Goodbye Daisy: A Previously Unpublished Interview With Scott Putesky

Scott Putesky died on October 22nd. Known best as Daisy Berkowitz, the co-founder of Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids (the name was later shortened, of course), he was the group’s primary composer from their founding in 1989 through the first phase of the Antichrist Superstar sessions in 1996, when he left the band because of creative differences.

After he left Manson, he was involved in a variety of projects. He played guitar in Jack Off Jill for a brief period, he released his solo output under the name Three Ton Gate, and he collaborated with younger musicians such as JP Marin and Justin Symbol.

He always stayed in touch with his fans, creating an organic community of outcasts and misfits on various social media platforms. In one of these groups, TRack Race, he hung out with fans in a live video chat and for a few minutes at a time made rare tracks from his Soundcloud account available to download.

I started checking out the TRack Race events at some point in 2012. It was a lot of fun, especially for a guy like me, who was transitioning from primarily writing short stories and novels to writing about pop culture. I had just moved to Frederick, Maryland at the time, and Putesky was living in Wilkes-Barre. I kept thinking of that drive. Wouldn’t be too far. I thought about how I might meet and interview him in person.

I got my chance on February 1st, 2013. Scott and White Zombie co-founder Paul Kostabi were having an art show in which Kostabi would show his paintings and Putesky would debut an experimental sound installation and show his collage work. It was at the Metropolis Collective’s Trash Art Gallery in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, which was a mere hour and a half drive from Frederick. By now, Scott and I had e-mailed back and forth a few times, and he knew me from his TRack Race group. So I got in touch and asked if he’d be down for an interview. He was, but there was just one caveat: we had to talk about his artwork, not his time in Marilyn Manson. I had no problem with this, since I had become of a fan of his solo music and art after finding him on Facebook.

I got in touch with a pop culture site that Scott had recommended and asked if they’d mind me covering the event for them. They didn’t, of course, and I published the article with them a little later in the month. The piece used a snippet of the interview I had conducted with Scott in the form of a direct quote. I never intended to release the entire transcription, keeping it instead as a private memento of one of the best nights my life. But it just seems too selfish not to share the whole thing now. So here it is.

We all miss you, Scott. Myself and the rest of your Daisy Kids will never forget you.

Can you tell me a little about your process?
I either start with a concept and I find materials appropriate to it. Or I’ll just be going through magazines or whatever image sources I have and I’ll find something and I’ll start with that. And I control them up to a point, but then I let it take me.

You, um, do it all by hand, though?
Yeah, yeah. I mean I may copy something to make it smaller or larger.

When you apply paint [to the collage] is it wherever inspiration takes you?
Well, I’ll go by what I already have down physically. It’s color and shape and composition.

Sometimes you don’t even notice there’s actually paint.
Right. I’m not trying to impress anybody with my painting. That’s why I do collage.

When did you start collage? Is it a new thing?
Yeah, it’s relatively new. Like early 2000’s.

When did you decide that you were going to really make a go of this art thing? When did it become a priority?
Just this past year, really. Yeah. Music became a little less fulfilling. Not commercially, but, just the process of it. I mean, it takes quite a while to develop a song that I’m happy with, because it’s music and lyrics and I’m particular about the two and I’m particular about the two working together. And there’s the technical, practical aspect of recording and making a good recording and making it come together. And then there’s singing, the actual, the guitar playing. And making that, it’s a lot of work. Not that I don’t want to do the work, but it’s very unrewarding when commercially it has no legs and you put it out and you can’t charge any more than .99 cents for it. And it’s like, you know, you need thousands of people to justify it commercially.

It takes me sixty hours to do one song. One track. And I’m happy with it. I still have to do a lot more work to sell it, so to speak. To get people to buy it. And if it’s more than .99 cents they’re going to go, “What the hell’s the point?” You know, it’s not just commercial but also artistically. It’s hard to justify all that work. And after awhile it’s not exciting.

So right now this is your main priority?
Yeah.

