long-winded and pedantic when I read them later.
What I failed to convey in that conversation, though, is just how complex a character Manson was, even at the beginning: an intensely ambitious, manipulative, brilliant, desperate guy who seemed eager to parlay his personal demons into a cultural persona.
Manson is unquestionably a huge talent. It's just that the vast majority of his talents have nothing to do with music. What this thirty-year-old former Broward Community College student has done is conceive and execute one of the shrewdest marketing campaigns ever perpetrated in music-industry history.
It was a work in progress when we used to speak regularly; he talked freely about his lust for fame and schemes for achieving it. Was he sincere? Put it this way: He sincerely wanted to be famous, and he sincerely had a kind of fucked-up suburban life, and he sincerely used that experience, or exaggerated extrapolations of it, to appeal to legions of other fucked-up kids.
Music was the ostensible product, so he surrounded himself with competent players from the start. He wasn't one of them; he taught himself to kinda play guitar, and he can find his way around mixing boards and drum machines, but he's not really a musician.
But he never wanted to be a musician. He wanted to be a big rock and rolllllll star. There's a difference.
The videotape is rolling. The overhead lights are dimmed in a cramped photo studio. Manson stands before a TV monitor, arms folded, and turns his narrow face with its aquiline nose, tiny mouth, and weak chin toward the cathode glow. A monster leers back at him: stringy black hair, eyes like lifeless white marbles, teeth smeared with black wax. The creature onscreen growls and seethes and fills the entire damn box. Behold the God of Fuck. Behold Marilyn Manson. Behold a skinny dude with pretty basic stage makeup.
Manson's girlfriend Missi (now ex-) is also here. She's tall, thin, very pale. Pretty in a bored-yet-predatory sort of way, she is downplaying her looks today: a black pullover and blue jeans, a torrent of black hair reaching below her shoulder blades. The tattoos and the Betty Page bangs would come later.
Manson is taller and thinner, maybe six feet three in his combat boots, but not quite as pale (no makeup). He's outfitted in what, for him, serve as civvies: black jeans and boots, a long-sleeve black T-shirt bearing the band's "The Satanic Army" logo (in the style of the Salvation Army insignia). The group's varied catalog of merchandise, for which Manson formed a company called Satan's Bakesale, is perhaps his favorite means of self-expression offstage.
It's May 1994, and my magazine's photographer is shooting pictures of the TV screen with Manson's image on it because the singer won't pose for us. As with most publicity-related matters, this choice was his. He doesn't explain why, but I have a theory: Our photographer is our photographer, who might want to pose him in a way that might not project quite the perfect image of Manson or his band. Plus our photographer ain't exactly Annie Leibovitz.
Instead his New York publicists are sending us a selection of shots both from live performances and from the photo sessions they'd done for the cover and interior art of the first record, Portrait of an American Family, which is currently being mixed. These shots will become the lead art for the story, supplemented by shots from the videotape and a closeup of Manson's Kiss lunchbox, both of which he has brought today.
"Hey," Manson says, as I walk into the room.
"Hey, man, how's it going?"
"Okay. The label had a problem with some of the album art, though."
"Which art?"
Manson reaches into a black folder and pulls out a mockup of the proposed CD insert. He unfolds it, revealing lyric text, line drawings, credits, thank-yous, and an arrangement of tiny Polaroid photos. "They didn't like the Polaroids too much."
Squinting, I note what appear to be shots of a naked woman splashed with blood. "They draw the line at snuff photos, huh?"
"They wouldn't let me use this, either," Manson says in disgust. He shows me another panel featuring a photo of a little boy, maybe five years old, naked but unharmed, sitting on a brown couch and staring guilelessly into the camera. "This photo counts as child pornography in, like, Oklahoma or something. So it's out."
"Who's the kid?"
Manson's tiny mouth corkscrews into a smirk. "Me."
Another day, another Denny's. It's May 1994, and Manson and I are sitting at a table sipping Cokes in the mostly empty family restaurant on Federal Highway just north of Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. This time we're alone, and we're working. As I scribble in my notebook, he outlines Marilyn Manson's plan for world domination. It has a lot to do with people hating him.
