Marilyn Manson was touring for Eat Me, Drink Me that had just been released less than three months before this show. I went with Donna, a girl I had been seeing since the beginning of the year with a white contact in one of my eyes leftover from my previous year’s vampire Halloween costume. I remember this show being General Admission (my favorite) because we sat in a seat for Slayer and went down to the floor for Marilyn Manson. Tim Skold had moved from bass to take over lead guitar duties for this tour. It was not the same as seeing Twiggy and John 5 but was an upgrade from the last time I had seen Marilyn Manson in L.A.

This was apparently a time period where Marilyn Manson was especially taken with Lewis Carroll. He reportedly began to make a movie called Phantasmagoria: The Visons of Lewis Carroll where he was to play Mr. Carroll around this time but scrapped it due to the emotional drain it was having on his psyche. The Alice In Wonderland influence on the album/show was evident throughout this show, especially when they played “Are You the Rabbit?” (my favorite song on the new album) and brought a giant chair out onstage. Unrelated but this may have also been the first time I saw the “knife microphone.”

SETLIST: If I Was Your Vampire, Disposable Teens, mOBSCENE, Are You the Rabbit?, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)/Lunchbox, Just a Car Crash Away, Heart-Shaped Glasses, Rock Is Dead, The Dope Show, Putting Holes in Happiness, The Fight Song, The Reflecting God, Antichrist Superstar, The Beautiful People