His name was Stephen, but, he explained in the ensuing seminar, if anyone called him Steve, it pissed him off. If anyone spelled his name with a v instead of a ph, it pissed him off too. The subject of names didn’t change until Ministry’s “Stigmata” came on and the Goths and pseudo-punks stopped dancing and started violently slamming. Much of the commotion was instigated by an effeminate, Crispin Glover-looking guy with purple hair, a mini-skirt and a leopard-skin leotard. He would eventually become our second bassist. Completely oblivious to the activity around him, Stephen told me that if I liked Ministry, I should listen to Big Black. He then delved into a detailed analysis of Steve Albini’s guitar playing—the techniques he used and the tones he produced—followed by a dissertation on Albini’s methods of production and the lyrical content of his album Songs About Fucking.
I didn’t get laid that night, which pissed me off, though it was nothing new. But I did exchange numbers with Stephen. He called me the next week and said he wanted to make me a cassette of Songs About Fucking and bring me something else he thought I’d be extremely interested in. He wouldn’t say what it was. He just wanted to come over and give it to me.
Instead of Big Black, he brought me a tape of a band called Rapeman, and he spent several hours extemporizing on the lineage between the two bands, rocking back and forth autistically all the while. I later learned he had a problem with hyperactivity as a child, which his parents had treated with Ritalin. Now that he wasn’t on medication, he often turned into a babbling blur that was dizzying to watch. His mystery surprise was a rusty can of spiced sardines that had expired in June 1986. He never offered an explanation for it, and I never figured one out. Maybe he thought I was going to pull an Andy Warhol and make silk screens of it.
We began spending a lot of time together, hanging out at my poetry readings and going to concerts by shitty South Florida bands that I thought were halfway decent at the time. After a show one night, we came back to my house and pawed through poems I wanted to turn into songs and lyrical scraps I had written. I was hoping he played an instrument since he seemed to know everything there was to know about all things electrical, mechanical, and pharmaceutical. So I asked. The answer came in the form of a long-winded monologue about how his brother was a jazz musician and played a variety of reed, keyboard and percussion instruments.
Eventually, he confessed, “I can play drums—heh, heh, heh, drums, heh, heh—sort of—heh, heh, sort of, heh.”
But my vision didn’t include drums. I wanted to start a rock band that used a drum machine, which seemed somewhat novel at the time since only industrial, dance and hip-hop bands used drum machines. “Just buy a keyboard and we’ll start a band,” I told him.
Stephen didn’t end up in the first incarnation of the group. Neither did the next person I found that I liked. I was at a record store in Coral Square Mall buying Judas Priest and Mission U.K. tapes as birthday presents for my cousin Chad. A well-tanned store employee who looked like an exotic Middle Eastern skeleton with an afro bigger than Brian May’s walked over and tried to foist Love and Rockets albums on me. His nametag identified him as Jeordie White. One of his coworkers, a girl named Lynn, had given blow jobs and much more to most of the South Florida scene, excluding me but including Jeordie (though he denies it to this day). Almost a year later, Jeordie and I would form a joke band called Mrs. Scabtree and perform a song about Lynn’s legacy to the music scene. It was called “Herpes.” Jeordie sang it dressed like Diana Ross and I played drums using a chamberpot as a stool. Jeordie would go on to play in my band as Twiggy Ramirez. But for now, Jeordie was just a friendly freak in a Bauhaus T-shirt trying to find someone who understood him.