"What good would Marilyn Manson be if no one hated Marilyn Manson?" he queries, already evincing a tendency to talk about himself in the third person. He's wearing a close-fitting red shirt with long black sleeves, covering, as he usually does in public, the intertwining tattoos of black flames, grinning devils, skulls, eyeballs, pentagrams, and triple-six dice running up and down each arm. We're at ease, chatting away.
In this conversation especially, I begin to notice that, despite his contention that the line between Brian Warner and Marilyn Manson doesn't really exist, he is able to view the band and himself with some critical distance.
His onstage persona, I tell him, sometimes reminds me of a carnival barker, beckoning to slightly squeamish onlookers. His eyebrows arch slightly, and he tucks a stray black lock behind his ear. "Yeah," Manson says as he mulls this notion. "Yeah, I'm inviting people in to see the freak show: Come on in and see the freaks! And then I pull back the curtain, and it's a mirror." He's wearing a little half-smile now, pleased with the image.
In the coming months Manson will recycle some version of this "freak show" line in interviews with Alternative Press and Spin. Doing press, after all, is crucial to the plan, and Manson gets better and better with practice. Almost without exception, it is Manson alone giving the interviews. It's always been his vision, and he trusts no one else, not even his bandmates, to give voice to the vision.
Here's what's always struck me about the coverage of Marilyn Manson: Nearly every writer who pens any sort of tidbit about the guy feels compelled to inform the reader that he has met the Antichrist, and the Antichrist's real name is Brian Warner. Funny, huh? Dylan is Dylan, Bowie is Bowie, Sting is Sting, Madonna is Madonna. But Manson is Warner.
Why must journalists always use this particular rock star's given name? I suppose it's because Sting doesn't give the impression that, when he goes home at night, he stops being Sting. Nor, we sense, does Iggy Pop bar the doors of his hacienda and sigh, "Whew, now I can get back to being James Osterberg." The Manson thing is so much more than a stage name; it's such an obvious, self-conscious (and annoying) construct, it's difficult to accept that a person could be like this all the time.
When I wrote that 1994 cover story, I made it through the whole bloody thing without once mentioning Manson's real name. Or his then-bandmates Scott, Steven, or Freddie.
For this I took a ration of shit from an editor. "This story is about this image, this band, this concept this guy is selling," I successfully countered. "His real name doesn't matter."
I don't want to be disingenuous here, though. The truth is that Manson asked me not to use his real name. I mentioned that he lived with his folks, but as he requested did not disclose that they lived in a comfortable townhouse in west Boca Raton. I told myself that I had made these sacrifices to preserve access.
Would Manson have given me access if I'd stuck to my guns? Probably. But I just didn't have the heart or the gumption, or whatever, to push it. When we dealt with each other as rock journalist and aspiring rock star, we did this sort of delicate dance. We were kind of friends, and we respected each other, but Manson was always a bit wary, because he knew he couldn't completely control me. He could try to influence me, but in the end I was going to write whatever I wanted. And at that point, before the band had even released its first album, every bit of press was vital.
The budding love-hate relationship with the press that started with us, by the way, is now in full bloom on a much larger scale. Craig Marks, editor of Spin, alleges that Manson had his goons rough him up at a November concert. He also asserts that the reason two Manson bodyguards pushed him up against a wall and grabbed his throat, while Manson yelled, "I can kill you!" was that Manson was upset his band would not be the exclusive subject of the magazine's January 1999 cover.
A subsequent response to these allegations on the official Marilyn Manson website didn't mention a physical altercation, noting only Manson's disappointment with the magazine's "immature business behavior" and his intention never to work with Spin again.
"Kissell."
"Yeah." It's late and I'm cranky. Earlier today (we're in fall 1994), I finished an article about the local industrial-rap-metal band Collapsing Lungs. I pulled a near-all-nighter doing so.
"Manson."
"Hey."
"So tell me about the Lungs' demo deal," Manson croaks in his customary monotone.
This is a switch. Manson is usually one of my sources for music-scene gossip, not vice versa. I explain that it isn't actually a demo deal. Atlantic Records has signed the Lungs to a pact that guarantees the band an EP and a tour. Afterward they're supposed to go back to the studio to put out a full-length record.
At this point in South Florida alternativity, Collapsing Lungs is easily the second most popular band in Broward County, behind Marilyn Manson. And although Manson and crew have inked a deal with Reznor's Nothing label, the band is having problems with Nothing's distributor, Interscope. Something about the "extreme tone of the band." The rumor mill in town has even speculated that Manson has been dropped altogether, the plan for world domination cut short before it's begun.
