LATE SUMMER 1969. Los Angeles was in the grip of panic. The fear spread like a virus, its Doppler effect resonating outwards from the source in the moneyed mansions of Beverly Hills towards Santa Monica, San Fernando, Torrence and Death Valley.
Since the early morning of August 9th, when three women and a man armed with knives, rope and a gun had driven to 10050 Cielo Drive and carried out what were later reported as the ritual slayings of four people including Sharon Tate, the heavily pregnant actress wife of Roman Polanski no-one, celebrity or otherwise, felt safe. The following night, less than 10 miles away at 3301 Waverly Drive, Leno and Rosemarie LaBianca, owners of a chain of grocery stores, were also slaughtered. The only apparent link between the two incidents was the blood-daubings on the walls of both residences, phrases such as PIGS , RISE and HEALTER SKELTER (sic).
The seemingly random nature of the killings engendered a dread which engulfed LA like toxic smog. A police clampdown resulted in the media reporting a succession of Chinese whispers: the KKK were involved; the bodies had been gruesomely mutilated; this was a Satanist cult killing. Paranoia was rampant amongst the actors and musicians colonies, all jittery about the attentions of the LAPD. As one insider told Life, Toilets are flushing all over Beverly Hills; the entire Los Angeles sewer system is stoned .
When it became known that the murders had been carried out by members of The Family, a cult commune led by pimp, burglar, car-thief, forger, self-styled guru and musician Charles Manson, it did little to restore anyone s confidence. Manson arrested by police on October 15th at the Barker Ranch in Death Valley had been a well known, if suspiciously regarded figure on the LA music scene, an associate of Byrds/Paul Revere And The Raiders producer Terry Melcher and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.
In the days following the murders, sales of firearms rocketed, locksmiths trade increased dramatically, the price of guard dogs inflated to the thousand dollar bracket and there was a surge of accidental shootings and suspicious persons reports. Mia Farrow stayed away from her friend Tate s funeral (she had starred in Polanski s film Rosemary s Baby the previous year) fearing she was next. Superstars began installing alarm systems, fortifying their homes and, in Steve McQueen s case, packing hardware. (Unsurprising, considering McQueen s name was rumoured to have appeared on a Manson shitlist that also included Elizabeth Taylor.)
Clubs emptied and parties fizzled out. It became impossible to hitch a ride anywhere in America as one young man told the New York Times, If you re young, have a beard, or even long hair, motorists look at you as if you re a kill crazy cultist and jam the gas.
The Manson murders destroyed what was left of the facade of flowerchild fellowship among Angelenos: after all, The Wizard (as Wilson called him) had been a music business insider, and not some rogue redneck. Almost overnight, the hippy dream changed from mellow vibes, good dope and pastoral sounds to a lysergic nightmare directed by Hieronymous Bosch and scripted by Truman Capote. The soundtrack? The Beatles Helter Skelter .
However, any LA artist with reasonably sensitive antennae might ve sensed that something had been rotten in the state of California for at least a year. The City Of Angels had transmogrified itself from an oasis of endless promise to a jaded den of iniquity, and the acid-driven kaleidoscope was spinning so fast no-one could tell the difference between the good, the bad and the downright ugly. STP was superceding psychedelics, San Francisco was being suffocated by amphetamines and heroin, and in the wake of Easy Rider, Hollywood was entering the cocaine age.
In retrospect, one can identify a chain of portents heralding the malaise, the sense of sin and retribution that wreaked havoc on the counter-culture from 1968 onwards: the grim climaxes of Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch and Bonnie And Clyde; Brian Jones drowning presaging the deaths of Jimi, Jim and Janis; Polanski s film adaptation of Ira Levin s creepy parable Rosemary s Baby; The Rolling Stones dabbling with diabolical forces on Sympathy For The Devil and a brace of apparently hexed films, Nicholas Roeg s Performance (which featured a score by Jack Nitzsche, who would later do the honours for The Exorcist) and Crowley acolyte Kenneth Anger s Lucifer Rising (not released until a decade later).
The latter film in which Jagger was originally intended to play Lucifer and Richards Beelzebub featured a soundtrack recorded in prison by Manson Family member and Gary Hinman murderer Bobby Beausoleil, who had once auditioned for Love. Indeed, Forever Changes itself seemed to anticipate the psychic miasma crackling in the dry desert air; a preoccupation with death in The Red Telephone, Live And Let Live and the all-too appropriately titled Bummer In the Summer . Place all these omens against the backdrop of Vietnam, and you get the sense of a culture about to come apart at the seams.
As James Parker observed in his unofficial Henry Rollins biography Turned On, The blood let by the Manson killings was the symbolic release of all this tension, a grotesque act of sacrifice, and it soaked right through the psyche of the city. Here, Parker was echoing sentiments expressed in Joan Didion s essay The White Album ( I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full ); that Manson and co had somehow lanced the festering boil of the 60s, letting the poison bleed from Los Angeles into the Pacific.
This is a consensus Roman Polanski has little time for, reasoning that the fetishisation of the Manson murders, the idea of the slaughter as somehow being the payback for a season of hedonism, was merely Hollywood blaming the victim: These were the films you made, so this was the life you lead and the death you died . And yes, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems fair to conclude that the film industry cast Sharon Tate whose first featured role was in Eye Of The Devil, in which David Niven becomes the victim of a hooded cult who practice ritual sacrifice as both a scapegoat and a sacrificial lamb, in order to assuage fears of a threat to its entire community.
As in life, there are forces at work in rock n roll that are beyond all comprehension. The Beatles White Album was a central part of Manson s skewed ideology. According to Paul McCartney, the band s 1970 split can be sourced to irreconcilable differences that became apparent while the band were making that record. Bad karma, all around. After all, if the Beach Boys, the bards most responsible for promoting California as a sun-kissed utopia, could be dragged into this maelstrom, surely the City Of Angels was going to hell? Maybe in 1969 it was hell.
After his arrest, Charles Milles Manson was feted by much of the underground press as a revolutionary martyr figure. Tuesday s Child named him their man of the year and put him on the cover on a cross. Rolling Stone dubbed him the most dangerous man alive . The Free Press and numerous radio stations interviewed him in jail. Free Manson badges proliferated and his face appeared on countless t-shirts. Still does. Even now, one can feel that cold dead stare transfixing the mind s eye, or picture those manic gestures, the courtroom antics, the skin-crawlingly compelling poetry of his testimony.
Three decades that have passed since the Manson trial, and generations of musicians have fallen under the spell of not just the myth, but the music. From Neil Young to Black Flag, from Psychic TV to Lydia Lunch, from Sonic Youth to Guns N Roses, from Nine Inch Nails to Marilyn Manson, from The Lemonheads covering Home Is Where You re Happy on Creator to The Flaming Lips singing Charlie Manson Blues on Hear It Is, the most notorious killer of the late 20th century America has cast a shadow over rock n roll that far exceeds his five feet two inches frame.
But for all Manson s designs on race war, his garbled pseudo science-fictitious/religious beliefs, and even his hatred of the Hollywood bourgeoisie, in the end, his is the story of one man who couldn t brand his name on the public consciousness through his music, so he did it in blood. If Meredith Hunter s stabbing by Hells Angels at Altamont on December 6th symbolised the death of the 60s, then Manson inflicted the mortal wound.

Charles Manson was born no name Maddox on November 12, 1934 in Cincinnati Ohio. His mother, 16-year old Kathleen Maddox, unable to remember her illegitimate son s birthday, changed it to the 11th, Armistice Day. Manson later described his mother as a teenage prostitute, although relatives claim she was merely promiscuous and given to drink. A brief marriage to one William Manson gave the boy his surname. The identity of his biological father remains unclear, although Kathleen did file a bastardy suit against a Colonel Scott of Ashland, Kentucky, two years after the boy s birth. (Manson s prison records later suggested that he may have believed his father was black. This was one of many similarities he shared with Adolf Hitler, who was haunted by a fear that he had a Jewish ancestor. Apart from this, both men were short, were failed artists, were vegetarian, had an interest in the occult, and exhibited powerful abilities to brainwash others.)
Kathleen would often leave the young Charles with neighbours and not return for periods of days or even weeks. When she and her brother Luther were sentenced to five years in the state penitentiary in 1939 for armed robbery, he was looked after by his aunt and uncle in West Virginia, a religious family who believed all pleasures to be sinful.
Kathleen was paroled in 1942 and reclaimed her son, but his childhood amounted to a succession of hotel rooms shared with his mother and her heavily-drinking companions. After Kathleen s mother unsuccessfully tried to have Charles placed in a foster home, the court admitted him to an Indiana boys school at the age of 12. He ran away from the school ten months later, returned to his mother, but when it became clear that she didn t want him, fled again, getting caught up in a vicious circle of petty burglaries and juvenile centres. It was a cycle that would continue for 17 years.
Shortly after his 17th birthday, while incarcerated in the minimum security Natural Bridge Camp, Manson was visited by his aunt, who vouched to the authorities that she could provide a home and employment for him. However, less than a month before his parole hearing the following February, Manson held a razor blade to another boy s throat while he sodomised him, and as a result, was transferred to the Federal Reformatory at Petersburg, Virginia. Within seven months he had committed eight serious disciplinary offences, three involving homosexual acts.
