Long Hard Road Out of Hell (25 page)

He said, “Why don’t you come out? We’re shooting a video for one of my songs, and I want you to play guitar in it.”

I told him, “Well, I don’t really play guitar.” But I went out there anyway and pretended to play guitar in a video that was never actually released. It was a song called “Gave Up.”

Then he signed you to Nothing?

Actually, I still didn’t know that Trent was starting a label. We just hung out and had a great time, and that’s when we really became close and established our friendship.

Can you remember anything more specific about that time?

I remember one night Trent ditched his girlfriend, a rich teenaged bitch who had become so obsessed with him that she tattooed his initials on her butt, and we went to a bar in L.A. called Smalls, where we met some girls that today I wouldn’t even let take out my garbage. But at the time they seemed like people worth wasting my efforts trying to fuck because I didn’t know any better.

Actually, we weren’t really interested in sex. We were more interested in having fun because we had this new friendship. So we invited these two terrible individuals back to his house, and I remember one of their names was Kelly, which I found interesting because, like her face, it could have belonged to a man or a woman. We went on to make a videotape which I’ve since lost. But it was known only as “Kelly’s Cornhole.” You can imagine why.

No, I can’t. Please tell me.

Well, what we did was we pulled a trick that I’ve become quite famous for. It is pouring a large glass of tequila for your adversary, or your victim, and then pouring a large glass of beer for yourself and pretending that yours is tequila also. You convince them to drink down their large glass until they vomit and pass out and are left to be tormented. A similar trick had been done to me when I was young.

So the trick worked, as it always does, and Kelly and her friend were drunk and running around the lawn where Sharon Tate’s friends had been murdered. They jumped in the pool and somehow I was convinced to join them. That’s something I don’t like to do because I don’t know how to swim. So I was in the pool with this sea bass, I suppose you could call her. By smell she was some sort of porpoise fish-woman, and by sight she looked like a water behemoth. Trying to create some sort of entertainment for everybody, I said, “Why don’t we play Guess Who’s Touching You? We’ll put a blindfold on you and try to figure out whose hands are on you.” So Trent and I take this sea bass back into his living room. The other girl had since passed out and was hopefully drowning in her vomit.

We blindfolded the sea creature. No, I think we just wrapped a towel around her head, which also covered up her face and made us both feel better. Not that her body was any greater than her face. It was all terrible. I grow ashamed of myself right now as we speak of this.

So we started squeezing her nipples and prodding around her genitals and what-have-you. We were laughing because we were both drunk, though not nearly as drunk as she was. In the background a Ween album was playing, “Push the little daisies and make ’em come up…” as me and the young Trent Reznor poked our fingers into the birth cavity of a bizarre fish lady in search of some sort of caviar. But what we ended up finding was a mysterious nodule—maybe it was white fuzz or a piece of corn—that she had on the outer region of her rectum. It horrified us and we looked at each other with disgust and shock. But we knew that we must continue with our debasement of this poor unsuspecting person. So I found a cigarette lighter, and I started to burn her pubic hair. Though it didn’t hurt her, it didn’t help things smell any better than they already did.

Unfortunately, there isn’t any real climax to this story other than I think that she wanted to cuddle with someone and we both ran.

Did she catch you?

I have a feeling that Trent may have ended up cuddling with her because he has a soft spot for shitty women. Not that we all don’t all have a penchant for taking ugly girls under our wings in the hopes that they’ll be better in the morning. But they’re always worse.

So I went to sleep and hoped that it all would go away. The next day it did and we felt a lot closer to each other of course. He told me that he was starting his own label through Interscope Records called Nothing, and he wanted Marilyn Manson to be the first band on it. I thought it was the best label to be on because Trent was so upset about his experiences with his old label, TVT, that one of his biggest goals was never to deceive or mistreat the bands on Nothing.

Trent said he was particularly impressed with the demo that we had out at the time, called
Live as Hell
. It was recorded on a Tampa Bay radio station and it was dreadful sounding. It was with our then-drummer, Freddy the Wheel [Sara Lee Lucas], whose timekeeping was about as impressive as Kelly’s cornhole was.

Tell me about the recording of your first album,
Portrait of an American Family
, which was actually number one in our reader’s poll last year.

It was a disaster at first. We went to record in Hollywood, Florida, at Criteria Studios, which is owned by the Bee Gees. The guy we were working with was Roli Mossiman, who was a weird character. I forget if he’s Swiss or German—some country where they’ve never discovered the toothbrush. He had about six—maybe eight—teeth in his head. And while we were in the studio recording he lost two of them. They were just falling out of his head, rotten, and he smoked all the time. Do you know how I feel about that?

Your manager told me you despise it.

Right, and Roli would roll into the studio smoking at about two o’clock and would want to quit a few hours later. He spent all his time talking about when he used to be in the Swans, which was one of the reasons why we picked him. But he only worked maybe five or six minutes a day.

When we were finally finished, Roli had done the opposite of what I’d expected. I thought he was going to bring out some sort of darker element. But he was trying to polish all the rough edges and make us more of a rock band, a pop band, which at the time I wasn’t interested in at all. I thought the record we did with him came out bland and lifeless. Trent thought the same thing so he volunteered to help us repair what had been damaged.

So then the band went out to Los Angeles?