The thought that another Broward band might leapfrog his own group drives Manson crazy, especially this particular band. Collapsing Lungs' frontman, Brian Tutunick, had been the original bass player for Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. Although this arrangement didn't last long, there is an ongoing rivalry between skinny Brian and chubby Brian.
The former isn't accepting my explanation of the Lungs' contractual status. "Ahh, that still sounds like a demo deal to me," he declares, pointing out that Atlantic is on a spree of buying up "alternative" bands for cheap, without offering them significant support, in hopes they'll get lucky and stumble upon the next Nirvana or Stone Temple Pilots. Manson predicts the label will put out the EP, not support it, and drop the Lungs when it doesn't sell.
I know how driven Manson is, but this is my first inkling of just how petty and jealous he can be. It's not enough that he succeed; his enemies must wither and perish. Manson wants to know more. "Did you ask them about when they decided they liked hip-hop?" he scoffs.
Well, yeah, we did talk about that. The Lungs started off as a sort of robotic industro-synth-metal outfit, à la Ministry, and gradually began to incorporate funky beats (aided by a live drummer, a very good live drummer) and rapping, so now they're kind of Biohazard-ish. When I asked Tutunick about incorporating traditionally black influences into their previously unfunky sound, he drew a parallel between his grandparents' stories of the Holocaust and the historic oppression of African Americans.
"Yeah, he really understands black people," Manson sneers when I relate this answer to him. Then Manson mutters something like, "Blah blah blah fat hairdresser blah blah blah." (A reference to Tutunick's day job.) The real reason the Lungs funked up their sound, Manson snipes, has more to do with what they think will sell than with any supposed empathy for rap and its originators. (Not that Manson is any paragon of racial sensitivity. He and his circle of friends created their own code word specifically for blacks--"pot pie"--which they used habitually. Don't ask me why. The behavior of an enlightened soul? You decide.)
I'm not close enough to Manson to have ever seen him really mad, except when he's pretending to be really mad onstage. In this conversation his voice never rises above the standard drone. But the underlying venom of his mood is evident. "You know, that's one thing that really pisses me off, is people being fake," Manson snorts. "I mean, I'm the biggest fake in the world, but I'm telling you I'm a fake, so if you buy it, it's your fault, not mine."
Clearly, Manson can be a mean, pissy prima donna. On the other hand he turns out to be right about the Lungs' deal with Atlantic. The EP bombs, the tour is a dud, and Atlantic drops the group like a tuber afire.
The Marilyn Manson juggernaut, of course, rolls on.
Although I'm impressed with the achievement, I've never been any great fan of the product. The show at the Sunrise Musical Theater in late 1996, for example, is looking pretty weak to me. Manson, as always, owns the stage: leering, snarling, baring his teeth, staggering around wrapped in a back brace. Steven looks energetic enough, pounding at the pipe organ in a Wehrmacht uniform. But the two other players up front, bassist Twiggy Ramirez and then-new guitarist Zim Zum, are standing around with poles up their asses. Even with Manson's spindly presence working its unsettling magic, the stage seems empty, the performance static and uninspired.
Then, late in the gig, the lights cut out, and when they come back on, the stage set has changed. Manson, dressed in a black suit, red shirt, and skinny black tie, now addresses the faithful from atop a pulpit/rostrum-type thing. It's black, too, and emblazoned with the band's militaristic insignia. As he raises his arms, a sampled shout that sounds suspiciously like "Heil!" blasts from the sound system. With the first three shouts, a trio of red banners with the Manson logo drop down behind him. The SS-like lightning bolt brings to mind a Nuremburg rally or those crossed hammers from Pink Floyd's The Wall. Or more comically, the opening number of the play Springtime for Hitler from the Mel Brooks farce The Producers.
His fans, of course, are completely into it. But when they raise their fists in unison before Manson, the scene begins to take on a more sinister cast. To wit: I'm in an auditorium with 3,000 white people saluting a thinly veiled Nazi symbol. In Broward County.
I try to take another step back. Surely Manson is savvy enough to realize that he's basking in the adulation of idiots. He must realize that what he's presenting--the demagoguery, the watered-down fascism--isn't original. Or could it be that he's begun to believe his own hype, that the idolization and financial reward have blinded him to the ridiculousness of it all?
