Marilyn Manson Says Led Zeppelin Is Responsible For Reunion With Twiggy

Taking a page from the Van Halen playbook, it was announced yesterday that Marilyn Manson and longtime collaborator guitarist Twiggy Ramirez would reunite for Manson's Eat Me, Drink Me tour. Rock Daily talked to Manson hours after the announcement, and he shared the story behind their reunion. Though the two had already re-connected during a chance meeting on the streets of Los Angeles, it was Manson witnessing another reunion that inspired him to invite Twiggy back. "The turning point for me was when I went to see Led Zeppelin's reunion show, and I saw Jimmy Page and Robert Plant look at each other for a moment, and they probably said, 'Holy shit, we wrote 'Stairway To Heaven.'' I wanted that look again," Manson explains. "I want to look at Twiggy and go — Holy shit, we wrote 'The Beautiful People.' I called him and I said 'Let's go do this.'" Plus, the duo had some unfinished business. "We started music together because we wanted to bring about the apocalypse, and we realized we didn't finish," Manson says. "The world could suffer much more if we were together again, and we really wanted to bring back the suffering."

With Twiggy back in the fold after departing over creative differences after 2000's Holy Wood, how would this effect Manson's "Rape of the World" tour, set to launch in a week? "We're still gonna play some new songs," says Manson, "but I think we're excited to play some stuff that we haven't done in a long time. I don't think it ever felt as right without him."

While Manson is eager to return to working on his film Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, he promises that his reunion with Twiggy will eventually result in a new album. "The concept originally of he and I getting back together was 'Let's write some music together,' " says Manson. "But life's too short, and this has to happen now because we couldn't stand not being on stage with each other, and wouldn't want to wait until we made another record to tour. So this tour will spawn another record, one hundred percent."

Related Stories
• Marilyn Manson: "I Can't Ever Consider Myself a Nihilist"
• Marilyn's Mansion: Sprawling Home Is Surprisingly Un-Antichrist-Like
• Marilyn Manson Sued By Former Bandmate

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter