Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (65 page)

TWIGGY RAMIREZ (Marilyn Manson):
We come from a different place than Trent. I want to make music that people can put on if they feel shitty, and it will make them feel even more shitty. I like to write stuff that makes people want to go out and do drugs and fuck shit up. If I can motivate someone to go out and destroy something, I accomplished my goal.

JOHN 5 (Rob Zombie, ex–Marilyn Manson, ex–David Lee Roth):
When I was in 2wo with [Rob] Halford, we were supposed to do a festival in Germany with Manson that was canceled. I was so bummed because it was the last day of the festival and I never saw Manson. I get home from Germany, put my bags down, and the phone was ringing. It was Tony Ciulla, Manson’s manager, saying, “We’re looking for a guitar player. Would you like to come meet Manson?” I was like, “Absolutely.” We met at Gaucho Grill [in West Hollywood] and he had a Loverboy shirt on and big sunglasses. He asked me to be in the band right there. He gave me the name [John 5] there in the restaurant. He wanted me to rerecord the guitars on
Mechanical Animals
because they hated ex-guitarist Zim Zum so much, but the record company was like, “We can’t, we’ve got to put this out.”

A volatile, confrontational performer, offstage Manson abused himself and others as well. He developed a hearty appetite for cocaine and other drugs, and relished every opportunity to stretch the limits of his libido.

MARILYN MANSON:
I met Alyssa at a showcase we did for Maverick Records. I immediately realized she was deaf because of the way her voice sounded. A year later we were at South Beach Studios in Miami, and I went outside to get something to eat and I ran into Alyssa. I said, “Why don’t you come by the studio?” It was ironic because just that day [ex-keyboardist] Pogo [aka Madonna Wayne Gacy] was saying that one of his fantasies was to have sex with a deaf girl. Pogo shouted, “I’m going to come in your useless ear canal,” and it seemed to echo through the room as maybe one of the darkest things we had ever heard. Alyssa went to take a shower because she was covered in meat [we had thrown at her while she was naked] and assorted body fluids from the act of filth. So since she was going into the shower anyways, I asked, “Can we urinate on you?” She said, “Just not on my boots, and don’t get it in my eyes. It burns.” Twiggy and I put one leg on the stall and one leg on the toilet and hosed her down with urine.

JOHN 5:
Every single night, every single day [there was debauchery]. It was disturbing, to say the least; it was unbelievable. The very first night of [2000’s]
Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)
tour there were tons of girls, and this girl had to go to the bathroom. Someone said, “Hey, why don’t you just go in the trash can.” I had the video camera, we’re all giggling. She starts to pee in the trash can, but she has a dick. It’s on film if you look on [2002’s]
Guns, God and Government
DVD in the behind-the-scenes section. And a black girl was smoking a cigarette with her vagina—and this is just the very first night of the tour. This stuff happened every night. I was upset if I didn’t [have sex with] two girls a night.

MATT PINFIELD (TV host,
120 Minutes
; DJ):
We’re partying under Roseland, doing blow and drinking. It was before a trip to rehab for me. I see Twiggy and Marilyn, and they’re sitting there, and Marilyn just looked at me and goes, “Pinfield, you scare
us
.”

ALICE COOPER:
When I first saw Marilyn Manson I went, “Well, I can understand this: a new Alice Cooper for a new generation.” It was sort of like, “Hmm, girl’s name, makeup, tall, slender, theatrical”—except that he found different pressure points and anger points within the audience. “I’m gonna be a devil worshipper. I’m gonna tear the Bible up. I’m gonna do all this Nazi stuff.” This was going to irritate every parent and every church in America. I totally got it [though] I was surprised that he went with a girl’s name, only because that just made it
totally
Alice Cooper. When I saw his show, I realized it was different. But at the same time, I could not buy into his theology at all. The guy was in the Church of Satan. When I announced that I was Christian, he suddenly disowned me saying, “I hate Alice Cooper because he’s Christian.”

