Interview:2008/01/12 Everyone Will Suffer Now

The Everyone Will Suffer Now interview originates from the now defunct fansite Mansonusa.com. Since it's original source disappeared in June 2009, the interview has been lost for over 6 months and no proper sources can confirm it's integrity.

Reuniting with Twiggy

Not long ago you had ruled out the possibility of working with Twiggy Ramirez again, going so far as to say that you didn't have much in common as friends anymore. Why the change of heart, and how did your reunion with your long-term friend and collaborator materialize?

Reflecting on last year, I have to say that it was a big deal for me to stay up and count down the moments until “6 am Christmas morning...” I had waited a year to be able to actually sing that. I was with Evan, Rudy – my friend, the magician – and I was with Twiggy. There were a few other assholes that managed to squeeze themselves in the room, but I kicked them out. They didn’t have the right to be in the same room when our experience took place. It wasn’t our first moment of reuniting, but it was the first time we actually got to talk.

Right before we left for the very last leg of the tour, I was staying at The Roosevelt Hotel. It’s very famous for being haunted. I’m not sure how I feel about ghosts. I know I have said in the past, “Honey I’m going to haunt your vagina with my dick ghost.” I know that I’ve had experiences with Ouija boards, but my cats were barking this time. Cats don’t normally bark, but they were barking at the ceiling and at strange noises. Ironically, I had a portrait of Bowie that Mick Rock took hanging above my bed and across the room there was a photograph of Sid Barret. I was in the room and we were getting ready to leave the country. I had to meet up with my friend Jonathan Shaw who has written a few books now. He was one of the most famous tattoo artists. He is responsible for the “Winona Forever” – Johnny Depp, and the Captain Jack Sparrow stuff. He’ll be tattooing me tomorrow for my birthday as a gift. I’m getting “Together as one against all others” tattooed across my lower back – but I digress…

I went downstairs to meet Jonathan Shaw. Bowie is one of my idols, of course; Sid Barret happens to be one of Twiggy’s biggest inspirations. That all being said with the ghosts and strangeness and not seeing each other for this past year. I sit down and the first person that walks into the room was Twiggy. It was really strange – a complete coincidence out of nowhere. I would never go to this bar that’s in this hotel unless I was staying at the hotel – although I normally don’t go out anyway.

So we sat down and I noticed he looked a little bit sad. We were both almost in tears seeing each other again. We’re like twin brothers in some strange ways, although I prefer not to be blamed for certain aspects of his facial features. He wouldn’t want to get blamed for not having as big of a penis as he does, although mine has preserved its integrity, we’ll just say. In our five minute conversation, he had told me he had gone through a really hard relationship breakup very similar to mine. I could see it in his face – he’s like my little brother, so I knew. We exchanged phone numbers and it wasn’t one of those, “Yeah, I’ll call you”—like when John 5 always calls me – and I’ll get back to that later…

I went back upstairs and told Evan. I didn’t know how to feel about it right away. I was happy, but didn’t know what to do. The conversation didn’t go any further than, “Hey, when you get back into town in six weeks, we should hang out. Let’s get together.” I asked him, “How was it with my old pal Trent?” I think he best described it as “A vacuum of happiness.” I guess he found out he wasn’t in the band anymore when he read it in the press. He did have a strange comment for me “Never in your craziest days of ever doing anything” – and I’ve never been an extreme dick in any way to Twiggy because I’ve never needed to. We never had a falling out or anything like that. I’ve had a reputation of not being the most polite gentleman in the past – that’s putting it lightly. “Never in your worst days could you have made my life as uncomfortable and miserable as it was this last year.” The good news is it’s
over.
We joked a little bit. I said, “You know what I’m sick and tired of? I’ve been on tour for a year. I’ll get a hangover, I go to complete extremes. I outdo the Shop Boys that mention me in their song Party Like a Rockstar. I go beyond that on a daily basis and every day I wake up and say, ‘God damn it. Why can’t I die?’” Being immortal sucks, unless you’ve got a beautiful girlfriend.

