The Music Work

George formed The Mad in 1978, while he was studying fine art at the School of Visual Arts, and took the band onto the stages of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City (a New York club, not the Missouri city). He wrote the lyrics and the music, and he sang. The family’s official memorial statement, posted August 16, 2026, names two surviving titles from these early days, “I Hate Music” and “We Love Noize.”

It was not the first band. Talking about his stage work years later, George mentioned an earlier one he called Disgusting, and said the theatrical staging was there from the start. His rule was that the performance did not have to act out the lyric, since some words cannot be staged literally. It only had to match.

George built the stage gore himself — foam latex, fake entrails — and worked it into the set, night after night, with no film crew and no film budget behind it. In an interview on the Frumess YouTube channel (The Mad: Screaming Mad George’s band from his NYC Punk days), a musician from the same Lower East Side scene remembers a woman walking on with an eyeball where her head should be, a mock abortion performed on stage with a bloody fetus prop pulled out of her, and George’s own hand-made films projected behind the band: claymation of hands pushing up out of the ground, eyeballs scooped from a skull. The recollection comes about four decades after the shows.

Cable-access host Paul Tschinkel taped the band for his show Inner-Tube, including a set at Max’s Kansas City and a CBGB performance built around an eyeball prop for the song “Eyeball.” The surviving uploads carry no captions or usable audio transcript, and catalogs disagree between 1978 and 1979. The taping date remains open.

One Mad song survived in another form. George wrote a Mad track called “Mask”; more than a decade later he kept its music, threw out the lyrics, and wrote “Regeneration” over the top for Screaming Mad George & Psychosis.

Surviving footage: Tschinkel’s Max’s Kansas City set and its second part on Inner-Tube, the “Eyeball” performance at CBGB, and a further clip with no credited date uploaded by a fan account.

George kept a band running alongside the film work. Screaming Mad George & Psychosis was three people. He sang, wrote and performed. A collaborator he called a mechanical genius, brilliant at industrial music and with a band of his own, came in after George pitched the project during a conversation. The name survives only as a garbled Japanese caption, so this page will not guess at it.

The third was a woman named Lisa. She was not a singer. George needed a female voice for the concept and asked a makeup-artist friend whether she knew anyone; she said she could do it herself. He did not believe her, made her sing something on the spot, and hired her. George later described the three-person collaboration as intense and its live show as unusual.

The songs came first, around 1990; the point was to make a record. “Regeneration” is the exception, and the exception connects two halves of his life: the music is an old song called “Mask” from The Mad, his New York punk band. He stripped out the original lyrics and wrote new ones over the same music, backwards from his usual habit of writing words first and composing to fit them.

George described The Mad as being about madness, and Psychosis as being about psychological analysis and transformation rather than destruction. He named Dadaism, Surrealism and Futurism as movements deliberately worked into the songs, for whoever recognizes them.

The band played EXTASY SUMMIT ‘92 at Nippon Budokan on October 30, 1992, on a ten-act bill for Yoshiki’s Extasy Records, and did three songs. The first single was 「パラノイアスケープ」(Paranoiascape), Extasy Records EXS-002, November 1992, backed with “Dried Up Scream.” The sleeve reworks Munch’s The Scream into a skull screaming inside flames, cracked and decayed down to bone; the same image opens the live footage. The album Transmutation followed on Extasy, EXC-012, June 10, 1993, eleven tracks: “Birth,” “Paranoiascape (V2.1),” “Dried Up Scream,” “Anxiety Neurosis I (trauma talk),” “Anxiety Neurosis II,” “Regeneration,” “Bacterium,” “Hope,” “Persecution Mania,” “Catastrophic Dream” and “Transmutation.”

What he wore, and why it moved like that

The stage costume was a brass creature head — sheet metal drilled through and shaped by hand — mounted on a corrugated water pipe that ran down his spine into a tail, with aluminum ribs screwed on and fitted to his body. The mouth sat where a microphone could be pushed into it, so he sang through the creature rather than around it. He compared the look to H.R. Giger: metal and organic matter fused.

The arm extensions came from the Bauhaus — the school, not the band, as he was careful to say. He had seen photographs of Oskar Schlemmer’s costume performances, one built around poles strapped along the performer’s arms so that shifting them changed the whole silhouette. A long pole would have wrecked a club stage, so he built stacked false hands instead: hold the arm straight and there is one hand, bend it and there are six.

The theatrical staging went back further than Psychosis, to his bands before it; the entry on The Mad covers how it started.

His music and effects work overlapped again in 1998, when he designed and scored Screaming Mad George’s Paranoiascape for the PlayStation. The game borrows its name from the band’s 1992 single; a fan video essay reports that its theme music comes from the same record.