No, I went out there by myself at first to try and remix the tracks I thought were still salvageable. A funny thing happened when I was done. I called home to Florida to talk to Daisy [Berkowitz, guitarist] and ended up talking to Pogo [keyboardist Madonna Wayne Gacy]. He told me they were at Squeeze and they got really fucked up. Daisy couldn’t handle his alcohol, and all of a sudden passed out while he was walking and fell right on his face. He split his chin open and lost his memory. He didn’t know who he was when he woke up, and he kept saying, “Where’s my car? Where’s my car?” He thought he had been in a car accident. I called him, and he sounded like another person. I couldn’t communicate with him. He didn’t understand anything I was trying to say and probably didn’t even know who I was. The doctors told him he had a bubble in his brain.

Was there any tension or hostility in the band at that point?

I had early impressions from Trent that there were problems with the band. He and everyone he worked with knew Freddy the Wheel was a weak link. And Brad Stewart [former bassist Gidget Gein] was also still in the band, and I knew that he was an even weaker link because at that point he had already OD’d three or four times. I was on the verge of kicking him out and replacing him with Twiggy Ramirez.

I also got the impression from a lot of people that Daisy was not only disliked as a person because his personality was abrasive but that no one was particularly impressed by his guitar playing—though I thought he was all right and didn’t have a problem getting along with him. I knew that we had a foot in the door but I was not satisfied. Marilyn Manson wasn’t the band that it could have been. I knew I’d have to go through hell to get the band to where I wanted it. And I’m still going through hell. You know, the only way to get out is to go through all the way, to the very bottom.

I’m sorry. Have another line.

Sniff the dust? Okay
[Cutting and clicking sounds. Sniffing sounds]
. Where were we?

We were talking about Daisy.

So when Daisy got out of the hospital, we told him, “Fly out. Come hear the mixes. Let’s work on fixing these other songs.” The day that he was supposed to leave, he missed his flight and showed up late. He walked in the studio, and Trent had never met him face to face before. Trent said hi to him and Daisy was kind of abrasive and greasy. He always seemed to have baby oil dumped on his face and on his hair. The kid needed some Stridex. So he came in, and he was like this angry greasy pimple guy with cigarettes coming out of every orifice of his body, and Trent’s like, “You wanna hear the mixes?”

And Daisy says, “No, I wanna go smoke a cigarette.” He was a dick right off the bat, which made me feel uncomfortable because I had to defend him. When Daisy eventually did listen to the mixes, he didn’t even pay attention or make a comment. He just kept bragging about the musical shit that he could do.

We spent the next month or so trying to re-record songs and fix things up, and everyone learned early on that Daisy was not someone who was easy to work with. He was stubborn and he never had a song or the album in mind. He just had his personal agenda as a musician. He wanted to display his idea of what his talents were. Sometimes it got frustrating making that record. But most of the time it was fun. It was new. Life still seemed like something to be enjoyed.

As we were working on
Portrait
, Trent was starting his album
The Downward Spiral
, and we had some good times working together. I thought that was what making music was about. Everyone was pretty sober except for maybe having drinks at the end of the night, and I can’t recall anybody doing drugs except Brad Stewart being passed out on heroin. All I had to be pissed off about was the rest of the world, the things that weren’t a part of my life, the way I saw everybody else’s life. So it was still okay to be idealistic. I hadn’t been scarred by the bad sex, drugs and touring that came afterward.

Can you recall any of those good times?

Well, the studio had a large window where you could view the live room, and one night we wanted to have someone entertain all of us. So we taped $ 150 to the inside door of the studio—Trent and I each put in seventy-five dollars. In order to win that money and get in all our good graces, the challenge was to go outside the studio, which was on Santa Monica Boulevard where all the transvestite and transsexual prostitutes come out after dark like little hermaphroditic cockroaches, and pick up one of them and bring him-her-it back.

At first, all of us went and walked around. There were lots of people driving by and they seemed to be having an easy time picking these people up. But the prostitutes were clearly afraid of us, and we came back frustrated and ate dinner.

Pogo, who was a skinhead with a long goatee then, went into the bathroom and shaved his head. He always carried around clown makeup because at random times he liked to go out dressed up like a clown. He made up his face Gene Simmons-style and went out by himself. We were starting to record some tracks when all of a sudden Pogo walks in with some she-male and takes her into the live room. All we had to do was turn on the microphones that were recording the drums and we could hear their conversation. Apparently this person’s name was Marie, and from far away it looked pretty much like a woman, and not that unattractive, at least for a prostitute. But upon closer inspection we could see that underneath her fishnets there were some open sores on her legs that looked like they came either from being burned with giant cigars or the first stages of something that we didn’t want to know about.

What ended up happening was that she was smarter than we thought. She knew we were watching and wanted to charge extra. We weren’t really into it that much so Pogo went into the other room and, to the best of our knowledge, he jacked off on a man’s tits—and I’m not sure what that makes him, other than depraved, of course.

Was it scary working in the Sharon Tate house?

One strange thing that happened was we were mixing the song “Wrapped in Plastic,” which is about how the typical American family will wrap its couch in plastic and the question, “Will it keep the dirt out or will it keep the dirt in?” Sometimes the people who seem the most clean are really the dirtiest. We were using a computer because we had a lot of samples and sequencing. While we were working on that song the Charles Manson samples from “My Monkey” started appearing in the mix. All of a sudden, we’d hear in the song, “Why does a child reach up and kill his mom and dad?” And we couldn’t figure out what was going on. The chorus of “Wrapped in Plastic” is, “Come into our home/Hope you stay?” And we’re in the Sharon Tate house, just me and Sean Beavan [the record’s assistant producer]. We totally got scared and we’re like, “We are done for the night.” We came back the next day and it was fine. The Charles Manson samples weren’t even on the tape anymore. There’s no real logical or technological explanation for why they appeared. It was a truly supernatural moment that freaked me out.