I got an email from Twiggy while I was off in some foreign land – New Zealand, I think. It was a picture of a dick. I’m very accustomed to him doing that. He likes to show me his dick. I felt like the bit of life that seemed to have been beaten out of him or whatever reasons in the past year. The twinkle in his eye was represented by the twinkle on his dick in the picture. It made me smile and I decided to call him. “We should get together and play some songs.” I said, “Yeah, I want to make a new record. I don’t want any rules, I just want to have some fun. Something new, something different.” I didn’t really relate that to Tim, because he plays guitar and I assumed that would be something that would be treading on what he felt was his territory. In the ironic sense, obviously, he replaced Twiggy. There’s some awkwardness there – although I can’t speak for either of them.

I just mentioned that I saw him. I could tell by the look on his face that it wasn’t going to be something he was going to like. I was just excited that I saw my best friend in the world. All of my best memories are always associated with him. Every story I’ve ever told – when I tell Evan stories about all of the terrible things that I’ve done and how she has the strange ability to care for me and think that those are redeeming qualities. It reminds me that they are. Anybody can be good. Why can’t it be me.

It just made me happy. It wasn’t about the music, it was about friendship. We e-mailed back and forth every now and then. I started to pick up a few very enjoyable bonding habits with most of the band. Rob Holliday is able to go head to head with me when it comes to going for broke with alcohol or whatever substance it might be – except Viagra. I won’t take that. Rob likes to take that when he’s alone and go into truck stops and buy porno magazines.” – but I’m digressing on that.

Chris Vrenna is like my other little brother, although he’s older than me. One of my hobbies is to see how banged up he feels in the morning after I have my way with him. He just looks so fragile and destroyed. I feel like I need to buy him some sort of vitamins or something. One night I was up and I was actually beating Chris senseless with a potted plant. I made him drink the plant water on a dare.

Ginger just picked up a new hobby of drinking. It’s always fun to see somebody experience that for the first time, especially when they’re insane. That’s why I like Ginger. We’ve got all three of us, and we’re having a wild time. We decided to call Twiggy up and we’re like “Hey man, get back in the fuckin’ band.” He said, “I’ll do it, man, but we have to take it to the next level.” I’m like, “Well, do you think I would call you if I didn’t know that?” Then we started deciding, what is the next level? Cutting our faces off? Extreme teenage sleepover? Crotchless wheel chairs? I don’t know what the next level is, but depravity and offensiveness is definitely going to be our post-it note of things to do on this tour.

I came home and we saw each other. It was Christmas, 6am. Things couldn’t be more fateful. All the stars were aligned one hundred percent. We just knew it had to happen. I know that there wouldn’t be a real positive combination between Twiggy and Tim. I respect Tim and I love the work we did together. I just want the next part of this tour to be positive and almost in a selfless sense for Twiggy to see how much he probably looked a year ago and to know that I wish I had my best friend here a year ago. I think it took him having me in his life is exactly what we both need. We looked at each other and said, “Shit is going to hit the fans. People are going to go insane. They’re not going to believe it.” I would have never thought it would happen, either. I can’t wait to finish the tour and start writing songs. We started writing songs last night. We knew right away that we were back in business; the old ways.

There’s going to be a lot of Smells Like Children added to the set. The two of us are nothing but trouble. Ive always loved Rob as a guitar player as well as a bass player because he, as a bass player, was the closest thing to a rock star that I could have to Twiggy. Now there will be two nightmares on either side of me. I can guarantee there is going to be a lot of things that we’ve never done – like switching. Sometimes we’ll play different instruments.

Happy Birthday

First of all, we'd all like to wish you a Happy Birthday. Did you do anything special for the occasion?

Last night I got a really amazing gift. I’m just grateful for friends and friends who have stuck by me and the fact that I can see somebody that I alienated and they forgave me for it. I can see people that I didn’t know even gave a shit about me. I’m not very complicated to make happy nowadays and I like that. I’m not jaded anymore. I appreciate small things in life. My favorite thing that I got for Christmas, my birthday, whatever, is Charlie, Lily’s new little brother. He’s amazing. He’s got a serious troublesome personality and he’s coming with me on tour, they both are. They need to experience it. Charlie needs to grow up seeing Marilyn Manson with Twiggy in it.

He has a little bit of a mustache. I didn’t think little Adolph had such a ring to it as Charlie, so we went with Charlie Chaplain. Then there’s Charlie Manson, if people want to go for the obvious. When he’s bad, I’ll just say “Charles, you need to behave.” If I get drunk with my cat I can say, “Come on, Chuck!” There are a lot of options. That was Evan’s gift to me. It was the greatest gift ever, because last year at 6am is when I had my other cats taken from me. For nothing else, Lily needs a companion because I can’t satisfy her alone. I’m not talking sexually – I don’t look at her in that way. Charlie still has his genitals intact, so I just wanted to see what he does before we get rid of them. I think he’s entitled to try them out at least. I don’t think Lily’s going to like that.

For my birthday, Kerry King came to visit me. We’ve become really good friends on the tour with Slayer. We hung out on Halloween as well. Twiggy answered the door. He told me he had been listening to Antichrist Superstar on the way there. He has tattooed on his fingers “When I’m God” on one middle finger; “Everyone Dies” on the other. He got that on the tour because he loves Reflecting God so much. We were all excited. Kerry King is also a big influence on Twiggy as a rhythm guitar player. I also watched Evan play Raining Blood on Guitar Hero the night before. There were many levels to the excitement of it. Kerry gave me as a gift, the trademarked, iconic Kerry King nail-spiked armband thing that he created. It’s a giant gauntlet of nails. He gave me one that he made. I said “Man, you’ve got to come on stage on this tour and play Reflecting God with us – we’ll have three guitarists, whatever – and I’ll wear that in honor of you.” There’s a chance that that may happen too. That really turns the evil content in the satanic cocktail up to one hundred proof. Who’s going to swallow, I don’t know. It was a great synchronicity and musically there’s a real big exciting future ahead of us. We’ve never been in the position where. I’m not going to say it’s anyone’s ego. I had the flexibility to have players and collaborators that are willing to change things and do things like this before. I don’t have any words for it. I feel like a kid.

The Tryptich and Twiggy's return

Twiggy left right after the completion of the triptych… do you forsee returning to songs of that nature versus the more personal, autobiographical songs on your last record?

I think we definitely have an agenda in front of us and it’s – first I have to remind him in the way… I should say another important thing. The real deciding factor before I called him up and said “let’s do this,” I was lucky enough to get to see the Led Zeppelin reunion with Evan. Everyone of course always likes to sing Stairway to Evan to her. I’ve never been as passionate about Led Zeppelin as I am about Bowie, The Doors, or The Beatles. I’m into them, just not in the same way. I realized that I was sitting here listening to the most famous song in rock n roll – Stairway to Heaven. I saw these two guys looking at each other on stage. I just laughed and said, “Holy fuck. We wrote Stairway to Heaven. Can you believe that?” I looked over to Evan, and Tony – my manager, sitting to my other side – and I said, “You know what? I want to be able to be on stage again and look at Twiggy and say ‘Holy fuck. We wrote Beautiful People!’” I wanted that look when I saw those guys. That was a big determining factor.

The show went on and they played Kashmir and dry ice comes rolling off the stage and the lights come descending down into this big, purple metal spider and it sounded exactly as it should. It sounded perfect and I just declared immediately that this is almost as amazing as Evan’s vagina. The guy right next to me goes, “That must be some vagina.” Everybody was just blown away by Kashmir. They had me. I’m sold. I felt like I was at a piece of rock n roll history. I don’t really get a chance to go to many shows, and I was really blown away by them.

Alain, the guy who runs Wild Bunch is producing Phantasmagoria, was also with me. I turned to him and said “You know what, Alain I’m going to get Twiggy back in the band. What do you think of that?” and he said “It’s the greatest thing you could do in your career right now. I will fly to America and see every show on the tour.” There was no questioning it at that point.

Tim Skold's departure

During his time in Marilyn Manson, Tim Skold has extended his role in the band from producer to almost the sole music composer on your last record. Taking this trend into account, few fans would have foreseen his abrupt exit at the end of the 2007 tour. Please tell us about the split and what this might mean for your future direction in music.

I wouldn’t consider it a split in the sense you can compare it to any previous band relationships, Tim became a very important fixture in Marilyn Manson with The Golden Age of Grotesque and he was a very important person for me in making Eat Me, Drink Me. I don’t know how he feels about me as a person, I know that the passion in the music making was there, I can hear it. I wasn’t so vulnerable that I would let someone do whatever they want. There should be no misconception that I just said ‘ok I’m going to sing and you can do what you want Tim‘, it wasn’t like that. He got me inspired and we wanted to do something different and I like working with him, so there is no problem with me and him. He may end up hating my guts but that’s not what I want, this is only about me and Twiggy. I just know that those two guys, I know there’s too much tension and history there, I don’t know, I can