Marilyn Manson Shows His Vulnerable Side

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 27, 2007

Marilyn Manson is sitting in a cold, dark room.

"There's drugs and naked girls everywhere, passed out -- does that work for you?"

Manson is on the phone from a Los Angeles hotel and, we suspect, having a little fun with our expectations. Of course, the reason he's at a hotel in his home town, Manson explains, is "because I shot the stove at my house -- it was making noises, and I thought it was looking at me -- and it caught on fire and burned my kitchen down. I was absinthe-drunk, which makes you have good marksmanship but no concept of reality. That's why I'm not allowed to have firearms.

"But it's all good now."

Again, Manson is probably having a little fun with us, but at least his closing statement is true, particularly in the context of the last year. This past Christmas eve, burlesque/fetish queen Dita Von Teese, whom Manson had married the previous December after a six-year relationship, filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. In subsequent interviews, Von Teese pointed to Manson's alleged infidelities, substance abuse and demons (inner, not pets). He blamed depression and a basic reluctance to change his ways.

Six months later, Manson released "Eat Me, Drink Me," his sixth studio album but his first since 2003's "The Golden Age of Grotesque." It is a raw, emotional breakup album in the tradition of Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" or the Cure's "Disintegration" but also a celebration of renewal as the 38-year-old Manson embarked on a relationship with 19-year-old actress Evan Rachel Wood. Apparently, even the antichrist superstar needs someone to hug.

Manson is asked whether "Eat Me, Drink Me" shows a human side and vulnerability few would associate with the longtime shock-rock provocateur.

"I suppose so, though when I was making the record, I didn't have any calculated concept," says Manson, who just a couple of years ago hinted that he would retire from music to concentrate on painting, writing and directing films. "I was at a point where I didn't know, and the people around me probably didn't believe, that this record was even going to happen until I turned in the artwork."

Manson says: "It was a very chaotic time in my life. I got to the point where I didn't understand who I was supposed to be. I thought that I'd said everything that I could say . . . about politics and religion. I realized I can convey the same ultimate motivation -- trying to talk to people about humanity, about individuality, about self-preservation -- by turning the magnifying glass onto myself and talking about human emotions. This may be the bravest concept record I've made -- it was right in front of me, my life at that time, a more dramatic idea than I could ever fictionalize."

Although the new album's industrial metal sounds familiar on its surface, it also contains elements of tenderness and romanticism mostly absent from Manson's previous works. And if the album was sired by Manson's breakup, it's equally inspired by the friendship-that-grew-into-a-relationship with Wood, whom he sought to cast in "Phantasmagoria -- The Visions of Lewis Carroll." (Manson, who directs his own videos, will direct from his own script, as well as play Carroll.)

"That's where we first met, but that wasn't our bond," Manson says of Wood. In various interviews, he has described her as a creative sounding board during the making of "Eat Me, Drink Me" and a much-needed friend as he battled severe depression that at times left him almost catatonic. In Rolling Stone, Manson cited Wood's gesture of solidarity and devotion when "she picked up a butcher's knife and said, 'Here, you can stab me.' When someone was willing to drown with me, I really didn't want to drown anymore."

Manson says the first song he was able to sing off the new album was "Just a Car Crash Away."

"I did it in one day, two takes, and played it for a few people. One person cried, and I realized that I was able to make somebody that I knew feel something. And it made me kind of redefine and lessen my insane schizophrenic moments -- who I am and what my life is about, the separation of Brian Warner from Marilyn Manson, 'Are you this or are you that?' "

He says: "When I'm on stage, I share -- I don't know if that's the word, it sounds a little hippie -- I put out all my personal feelings to strangers. Offstage, I wanted to do the same things to people I know, but I felt like I was failing, couldn't make the people I know understand what I was feeling. So I started writing songs for the people that I knew instead of the people I don't know, which is the opposite of what I've done my whole life."

