ROLLING STONE
November 1998
THE LOVE SONG OF MARILYN MANSON
In which our hero, trapped in the hills of Los Angeles, finds a girl, discovers his emotions and consumes copious amounts of drugs
by Chris Heath
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The guest had arrived at Manson's rented house in the Hollywood Hills. Manson gestured that he should sit between Manson and Twiggy. Down below, you could see Los Angeles twinkling out of the darkness, but Manson didn't look. He had looked out the window enough. Perhaps too much. This evening, he and Twiggy -- Manson's principal musical collaborator, his housemate and closest friend -- had hospitality on their minds. They would play the guest their music. They would put him in a long blond wig. They would watch Chevy Chase movies together. They would drown a guitar. They would let him see their prized photo of Lionel Richie. They would do their best to show him a good time. Maybe he'd understand.
There are some things Marilyn Manson would like you to understand. He has changed. Don't get this wrong -- there will be no apologies offered or regrets expressed in the pages that follow, at least not about any of those things for which apology and regret have most often been demanded.
But he has changed. The character he became during Antichrist Superstar was emotionless and cold, and that was very much how he was himself. Maybe that's how he had to be to muscle his way to celebrity and attention, but he has not stayed that way. For one thing -- and I don't think even he is sure of whether this is a use or a product of the changes within him -- he seems to have fallen in love. "I've learned to have a sense of empathy," he says. "I really feel people's pain now, almost on a weird supernatural level where it really affects me if someone is upset about something, and it will set off a huge depression."
As is his nature, now that he has started feeling, he is overdoing it. "It's almost like if I was a machine or an alien and you granted me some human emotions; they're not working right because I just got them for the first time and I'm not learning how to use them properly," he says.
The story of a man beginning to feel emotion is, in part, what his new album, Mechanical Animals, is about. When Manson began to feel emotion, he began to despair about how little emotion most humans feel. They -- we -- are the mechanical animals of the title. He imagined a story. A man is somewhere far away -- maybe in space, maybe on drugs, maybe just high in the Hollywood Hills -- and he is looking to come back. He is looking among the mechanical animals for the thing he needs to make himself whole. He calls it Coma White.
Though, naturally, it's more complicated than that. And a lot sadder.
Manson, a more considerate host than his many detractors would have expected, had noticed the guest's preferred drink when they had met briefly the previous night. He fumbled with a Corona, to no great effect, then announced a little helplessly, "I don't know how to open beer bottles." Twiggy took over.
The record had been finished a couple of days earlier. Manson handed the guest a sheaf of neatly typed lyrics inside a manila folder. Only when the music started did the guest realize how awkward this might be. Secretly, the one part of Marilyn Manson's canon that he had not always been so enthusiastic about was the music. Between the few fine songs, there was too much death-metal riffing, distorted shouting and industrial rancor; he had few problems with Manson styling himself as the Antichrist, but rather more with Manson's role as the anti-tune.
Happily, this was different. From the beginning it was easy to like and exciting to hear. The guest stared around the room. There were anatomical models and charts of anatomy and physiology. Next to tthe video player was a shrunken Mexican voodoo head. On the wall, framed, was Marilyn Manson's first "Rolling Stone" cover and a poster from "The Doom Generation," the film which Manson's old girlfriend had shown to him and which had sparked his attraction to its leading actress and his current girlfriend, Rose McGowan. The guest thought about the cute grotesqueness of that situation: that his old girlfriend had identified with McGowan, and in doing so had drawn Manson's attention to her. And that, in the end, Manson had simply cut out the middle man.
Half the songs were staccato glam romps; the other half were darker, weirder and more beautiful. The sixth song, "Speed of Pain," sounded sad and brutal and creepy in the best ways. Its title referred to soemthing Manson had read about: that scientists were trying to make computers react organically, like human nervous systems. The idea was that machines would be able to react to the speed of pain in the way that humans do. That interested him - that you could maybe outrace the speed of pain. Another way to run away from your feelings. In the song, the singer was failing to outrace the pain his love brought him and ended up declaring, "I hope that we die holding hands."
"It was meant to be somewhat of a love song," Manson said, a proud grin leaking onto his face. "So that's how it comes out for me."
