Prior to embarking on any official tour under the wing of a major label, Marilyn Manson spent several years touring independently at various locations in Florida such as Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Miami Beach, South Hallandale and Davie, among various other one-night venues. During this time, the band is known to have left Florida only three times to perform. Until August 1992, the band played these shows as Marilyn Manson & the Spooky Kids. The band played these independent shows from April 28, 1990 until June 4, 1994.
Performance and show themes
During the Spooky Kids-era, the concerts featured several antics among which were girls covered in blood and wearing animal masks whilst locked in metal cages, women ironing Nazi flags onstage and keyboardist Madonna Wayne Gacy's renowned keyboard paraphernalia, such as children's toys and dismembered doll heads. At the band's July 11, 1991 performance, the first ten people to attend the show with an x across their forehead received a limited edition Marilyn Manson milk chocolate bar.
After the band's second show, which Manson has described as the band's "first real performance", Zsa Zsa Speck and Olivia Newton Bundy were removed from the band. They were replaced by the next performance by Madonna Wayne Gacy who hadn't yet attained a keyboard so instead played with toy soldiers onstage in the meantime, and Gidget Gein, guitarist of local band Insanity Assassin, respectively.
Set list
During the first two years of the band's existence, they had recorded a core set of songs that they would perform favorably, some that would never be performed again following the independent shows. The following list contains the most commonly played songs in the order they were most generally performed:
"Cake and Sodomy"
"Learning to Swim"
"White Knuckles"
"Suicide Snowman"
"Lunchbox"
"Dope Hat"
"My Monkey"
"Misery Machine"
Towards the end of the independent shows and the near completion of the band's debut albumPortrait of an American Family, the live set list resembled the following, occasionally with answering machine messages sampled as an intro and outro respectively:
