"Kissell."

"Yeah." It’s late and I’m cranky. Earlier today (we’re in fall 1994), I finished an article about the local industrial-rap-metal band Collapsing Lungs. I pulled a near-all-nighter doing so.

"Manson."

"Hey."

"So tell me about the Lungs’ demo deal," Manson croaks in his customary monotone.

This is a switch. Manson is usually one of my sources for music-scene gossip, not vice versa. I explain that it isn’t actually a demo deal. Atlantic Records has signed the Lungs to a pact that guarantees the band an EP and a tour. Afterward they’re supposed to go back to the studio to put out a full-length record.

At this point in South Florida alternativity, Collapsing Lungs is easily the second-most popular band in Broward County, behind Marilyn Manson. And although Manson and crew have inked a deal with Reznor’s Nothing label, the band is having problems with Nothing’s distributor, Interscope. Something about the "extreme tone of the band." (It’s probably worth noting here the Plus Five gig at which Manson tied good old Missi to a cross, on a stage festooned with severed sheep heads.) The rumor mill in town has even speculated that Manson has been dropped altogether, the plan for world domination cut short before it’s begun.

The thought that another Broward band might leapfrog his own group drives Manson crazy, especially this particular band. Collapsing Lungs’ frontman, Brian Tutunick, had been the original bass player for Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. Although this arrangement didn’t last long, there is an ongoing rivalry between skinny Brian and chubby Brian.

The former isn’t accepting my explanation of the Lungs’ contractual status. "Ahh, that still sounds like a demo deal to me," he declares, pointing out that Atlantic is on a spree of buying up "alternative" bands for cheap, without offering them significant support, in hopes they’ll get lucky and stumble upon the next Nirvana or Stone Temple Pilots. Manson predicts the label will put out the EP, not support it, and drop the Lungs when it doesn’t sell.

I know how driven Manson is, but this is my first inkling of just how petty and jealous he can be. It’s not enough that he succeed, his enemies must wither and perish. Manson wants to know more. "Did you ask them about when they decided they liked hip-hop?," he scoffs.

Well, yeah, we did talk about that. The Lungs started off as a sort of robotic industro-synth-metal outfit, à la Ministry, and gradually began to incorporate funky beats (aided by a live drummer, a very good live drummer) and rapping, so now they’re kind of Biohazard-ish. When I asked Tutunick about incorporating traditionally black influences into their previously unfunky sound, he drew a parallel between his grandparents’ stories of the Holocaust and the historic oppression of African Americans.

"Yeah, he really understands black people," Manson sneers when I relate this answer to him. Then Manson mutters something like, "Blah blah blah fat hairdresser blah blah blah." (A reference to Tutunick’s day job.) The real reason the Lungs funked up their sound, Manson snipes, has more to do with what they think will sell than with any supposed empathy for rap and its originators. (Not that Manson is any paragon of racial sensitivity. He and his circle of friends created their own code word specifically for blacks - "pot pie" - which they used habitually. Don’t ask me why. The behavior of an enlightened soul? You decide.)

I’m not close enough to Manson to have ever seen him really mad, except when he’s pretending to be really mad onstage. In this conversation his voice never rises above the standard drone. But the underlying venom of his mood is evident. "You know, that’s one thing that really pisses me off, is people being fake," Manson snorts. "I mean, I’m the biggest fake in the world, but I’m telling you I’m a fake, so if you buy it, it’s your fault, not mine."

Clearly Manson can be a mean, pissy prima donna. On the other hand he turns out to be right about the Lungs’ deal with Atlantic. The EP bombs, the tour is a dud, and Atlantic drops the group like a tuber afire.

The Marilyn Manson juggernaut, of course, rolls on.

Although I’m impressed with the achievement, I’ve never been any great fan of the product. The show at the Sunrise Musical Theater in late 1996, for example, is looking pretty weak to me. Manson, as always, owns the stage: leering, snarling, baring his teeth, staggering around wrapped in a back brace. Steven looks energetic enough, pounding at the pipe organ in a Wehrmacht uniform. But the two other players up front, bassist Twiggy Ramirez and then-new guitarist Zim Zum, are standing around with poles up their asses. Even with Manson’s spindly presence working its unsettling magic, the stage seems empty, the performance static and uninspired.

Then, late in the gig, the lights cut out, and when they come back on, the stage set has changed. Manson, dressed in a black suit, red shirt, and skinny black tie, now addresses the faithful from atop a pulpit/rostrum-type thing. It’s black, too, and emblazoned with the band’s militaristic insignia. As he raises his arms, a sampled shout that sounds suspiciously like "Heil!" blasts from the sound system. With the first three shouts, a trio of red banners with the Manson logo drop down behind him. The SS-like lightning bolt brings to mind a Nuremburg rally, or those crossed hammers from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Or more comically, the opening number of the play Springtime for Hitler from the Mel Brooks farce The Producers.

