Call it Scream III, but don't expect this season's teenage horror vehicle to play your local cineplex anytime soon. Just like a Wes Craven horror flick, the Marilyn Manson-Hole-Monster Magnet tour is completely scripted to shock teenagers, but ultimately devoid of anything truly dangerous.

This grouping is titled the "Beautiful Monsters Tour," but at its North American kickoff on Sunday (Feb. 28) in Spokane, Wash., it was only beautifully monstrous. Like the first night of a play that still needs more rehearsal, things weren't quite running on all cylinders (though Manson and Hole had just done two weeks in Australia). Not all the props worked as planned - during the Manson set, a curtain failed to drop at the right time, and an explosion went off in the middle of a song. On top of all that, the whole show began, and ran, late. By the time Marilyn Manson finally left the stage after just one encore, it was 12:30 in the morning, just eight hours from when most of these kids were starting their next day of junior high school. Only about 6,000 tickets had been sold (in a 10,000-seat venue), so at least not many classes started late.

The pairing of Hole and Marilyn Manson is a shotgun wedding of sorts - the two acts joined by the fact that both are controversial and appeal to teenagers. What the performers and the audience share is knowledge of life as an outcast. Everyone has their own approach to being a misfit, however: Love takes that pain and pours it out in her confessional songs, while Manson throws anger at it, as if to say, "If you shunned me more, try my antichrist role." Openers Monster Magnet simply decided to play loud and hard in their short set.

Hole's take on being different was by far the most effective. Though Courtney Love's musical approach is more melodic and lush than her stagemates ("It's romanticism meets Goth," Love said backstage before the show), it's also more honest. Hole concentrated on songs from Celebrity Skin, though the band also mixed in several of its older numbers ("Asking for It," "Doll Parts," "Miss World"). Love also showed her good taste in a pastiche of covers including Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" and the Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties." After playing the VU cover, she implored the crowd to promise to go out and immediately buy this classic album rather "than that crappy Offspring s--t."

The highlight of Hole's set came during its encore when Love, accompanied only by Eric Erlandson on acoustic guitar, went out into the crowd to sing "Northern Star," her poignant ode to her dead husband, Kurt Cobain. She had earlier introduced "Doll Parts" as a song she'd written for a "boy from Aberdeen" but this time the song's lyrics were even less oblique. Toward the end of the tune, some errant fan threw a sneaker that smacked Love on the side of the head and brought her to tears.

There was little crying during Marilyn Manson's set, unless the crowd was crying in laughter at his act, which mixes Lenny Bruce with Caberet-era Joel Grey. He began with "Reflecting God" and segued that into "Great Big White World," the first of many songs where he changed costumes and showed off much of his big, white body. Over the course of the 90-minute set, Manson tried on more outfits than a high school girl prepping for the prom, all the while plugging away on songs from his latest, Mechanical Animals. Each time it seemed as if the band had pulled out all the stops - with props, explosions, and lights - but the next tune would take it to yet another level. It was all ridiculous, of course, designed to outrage the Moral Majority (a handful of whom had been outside protesting before the show), and give these kids something to talk about during recess. "I Don't Like the Drugs" featured a 20-foot-high Broadway-esque marquee spelling out "DRUGS." "Antichrist Superstar" found Manson shredding Bibles and doing his best Hitler impersonation, high art lost on many of these viewers. Much of what Manson did was over the heads of his audience, and if ever a show needed VH1's pop-up explanations, it was this one. When Manson ended with "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger," it was the musical high point of his set, though the screams of "outside of society" seemed surprisingly comical compared to Patti Smith's performance of this tune, which actually seems dangerous. But then again, didn't Bob Dylan say to live outside the law you must honest?
 
 
 

Charles R. Cross
Wall Of Sound, March 1, 1999