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| What the hell are they hugging? Boyd (left) with a young, impressionable Marilyn Manson. |
So Rice won't
be hitting the Billboard Hot 100 any time soon. But he
can take pride in the massive success of those he's inspired
over the years, most notably, reigning shock-rock king Marilyn
Manson, who took some sartorial and philosophical tutelage from
Boyd.
"He used
to call me up when he was a teenager living with his parents in
Florida. He would call me all the time and just talk and talk
about philosophy," Rice said of his relationship with Mr. Mechanical
Animal. "Whenever he comes through town, we visit and hang out,
and if I'm in London when he's in London, we hang out together.
But he's a really busy guy now, so I actually had a lot more contact
with him before he even had a recording contract."
>When he's
not making beautiful noise and shaping the minds of tomorrow's
counterculture icons, Rice amuses himself with his other driving
passion: pulling pranks. The author of a popular book on the subject
for the infamous RE:Search
series, Rice has spent years culling practical experience in the
field.
"I still
do stuff like that whenever the opportunity arises, but it's just
like -- it was a passion when I was young. And now that I'm older,
I kind of feel like actively wasting somebody else's time could
be fun, but at the same time, I'm actively wasting my time as
well. The impulse is still there, and we still do it. Do you remember
when Denny's had those little timers? If you went in, they took
your order and pressed this timer, and if your meal didn't come
within 10 minutes or something like that, you'd get the meal for
free. So I stole one of these timers, and I would invite all my
friends to go to Denny's, and as I was about a half a block away,
I would press the timer, and it would start ticking over. Then
we would go in, and we would order, and the waitress would set
her timer down, and as soon as she left, I would put my timer
on the table and take the timer she had left. We would order all
this food -- you know, steak and eggs, coffee, milkshakes, pie
à la mode, all this stuff -- and get it free every time. When
I was young, I was interested in how these things could be functional,
how you could just screw around with somebody's thought in order
to get them to do what you wanted. I was thinking, I didn't want
to hold a normal job, and I thought, 'When I'm older, I'll just
make a living off of conning people and getting stuff for free
and just going through the world that way.'"
Little surprise,
then, that he found a career in the music industry.
| "
It
would be exciting to have everybody in the world imagining
that there are people who cared enough to steal Mussolini's
brain. "
|
|
"I think
it's far more constructive," he says of turning his impulse to
prank into making music. "Because when you're pulling a prank
on someone, you're sucking them into an alternate reality for
a brief period of time, and then, sooner rather than later, they
find out that it is false. It's like a slap in the face. Whereas
with music, I think that it's an alternate universe that people
can feel comfortable with. Or maybe it's a universe that they've
always existed in and have felt at odds with what people call
'the real world.' Or they're at loggerheads with how everybody
else lives their lives. That was always the way with me. As a
youngster, I felt like I was walking out of rhythm with everybody
else in the world. And then I'd find these strange artists or
philosophers who [I was] totally in sync with. You kind of think,
'Oh. Maybe I'm not alone.'"
While devoted
more to music than practical jokes, Rice still finds time to indulge
his prankster side. On his recent European tour, for example,
he and his pals from Death in June came within a hair's breadth
of making global headlines.
"We went
to Italy, and we tried to steal Mussolini's brain," he recounted.
"Mussolini's brain is interred in a little marble box, separate
from his body. It's in a glass case that's in the wall because
they removed it and shipped it to the United States to do scientific
experiments to find out how intelligent he was. So we happened
to be there in this town in Italy that was Mussolini's hometown.
We found that he was buried there and found that his brain was
interred separately. So we snuck into this place and tried to
steal his brain, and we couldn't get in there. It would probably
make the world press," he said when questioned about why he would
even want to possess the brain of the late icon of Italian Fascism.
"It would be exciting to have everybody in the world imagining
that there are people who cared enough to steal Mussolini's brain."
Ultimately, Rice found solace in the fact that his heist was foiled
by Italy's impenetrable brain-protection technology. "It was locked
up tight as a drum at night, so we went back the next morning.
We went in, and there were all these old people in there putting
wreaths on his grave, and they had tears running down their face,
and I just felt really kind of selfish -- like, 'Oh, fuck. What
a selfish asshole I am, wanting to take this, and it means so
much to these nice old Italians. I'll leave it so everyone can
appreciate Mussolini's brain. It belongs to everybody. It doesn't
just belong to me,'" he laughs.
One imagines him barely able to keep a straight face. And if he
could just get his Website updated, he could share the laughter
with everyone.
Boyd Rice's
latest album, The
Way I Feel, was released by SoleilMoon Records in August, 2000.
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