Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Neil Strauss, Marilyn Manson

the day after the party and his abrasive mother rasped nasally at me, “Sorry, Scott isn’t here. He’s in jail.” I thought she was kidding, but it turned out he had been picked up for drunk driving on the way home from the party.

    Scott had been in several local rock and new wave bands before, and almost everyone he worked with wanted to kill him because he was very pretentious and had deluded himself into thinking that he was much more talented than he actually was. Some people talk better than they play, but Scott did neither well. He always knew just what to do to annoy people. He’d tell girls, “You look great from the waist down,” and think it was a compliment.
    I would have performed using my own name, but I needed a secret identity in order to write about my music in 25th Parallel . So I carefully chose a pseudonym, a moniker with a magical ring to it like hocus-pocus or abracadabra . The words Marilyn Manson seemed like an apt symbol for modern-day America, and the minute I wrote it on paper for the first time I knew that it was what I wanted to become. All the hypocrites in my life from Ms. Price to Mary Beth Kroger had helped me to realize that everybody has a light and a dark side, and neither can exist without the other. I remember reading Paradise Lost in high school and being struck by the fact that after Satan and his angel companions rebelled against heaven, God reacted to the outrage by creating man so that He could have a less powerful creature companion in his image. In other words, in John Milton’s opinion at least, man’s existence is not just a result of God’s benevolence but also of Satan’s evil.
    As a bipedal animal, man by nature (whether you call it instinct or original sin) gravitates toward his evil side, which may be one of the reasons people always ask me about the darker half of my name but never about Marilyn Monroe. Although she remains a symbol of beauty and glamor, Marilyn Monroe had a dark side just as Charles Manson has a good, intelligent side. The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects shaping our personalities and humanity. I could elaborate further, but it’s all on the Internet (try the alt.life’s-only-worth-living-if-you-can-post-it-online-later newsgroup). All I’ll add is that the first article written on Marilyn Manson was by Brian Warner. And he completely misunderstood what I was trying to do.

    At the time, Charles Manson had been resurrected as a news item and television special in the name of Nielsen ratings. In high school I had bought his Lie album, which featured him singing bizarre, almost comical original songs like “Garbage Dump” and “Mechanical Man,” which I incorporated into one of my own poems, “My Monkey.” “I had a little monkey/I sent him to the country and I fed him on gingerbread/Along came a choo-choo, knocked my monkey coo-coo/And now my monkey’s dead/At least he looks that way, but then again don’t we all/(What I make is what I am, I can’t be forever.)”
    “Mechanical Man” was the beginning of my identification with Manson. He was a gifted philosopher, more powerful intellectually than those who condemned him. But at the same time, his intelligence (perhaps even more so than the actions he had others carry out for him) made him seem eccentric and crazy, because extremes—whether good or bad—don’t fit into society’s definition of normality. Though “Mechanical Man” was a nursery rhyme on the surface, it also worked as a metaphor for AIDS, the latest manifestation of man’s age-old habit of destroying himself with his own ignorance, be it of science, religion, sex or drugs.
    After we turned four or five of my poems and ideas into songs, we felt we were ready for South Florida to see our ugly faces, which we strategically covered with makeup. Unfortunately, Stephen still hadn’t bought a keyboard, so we found an acne-faced nerd