His fans, of course, are completely into it. But when they raise their fists in unison before Manson, the scene begins to takes on a more sinister cast. To wit: I’m in an auditorium with 3000 white people saluting a thinly veiled Nazi symbol. In Broward County.

I try to take another step back. Surely Manson is savvy enough to realize that he’s basking in the adulation of idiots. He must realize that what he’s presenting - the demagoguery, the watered-down fascism - isn’t original. Or could it be that he’s begun to believe his own hype, that the idolization and financial reward have blinded him to the ridiculousness of it all?

Atop his podium, Manson soaks it in, his black-painted lips parted in a shit-eating grin.

My cat is face to face with the Antichrist Superstar. Manson, Missi, my then-girlfriend, and I are getting ready to get some Italian food and see Mars Attacks!. It’s a couple of weeks after the Sunrise gig. Antichrist Superstar is a hit and Marilyn Manson is every bit the cultural villain he hoped to be. But he still likes cats.

So he’s scooped up Ing, the youngest of our four cats, and is pressing noses with the little guy. His ensemble now: all black, no Manson logos. He no longer needs to be a walking billboard for himself.

Ing is adorable, a mottled white-and-gray tabby fuzzball. He also has three genetic defects. First and second are his extra toes, one apiece on each paw, jutting out like thumbs. Third, he’s got this weird allergy that causes his face to become all puffy, and eventually kind of oozy and scabby. The vets are baffled.

So anyway, there’s Marilyn Manson, rubbing noses with Ing, making little kitty noises (you cat people out there know what I’m talking about). "Uh, Ted," he says. "Did this cat get in a fight or something? It looks like he got scratched."

"Oh, no," I say. "He’s got this weird allergy thing that makes parts of his face get all puffy, and then eventually get kind of oozy and scabby."

Manson drops the cat, makes a sound of revulsion (something like "auggghhh", if I remember right), covers his mouth, and heads to the bathroom. He doesn’t actually puke, though we hear a few strangled gags through the door. Apparently cat pus is as anathema to him as holy water.

Later that night, over dinner at Big Louie’s Pizzeria, we’re talking about how some superstar bands cling to their indie credibility. Manson starts picking on Bush for voicing their admiration for the group The Jesus Lizard, a Chicago-based quartet that has long been a darling of the underground music press.

I, too, am a big fan of The Jesus Lizard. In fact I’ve twice interviewed lead singer David Yow. Between bites of baked ziti, I launch into the tale of how Yow once took it upon himself to grab hold of my nether regions in a crowded room, a story with which I have bored many a hapless listener.

Manson’s normally soft brown eyes narrow. He purses his lips in a mock grin, and then imitates me telling my lame little story: "Me and a friend interviewed The Jesus Lizard when they were opening for Helmet at The Edge...." Missi snickers. Manson’s smile widens. "You’re alternative and progressive, Kissell," he declares, sardonically granting me the street cred I’d been hoping to establish. The back of my neck grows warm. The Antichrist Superstar is calling me a starfucker, and he’s right.

This, it turns out, ends up hurting more than the fact that he calls me Matthew Sweet for most of the evening, a tribute to my shoulder-length hair.

I get my licks in later, calling him Bob Geldof in return, a reference to the stage show he’s cribbed from The Wall. He barely flinches. I also mention Springtime for Hitler, but he doesn’t get it.

At this point he’s way beyond caring about my rock-crit barbs.

It should hardly come as a surprise, given Manson’s catty, controlling tendencies, that South Florida is littered with disgruntled former Manson members and disillusioned former friends of Brian Warner.

Some of these folks have joined forces in an attempt to leverage their early friendship with Manson into a tidy profit. Chris Nicholas, ex-Collapsing Lungs, has produced an unauthorized 90-minute video called Demystifying the Devil. It includes home video of Manson being cruel and degrading to just about everything that walks or crawls, as well as filmed interviews with Missi and other folks Manson left behind. You can order it online for $19.95.

Two ex-bandmates received their pound of flesh recently. Guitarist and band co-founder Scott Putesky and bassist Brad Stewart reached out-of-court settlements with Warner in their lawsuits. Both were looking for lump sums of cash, plus continuing revenue from the Manson songs to which they contributed.

