Long Hard Road Out of Hell (42 page)

The next day, I met Sean Beavan, the sound engineer we had hired to coproduce the album in Dave Ogilvie’s place. We had worked together since
Portrait of an American Family
, and despite his penchant for cappuccino sipping and roller-blading, we had a lot in common when it came to music and cross-dressing. Though we had to work in an auxiliary studio while Nine Inch Nails mixed “The Perfect Drug” for the David Lynch soundtrack, we didn’t care. We were working, and not just on what I felt was our best song, but the first one I had recorded since quitting cocaine and alcohol. There were songs on the album that took place in the past and the future, but this was one of the only ones set in the present. “You cut off all your fingers/Trade them in for dollar bills/Cake on some more makeup to cover all those lines/Wake up and stop shaking/’Cause you’re just wasting time.” It was the most self-recriminating I had ever been, and it wasn’t just about myself. I had been part of an epidemic of drug abuse, self-abuse and insincerity that seemed to be raging through everyone I met in New Orleans. Their motto: “I’ll be your lover, I’ll be forever, I’ll be tomorrow, I am anything when I’m high.”

When we played the song for the record company, they hated it. Not only did they want to use the rough mixes instead, they wanted to fire Sean. “Listen,” I was told. “Why don’t we find someone else to mix the album, delay the release, and put it out in January instead of October?”

“No way,” I insisted, proud for laying down the law, my law. “This is the time to release it, and you know it.”

That would be the last time I sought anyone’s opinion on my work again.

Each time I walked to the studio in the weeks that followed, I felt progressively more elated—I was making this album myself, without mentors, managers, and sycophants. The closer we got to completing the album, the more it became like a magnet, drawing the band back in the studio and back together. We found a replacement for Daisy, a deceptively benign Chicago vegetarian with horrible taste in women who now goes by the name of Zim Zum, after sifting through countless videotapes of washed-up metal guitarists kicking dead deer, eating human feces, and dressing up in ridiculous outfits thinking that we would like that. I even found a way of getting around paying the $5,000 I owed for repainting my living room: by charging Interscope Records $5,000 for a spurious photo shoot.

I didn’t miss the drugs, and I didn’t even mind the betrayals that continued up to and past the point when I turned the completed album in to Interscope Records. I had gotten used to defection, desertion, disloyalty and double-dealing, and I’d come to understand that I was bigger than all of that. It wasn’t that I was cold and uncaring. I finally knew what was worth caring about. For perhaps the first time in twenty-seven years, I now knew myself.

This was because I had begun to see the world with new eyes, and to understand that the world was bigger than a studio in New Orleans, as was
Antichrist Superstar
. Everything and everyone who had tried to beat the album down had only made it stronger, more powerful and more effective. The album had entered the pop charts at number three, and now I was bigger than rock clubs, rock cocaine and feel-good rock; bigger than back stabbing, bullshit and shiny and/or happy people; bigger than rubber underwear, Willy Wonka, meat,
Night Terrors Magazine
, Tina Potts’s pussy and the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville; bigger than anyone who has ever worked out and bigger than most of the musicians I used to idolize. To some people, I was even bigger than Satan.

fifty million screaming christians can’t be wrong

[H
IS] MUSIC IS MADE BY CRETINOUS GOONS [SINGING] SLY, LEWD, IN PLAIN FACT, DIRTY LYRICS
. I
T MANAGES TO BE THE MARTIAL MUSIC OF EVERY … DELINQUENT ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH
. I
T IS THE MOST BRUTAL, UGLY, DESPERATE, VICIOUS FORM OF EXPRESSION IT HAS BEEN MY MISFORTUNE TO HEAR.

—Frank Sinatra, speaking about Elvis Presley

EXHIBIT A: OPPOSITION PROPAGANDA

AFFIDAVIT OF

[
NAME WITHHELD
]

STATE OF OKLAHOMA

COUNTY OF OKLAHOMA

I [NAME WITHHELD] HEREBY SWEAR, AFFIRM, DECLARE AND AFFITT:

1. I
AM A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD MALE AND RESIDE AT [ADDRESS WITHHELD]
O
KLAHOMA
C
ITY
, O
KLAHOMA [ZIP CODE WITHHELD];