MARILYN MANSON:
I’m completely unlike a lot of other performers in the past who have been forgiven or come to terms with the real world because they tell everyone their performance is just a show. So people say, “Oh, it’s okay then. We don’t care. He’s not really a bad person.” It’s not just a show for me. It’s my life. I live my art. I’m not just playing a character onstage. Anyone who thinks I’m just trying to be this weird or shocking guy is missing the point. I’ve never tried to be merely shocking because it’s too simple. I could do a lot more shocking things [than I do]. I’ve just always asserted myself as a villain because the villain in any walk of life is the person who refuses to follow blindly and always wants to question things.

ALICE COOPER:
Manson and I had about twenty-five rounds of dueling against each other in the press. But we finally did meet in Transylvania at a festival around 2008. He walked by the dressing room and knocked on the door and opened it as I was getting ready, and he said, “Can I come in?” I said, “You know what? It’s about time we met.” We got along very well. But I still held to the point that my belief in Christianity was something where his show did offend me in a lot of places. Tearing up the Bible and throwing it in the audience—that was very offensive to me. But he came up onstage and did “Eighteen” with us and then I did “Sweet Dreams” with him. I understood that for this generation there needed to be a new villain, and he was that villain.

MARILYN MANSON:
I was born to be a rock star, so I’m just trying to be the best one that I can. We’re in an era where rock music is gradually becoming extinct, and I think it’s important for me to ensure that it survives and that it survives with a personality and an attitude, and not mediocrity. The only rock music that exists right now isn’t doing what the people that created the music form intended for it to do. Now I feel I can balance perfectly because I can be as sober as I want, or I can out-drink Frank Sinatra or Jim Morrison, and I could do more drugs than Andy Gibb, and I could still get up and look better than all four Spice Girls.

JEFF HANNEMAN:
When we toured with Manson [in 2007] I went onto his bus one time and he says, “Hey, Jeff.” I go, “Hey, what’s up?” He says, “Hey, come kick me in the balls.” I told him, “I’m not gonna fuckin’ kick you in the balls.” I was like, “This is too weird. I gotta go.”

TRENT REZNOR [2009 interview]:
Manson is a malicious guy and will step on anybody’s face to succeed and cross any line of decency. Seeing him now, drugs and alcohol rule his life and he’s become a dopey clown. During the
Spiral
tour we propped [Manson’s band] up to get our audience turned on to them, and at that time a lot of the people in my circle were pretty far down the road as alcoholics. Not Manson. His drive for success and self-preservation was so high he pretended to be fucked up a lot when he wasn’t. Things got shitty between us, and I’m not blameless. The majority of it, though, was coming from a [resentful] guy who finally got out from under the master’s umbrella and was able to stab him in the back.

MARILYN MANSON:
A doped-up clown sounds kinda fun. It sounds like something you’d send to a kid’s party and be really upset you’ve hired the wrong person. Which is kinda me. Lipstick, drunk sometimes. . . . Since I’ve known Trent he’s always let his jealousy and bitterness for other people get in the way. I’m not talking about me—I sat back and watched him be jealous of Kurt Cobain and [Smashing Pumpkins’] Billy Corgan and a lot of other musicians. I stopped thinking about him a while back, but I know that every day I have a song played where the money will go to him, forever. As long as I have a record deal it will be attached to him financially. In the words of his own song, you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you—you should take that hand and punch yourself in the face.

Around the same time that Trent Reznor was falling out with Marilyn Manson, White Zombie was heading for the grave. The band, which started as a tight-knit group, had become a business entity, and the bond that once united them was splintering.

ROB ZOMBIE:
The last seven years of the band were pretty shitty. No one got along, no one ever wanted to do the same thing. It was like when you have a group of friends, and everyone outgrows each other. But when you’ve got all this money involved and these expectations about what you’re supposed to do, it forces all those people to stay together and you drive each other fucking crazy.

