Marilyn Manson - the 'Nobodies' remix
….they seem like nice enough lads.
2001. It came out of the blue this one. I got a call telling me that Marilyn was going to be in town (NYC) doing a couple of shows and needed a studio and engineer to complete a remix for the From Hell movie soundtrack. Of course I said 'sure!'. This could only interesting.
Manson sent his drummer, Ginger Fish, along in advance to bring in the required gear and setup for the mix . Ginger told me that for the last few weeks Manson’s manager had been pushing Marilyn to get this remix done because the film producers of From Hell were getting anxious for it. So Manson, night after night, got Ginger to setup their touring studio in his hotel room after every show and said he’d come and work on the mix - but he never did. It quickly became apparent that Ginger lived in fear of his boss. I felt sorry for him. Manson’s tour took a couple of days off for Christmas and Marilyn even told Ginger to meet him at his house on Christmas Day so they could work on the remix. As Ginger was driving the couple of hours to Marilyn’s house he didn’t have a good feeling about his trip - quite rightly of course because, yep, you guessed it, Manson didn’t show up. Ginger spent Christmas Day on his own in Manson’s house and took it upon himself to work on the remix himself and sequenced up quite a few tracks of stuff that sounded pretty good.
Ginger was now paranoid thowever that he wouldn't have all the hard drives of possible sounds/samples that Marilyn might want to use on the remix. He had nearly every sound from at least a couple of entire previous Manson albums. Literally thousands of samples/sounds. But Ginger feared that he might have left one song's worth of files in a flight case that was currently winging its way to Japan for the next leg of Manson's tour.. I naively thought 'what are the chances that Manson is going to want a sound from that one particular song?!’ Nevertheless, Ginger continued to get more and more anxious about Marilyn's arrival at the studio.
One the first day, Marilyn didn't show up at all.....we waited until about 2am and finally we were told that Manson was hanging out with Elton John and wouldn't be coming. The second day he didn’t show either. The third day we waited for hours and hours until late at night Marilyn showed up. He was incognito - his ass cheeks discreetly hidden in a normal pair of black jeans and he wore no makeup. He sported a black cowboy hat and black t-shirt. I remember being struck by how big he was. Having your butt hanging out of your trousers must make you look smaller.
In tow was Dita Von Teese, Marilyn’s burlesque dancer girlfriend - she was much less incognito and definitely fit the bill of gothic rock star girlfriend. Shortly afterwards Manson’s guitarist John 5 turned up with a female companion. John looked every part the LA goth metal guitar player with his full sleeve tats, pale face and bleached blonde hair - his lady friend was dressed in accordance with LA rock star companion policy.
By the time Manson arrived, I'd heard enough horror stories from Ginger that made me think that this was not going to be an easy session and I was feeling ready for trouble and braced to stand my ground. Trouble didn’t come though - not for me anyway.
Once the menfolk were in the control room, it became clear that Marilyn did not approve of John 5’s female companion. He told John to ‘get rid of it’. ‘Did I just hear him refer to the lady as ‘it’?’ I thought to myself. And just to confirm it Manson added ‘it shouldn’t be here’.
At one point, after John 5 had cleared the studio of ‘it’, he and I were in the control alone for a few minutes and I was a more than surprised when he picked up my 1968 Gibson acoustic and started playing some brilliant bluegrass on it. He guessed what I was thinking and said…‘Oh..I was playing with KD Lang before this’. I wouldn’t have guessed that was coming in a million years.. KD Lang to Marilyn Manson - that is an almighty stretch! John also played with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Meatloaf, Alice Cooper and David Lee Roth.
In the studio, unbelievably, one of the first things that Manson asked Ginger for was precisely the one bloody hard drive that Ginger didn't have - the one that was floating its way to Japan. And I swear I heard a whimper from Ginger as Marilyn asked him for it - Marilyn must have wire tapped Ginger!
Next Marilyn asked me to push up each fader to hear what Ginger had put together already for the remix. As we did, Ginger would attempt an apologetic explanation of what it was before being cut of by Manson’s firm ’get rid of it’ for each track. There was no debate. All of Ginger’s work was trashed in a matter of a few minutes.
On the positive side though, Marilyn knew exactly what he did want and the rest of the session went really well. He was also completely respectful and polite towards me throughout. We recorded some new heavy guitars with John 5 and within a couple of hours, after sitting around waiting for Manson for over a day and a half, the mix was put to bed pretty swiftly.
I have to say that after listening to Manson’s vocals in their pure unmixed form, they are bone chillingly good. I’m sure no producer ever had to push down the talkback button and say ‘yeah…Marilyn that was good, but I’m not feeling it yet - can you do one more and give it a little more edge?’
Maybe not one to play in the car when you are taking the kids to kindergarten……
Ginger Fish