Radio Host Reveals Dark Details Behind D'Arcy Call

It's been a weird week at the station for Chicago DJ Ryan Manno. It all started when former Smashing Pumpkins bassist D'Arcy Wretzky called in to his Q101 FM line. Initially, the call was to inquire about both Davy Jones and the Silversun Pickups, both of whom Manno featured on his show, but it turned out to be the first peep the public has heard out of D'Arcy for years, so Manno took the opportunity to ask her some questions.

Going off on a tangent (one of many) about how much fun she had hanging out with Marilyn Manson back in the day, D'Arcy told Manno a bizarre story about how "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" in the Manson family. According to D'Arcy, Manson introduced the Smashing Pumpkins to his parents at a music festival back in the '90s. "His dad got four rats and named each one after somebody in our band," she remembers. "And then when they died, he kept them in his freezer."

Thankfully, the story turns out to only be partially true. Manson Sr. himself (a.k.a. Hugh A. Warner) emailed Manno this week to correct the anecdote: "D'Arcy is right, but it was only one rat we kept in the freezer," he wrote. "She is a cool lady."

So Marilyn Manson's dad had a frozen dead rat named D'Arcy that he kept in his freezer. Not a big deal. But D'Arcy spilling her guts to a radio DJ for 13 minutes? Kind of a big deal.

Manno tells Spinner that, while he's a Smashing Pumpkins fan, he had never met or spoken to D'Arcy before the phone-in. "Having been on the receiving end of her call," he says, "the one thing that I was left with was that it was nothing more than a woman who was having a bad day or a bad week because she had lost a friend and literally just wanted to speak to someone, maybe even a stranger, and that's it.

"A lot of people have speculated that she was calling to be cryptic about the Pumpkins or about her relationship with Billy ... a lot of people are supposing that her saying 'I miss Chicago' was her way of saying, 'I want back in the Pumpkins," Manno says. "I don't think so. This is a woman who just lost her friend, her ex-boyfriend who committed suicide this week -- it sounded like she took a lot of grief in that, maybe even some blame in his death, and she just wanted to talk to someone."

Fans can hear the complete unedited phone call at Manno's Q101 blog.