When Marilyn Manson lived in New Orleans...

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We did all the drugs there were to do, drank all the alcohol there was to drink, and dug up as many graves as possible."During their time in New Orleans, the band – chiefly Twiggy Ramirez – picked up a grave-robbing hobby, collecting bones from neglected cemeteries.

"The bones just pop right out. You can pick them right up," Ramirez told Guitar World.

"New Orleans is the closest place you can get to hell on earth, so it was very appropriate," Manson said. "We were very secluded, away from the world, when we made the record. We didn't go anywhere. But there are only two things in New Orleans: bars and graveyards."
When the band moved away, Ramirez told Guitar World, he left his bone collection in a big bag under the mattress in his New Orleans apartment. Apparently not all of it, though: in a 2003 Spin Q&A, Manson told his interlocutor, future New York Times magazine ethicist Chuck Klosterman, that they carried some around in a shopping bag on tour after leaving the city.

"And when we toured through L.A.," he went on, "we were staying at the Sunset Marquis hotel. I saw some Hollywood types that I didn't like then, and I still don't like now, and I convinced them to smoke the human-bone chips I put in their pot pipe. It made a terrible smell, and I was greatly amused. I took a little puff of it myself. It's not good for you — I got a terrible headache. But why not try? If someone ever asked me, 'Why smoke human bones?' I would quite easily respond by saying, 'Why not smoke human bones?'"
In the same conversation, he admitted that the months in New Orleans were debauched ones, even for a person who would readily ask, "Why not smoke human bones?" or, as Reighley related in his book, defecate on a plate and leave it on a Lower Garden District porch for the neighbors to discover.

"It was decadent," he told Klosterman. "I think he [Trent Reznor] felt unable to deal with it, and it crumbled our relationship. I would go to bed at 7 a.m., wake up at 4 p.m. and then begin drinking and doing drugs. The funniest point — which is something I just watched a videotape of — was a day when I wore only a blond wig, a Burger King crown, and a paper-towel tube around my penis. I walked around like that in broad daylight. To me, that's true rock 'n' roll, and I'm not afraid to go there again." (In the right part of New Orleans, he probably still could, without anyone blinking an eye.)

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