The next time I ran into Jeordie at the mall, he was playing bass in a death metal outfit called Amboog-A-Lard. So I didn’t even bother trying persuade him to quit. I just asked if he could recommend a good bass player, but he insisted that there weren’t any in South Florida. And he was right. I ended up talking Brian Tutunick, my friend from theater class, into playing bass with us. I knew this was wrong from the start because he had been talking about forming his own band for some time, and had no intention of including me. He may have thought he was doing me a favor when he joined Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids as part of the rhythm section instead of as the frontman that he wanted to be, but it wasn’t much of a favor because he was a bad bassist, a fat hairdresser, a wanna-be vegetarian and a devotee of Boy George, which placed him at the bottom end of the aggressivity meter. He lasted two shows before we kicked him out. He wound up forming Collapsing Lungs, a bad, watered-down industrial metal band with songs like “Who Put a Hole in My Rubber?” They thought they were God’s gift to South Florida, especially after they got signed to Atlantic Records. But I cursed them. Now they’re God’s gift to the unemployment line, though I can’t entirely take credit for their downfall. Bad musicianship and industrial metal songs about saving sea turtles didn’t help their career any.
I found the next piece of the band at a drunken house party. An intoxicated, pie-faced twit with greasy brown hair and long monkey arms flopped onto the couch next to me, pretending he was gay and talking about the drapes. He introduced himself as Scott Putesky. He seemed to know a lot of technical information about music-making and, even better, he owned a four-track cassette recorder. I had a concept but no musical skills whatsoever, and I was easily impressed. Scott was the first real “musician” I had come in contact with, so I asked him to join the band and later rechristened him Daisy Berkowitz. He immediately proved to be a fuck-up when I called him the day after the party and his abrasive mother rasped nasally at me, “Sorry, Scott isn’t here. He’s in jail.” I thought she was kidding, but it turned out he had been picked up for drunk driving on the way home from the party.
Scott had been in several local rock and new wave bands before, and almost everyone he worked with wanted to kill him because he was very pretentious and had deluded himself into thinking that he was much more talented than he actually was. Some people talk better than they play, but Scott did neither well. He always knew just what to do to annoy people. He’d tell girls, “You look great from the waist down,” and think it was a compliment.
I would have performed using my own name, but I needed a secret identity in order to write about my music in 25th Parallel. So I carefully chose a pseudonym, a moniker with a magical ring to it like hocus-pocus or abracadabra. The words Marilyn Manson seemed like an apt symbol for modern-day America, and the minute I wrote it on paper for the first time I knew that it was what I wanted to become. All the hypocrites in my life from Ms. Price to Mary Beth Kroger had helped me to realize that everybody has a light and a dark side, and neither can exist without the other. I remember reading Paradise Lost in high school and being struck by the fact that after Satan and his angel companions rebelled against heaven, God reacted to the outrage by creating man so that He could have a less powerful creature companion in his image. In other words, in John Milton’s opinion at least, man’s existence is not just a result of God’s benevolence but also of Satan’s evil.
As a bipedal animal, man by nature (whether you call it instinct or original sin) gravitates toward his evil side, which may be one of the reasons people always ask me about the darker half of my name but never about Marilyn Monroe. Although she remains a symbol of beauty and glamor, Marilyn Monroe had a dark side just as Charles Manson has a good, intelligent side. The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects shaping our personalities and humanity. I could elaborate further, but it’s all on the Internet (try the alt.life’s-only-worth-living-if-you-can-post-it-online-later newsgroup). All I’ll add is that the first article written on Marilyn Manson was by Brian Warner. And he completely misunderstood what I was trying to do.
At the time, Charles Manson had been resurrected as a news item and television special in the name of Nielsen ratings. In high school I had bought his Lie album, which featured him
singing bizarre, almost comical original songs like “Garbage Dump” and “Mechanical Man,” which I incorporated into one of my own poems, “My Monkey.” “I had a little monkey/I sent him to the country and I fed him on gingerbread/Along came a choo-choo, knocked my monkey coo-coo/And now my monkey’s dead/At least he looks that way, but then again don’t we all/(What I make is what I am, I can’t be forever.)”
“Mechanical Man” was the beginning of my identification with Manson. He was a gifted philosopher, more powerful intellectually than those who condemned him. But at the same time, his intelligence (perhaps even more so than the actions he had others carry out for him) made him seem eccentric and crazy, because extremes—whether good or bad—don’t fit into society’s definition of normality. Though “Mechanical Man” was a nursery rhyme on the surface, it also worked as a metaphor for AIDS, the latest manifestation of man’s age-old habit of destroying himself with his own ignorance, be it of science, religion, sex or drugs.