As the ninth song - "I Don't Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)" - revved up, Manson announced, "You can't hear the next song without doing drugs." He and Twiggy gathered around the rivulets of cocaine arranged on a CD case, but the guest demurred". It seemed inappropriate to submit to his hosts' will and choreography on demand.
For whichever reason, Manson was getting chattier. He explained that half the songs - the pumped-up glam ones - were the hollow anthems of a group called Omega and the Mechanical Animals. They had stompind riffs and singalong choruses, and they also served as satires about the way the world looked at Marilyn Manson; the hollow anthems of rock stardom. The others - the spacier, more somber ones - told the story and carried the sadness.
As the final song ended, Twiggy brought in a framed gold disc of Leif Garrett's "Feel the Need" album. Garrett, one of their Hollywoof acquantances, had given one to each of them. Manson had met Garrett at a party; they bonded after Garret put on Iggy Pop's "The Idiot."
"You know, those aren't his legs on the album cover," Twiggy said. They insisted Garrett had told them the legs in his cover photo were not his; they were from a body double.
"Sexier crotch," Twiggy explained.
INCIDENTS FROM MARILYN MANSON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY THAT REWARD FURTHER SCRUTINY, NUMBER ONE (PAGE THIRTY-NINE): Manson's father, Hugh Warner, told his son that he wanted to take him to a prostitute to divest him of his virginity.
"That scared me," Manson says. "I'm not quite sure if he would have done it or not. Unless it made me cry or made me scared, my dad would do whatever he threatened to do when I was a kid. That was just his sense of humor, and I think I've gotten that from him. He's always been real confronting with sexual issues; maybe he got that from his father." (It is Hugh Warner's father whose basement is described at the beginning of Marilyn Manson's book.)
Manson has never discussed his book with his parents. That task falls to me.
ME: Now, I must ask you, did you really want to take him to a prostitute to lose his virginity?
HUGH WARNER: [laughs heartily] Honestly? No.
ME: So where on earth did he get that idea?
HUGH WARNER: I love to bust people's balls.
ME: So you would tell him that when he was younger?
HUGH WARNER: Oh, yeah, I did tell him that, yeah.
ME: But, if he had called you on it, you wouldn't have followed through?
HUGH WARNER: No. I'm not that liberal.
ME: Well, what if he had just told you he had gone and done it?
HUGH WARNER: I would have said, "Good boy."
Tonight, Manson wore a Loverboy T-shirt from Loverboy's 1982 "Get Lucky" tour. Twiggy's T-shirt, which had colored glitter on it and was a gift from a member of Pantera, commemorated the Charlie Daniels Band's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." On the way upstairs, they proudly showed their guest the framed photo of Lionel Richie they had recently stolen from a recording studio. Richie was a current fetish of theirs. Manson had depraved theories about Richie: that the singer's peculiar cheeks were the consequence of walking around with cotton in his mouth; that his disturbingly jaunty hit "Dancing on the Ceiling" was an ode to the over-effects of cocaine. Sometimes Manson worried that Richie, whom he had seen around town, might become aware of these libelous and offensive opinions. "He's going to end up knowing that I'm onto his cotton thing, and he's going to accost me about it and punch me in the face," Manson figured. "But then I'll just take the cotton and wipe up my bloody nose, and it will all be fair."
"Didn't he set his wife on fire or something weird like that?" Twiggy asked. (Their love of pop trivia was not equaled by a firm grasp on, or respect for, the relevant truths.)
"I think he might have been trying to cook some macaroni and cheese when he was dancing in the ceiling," Manson argued.
"His wife locked him up in the fireplace or something," Twiggy said.
And, somehow satisfied, they left it at that.
Marilyn Manson met the actress Rose McGowan just less than a year ago. After he had been entranced by The Doom Generation, Manson read an interview with her in which she talked about her childhood: "that she had a strange family," he recalls, "and her father was in the Children of God, and she had an extremely difficult time growing up with this bizarre religious cult. And I thought, `Here's someone who I could definitely relate to.' Someone who has been through more than me." When he arrived on the West Coast, he told people that she was the only person he wanted to meet. It happened at a screening of Gummo. McGowan, who is perpetually late, missed the movie but was standing outside. "I met her," he says, "and I really haven't left her side since then." She knew he had been wanting to meet her. "I guess maybe she went there on purpose," he says. "I don't know. Maybe she'll never admit that to me."