Atop his podium, Manson soaks it in, his black-painted lips parted in a shit-eating grin.
My cat is face to face with the Antichrist Superstar. Manson, Missi, my then-girlfriend, and I are getting ready to get some Italian food and see Mars Attacks! It's a couple of weeks after the Sunrise gig. Antichrist Superstar is a hit, and Marilyn Manson is every bit the cultural villain he hoped to be. But he still likes cats.
So he's scooped up Ing, the youngest of our four cats, and is pressing noses with the little guy. His ensemble now: all black, no Manson logos. He no longer needs to be a walking billboard for himself.
Ing is adorable, a mottled white-and-gray tabby fuzzball. He also has three genetic defects. First and second are his extra toes, one apiece on each paw, jutting out like thumbs. Third, he's got this weird allergy that causes his face to become all puffy and eventually kind of oozy and scabby. The vets are baffled.
So anyway, there's Marilyn Manson, rubbing noses with Ing, making little kitty noises (you cat people out there know what I'm talking about). "Uh, Ted," he says. "Did this cat get in a fight or something? It looks like he got scratched."
"Oh, no," I say. "He's got this weird allergy thing that makes parts of his face get all puffy, and then eventually get kind of oozy and scabby."
Manson drops the cat, makes a sound of revulsion (something like auggghhh, if I remember right), covers his mouth, and heads to the bathroom. He doesn't actually puke, though we hear a few strangled gags through the door. Apparently cat pus is as anathema to him as holy water.
Later that night, over dinner at Big Louie's Pizzeria, we're talking about how some superstar bands cling to their indie credibility. Manson starts picking on Bush for voicing their admiration for the group the Jesus Lizard, a Chicago-based quartet that has long been a darling of the underground music press.
I, too, am a big fan of the Jesus Lizard. In fact I've twice interviewed lead singer David Yow. Between bites of baked ziti, I launch into the tale of how Yow once took it upon himself to grab hold of my nether regions in a crowded room, a story with which I have bored many a hapless listener.
Manson's normally soft brown eyes narrow. He purses his lips in a mock grin, then imitates me telling my lame little story: "Me and a friend interviewed the Jesus Lizard when they were opening for Helmet at the Edge ..." Missi snickers. Manson's smile widens. "You're alternative and progressive, Kissell," he declares, sardonically granting me the street cred I'd been hoping to establish. The back of my neck grows warm. The Antichrist Superstar is calling me a starfucker, and he's right.
This, it turns out, ends up hurting more than the fact that he calls me "Matthew Sweet" for most of the evening, a tribute to my shoulder-length hair.
I get my licks in later, calling him "Bob Geldof" in return, a reference to the stage show he's cribbed from The Wall. He barely flinches. I also mention Springtime for Hitler, but he doesn't get it.
At this point he's way beyond caring about my rock-crit barbs.
It should hardly come as a surprise, given Manson's catty, controlling tendencies, that South Florida is littered with disgruntled former Manson members and disillusioned former friends of Brian Warner.
Some of these folks have joined forces in an attempt to leverage their early friendship with Manson into a tidy profit. Chris Nicholas, ex-Collapsing Lungs, has produced an unauthorized ninety-minute video called Demystifying the Devil. It includes a home video of Manson being cruel and degrading to just about everything that walks or crawls, as well as filmed interviews with Missi and other folks Manson left behind. You can order it online for $19.95.
Two ex-bandmates received their pound of flesh recently. Guitarist and band co-founder Scott Putesky and bassist Brad Stewart reached out-of-court settlements with Warner in their lawsuits. Both were looking for lump sums of cash, plus continuing revenue from the Manson songs to which they contributed.
In Putesky's case this was a lot of songs: most of Portrait of an American Family, plus five songs on the megahit Antichrist Superstar. (Though Manson continues to be the sole lyricist, the tunes have always been collaborative efforts among the rest of the lineup, whoever that might be at the time.) Putesky also retains the rights to 21 previously unreleased songs on several hours of early Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids demos. He's pondering when and how to release this stuff.
Both settlements came with confidentiality agreements regarding the financial terms, and both were reached just as the Mechanical Animals CD hit the streets last September.
