The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

to cuddle with someone and we both ran.
    Did she catch you?
    I have a feeling that Trent may have ended up cuddling with her because he has a soft spot for shitty women. Not that we all don’t all have a penchant for taking ugly girls under our wings in the hopes that they’ll be better in the morning. But they’re always worse.
    So I went to sleep and hoped that it all would go away. The next day it did and we felt a lot closer to each other of course. He told me that he was starting his own label through Interscope Records called Nothing, and he wanted Marilyn Manson to be the first band on it. I thought it was the best label to be on because Trent was so upset about his experiences with his old label, TVT, that one of his biggest goals was never to deceive or mistreat the bands on Nothing.
    Trent said he was particularly impressed with the demo that we had out at the time, called Live as Hell . It was recorded on a Tampa Bay radio station and it was dreadful sounding. It was with our then-drummer, Freddy the Wheel [Sara Lee Lucas], whose timekeeping was about as impressive as Kelly’s cornhole was.
    Tell me about the recording of your first album, Portrait of an American Family , which was actually number one in our reader’s poll last year.
    It was a disaster at first. We went to record in Hollywood, Florida, at Criteria Studios, which is owned by the Bee Gees. The guy we were working with was Roli Mossiman, who was a weird character. I forget if he’s Swiss or German—some country where they’ve never discovered the toothbrush. He had about six—maybe eight—teeth in his head. And while we were in the studio recording he lost two of them. They were just falling out of his head, rotten, and he smoked all the time. Do you know how I feel about that?
    Your manager told me you despise it.
    Right, and Roli would roll into the studio smoking at about two o’clock and would want to quit a few hours later. He spent all his time talking about when he used to be in the Swans, which was one of the reasons why we picked him. But he only worked maybe five or six minutes a day.
    When we were finally finished, Roli had done the opposite of what I’d expected. I thought he was going to bring out some sort of darker element. But he was trying to polish all the rough edges and make us more of a rock band, a pop band, which at the time I wasn’t interested in at all. I thought the record we did with him came out bland and lifeless. Trent thought the same thing so he volunteered to help us repair what had been damaged.
    So then the band went out to Los Angeles?
    No, I went out there by myself at first to try and remix the tracks I thought were still salvageable. A funny thing happened when I was done. I called home to Florida to talk to Daisy [Berkowitz, guitarist] and ended up talking to Pogo [keyboardist Madonna Wayne Gacy]. He told me they were at Squeeze and they got really fucked up. Daisy couldn’t handle his alcohol, and all of a sudden passed out while he was walking and fell right on his face. He split his chin open and lost his memory. He didn’t know who he was when he woke up, and he kept saying, “Where’s my car? Where’s my car?” He thought he had been in a car accident. I called him, and he sounded like another person. I couldn’t communicate with him. He didn’t understand anything I was trying to say and probably didn’t even know who I was. The doctors told him he had a bubble in his brain.
    Was there any tension or hostility in the band at that point?
    I had early impressions from Trent that there were problems with the band. He and everyone he worked with knew Freddy the Wheel was a weak link. And Brad Stewart [former bassist Gidget Gein] was also still in the band, and I knew that he was an even weaker link because at that point he had already OD’d three or four times. I was on the verge of kicking him out and replacing him with Twiggy Ramirez.
    I also got the impression from a lot of people that Daisy was not only disliked as a person because his personality was abrasive but that no one was particularly impressed by his guitar playing—though I thought he was all right and didn’t have a problem getting along with him. I knew that we had a foot in the door but I was not satisfied. Marilyn Manson wasn’t the band that it could have been. I knew I’d have to go through hell to get the band to where I