ME: Is Coma White supposed to be, on some level, Rose?
MANSON: I think that definitely inspired it. A lot of the pain that she's gone through, I started to feel, and the record kind of documents me coming to terms with emotions and caring about somebody for the first time. And I guess I still epress the fear of doing that as well.
ME: Are you saying that you didn't have emotions in a way that was usual for someone of your age?
MANSON: I think I just tried to keep them away for so long. Just the simple fear of being hurt...I felt lied to so much as a kid, because of religion specifically. I thought that everybody was going to lie about something. One of my very first girlfriends had never told me that she had a kid, and that was something that made me feel afraid, because I'd been going out with her for three years. It was something big to hide from somebody. I think it was on Mother's Day - she started crying, and I asked her why. It upset me a little bit that she was crying, but I didn't feel sorry for her, I just felt betrayed.
ME: So why did things change with this new relationship?
MANSON: I don't know. There's something very tragic about her, something very classic, in a Marilyn Monroe sort of way, that just captured me. I've never met anyone like her, a guy or a girl. And she has very extreme ups and downs - they're so extreme that they affect me as well. I think we have a great relationship but it still has a sense of tragedy to it. Maybe that's what makes it appealing in some ways, that it just seems like it has an unhappy ending to it somewhere.
ME: Do you say that to her as well?
MANSON: No, but she's very pessimistic that something bad's always going to happen.
ME: How does it feel to be feeling more?
MANSON: It's a little like walking outside today, in that it's hot, it's bright and it's a little overwhelming. But at least it's kind of starting things over, and it's not continuing in the direction that I was going, which doesn't have much farther to go.
ME: Where would that have ended up?
MANSON: Dead, probably, because it was just a path of nihilism. Either destroying myself or convincing other people to destroy me. I think my lifestyle over the past couple of years has been a long form of suicide.
Some reluctant reflections on the act of self-mutilation: One afternoon, changing after having his photograph taken, Manson slips off his top. Pale white scars crisscross his torso, the pen strokes of a foolish, inarticulate private language. He first cut himself in high school in class during the ninth grade, digging into his forearms with a pocketknife. Onstage, it has become a ritual. "I think that's all a form of wanting to let go, of wanting to get out," he says. It is something he thinks he will not do again. "It's not something easily described or understood," he notes, "though I've come to find that Princess Di also used to mutilate herself, and so did Emily Dickinson." In all the time I spend with Marilyn Manson, it is during the following conversation that he seems the most uncomfortable and imposed upon.
ME: Would you do it as much offstage as you would on?
MANSON: Sometimes.
ME: Was that the same impulse?
MANSON: No. I think onstage it was more me trying to show people my pain, and offstage it was just feeling it, period.
ME: This may be a dumb question, but would it hurt?
MANSON: No, I never felt it. I felt it afterwards, but never when it happened.
ME: Do you remember the last time you did it?
MANSON: Probably the last show we performed before moving to Los Angeles.
ME : And why do you think you haven't done it since?
MANSON: Um . . . I don't really have an answer for that. [Grabbing for the glib evasion] I suppose I was running out of space. Maybe since I never really talked about my emotions in songs, I had to express it that way, and now that I've found a way to talk about it in songs, that provided a replacement. I'm guessing....
Later, I recall something he had said in a different context: "I think before, I experienced a lot of pain physically because I wasn't experiencing it emotionally." And I reflect that this kind of personal exchange - physical pain for emotional pain - can very easily reverse direction more tyhan once in a lifetime.
Manson got out some watercolors he had recently painted. "I can paint a picture of you if you want," he offered. As Mason painted, laying down grays and purples and greens, the guest first worried that the picture didn't look like him, then worried that it did. "It's kind of impressionistic," Manson said. "You don't have to take it literally. Or personally." Manson liked to concentrate on the parts of people that stood out the most, usually the eyes or mouth. Sometimes it seemed to him as though he were actually painting their shadows. "I guess it's the darkest part of them," he said.
The guest pointed out that everyone Manson painted looked lonely.
"I guess that's how I see everybody," Manson said. "Maybe I see my own reflection in everybody else."
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