Music’s just kind of – hard to say “second” but, I mean –
If I’m going to focus – yeah, it’s second. If I’m going to focus, music is secondary now. It doesn’t mean it’s going to suffer, but…

Sounds like it’s less stressful for you, too?
It’s less stressful, it’s exciting. It’s just a different realm. I was putting out music before the huge Internet shift and all through it. I joke, when I came out with my first solo album, Lose Your Mind, I joke that people stopped buying CDs. But that’s actually how how it happened. I came out with Lose Your Mind in 2005, and that’s pretty much the year people stopped buying CDs. I forget which came first. But because of the digital revolution people stopped buying music and then they stopped buying CDs or they stopped buying CDs then they stopped buying music. Either way, people started having collections of CDs that were so large, they only downloaded files. Whether for free or not, legally or not. Or, they had so much music already that they stopped buying music anyway. Between 2004 and 2007 people stopped buying music to the point where musical artists had no idea what to do. Labels had no idea what to do. How many tracks do we give away to promote? How much do we charge for tracks? And everybody went nuts. And the only people that benefited were music listeners who, if they could get it for free, they could get it for free. And if they can get it for free or download it, why even pay .99 cents?

That pretty frustrating?
It’s very frustrating! Very, very frustrating. I mean, just looking at it practically, and commercially, what the hell are you supposed to do when people don’t have to pay for your product anymore? When people can get your product but they don’t have to pay for it, what are you supposed to do?

Man, I’m a writer.
But it affects writers too. What if you write a book and you come out with a book but people don’t buy your book because people can download it in ebook form for free? How do you get around that? You can’t!

I just put it out there for free!
Yeah, and you promote yourself, but if you do that too much, you’re working a lot and not getting anything back.

So, I guess back to the art… (laugh)
Yeah, it sounds like I’m bitching a lot.

No, no. I mean you’re doing pretty well, you’re selling a lot of stuff.
Yeah.

That’s good. What kind —
I mean, I would do it anyway. It’s no big deal. The only awkward part is amassing my own stuff. It’s just storage. It’s basically about storage. But that doesn’t translate into a huge markup for the next gallery show. It’s not like I’m going to to add $100 to a piece because I’ve had to hold onto it. Some people do that, but I don’t.

I liked LOOK, the found poem that you made out of the article by crossing words out. Do you do that a lot or –
No, not a lot.

Kind of sort of reminded me of the Situationist Detournement. They would take something from pop culture and turn it on its head. Is that something you’re interested in? I mean, you have a fondness for pop culture too.
Absolutely! I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s. Yeah.

So, this sound installation. So where’d that come from?
The early 90’s in Florida. In Marilyn Manson, there was a club we used to go to called the Institute, in Miami Beach. The Institute was this huge hollowed-out building. I don’t even remember what it was previously but it was just a huge space. So they could put in a really big sound system and get it really loud. I mean, it sounded terribly acoustically. It was like a good early rave setting. A buddy of mine that I was living with at the time, he’s a Full Sail sound school graduate. So we talked about using the acoustics and I thought it would be really cool to have a couple different bands all playing in the same key in different points in the room so then you’d hear all these echos but everything would be in key.

So Boombox is basically the evolution of that, but scaled down. Yeah, all the stereos are independent. It’s just, I start program one and ten seconds later, program two, ten seconds after that three, ten seconds after that four. So I did the synching in the recording phase. So I started with one program that has all the tracks where certain things line up properly then I broke them up into four different programs. So it’s all very manual. You couldn’t have done this fifteen, twenty years ago, technologically, but that’s how it works. This is the first one. It’s going to evolve, take on different themes and characteristics, but what I really wanted to do, at least with this first one, was to have sounds like the sounds that come out, it’s all strict stereo. No sound comes out of both speakers on one stereo. But there’s sounds that come out of one stereo [speaker] that match up with another channel on another stereo. So that’s why it was important to record all of the tracks together and then bring them up. Because that way I would have a stereo guitar track and half of it is one one system and half is on another. So you’ll hear em both at the same time as long as I start them sequentially. And it sounds great, so…I was pleased with it.

Did you do all the sounds recently?
Started about six weeks ago. It’s a lot of work.

How did you decide what to include and what wouldn’t make it? Is it mostly intuition?
Yeah, I like to go by instinct and I don’t like to overthink. This was really well planned but it got a little complex and so I told myself to lay off and relax and just keep in my head what I want to do rather than what I wrote on the paper. It works out because I feel like you have to trust your brain. Your brain knows more than you do. Let it do its job. And I really feel like that applies to organization. There’s a reason you forget things that you forget. They’re probably not that important.