After we turned four or five of my poems and ideas into songs, we felt we were ready for South Florida to see our ugly faces, which we strategically covered with makeup. Unfortunately, Stephen still hadn’t bought a keyboard, so we found an acne-faced nerd named Perry to fill in.
Another problem was that among the many neuroses that Christian school had instilled in me was a crippling stage fright. In fourth grade, the drama teacher chose me to portray Jesus in a school play. For the crucifixion scene, he wanted me to wear a loincloth. Forgetting the cruelty kids were capable of, I borrowed an old, frayed terrycloth towel from my father and wore it without underwear. After dying on the cross, I walked backstage, where several older kids yanked the towel off me, started whipping me with it, and chased me through the hall. It was your classic preteen nightmare come to life: running down a corridor naked in front of all the girls you like and all the boys who hate you. Oddly, I got over my fear of exposing myself on stage, but I never got over my resentment of Jesus for traumatizing me.
Our first show was at Churchill’s Hideaway in Miami. Twenty people showed up, though now that we’re famous at least twenty-one claim to have been there. Brian the fat hairdresser (name changed to our trademark starlet-serial killer combination of Olivia Newton-Bundy) played bass; Perry the pimplehead (who renamed himself Zsa Zsa Speck without realizing the pun on his speckled complexion) played keyboards; and Scott the fascist of the four-track (Daisy Berkowitz) played guitar. We used Scott’s Yamaha RX-8 drum machine (which, like Scott, would one day leave us, although the drum machine was never heard from again).
Being very literal-minded, I wore a Marilyn Monroe T-shirt, but I added a Manson-style swastika to her forehead. Droplets of blood had leaked through the shirt, staining Marilyn Monroe’s left eye, a result of my having had a potentially cancerous mole recently removed from beneath my nipple in the same spot where Jesus was wounded. Although the doctor warned me not to touch the area around the incision, as soon as I returned home I stretched the skin around it as tautly as I could. The results were my first new hobbies as Marilyn Manson: scarification and body modification, which I furthur pursued with a plastic surgeon, who clipped my drooping earlobes down to human size.
The stage at Churchill’s consisted of several pieces of plywood over rows of bricks, and the P.A. was basically a pair of Walkman headphones snapped apart and scotch-taped to the wall on either side of the stage. We opened with one of my favorite poems, “The Telephone.”
“I am awakened by the incessant ringing of the telephone,” I began, my croak turning to a growl as I wondered whether there was enough chaos on stage to hold the audience’s attention. “I still have dreams caked in the corners of my eyes and my mouth is dry and tastes shitty.
“Again—the ringing. Slowly, I bustle out of bed. The remnants of an erection still lingering in my shorts like a bothersome guest.
“Again the ringing. Carefully, I abscond to the bathroom so as to not display my manhood to others. There, I make the perfunctory morning faces, which always seem to precede my daily contribution to the once-blue toilet water that I always enjoy making green.
“Again the ringing. I shake twice like most others, as I am annoyed by the dribble that always seems to remain, causing a small acreage of wetness on the front of my briefs. I slowly, languidly, lazily, crazily stumble into the den where my father smokes all the time. Cigars in his easy chair.
“Oh, the stench!”
The song went on, the concert went on, and I lost track of what I was doing until afterward, when I rushed into the club bathroom and threw up in the toilet. I thought it had been a terrible show for watcher and performer alike. But a funny thing happened as I leaned over my putrid amalgamation of pizza, beer and pills. I heard applause, and suddenly I felt something rise inside me that wasn’t vomit. It was a sense of pride, accomplishment and self-satisfaction strong enough to eclipse my withering self-image and my punching-bag past. It was the first time in my life I felt that way. And I wanted to feel like that again. I wanted to be applauded, I wanted to be hissed, I wanted to make people pissed.
