The Last Tour On Earth (1999)
A live album that also features two non-album songs - the studio recording "Astonishing Panorama Of The Endtimes" (which was previously on a Celebrity Deathmatch companion album and it's own standalone single), and "Inauguration Of The Mechanical Christ", a mostly instrumental, droney track that mainly sets the atmosphere for their concerts.
The tracklist is largely heavy on Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals material, although Portrait Of An American Family is represented with "Get Your Gunn" and "Lunchbox", and of course "Sweet Dreams" is also here (with a brief interpolation of the "Long Hard Road Out Of Hell" riff at the end). For being somewhat of a New Sound Album, the Mechanical Animals material actually fits in pretty well with the rest of the set: While they're pretty faithful to the studio versions, the live versions feel just a little bit louder and more aggressive, particularly the version of "Rock Is Dead". It probably also helps that only a couple of the more ballad-like tracks are performed; "I Don't Like The Drugs..." and "Dope Show" might be less heavy than the surrounding material, but still feel like crowd-pleasers here.
The thing is though, that of course a lot of the appeal of a Marilyn Manson show is visual, and while the performances are fine, they generally never add any notable level of additional live energy to the songs - if anything, the vocals are generally a little bit weaker, although there is a rendition of "The Last Day On Earth" with a pretty nice vocal performance. The songs also aren't really changed much in terms of arrangement: "Lunchbox" and "I Don't Like The Drugs..." both get stretched out to over 8 minutes, but the former is due to a spoken intro and the latter is due to a long instrumental vamp where Manson talks to the audience and presumably some cool stuff the listener doesn't get to see happens. Thus, it works as kind of a summation of the band's career so far, but if you've already got the album versions, the key points of interest are moments of audience interaction and some stage banter. Actually, for the hell of it, here's a few representative quotes:
In the middle of "Lunchbox":
"I don't know if you guys know it, but we got some special friends here tonight... There's about a hundred cops just waiting to arrest any of us. I think we should say hello to the cops!"
Introducing "I Don't Like The Drugs (But The Drugs Like Me)":
"...I was drowning in a sea of liquor, and I washed up on a beach made of cocaine. The sky was made of LSD! And every tree was made of marijuana! When the cops pulled me over, they did not arrest me. Instead, they sucked my dick! And it was so beautiful that God came down from heaven. He said to me 'Marilyn Manson, we will no longer spell the word 'God' 'G! O! D!'. I said 'How do you wanna spell it, God?' He said 'Gimme a D! Gimme an R! Gimme a U! Gimme a G! Gimme an S'!"
As for "Astonishing Panorama...", it's somewhat of a return to Antichrist Superstar industrial metal - it was written around the same time, and even reprises the "This is what you should fear, you are what you should fear" part of "Kinderfeld". It's mainly highlighted by a stomping, mechanical riff (albeit one that may sound a bit
familiar to Ministry fans) and a lightning-fast guitar solo that's the first real showcase for John 5, who was then the newest member of the band.
The bonus EP that was only available with the UK version is also notable for including three non-album tracks - covers of Dr. Hook's "Get My Rocks Off" (written by Shel Silverstein) and George Hamilton IV's "A Rose And A Baby Ruth" and an acoustic rendition of "Coma White". The covers are both fairly unlikely choices on the surface, which is part of what makes them fun: "Get My Rocks Off" gets a Mechanical Animals style industrial-glam-funk treatment that fits the lyrics remarkably well ("Sometimes I dream of chicks, to bring me ever lasting joys / Sometimes I dream of animals, sometimes I dream of boys / Sometimes I kill the living, sometimes I raise the dead / Sometimes I say just fuck it all, and crawl back into bed"). "A Rose And A Baby Ruth" meanwhile, is one of the weirdest things I've heard from this band simply because of how normal it is: You'd expect some kind of subversive musical or lyrical change, but while Manson's singing voice just innately makes it sound like something primed for a Soundtrack Dissonance moment in a horror film, it's pretty much a straightforward take on a tongue-in-cheek country ballad about teenage romance.
Key Tracks: Astonishing Panorama of the Endtimes, Get My Rocks Off
