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From Entertainment Weekly Issue #330 (June 7, 1996)

By Chris William

With a rough-and-tumble redhead as frontwoman, Garbage is smelling sweet

The three male founders of Garbage are looking, well, trashed. Bleary-eyed after a 4 a.m. tour-bus roll-in to Manhattan and just two hours' sleep, these Wisconsinite rockers may be a little too haggard to properly impress their uptown hotel's lone mid-morning waiter. He seems to be good only for coming round to remind the Garbage men where, in his virtually empty restaurant, they can't sit.

"We've been kicked out of every section of this cafeteria," Duke Erikson tells just-arriving fellow guitarist Steve Marker.

"Yeah, they knew we were in a band," adds drummer/producer Butch Vig, resignedly migrating again.

If only Shirley Manson were here. Tables would open, napkins magically unfold, staff multiply, waiterly tongues drop. A ravishing redhead with friendly defiance in her green eyes and a seductive challenge in her Scottish burr can, and does, have that effect. Unfortunately, she's presently putting it to work at a fashion shoot across town, leaving her genial caffeine-challenged colleagues to fend for their less photogenic selves.

It's worth remembering that when Garbage's self-titled debut album was released last August, it was Vig who was perceived as the star, at least among the cognoscenti. His was the golden resume, with a career-making producing credit for Nirvana's zeitgeist-shifting Nevermind, as well as albums for Sonic Youth, Soul Asylum, and the Smashing Pumpkins. Besides their membership in a series of Midwestern indie bands, Erikson and Marker were known in the alternative and dance music communities for their producing and remix work. In America, at least, Manson - who'd fronted two failed Scottish bands, Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie and Angelfish - was the wild card.

Emphasis on wild.

"When we're having a really good show," says Vig, finally rooted and sipping coffee, "I'm behind the drum set triggering all these loops and samples, and these guys are totally rocking, and it's just a wild craziness on stage, and I look out and there's 2,000 people - and they're all watching Shirley.

"Which," he adds, with genuine appreciation, "is all right."

It'd better be. Vig isn't exactly James Mason, and Manson's definitely not Judy Garland, but there is a star-is-born story in the growing Cult of Manson. Ironically, the singer was the final addition; Vig, 40, Marker, 37, and Erikson, in his mid-40s, had been fielding frontwomen possibilities for months when they spotted the sole MTV airing of an Angelfish video. Marker rang her up just a couple of days after Angelfish's founder had quit in a huff, leaving Manson in the lurch and all too happy to be transatlantically replanted.

Manson, 29, added her funny, omnifeminist sheen to what Vig calls the group's "sci-fi pop" - a visionary mix of the kind of guitar rock that goes down fine in the upper Midwest with the sort of ripe-for-remixing techno brublings that leave clubby downtown types literally raving. The debut album proved a smash in the U.K., where such cross-pollination is virtually mandatory. Here, although the singles "Only Happy When It Rains" and "Stupid Girl" have been embraced by MTV, things "initially were slow going," says Vig, "because I don't think it's cool to say you're in a pop band in the States. To be truly PC, you have to be in the grunge zone." Now the album has gone gold, and a summer spent opening for Vig's pals the Pumpkins will likely secure Garbage's platinum card.

What tour-goers may see in Manson is Patti Smith reincarnated as a supermodel: less sensual grinder in her fluorescent miniskirts and braless tees than pretty puglist, pogoing in pent-up place, champing at the sampled bit. That's just about right for Garbage's sly, pulsing songs, which deftly combine sexiness and contempt. For evidence, look to the album's leadoff track, the super-ironic "Supervixen" - title borrowed from Russ Meyer - which has Manson anointing herself a goddess, demanding her subjects "make a whole new religion...I'll feed your obsessions...Bow down to me!"

"That's tongue in cheek, but," Vig points out - mindful of Manson's increasingly worshipful congregations - "it's also kind of becoming real every night."

And now, the Divine Miss M.

"Sorry you had to wait around all day for our little bitch singer, Shirley Manson," says Vig a few weeks later, poking his head into the group's dressing room at the Palace in Hollywood after a photo shoot (full band this time) has run overtime. Manson takes no offense at Vig's gibe; her rock-dominatrix image is a source of some amusement. And it's not as if she doesn't cultivate it, posing for photos with a mocking sneer or her biceps clenched in muscle-mama fashion. And then there are those "Supervixen" marching orders.

"It's all lighthearted; I think they know that too," she says of the part of their audience that might just be willing to bowdown. "It's not any kind of sinister crowd dontrol. They understand that we have irony, and they are taking part in it."

The irony doesn't end there. Manson's a big fan of humble indie roots rocker Vic Chestnutt, and Garbage contributes a cover of one of his songs to the upcoming Sweet Relief II album. But she maes no apologies for being bigger than life herself, which extends to setting ehr tomboy tendencies aside to enjoy the high-fashion role playing of photo shoots. Roll over, Chrissie Hynde; tell Christy Turlington the news.

"Rock & roll was always about escapism and fantasy and fun," says the Edinburgh-bred Manson, whsoe mom is a jazz singer, and who quit school at 16 to join Mr. Mackenzie. "Life can be so hard and mundane that to me, the ultimate rebellion is to go out and entertain.... I've been told, 'People won't take you seriously if you do a photo shoot for Elle.' But I don't give a f---. I don't have any problem with my own self-worth."

For all that swagger, Manson may be one of the most unfailingly courteous people in rock & roll. And a scurrilous rumor making the rounds has it thatm predatory stage persona aside, she's actually a sweet, even down-to-earth gal.

This flattering revisionism doesn't sit entirely well with her. "People say, 'Oh, you're so strong on record,' and then when they meet me, because I'm polite, they mistake that for weakness.... Well I am sweet," she says, a bit of brrr in her burr. "But f--- with me, and I'll wipe the floor with you."