The album features the smoldering dirge "If I Was Your Vampire" as well as "Putting Holes in Happiness," "Mutilation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery" and the dark valentine "Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)." The Cleveland Plain Dealer's John Soeder trumpeted, "Goths, behold the make-out album of the year, maybe of the decade." Manson told Rolling Stone that "if I had to do a record review, I'd say it's got a cannibal consumption, obsessive, violent-sex, romance angle, but with an upbeat swing to it."

"It was very vulnerable in a way I wasn't intentionally trying to be," he says from L.A. "I don't regret it, but if I was understanding that when it happened, I might have been afraid to do it. It was something I had to do, and as melodramatic as it sounds, it was really the thing that made me driven to have hope.

"People have always misinterpreted me as being nihilistic, and I understand that, but there's a difference between having nothing to believe in and being angry about what's going on in the world," Manson says. "If you're putting something into the world, you have to care about the world, as much as you may dislike it. If you're a nihilist, you're not going to be an artist."

Manson gives much of the credit to bassist-guitarist Tim Skold, who created the music to his lyrics. "With 'Car Crash,' I realized that the music sounded like how I felt. It might be more Tim scoring what he saw me going through than him just being in tune with what I wanted. This is the first time in any album that I did not have to tell the person who was writing with me where to go."

And, Manson adds, it was something that "ultimately translated to my personal life, where I started allowing myself to give in to trust, to trusting people in a different way, and it ended up being fun at an awful time in my life. It was rather strange that in the worst period that I can remember, I was able to make something that I enjoyed."

Maybe that explains some of Manson's playfulness at the start of the conversation, a willingness to subvert his startling image (the razor-thin goth ghoul, blackness of hair and whiteness of skin often set off with blood-red lipstick) and shock-the-conservatives-and-Christians reputation as the great corrupter of American youth.

Now, after eight weeks in Europe, Manson will hit the road on a co-headlining bill with Slayer, his first stateside jaunt since 2004's Against All Gods tour. (They perform Monday at Merriweather Post Pavilion.) When it ends in late November, he'll get back to work on "Phantasmagoria," which will feature Tilda Swinton, Lily Cole and Wood, already Manson's co-star in a controversial video for "Heart-Shaped Glasses" shot using "stereoscopic" 3-D technology developed by "Titanic" director James Cameron.

The eight-minute video kicks off with 2 1/2 minutes of the near-naked Manson and Wood in a passionate, and loud, make-out session, cuts to them driving a Corvette down a dark highway doing unsafe things with Polaroid cameras and a steak knife, segues to a blood-drenched bedroom scene and ends with them driving their flame-engulfed 'Vette off a cliff a la "Thelma & Louise."

The video begins with a warning for viewers younger than 16, and there are edited versions for commercial television (and, reportedly, a raunchier one for a future DVD). The controversy has come over Wood's orgiastic performance (hey, she is an actress) and the sheer "Lolita"-ishness of it all. Manson has said the song was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's notorious pedophilic novel, and Wood made her name at 15 in "Thirteen," playing a 13-year-old discovering sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.

"To me it's very unoffensive, it's almost PG -- there's no nudity," Manson says. "I just wanted to make something that conveyed the sentiment of the song and was more romantic in a dark way. If I wanted to be offensive, it could have really been offensive."

Marilyn Manson and Slayer Appearing Monday at Merriweather Post Pavilion Alice or malice?: In Marilyn Manson's "Phantasmagoria," author Lewis Carroll's wife will be played by the beautifully odd Tilda Swinton, who has said her very evil White Witch in "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was "very Marilyn Manson-inspired." There will be two Alices: Alice Liddell, the child who inspired the "Alice in Wonderland" stories, will be played by fashion model Lily Cole, while Evan Rachel Wood will portray the girl who played Alice in the first stage production of the work, a particularly traumatic experience for Carroll, according to his diaries. "I did so much research," says Manson, describing Carroll as a fractured soul: "a guy who's deaf in his right ear and he's left-handed . . . a mathematician who's also into writing -- a very serious left side, right side of the brain, split-personality situation. Researching 19th-century medicine, he would have been diagnosed as having aphasia, which probably someone would diagnose me as having, too. But I think you can turn lemons into lemonades."