Manson would spend most of the next 15 years in prison, marry twice, and sire two children. A staff evaluation conducted in July 1961 concluded that, he receives security in institutions which is not available to him in the outside world . At this time, he developed two fixations; Scientology and the guitar.
According to fellow prisoners, when The Beatles topped the US charts with I Wanna Hold Your Hand in 1964, Manson betrayed an obsession with the group that had as much to do with jealousy as fan worship. By 1966, he had accumulated 80-90 original songs, which he hoped to sell upon his release. By now he had dropped the Scientology phase, having reached its highest stage theta clear (and no doubt borrowing the best of their mind control techniques), and music was his main preoccupation.
On the morning of his release, March 21st, 1967, Manson pleaded with the authorities to be allowed to remain in prison. The request was denied, and he was transported into Los Angeles. The same day, he received permission to relocate to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco.
By winter of 1967 this ex-con had established contacts on the LA scene, and even recorded a session for Universal Records, an offshoot of the film studio. He was also gathering around him the harem that would become known as The Family, a bunch of suggestible destitutes, desert rats, acid casualties and nomadic hippies, and they holed up in Topanga Canyon, home of many of the record industry s movers and shakers.
Soon, Manson latched onto Terry Melcher the successful record producer offspring of Doris Day and Dennis Wilson, both of whom he saw as his ticket into rock n roll s inner sanctum. Wilson admired the spontaneity of Manson s songs, but also opined that Charlie never had a musical bone in his body . The newly-divorced singer arrived home one night in the spring of 1968 to find that Manson (who greeted him by kissing his feet) and about a dozen of The Family, nearly all girls, had taken up residence in his home. They stayed for several months, almost doubling in number. The experience, Dennis later reckoned, cost him about $100,000 dollars, with his houseguests liberating everything in sight: clothes, possessions, even his Mercedez Benz. He also gave Manson nine or ten Beach Boys gold records.
Not that Dennis didn t sometimes enjoy the company, sitting up singing and rapping with Charlie, and being looked after by the girls. Indeed, on one spectacular occasion he took the entire Family to his Beverly Hills doctor for penicillin shots, probably the largest gonorrhea bill in history . The Beach Boy wouldn t be rid of his house guests until August of 68, when he moved in with Gregg Jakobson and simply let the lease run out, leaving it to his manager to evict them. I m the luckiest guy in the world, because I got off only losing my money, he later told Vincent Bugliosi, deputy DA, prosecutor in the Manson case, and co-author of the best-seller Helter Skelter.
It was in Wilson s house that Neil Young first met the man who would become the subject of songs such as Revolution Blues and Mansion On The Hill .
A lot of pretty well-known musicians around LA knew him too, though they d probably deny it now, Young told Nick Kent in the latter s book The Dark Stuff. But fuck, why deny it? He was potentially a poet, that guy. The girls were around, too. (Linda) Kasabian and the other one (Patricia Krenwinkel) - they were always there. They d be right there on the couch with me, singing a song.
It was Gregg Jakobson who arranged a demo session for Manson at a studio in Van Nuys on August 9th 1968, exactly a year before the Tate murders. These sessions included songs that would eventually become integral to the Cult of Charlie: Cease To Exist (derived from Scientology jargon, later offered as an olive branch to the Beach Boys, who retitled it Never Learn Not To Love for their 20/20 album the following year) , Look At Your Game, Girl and Sick City . Most who have heard these demos agree that Manson was no better or worse than many of the singer-songwriters circling the airport at the time, peddling narcotic nursery rhymes such as I ll Never Say Never To Always . In his search for a motive for the Cielo Drive murders, Bugliosi later sifted through the tapes and referred them to a folk-song expert for an informed opinion. The expert characterised the tunes as extremely derivative , and concluded that there was nothing original about the music. But the lyrics are something else. They contain an amazing amount of hostility ( You ll get yours yet etc.). This is rare in folk songs, except in the old murder ballads, but even there it is always past tense. In Manson s lyrics these are things that are going to happen. Very spooky. Overall judgement: a moderately talented amateur.