George’s account of this period survives through automatically generated Japanese captions on video he made with his daughter Alice. It is paraphrased here, and names that the captions garble have been omitted.

On November 9, 2019, at 難波ベアーズ (Namba Bears) — a small basement live house in Osaka — George got up and sang. The band behind him was THE GEROS, and the set was The Mad: his own songs from New York in 1978, played again four decades later.

THE GEROS are an Osaka punk trio who formed around 2014. George appeared with them as a guest for this one set. Their records include a 2014 demo, a Genocide or Suicide 7” on Killer Boy Records in 2015, a Razor Dog 7” on an American label in 2017, and a remastered collection out of Malaysia in 2023. Their line-up is ANGEL on guitar and vocals, SHOOTER on bass and TA/CO on drums.

His own site announced it: 「マッド・ジョージのバンド “The MAD” カバーに本人登場！」 — Mad George himself turns up to cover his own band, The MAD.

Teppei Miki photographed it, and his pictures are the record of the evening: George white-haired and barefoot on a low stage, in a shirt printed with his own name, hanging off the microphone stand, the room close enough that phones are held up at arm’s length from his face. Afterwards the four of them sat for portraits in the dressing room, George grinning open-mouthed in the middle of three men in leather.

Photographs by Teppei Miki, credited on both his own site and George’s. Video of the night exists as a short cut on YouTube, linked from George’s official movie page.

Jealousy is the album by X (renamed X Japan in 1992) whose cover shows Yoshiki bound and chained, his body wrapped in extra arms. George described the job himself, on camera, in a retrospective he filmed with his daughter Alice.

He recalled that he did not know what kind of band X was when the work came in, so he went and looked them up in magazines. He designed the image, and then he built it: the block wall behind Yoshiki, the rigging the chains hung from, the whole set. He remembered being struck that Yoshiki turned up exactly on time.

This is also where he met hide, who had no reason to be at the shoot and came to watch anyway. Everything that followed between them — the Hide Your Face mask, the magazine cover, a music video full of live cockroaches — started in that room.

The year after, X gave him the stage. For the band’s first dome shows, at the Tokyo Dome in January 1992, he designed four huge faces rising over the set, with a mass of eyeballs in the middle. Building four complete faces turned out to be more than the schedule allowed, so each came only halfway out from behind a curtain. With all four up at once, that was enough to fill the dome.

His own site lists both jobs plainly: 「X アルバム／Jealousy ジャケット・東京ドームステージデザイン」 — Jealousy jacket, and Tokyo Dome stage design. The album’s own credits name him for the front cover concept alongside Yoshiki, and for mask and makeup. When George died, Yoshiki’s tribute named the Jealousy artwork too.

The organic-metal piping in this site’s ornaments was drawn from that cover.

George’s account survives through an automatically generated Japanese caption track, so it is paraphrased here rather than quoted.

George met hide (Hideto Matsumoto) at the Jealousy cover shoot in 1991. hide had no working reason to be there and turned up to watch anyway. George, who had looked the band up in magazines before the job, had already picked him out as the one doing the strangest things.

For hide’s solo debut he wanted to disappear behind a mask so the music spoke first. He was a Giger admirer and hoped to commission an original piece, but Giger was unavailable; instead he was allowed to use an existing 1993 aluminum sculpture, The Watch Guardian V, and brought it to George to turn into something a person could actually wear. George’s own site records the job in one line: 「ヒデ アルバムカバー ギーガーデザインマスク」, hide, album cover, Giger-design mask.

George and collaborator Joanne Bloomfield built it at his Los Angeles studio in fiberglass and foam latex rather than Giger’s heavy aluminum, and made two versions: a detailed one for the album photography, and a wider, reinforced one light enough for the stage. hide wore the stage version during the opening of “DICE” at Yokohama Arena in April 1994, standing still under the third eye before pulling it off mid-song. The mask went into the hide MUSEUM in Yokosuka after his death in 1998 and has toured Japan in memorial exhibitions since — the third eye is this site’s logo for that reason.

Two heads on a table

The friendship produced stranger things than the mask. FOOL’S MATE ran an interview between the two of them, then asked George to shoot the cover as well. George recalled that once he was involved, the concept had to be something crazy: the two of them as severed heads on a table, grinning at each other, their organs spilling across the tabletop between them. They cut a hole in the table, put their faces through it, and wore torn-neck appliances to hide the join.

The magazine was not sure it could print it. Something anatomical was visible in the mass of organs, so the cover logo was positioned directly over it — a censor bar doing double duty as branding. Inside, each of them got a solo severed-head portrait. Back-issue listings put it at No. 136, February 1993.