2. O
N
T
HURSDAY
, D
ECEMBER
19, 1996, I
PERSONALLY ATTENDED THE
M
ARILYN
M
ANSON CONCERT IN
D
ALLAS
, T
EXAS;

3. W
HEN THE BAND TOOK THE STAGE THE FEMALE GUITAR PLAYER CAME OUT NAKED EXCEPT FOR VERY THIN, SEE THROUGH PANTIES
. S
HE DID THINGS TO HERSELF WITH A VIBRATOR AND OTHER THINGS
. M
ANSON BROUGHT A DOG OUT ON STAGE AND HAD INTERCOURSE WITH IT
. T
HE BAND ASKED THE CROWD TO GET ON THE FLOOR AND HAVE SEX
. I
HEARD THEM TALK TO THE CROWD ABOUT DOING RAPE ON YOUNG GIRLS AND BOYS;

4. T
HE YOUNGEST PEOPLE IN THE CROWD WERE NINE OR TEN YEARS OLD
. D
RUGS WERE CONSTANTLY BEING PASSED OUT FROM THE FRONT TO THE BACK
. T
HE SECURITY GUARDS IN THE CONCERT WERE ENCOURAGING PEOPLE TO DO WHAT
M
ANSON ASKED THEM TO DO
. N
O POLICE WERE EVER IN THE AUDITORIUM AREA
. T
HEY WERE KEPT OUTSIDE
. I
FEARED FOR MY OWN PHYSICAL SAFETY AS THE CROWD WENT INTO A FRENZY;

5. I
SAW BAND MEMBERS HAVE REAL AND SIMULATED SEX WITH EACH OTHER
. D
URING A SATANIC CHURCH SERVICE
M
ANSON TALKED ABOUT KILLING ANIMALS AS A SACRIFICE, PREACHED FROM THE SATANIC BIBLE AND GAVE AN INVITATION TO ACCEPT
S
ATAN AS LORD BY COMING FORWARD TO AN ALTAR
. H
E THREW OUT SOME LIQUID SUBSTANCE OVER THE CROWD;

6. I
WITNESSED SEXUAL INTERCOURSE AND SEXUAL ACTIVITY BY PEOPLE IN THE CONCERT, NOT JUST ON THE STAGE, AND
I
SAW MORE THAN TWO DOZEN PEOPLE BEING TAKEN OUT OF THE CONCERT BECAUSE OF INJURY;

7. I
LEFT BEFORE THE CONCERT WAS OVER;

8. F
URTHER, YOUR
A
FFIANT SAYETH NOT.

E
XECUTED THIS 17TH DAY OF
J
ANUARY, 1997.

—F
AKE AND DEFAMATORY AFFIDAVIT DISTRIBUTED BY THE
A
MERICAN
F
AMILY
A
SSOCIATION

EXHIBIT B: TOUR DIARY

UNDATED

People don’t keep journals for themselves. They keep them for other people, like a secret they don’t want to tell but they want everyone to know. The only safe place for your thoughts is your memory, which people can’t take and read when you’re not looking—at least not yet. I’m starting to think that if the Internet is the CB radio of the nineties, then the home computer is the trailer park of the soul, a dangerous tool in the hands of idiots. Eventually self-imposed fascism will destroy man as he convinces himself he doesn’t have to think anymore.

SEPTEMBER 1996, NEW YORK CITY

None of us wanted to play this Nothing Records showcase in the first place, and now I’ve inadvertently injured my drummer, nailing him with a microphone stand and landing him in the hospital. We had wanted to do a Marilyn Manson show to kick off the tour for
Antichrist Superstar
, but this turned into some sort of strange ego trip which I’m sure was just to make us look foolish. I’m going to go to sleep now and pretend like this didn’t happen. This wasn’t the beginning of the tour, it was one last favor.

OCTOBER 19, 1996, CLEVELAND

Tony Ciulla, our new manager, came by and asked me to guess what number
Antichrist Superstar
went to on the charts today. I told him, “Three,” and I was right. It couldn’t be any other number. On the back of the record, there’s three of us. There’s three sections to the record. It’s all three. The three means something else, too, something that’s going to happen in the future, something that is going to change the world as far as we…

OCTOBER 22, 1996, TORONTO

Someone called in a death threat today. They said they were gong to bomb the building and its occupants with mustard gas. Is that some sort of condiment? I guess I give them credit for being creative. And obviously I’m still here.

UNDATED

For a moment tonight I felt like Christ. It was snowing on me, and I could have been anywhere—Wichita, Berlin, Golgotha. There was a mirror behind the crowd on the wall, and I watched myself like a painting, frozen. The gash in my side bled and bled. It was so beautiful I cried right there in front of five thousand people. I was letting out the boy who had died on his plastic cross in elementary school. He escaped through the hole in my ribs.

HALLOWEEN 1996, NEW JERSEY