Interview:1998/11 And The Freak Shall Inherit The Earth

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And The Freak Shall Inherit The Earth...
1998-11 Q-Magazine 146 cover.jpg
Photographs by Perou
Interview with Marilyn Manson
Date November, 1998
Source Q Magazine #146
Interviewer Andrew Collins


Beware! Marilyn Manson has enslaved a generation of Yank teens with his magnetic amalgam of perv-rock, bad drugs and surgical supports. Now even adults and the British are in danger. "I'm an entertainer, I'm not here to pump gas," the former Brian Warner tells Andrew Collins.


Zepp has many tattoos. One of them depicts an ex-girlfriend with an axe embedded in her skull. He was still going out with her when he had it done. Nicknamed after the Led Zeppelin tattoo on his right shoulder, Zepp's story is this: he turned up in the parking lot after a 1995 Danzig show in Philadelphia and offered the support band Marilyn Manson a canister of nitrous oxide in return for an autograph.

Identifying a kindred spirit, they handed him a video camera and offered him a job. Nowadays Zepp is Marilyn Manson's de facto personal assistant. A square-jawed, long-haired, bronzed bundle of muscle, there is little evidence today that he used to inject speed, whisky or "sludge from a puddle" for kicks with his aunt in Pennsylvania. Zepp is, in fact, typical of the kind of reformed, straight-edge character that successful American rock bands gather around them as they graduate from club-tour, Spin-feature dues-paying to the sports arena, Rolling Stone-cover big time. Successful American rock bands like Marilyn Manson.

Zepp is doing his indispensable advance party bit at Smashbox, an impeccably-tooled, $1,500-a-day studio complex in Culver City, LA, where Manson (as the man after whom the group is named prefers to be addressed) is due to be shot. Zepp adjusts the air conditioning, double-checks that the rack of costumes are in place, and surveys the salmon, brown rice and feta salad banquet laid on by Good Food Catering. Marilyn Manson's new album - their fourth, entitled Mechanical Animals - bounces around the whitewashed walls ("I'm not in love but I'm gonna fuck you until someone better comes along") while we wait for the self-styled Antichrist Superstar to turn up. He is now three hours behind schedule. However, far from being fished out of an Orange County storm drain by paramedics with bloodied snot caked around his face after snorting too much Catsan kitty litter at his own funeral, Manson is actually overseeing a last-minute edit of his new video in order to get it over to MTV in time for next week's playlist meeting.

RELOCATED FROM FLORIDA to West Hollywood, this is Marilyn Manson's new life. The first ended in New Orleans, where, after what must have felt like 100 years on the road, the band recorded 1996's Antichrist Superstar album with Trent Reznor. According to Manson's autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell, the make-or-break sessions took place in a converted mortuary. There was drug-taking, violence, a near-death and an abortion. The supporting cast included a "foul harem of strippers", a pack of baying hounds belonging to Reznor, a drug dealer called Casey whose apartment was lined with platinum discs and an orgy of destruction that culminated in a four-track and some fireworks being fried in a microwave. "After four months," Manson writes, "all we had to show for ourselves was five half-finished songs, sore nostrils and a hospital bill." It was worth it. The completed album catapulted Marilyn Manson to superstardom, reaching Number 3 in the Billboard 100 in October 1996, subsequently selling three million copies in the US, and a further million throughout the rest of the world. A concept album that consolidated all the loathing Manson felt for himself, America, rock'n'roll and force-fed Christian morality ("I am the anti-flag unfurled... I am the faggot anti-Pope"), the attendant, high-profile tour turned it into "a self-fulfilling prophecy", as the enraged Christian right supplied death threats, protests and falsified affidavits, transforming Manson from a sideshow freak into America's Most Wanted. His Munsters make-up, surgical supports and funny contact lenses, his penchant for carving himself with broken bottles and tearing pages from the Bible under mock-fascist insignia, went from being a thorn in the moral majority's side to a trussed-up groin in their face.

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut declared Marilyn Manson "perhaps the sickest group ever promoted by a mainstream record company". Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating said, "Marilyn Manson are clearly bent on degrading women, religion and decency, while promoting satanic worship, child abuse and drug use. It's further proof that society's moral values continue to crumble." Senator Dale Shugars of Michigan claimed he'd received 10,000 signatures protesting against a Manson gig at Wings Stadium in Kalamazoo, alarmed that "their message is to kill God, kill your parents and then commit suicide". And lo, the kids in America did form a line round the block, saying, "Cool!"