The cockroaches

For a hide music video whose title the captions garble, George built a flying-saucer drum-kit prop for a crew descending in spacesuits. Then the director asked for live cockroaches stuck to hide’s bare torso. George would have made fakes — he had built a cockroach transformation for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and had no wish to handle real ones — but the shoot wanted real roaches, and the animal handler who brought them would not stick them on. George settled on 水飴, thick starch syrup, as the adhesive: coat the skin, lay each roach wings-down with its legs facing forward, press, repeat. They went on hide’s face too.

Once filming started the director asked hide to put one in his mouth, and he did. George found out afterwards why hide had gone along with the real ones: the director had offered him a choice between vomiting fake blood on camera and wearing the roaches, and he flatly refused the vomit. George called hide incredible.

George’s account of the magazine shoot and the video survives through automatically generated Japanese captions. It is paraphrased here, and names that the captions garble have been omitted.

George said it himself in Heather Wixson’s published interview: “I did the beating heart at the beginning of Nine Inch Nails’ Closer video.” nin.wiki’s video credits independently name him as the artist who created it.

The video shows the heart held in a metal frame, its tubing exposed and its movement timed to the beat. The surviving public sources confirm George’s credit but do not document the mechanism or materials, so this page does not guess at either.

Manson and photographer Joseph Cultice conceived the Omega persona as sterile and sexless, an alien rather than anything human. They came to George’s San Fernando Valley studio, and George sculpted the chest plate from his own imagination rather than casting it from a model: a silicone piece with breasts. The Marilyn Manson Wiki credits the application of the fake breasts and feet for Cultice’s album shoot to the Screaming Mad George crew.

The nipples on George’s original sculpt did not survive. In retellings of Cultice’s account, Nothing/Interscope worried they would keep the album out of Walmart, so Manson and Cultice went back to the studio and had them smoothed off, and Walmart refused to stock the record anyway. Popula’s 2018 history of the cover puts it differently: Walmart would not stock the album unless the nipples were removed. Either way, the finished cover shows none. The chest plate appears there coated in white liquid latex and airbrushed to hide the seams, and again in motion in Paul Hunter’s “The Dope Show” video and at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, where Manson performed in it live.

The studio visit, the sculpt-from-imagination detail and the label’s pushback come from secondary retellings of Cultice’s account that this site has not traced to a primary interview.

Wayne Isham needed all five members of NSYNC turned into dolls. He went to the San Francisco effects house Radium first, to do them in CGI; Radium said it could not make the deadline. So the dolls were built on the performers instead, and George’s shop did the building.

The surviving record documents prosthetic makeup, prosthetic eyebrows and facial hair, and doll hair fitted over the scalp. It does not establish the materials or the construction of the visible doll joints.

Each member spent six hours in the chair. The band then stayed in the makeup for 24 hours straight, 22 of them shooting. The video was shot from April 26 to 28, 2000, at Los Angeles Center Studios, on a toy-store set scaled about seven times larger than life.

Isham shot the choreography at 12 frames a second and played it back at 24, so the dolls move with a stop-motion stutter on top of the makeup. It won Best Makeup at the 2001 MVPA Awards. The doll-in-a-box image returns every year with the “It’s Gonna Be May” meme.

The Radium detail, the makeup hours, the shoot dates, the set scale and the frame rates follow the Wikipedia article on the song and the press coverage it cites.

Slipknot’s 1999 debut era was built from found and modified masks rather than sculpted effects work: Shawn Crahan’s clown, Paul Gray’s pig mask (picked out and padlocked for him by former singer Anders Colsefni before Colsefni left the band), Corey Taylor’s crash-test dummy turned inside out with his dreadlocks pulled through the holes. None of that was George’s.

He came in for Iowa in 2001. On Dean Delray’s Let There Be Talk podcast, as reported by Loudwire in January 2019, Taylor drew the boundaries of the whole relationship in one sentence: George “did the masks for us, for Iowa, Volume 3, he did a little work with us on All Hope Is Gone.” His documented involvement therefore spans 2001 to 2008. For the band’s 2019 album, Taylor went to Tom Savini instead.

The lifecasting session — every member cast, masks sculpted over the casts, the first time the things actually fit the faces underneath — belongs to Vol. 3 in 2004, not Iowa. Through the Iowa era some members were still wearing their 1999 masks.

For Vol. 3, Taylor’s mask came out of that process: a mangled face with burnt, stitched skin, sometimes called the football mask for its seams, and by Taylor’s own account the hardest of his masks to sing in because it was asymmetric.

Photographs from George’s exhibitions show Slipknot masks displayed as his. One carries a museum card that specifically documents his prototype for Mick Thomson: “MICK’S TEST MASK PROTOTYPE MADE BY ‘SCREAMING MAD GEORGE’ — THIS MASK EVENTUALLY BECAME MICK’S SIGNATURE MASK.”

The stitching on this site’s section dividers is a nod to the Vol. 3 mask.