Neil Young was rather more impressed, to the point of referring him to Warner Brothers head Mo Ostin:
Listen, he was great, he told Nick Kent. He was unreal. He was really, really good. Scary. Put him in a band that was as free as he was . . . see, that was the problem right there. No-one was ever going to catch up with Charles Manson cos he d make up the songs as he went along. Every song was different. And they were all good. They were all simple . . . he d just play a couple of chords and keep on going. The words just kept on coming out. I mean, if he d had a band like Dylan had on Subterranean Homesick Blues , then . . . But he was never gonna get that band, because there was just something about him that stopped anybody from being around him for too long. I was always glad to get out because he was too intense. He was one of these guys that wouldn t let you off the hook. I was always thinking. What s he going to do next? I d better get out this guy s way before he explodes. So I did.
Wilson also experienced that rabbit-in-the-headlights feeling, admitting to English magazine Rave in 1969 that, Sometimes The Wizard frightens me. The Wizard is Charlie Manson, who is a friend of mine who thinks he is God and the devil.
By the end of 1968, the rapidly expanding Family had set themselves up on an old ranch in Death Valley, recruiting miscreants, psychos and sociopaths of every stripe, stocking up on arms, assembling dune buggies out of parts cannibalised from stolen cars, and making lunatic forays into the desert, searching for races of subterranean hole-dwellers, readying their own bolt-hole for Manson had begun referring to as Helter Skelter .

The Beatles White Album double set was released by Capitol in America in December 1968. Charles Manson first heard the record in Los Angeles that month, on a trip from Death Valley. Upon his return to Barker Ranch that New Year s Eve, The Family listened to the record incessantly and began sending telegrams, letters and making phone calls to The Beatles office in England, to no avail.
Up until then, Manson, not unlike many in Los Angeles, and indeed, across the free world, spoke vaguely of the shit coming down , an imminent counter-cultural revolution. Post-White Album however, Charlie had a new name for the shit : Helter Skelter. He became obsessed with both The Beatles and Biblical prophecy, seeing himself as the avenging fifth angel referred to in Revelations 1, a grim reaper entrusted with the keys to the bottomless pit , come to earth to punish the idolatrous, materialistic denizens of Sodom central, and to exterminate the third part of man , the white race. This angel, known as Abaddon in Hebrew and Apollyon in Greek, also had a Latin name, omitted from the King James version of the Bible. His name was Exterminans: Charles Manson.
According to Charlie, Helter Skelter would be triggered by the black man breaking into rich white residences in the Bel Air or Beverly Hills districts, slaying the occupants and writing on the walls in the victims blood. These murders would then cause widespread fear and paranoia amongst whites, triggering a race war. The true black race as Manson saw it, the Black Panthers and Black Muslims, would remain in hiding until after the carnage, when they would emerge, appealing to whitey s guilt.
Thus would follow a white civil war between hippy liberals and hard-nosed conservatives, after which the Black Muslims would swoop in to wipe out the survivors. The Family, having grown to 144,000 strong as predicted in the Bible, would in turn emerge from their own refuge in Death Valley, and as a white master race, relieve the kill-sickened blacks of their power, and inherit the earth. Therefore, Manson believed he would be the ultimate beneficiary of a race war.
Fantastical though it was, this was the motive for which Vincent Bugliosi had been looking. In the course of his investigation, he interviewed Gregg Jakobson, plus family members Paul Watson and Brooks Poston, in order to determine what part The White Album played in Manson s bizarre belief system.
Firstly, and incredibly, Manson believed that the four angels in Revelations were John, Paul, George and Ringo. He arrived at this conclusion via the quotation, And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth; and unto them was given power . These locusts, or Beatles, had the faces of men but hair as the hair of women , and out of their mouths issued fire and brimstone .
Manson considered the songs on the White Album to be prophetic, and in the grand manner of fanatics, believed The Beatles to be speaking directly to him. He based this on the lyrics of both I Will ( Your song will fill the air/Sing it loud so I can hear you ) and Honey Pie ( Come and show me the magic/Of your Hollywood song ). Even Yer Blues was heard as a desperate call to Charlie/Christ. Sexy Sadie was taken as a reference to Family member Susan Atkins (renamed Sadie before they d heard the album), and Happiness Is A Warm Gun and Blackbird were both interpreted as a call to arms for the black race: Blackbird singing in the dead of night/Take these broken wings and learn to fly/All your life/You were only waiting for this moment to arise . Rise of course, being one of the words scrawled on the wall of the LaBianca residence. George Harrison s Piggies meanwhile, described moneyed couples in all their privilege, eating bacon with knives and forks, implements with which Leno and Rosemary La LaBianca would soon be murdered.
Revolution 1 was taken as a direct challenge from The Beatles for Charlie to show what he was made of: You say got a real solution/Well you know/We d all love to see the plan . Furthermore, he understood the lines, But when you talk about destruction/Don t you know that you can count me out . . . . in to signify the group s own ambivalence towards the idea of a violent uprising.