SEAN YSEULT:
It’s weird that he would say that because we were together eleven years, and most of that time was really good. But when we were in the middle of a tour with Testament in 1992, [drummer] Ivan de Prume and Rob got in a big fight onstage. Ivan made a slipup and Rob got mad and spit on him. Ivan was like, “I quit!” Rob said, “Okay, quit!” I thought we could work things out, but at that point it was irreconcilable. That was sad because we were like a gang or a family of misfits. By that time the band and business had really taken over our relationship, so Rob and I decided to call it quits as a couple. That was when we started working on
Astro Creep 2000
, [which came out in 1995].

ROB ZOMBIE:
When we recorded the last record, I don’t think the four of us were in the studio at any point. I would ride on a separate bus at all times. Separate dressing rooms. It was just four people who didn’t work at all. That was beyond stressful. Everything about it should have been great. We had finally made it, we sold millions of records, we were playing in big, sold-out arenas. On the outside, it looked so fucking great, but on the inside it sucked.

SEAN YSEULT:
I dated Al [Jourgensen] for a while in 1995, and I don’t think that helped my relationship with Rob any [
laughs
]. Al and I packed a couple of years into a whirlwind couple of months. He almost drove us off a cliff at Johnny Depp’s house. It was late one night and Al was backing up. I told him he should back up a little slower ’cause we were getting ready to go off a cliff, and he proceeded to back up really quickly. It was just like in a Looney Tunes cartoon. The car was teetering back and forth and we had to delicately leap out of the Taurus back onto safe ground and spend the night there until we could get a tow truck.

ROB ZOMBIE:
Now [as a solo performer with a new band], I’m finally in a place where I’m with a group of friends doing this weird thing and we’re all on the same page. I never had that before. This feels like what that was always supposed to be.

SEAN YSEULT:
The end for White Zombie came because Rob wanted the band to go a little more techno. He hired [programmer] Charlie Clouser from Nine Inch Nails to write techno tracks, and [guitarist] Jay [Yuenger] and I had to create riffs over them on a couple of songs. Rob can be really controlling. Whoever’s on his team, it’s them against the world. Once Jay and I didn’t want to go along with him creatively, he kind of considered us against him.

Most industrial bands that formed in the eighties had played electronic music and alternative rock prior to integrating their music with metal. One of the first extreme metal bands to tinker with samples and electronics was Fear Factory.

DINO CAZARES (Fear Factory, Divine Heresy):
I first heard [vocalist] Burton [C. Bell] singing in the shower. In the late eighties, we both lived in this eight-bedroom house in Hollywood that this guy rented out to starving musicians. Burt’s in there singing some U2 songs and I thought, “Hey, it sounds pretty good.” Later, we met and started talking and I found out he was into some heavy, heavy industrial shit. I was into grindcore, death metal, and speed metal, so he turned me on to stuff I didn’t know and we decided to start a band together.

BURTON C. BELL (Fear Factory):
The reason I moved into that house was because I was in this industrial noise band called Hateface and my other bandmates lived there. When we broke up, Dino said, “Hey man, I know this great drummer. We’re gonna meet and jam. Come with me.” That’s when we went and met Raymond [Herrera].

DINO CAZARES:
I said to Raymond, “Yo, I’m trying to put a band together. Let me know if you’re interested.” He said, “Well, I know a band looking for a guitar player. Why don’t you go jam with them?” So I went and joined this grindcore band called Excruciating Terror. But I was like, “Eh, I need something a little more experimental.” One day I was at rehearsal and the drummer didn’t show up. Raymond happened to be there to watch us rehearse, and he got behind the kit and I was like, “Oh, man, this guy can play double-bass pretty good. Maybe I can see something going on there.” So I quit Excruciating Terror after two shows. And Raymond goes, “Well,
our
guitar player quit. Wanna join
my
band?” His band was horrible. They were called Extreme Death. But I saw the potential in Raymond. So I asked him to join forces with me. I said, “We already got a singer,” because Burton was on board. So we formed the band Ulceration, and later, three of those songs came out on Fear Factory records.