Few stories in my life are without an anticlimax, and this one came as I was driving back to Fort Lauderdale at three A.M. that night in my mom’s red Fiero. On the overpass arching above the crime-ridden ghetto of Little Havana, the digital radio blinked out in my car. I pulled over to the shoulder to see what was wrong, and discovered that I couldn’t restart the car. The alternator belt had snapped, and, less than an hour after having found my true calling, I was stuck foraging for a phone by myself in Little Havana, where the chances of a makeup-streaked clown named Marilyn Manson not getting beat up were pretty slim. The only good that came out of the experience was that, since the tow truck didn’t arrive until ten A.M., I got used to not sleeping after a concert early in my career.
Our first real show took place at the Reunion Room. I booked it by telling the manager and DJ, Tim, “Listen, I got this band and we’re going to play here and we want $500.” Normally bands were paid $50 to $150, but Tim agreed to my price. That was lesson number one in music-industry manipulation: If you act like a rock star, you will be treated like one. After the show, we kicked pimplehead and the fat guy out of the band and they no doubt went off to make sandwiches, squeeze zits and star in the sitcom Pimplehead and the Fat Guy, which lasted for two episodes.
We then lured Brad Stewart, the Crispin Glover look-alike from the Kitchen Club, away from a rival band, Insanity Assassin, which featured Joey Vomit on bass and on vocals Nick Rage, a short, stubby guy who had somehow tricked himself into thinking he was a tall, skinny, attractive guy. It wasn’t hard to convince Brad to play bass with us (even though he had played guitar with Insanity Assassin) since we had similar musical goals—and better stage names. He became Gidget Gein. We let Stephen join the band as Madonna Wayne Gacy, even though he didn’t have a keyboard. Instead, he played with toy soldiers onstage.
For better but ultimately for worse, one more character ended up in our freak show. Her name was Nancy, and she was psychotic in all the wrong ways. She knew my girlfriend Teresa, who was one of the first people I met after Rachelle had made a fool of me. I was seeking a motherly figure instead of a model’s figure, and I found it at a Saigon Kick concert at the Button South. Teresa came from the same factory as Tina Potts, Jennifer and most of the other girls I ended up with in Ohio. She had a slight overbite, tiny hands and a blond bob not unlike Stephen’s. The two were perpetually mistaken for twins.
I had seen Nancy once before when I worked at the record store, a hippo Goth looking foolish in a black wedding gown. When Teresa introduced me to her a year later, Nancy had lost fifty pounds and had an I’m-skinny-and-I’m-gonna-pay-back-the-world-for-all-the-times-when-I-was-fat-and-didn’t-get-fucked attitude. She had shoulder-length black curly hair, floppy tits that hung out of a slutty tank top, Hispanic features, a pale face, and a permanent stench that was half flowery, half noxious. Once I told her about the performance art ideas I had for future shows, there was no e
scaping her: She pushed herself into the band like a tick working its way under an elephant’s skin. Any idea I had that involved a girl—no matter how extreme or humiliating—she immediately volunteered for. Because she was willing and I was desperate—and also since she seemed like somebody other people would dislike as much as they disliked me—I gave in.
Our antics quickly grew from tame to depraved. The first time we performed together, I sang while holding her on a leash the whole time—to make a point about our patriarchal society, of course, not because it turned me on to drag a scantily clad woman around the stage by a leather leash. Soon afterward, Nancy asked me to punch her in the face, so I began giving her progressively cruder beatings each show.
It must have caused some brain damage because she began to fall in love with me—even though I was going out with Teresa, who was good friends with Nancy’s boyfriend, Carl, a tall, goofy, well-meaning klutz with big hips and a soft, girlish figure. This lame Real World situation was made even worse when Nancy and I began to explore sexuality as well as pain and dominance onstage. I made out with her and sucked her tits, and she got on her knees and caressed whatever she found down there. Without fucking, we took it as far as we could without getting in trouble with my girlfriend, her boyfriend or the law.
Long Hard Road Out of Hell Page 8