In Putesky’s case this was a lot of songs: most of Portrait of an American Family, plus five songs on the megahit Antichrist Superstar. (Though Manson continues to be the sole lyricist, the tunes have always been collaborative efforts among the rest of the lineup, whoever that might be at the time.) Scott also retains the rights to 21 previously unreleased songs on several hours of early Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids demos. He’s pondering when and how to release this stuff.

Both settlements came with confidentiality agreements regarding the financial terms, and both were reached just as the Mechanical Animals CD hit the streets this past September.

Scott is actually a pretty good friend of mine. A few months after his 1996 departure from the band he showed me how to play the haunting hook riff of Tourniquet, far and away the most interesting song on Antichrist Superstar. He can't tell me how much he was able to squeeze out of Manson, at least not while I'm wearing my reporter hat. He has bought a pretty sweet sequencer/sampler, though, and is contemplating a move to New York City sometime in the spring. He wants to write, produce, and perform soundtracks, and work as a session guitarist.

I like Scott but Scott's lawyer gives better quote. I talked to Richard Wolfe last month and he's more than pleased with the settlement his client received, especially with its timing. "I think I lucked out, or Scott did," Wolfe relates. "When the current record [Mechanical Animals] came out, we settled that week. It debuted at number one, and it's plummeted to a fast and painful death. It was at number 110 on the Billboard charts in its thirteenth week. The usual curve, with the kind of across-the-board promotion this record has gotten, is to stay in the Top 10 at least a couple of weeks."

Wolfe is far from sounding the death knell of the Manson phenomenon, however: "He's a wonderful marketer and showman, and he has a way of ending up on his feet. He's an incredible manipulator of people - his band, his fans."

And as it turns out Manson is one heck of a deponent as well. "I took his lawyer's deposition for six hours, his manager's deposition for seven hours, and his deposition for nine hours. After all this, it is my definite opinion that the guy who was running the show was the guy with the high school diploma. He was well prepared, well rehearsed, well spoken. I've never seen anyone have such control of himself in a deposition, and I've deposed CEOs of corporations. He was excellent."

Marilyn Manson has never looked better than he does right now, on the brink of the new millennium. He's no longer the Spawn of Satan: He's a Spider from Mars.

Manson's sartorial makeover is fantastic: all glitter, glam, flame-red hair, platform shoes, and feather Bowies... sorry, boas. He's accessorized with another new guitarist and a retro-yet-current glam-rock sound. The songs on Mechanical Animals are tuneful, and the production does a good job of masking the general tunelessness of Manson's voice, which killed my two otherwise-favorite songs on Antichrist: Tourniquet and The Man That You Fear.

This reinvention of himself might pay off, long term, because grownups seem to be pretty impressed with both the album's songcraft and Manson's gender-bending look. Then again, maybe he screwed up. Maybe he's been listening to too many Sophisticated Rock Critics. He's wrought a style and a sound that the rock intelligentsia is receiving with pleasant surprise. Yet it continues to plummet down the charts. Why? Because he's alienated those alienated preteens who would have preferred a followup to Antichrist that mimicked the record's satanic verses and choruses, and boasted the same turgid postindustrial clatter.

Manson's current spat with Spin, which this month crystallized into a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by editor Craig Marks (earlier this month Manson's lawyer hinted at a countersuit), has prompted whispers that he might be trying to reassert his status as a rock-and-roll bad boy in light of all the good press he's gotten. New Year's Eve he added Keith Moon to his list of influences by (gasp!) trashing his Las Vegas hotel room and throwing a chair out a window.

As I finish this story Marilyn Manson is touring Europe. His publicist at Interscope has no idea who I am (nor should she) and makes it clear in no uncertain terms that the band is incommunicado for the duration of their stay across the pond.

Even if I did get him on the phone, what would I ask him? Does he remember the time he puked at Denny's? Or almost puked in my house? Or the show where he tied Missi naked to a cross? Would he tell me if his mansion in Los Angeles is as comfy as his bedroom in his parents' townhouse in Boca, where, a few years ago, he surrounded himself with lunchboxes and action figures?

I'm guessing I'd probably have more to say to him, actually, than he would to me. For starters I'd tell him that, with the exception of a few songs here and there, I never really liked his band that much.

As a failed musician I'd tell him that I've felt pangs of envy, even resentment, at his mind-boggling success. I'd tell him that writing this story has made me feel almost as much a starfucker as I did that night in 1993 when I slipped him a copy of my band's demo tape outside Squeeze. And I'd probably tell him that, despite my pseudointellectual parsing of him and his career, I still respect his vision and his drive.

And that, despite the fact that he's a sonofabitch, I still care what he thinks of me.

But being so far outside his circle these days, I'll probably never get a chance to tell Manson that stuff. All I can do is watch in morbid fascination as his science project devours its creator and excretes a commodity.