Putesky is actually a pretty good friend of mine. A few months after his 1996 departure from the band, he showed me how to play the haunting hook riff of "Tourniquet," far and away the most interesting song on Antichrist Superstar. He can't tell me how much he was able to squeeze out of Manson, at least not while I'm wearing my reporter hat. He has bought a pretty sweet sequencer/sampler, though, and is contemplating a move to New York City sometime in the spring. He wants to write, produce, and perform soundtracks, and work as a session guitarist.
I like Putesky, but his lawyer gives better quote. I talked to Richard Wolfe last month, and he's more than pleased with the settlement his client received, especially with its timing. "I think I lucked out, or Scott did," Wolfe relates. "When the current record [Mechanical Animals] came out, we settled that week. It debuted at No. 1, and it's plummeted to a fast and painful death. It was at No. 110 on the Billboard charts in its thirteenth week. The usual curve, with the kind of across-the-board promotion this record has gotten, is to stay in the Top 10 at least a couple of weeks."
Wolfe is far from sounding the death knell of the Manson phenomenon, however: "He's a wonderful marketer and showman, and he has a way of ending up on his feet. He's an incredible manipulator of people--his band, his fans."
And as it turns out, Manson is one heck of a deponent as well. "I took his lawyer's deposition for six hours, his manager's deposition for seven hours, and his deposition for nine hours. After all this, it is my definite opinion that the guy who was running the show was the guy with the high school diploma. He was well-prepared, well-rehearsed, well-spoken. I've never seen anyone have such control of himself in a deposition, and I've deposed CEOs of corporations. He was excellent."
Marilyn Manson has never looked better than he does right now, on the brink of the new millennium. He's no longer the Spawn of Satan: He's a Spider from Mars.
Manson's sartorial makeover is fantastic: all glitter, glam, flame-red hair, platform shoes, and feather Bowies ... sorry, boas. He's accessorized with another new guitarist and a retro-yet-current glam-rock sound. The songs on Mechanical Animals are tuneful, and the production does a good job of masking the general tunelessness of Manson's voice, which killed my two otherwise-favorite songs on Antichrist: "Tourniquet" and "Man That You Fear."
This reinvention of himself might pay off, long-term, because grownups seem to be pretty impressed with both the album's songcraft and Manson's gender-bending look. Then again, maybe he screwed up. Maybe he's been listening to too many Sophisticated Rock Critics. He's wrought a style and a sound that the rock intelligentsia is receiving with pleasant surprise. Yet it continues to plummet down the charts. Why? Because he's alienated those alienated preteens who would have preferred a follow-up to Antichrist that mimicked the record's satanic verses and choruses, and boasted the same turgid post-industrial clatter.
Manson's current spat with Spin, which last month crystallized into a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by editor Craig Marks (earlier in January Manson's lawyer hinted at a countersuit), has prompted whispers that he might be trying to reassert his status as a rock and roll bad boy in light of all the good press he's gotten. New Year's Eve he added Keith Moon to his list of influences by (gasp!) trashing his Las Vegas hotel room and throwing a chair out a window.
As I finish this story Marilyn Manson is touring Europe. His publicist at Interscope has no idea who I am (nor should she) and makes it clear in no uncertain terms that the band is incommunicado for the duration of their stay across the pond.
Even if I did get him on the phone, what would I ask him? Does he remember the time he puked at Denny's? Or almost puked in my house? Or the show where he tied Missi naked to a cross? Would he tell me if his mansion in Los Angeles is as comfy as his bedroom in his parents' townhouse in Boca, where, a few years ago, he surrounded himself with lunchboxes and action figures?
I'm guessing I'd probably have more to say to him, actually, than he would to me. For starters I'd tell him that, with the exception of a few songs here and there, I never really liked his band that much.
As a failed musician I'd tell him that I've felt pangs of envy, even resentment, at his mind-boggling success. I'd tell him that writing this story has made me feel almost as much a starfucker as I did that night in 1993 when I slipped him a copy of my band's demo tape outside Squeeze. And I'd probably tell him that, despite my pseudointellectual parsing of him and his career, I still respect his vision and his drive.
And that, despite the fact that he's a son of a bitch, I still care what he thinks of me.
But being so far outside his circle these days, I'll probably never get a chance to tell Manson that stuff. All I can do is watch in morbid fascination as his science project devours its creator and excretes a commodity.
