The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

behind Marilyn Manson,” Trent warned. “Marilyn Manson is known for his guitar style.” John Malm, our manager and label head, agreed.
    A wave of frustration surged through my body. I dug a fingernail into my side to keep it in check. “I’ve read a hundred articles and not one person has ever even mentioned guitars,” I said, pissed off. “In fact, nobody even talks about the songs. I want to write good songs that people are gonna fucking talk about.”
    I offered to show them the lyrics, to tighten the songs, to add extra melodies, but nobody had any faith in the project. Besides, everybody thought we should still be promoting Portrait of an American Family . In many ways, I was my own worst enemy because I still didn’t trust myself. I was so new at this that I looked up to and believed publicists, lawyers and label heads. I followed their instincts instead of mine, so I forgot about the songs we had written and, for the first but soon to be last time, compromised. We began working on an EP of remixes, cover songs and audio experiments to encapsulate our mind-set at the time, which was dark, chaotic and drug-addled.
    Whatever flaws I found in Portrait paled in comparison to the disaster that this EP turned out to be. It was like stitching together an elaborate outfit for a party but catching the hem on a nail when leaving the house and watching helplessly as it unraveled and fell apart. The nail, in this case, was Time Warner, Interscope/Nothing’s parent company.
    The album we turned in to the label began with one of the most harrowing tape recordings I had ever made. Naturally, Tony Wiggins was involved. It was of a girl he had brought backstage early in the Danzig tour. She begged to be humiliated and abused. Wiggins began teasingly, cutting off her pubic hair, lightly whipping her and wrapping a chain ominously around her neck. But she kept asking for more and more abuse until, finally, she screamed that her life was worthless and begged to be killed on the spot. The tape snippet had Wiggins worrying that he had gone too far. “You’re okay, aren’t you?” he asked as she let loose a flurry of screams that no longer differentiated between pleasure and pain. “You know I’m not going to kill you,” he tried to soothe her.
    â€œI don’t fucking care,” she told him. “This feels so fucking good.”
    It was the only time I saw Wiggins exercise restraint.
    On the album, as soon as she said her life didn’t matter and begged to be killed there was a loud, ambiguous, cataclysmic crash and then the bassline of “Diary of a Dope Fiend” slowly kicked in. It was a perfect preface to an album about abuse: sexual abuse, domestic abuse, drug abuse, psychological abuse. Midway through the record, we included one of the taped confessions we had gathered, from a girl who had molested her seven-year-old male cousin. It underscored the subplot of the album, about the most common target of abuse: innocence. I’ve always liked the Peter Pan idea of being a kid in mind if not in body, and Smells Like Children was supposed to be a children’s record for someone who’s no longer a child, someone who, like myself, wants their innocence back now that they’re corrupted enough to appreciate it. Having recently had our own innocence abused by our road manager, Frankie, who we fired when we discovered he had run up $20,000 in expenses he couldn’t account for, we felt justified in adding a song about him called “Fuck Frankie.”
    The glue holding all of this together was dialogue from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that had been taken out of context to sound like sexual double entendres. And the centerpiece was our recasting of the Eurythmics’s “Sweet Dreams,” which we had been performing on the road. In a single lyric, it summed up not only the album but the mentality of nearly everyone I had met since forming the band: “Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused.” The record label fell into the first category of abuse. They had us excise the Willy Wonka samples because they didn’t think we would be able to get permission to use them and—I should have learned my lesson by now—said that we needed written affidavits from the people in the Tony Wiggins recordings. Most record labels probably would have come to the same conclusion, which is one reason