AMERICAN ROCK GOES something like this: Elvis, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground, Kiss, Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Guns N'Roses, Nirvana. You have to add black people and Englishmen to make it truly interesting - and you have to add Marilyn Manson to bring it up to date.

Their music up to now may have been a din, and their composite stagenames daft (Twiggy Ramirez, Madonna Wayne Gacy, Daisy Berkowitz, Gidget Gein - each one a hybrid of female icon and serial killer), but Marilyn grunge, in the same way that grunge was a vital antidote to Izzy Stradlin. With Mechanical Animals, a dazzling glam rock carnival after the everymetal of yore, Manson's music has finally caught up with his interviews. In emerging from the shadow of Trent Reznor, who signed the band to his Interscope-owned Nothing label and nurtured them through their first three albums, Marilyn Manson have finally made a record which doesn't sound like Eight Inch Nails. Manson and Reznor haven't spoken since January 1997 when Antichrist Superstar put the protéges ahead of their master. "I had to make a choice between being friends and having a mediocre career, or breaking things off and continuing to succeed," says Manson. "It got too competitive. And he can't expect me not to want to be more successful than him." In America, they're still signed to Nothing.

Marilyn Manson are one of those uniquely American success stories. They couldn't happen here. Consider some numbers: 63 percent of Americans attend church, 66.6 per cent (no, honestly) believe in the devil, and over 70 per cent give to charity (compared to 30 per cent in the UK). Americans are a God-fearing, democratic people, and yet 12 out of America's 50 states uphold the death penalty. When celebrated serial killer and ex-clown John Wayne Gacy was given a lethal injection in 1994, his was the 237th execution in the US since the law was restored in 1976. God-death-compassion-guns-fitness-waffles. What a country. It almost makes you want to form a satanic metal band.

Manson was born Brian Warner in Canton, Ohio, 1969, a sickly youth with over-large earlobes obsessed with Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory. Attending a Christian school and seeing his grandfather wanking in the cellar didn't so much screw him up as focus his mind. He threw himself into Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal. The Warner family moved to Fort Lauderdale (cue: increased sense of dislocation) and Brian began sending poetry and grisly short stories to compendium magazines (all rejected) and ended up lying his way into a position at local rag 25th Parallel (an impressive feature he authored about a local dominatrix Mistress Barbara is reprinted in his autobiography). He got to interview Malcolm McLaren, Debbie Harry and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but quickly decided he wanted to be on the other side of the tape recorder.

His own band, initially called Marilyn Manson & The Spooky Kids, formed in 1990, would satiate that need. Brian Warner was dead. The band's first live appearance was at a club called Churchill's Hideaway in Miami ("Twenty people showed up, though now we're famous, twenty-one claim to have been there"). Four years, a couple of members and umpteen self-inflicted scars later, their debut album Portrait Of An American Family appeared (top track: Cake And Sodomy; defining line: "I am the god of fuck"), and they went from being a local cult to a national cult. By January 1997, Manson's devil eyes were staring out of the cover of Rolling Stone - the band ceremonially snorted coke off the magazine while a Dr Hook record played in the background.

Dr Hook never made the cover of Rolling Stone.

"I've always felt in my heart that we were going to get there," declares Manson when he finally turns up. "I don't think there's any reason why someone with as much to say as me should be limited to saying it to a few people. I should be on the same scale as the Spice Girls or Michael Jackson."

His handshake is surprisingly firm and sincere.

Although every interviewer to have been in Manson's presence draws the same conclusion - "He's a pussycat" - his unassuming appearance is disarming. Sans slap, his road-map of tattoos and wounds covered by an orange nylon shirt, eyes concealed behind Gucci shades - you'd walk right past him in the street, you really would. This, of course, is playing straight into his hands...

"I'm sure people expect me to start a fire or chant to the devil or slaughter a puppy," he smiles. "People's misconceptions become part of the power of what I do - if a bunch of people believe I removed two of my ribs so I could suck my dick, it might as well be true."

Sober, lucid and focused, Manson is anything but the clichéd LA rock fuck-up. When the late US comic Bill Hicks moved to "Hell A", he hated it so much he willed an earthquake to send the whole state into the sea. Conversely, Manson feeds off the sun-dried vacuity, gazing over LA's "mechanical animals" from his Hollywood hillside, protected by his belief that he is the only person here with any feelings (a reversal of his previous incarnation, for which he consciously divested himself of all emotion).

"This album is like feeling for the first time," he enthuses. "Everything is oversensitised, pain is more extreme and love is more extreme - hence the change in the music, which is more in the bombastic tradition of Queen and Bowie. Some bands are afraid of not sounding hard all the time, I'm not. In a lot of ways it is more mainstream, but I'm more mainstream. I don't think I've sold myself out - I've adapted to my surroundings. There's not much to do in New Orleans but abuse yourself. There's something dark there that's not agreeable. A lot of people go there to die, and at the time that's probably what I wanted."

However, against all odds, he didn't. In fact, Manson hits the big three-oh in January. There must've been times when he didn't expect to reach that particular milestone.

"I haven't got there yet," he chuckles. "I plan on it, though. There's a lot I'm looking forward to in the next year. I'm not scared of dying... but I'd prefer not to."

Did he make a conscious decision to do less drugs?

"Yeah, at the end of Antichrist Superstar I decided to focus. And you can't focus when you're on drugs. Drugs are very inspirational, and when used recreationally, in a decadent way, they're really great, but when they're used to fill a hole in yourself, that's when they don't achieve anything. New Orleans was the closest I've ever come to being out of control. I like being in control."

This explains his fanatical disapproval of heroin (he claims never to have stuck a needle in himself).

"Heroin is one of the few drugs that seems to have become a lifestyle - it's not something you would take for fun. I can't really say because I refuse to do it, but I'm not into the idea of something that controls you to the point where your life revolves around it. If you ask me, drug abusers give drug users a bad name."

MARILYN MANSON firmly believes that Americans should be forced to pass a written exam before they can have children. "There's so much stupidity," he rails. "America has no sense of irony - when they hear the name Marilyn Manson they immediately become hostile, they don't recognise that I'm making an interesting point."

So, the only living boy in LA fancies himself the only thinking person in America. It's easy to go along with this when former world heavyweight champion George Foreman is mono-syllabically TV-advertising his own portable grill ("$99 plus $9.95 shipping and handling: we're changing the way people think about grilling!") while a hyperventilating reverend from Tulsa waves the collection plate on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, saying, "There's a person watching who's got something in some bank account, and a portion of that belongs to God."

The leap of faith is not great from America's zomboid cable culture to the vast MTV/college radio counter-universe that makes bands like Marilyn Manson happen. Post-Lollapalooza, post-Woodstock II, US rock has a new fanbase, a marketable hybrid of punk, grunger and metal fan, suckling at the teat labelled "alternative" and converting club turns into platinum-sellers overnight. "I think it's pretty positive up to a certain level," reasons Manson, "until it becomes a product, where you've got TV and radio trying to convince kids that it's better for them."

Phil Alexander, editor of loud rock's parish magazine Kerrang! - who've put Manson on the cover nine times since November 1996 - concurs. He attended a Rancid gig in LA and had to leave: "Ten years ago, that audience would've liked Mötley Crüe, because MTV was feeding it to them - now they're feeding them Rancid." Identifying the new breed as "a load of jocks", Alexander lauds the influence of Marilyn Manson ("a celebration of freakitude on a mass scale"), which can be felt in Billy Corgan's face paint for the Smashing Pumpkins' Ava Adore video, in the acceptance of Placebo's Brian Molko, and in the next generation of mini-Mansons: Tura Satana, Jack Off Jill and Coal Chamber (who were crestfallen on a recent English visit to find that the Batcave wasn't still going).

"Grunge was shooting so low," sneers Manson. "Do you wanna look like a rock star or do you wanna look like you work in a gas station? I'm an entertainer, I'm not here to pump gas."

Pete Murphy of the re-formed Bauhaus (currently touring America) recently proclaimed in the LA Times that "bands like Marilyn Manson" had got goth rock all wrong.

Manson laughs as he heads off to the dressing room to disappear under the make-up artist's brush. "I wanted to say to Pete Murphy, I'm pretty sure I got it all right and you got it all wrong - because I have a successful career, and you're going bald."


Scans[edit]

Credit: pear-pies