Dancin' With Manson

January 25 1971: Manson, Krenwinkel, Atkins and Van Houten are found guilty of multiple counts of murder in the first degree and conspiracy to commit murder. The trial had been a predictably controversial affair, marked by images that would brand themselves on the American psyche for years to come the chanting Family members outside the courthouse, Manson leaping across the courtroom, pencil in hand, as if to stab the judge, an altercation between prosecutor Bugliosi and Atkins in which she grabbed his notes and he inadvertently called her a little bitch . Even Dennis Hopper a close friend of Jay Sebring let curiosity get the better of him and visited Manson in his courthouse cell after the murderer requested he play the lead role in a film version of his life. Unsurprisingly, the movie was never made.
Six years later, Martin Scorsese received death threats from Family members after he d been asked to play the lead in a TV movie called Helter Skelter, and was surrounded by FBI agents at the 1977 Oscars quite an inconvenience for a man afflicted with a four-star coke habit. Indeed, the cult of Charlie had a considerable effect on the New Hollywood directors: Coppola s Apocalypse Now depicted Brando s Colonel Kurtz as a shaven-headed guru presiding over a Spahn Ranch-like compound in the jungle, while Travis Bickle s longing for a rain to wash all the scum off the streets of New York in Taxi Driver could ve come direct from one of Manson s monologues as much as screenwriter Paul Schrader s fervent imagination.
Manson had testified to the court in late 1970. The speech lasted for over an hour, and the transcript ran to 16 pages of text. In it, the killer placed himself squarely outside the confines of society, a product of the prison establishment, and condemned the judicial system, the media and America itself. These children come at you with knives, he declared, they are your children. You taught them. I didn t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. (In Robert Hendrickson s documentary film Manson, Family member Brenda was quoted as saying, We are what you have made us. We were brought up on your TV. She also cited Robert Altman s Combat series as one of her favourite shows.)
The same point was made, even more infamously, in the statement issued by Manson after his conviction: Mr. and Mrs. America you are wrong. I am not the King of the Jews nor am I a hippie cult leader. I am what you have made of me and the mad dog devil killer fiend leper is a reflection of your society . . . Whatever the outcome of this madness that you call a fair trial of Christian justice, you can know this: in my mind s eye my thoughts light fires in your cities.
Reading these words, it s hard not to think of Public Enemy s Burn Hollywood, Burn on Fear Of A Black Planet, a virtual prophesy of the race riots of 1992, themselves a close replay of the Watts uprising 17 years earlier.

In the opening paragraphs of his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind describes an earthquake which took place early on the morning of February 9 1971, when the trial was in its penalty phase. It was an uncommonly violent upheaval, 6.5 on the Richter scale, and many feared it to be the Big One long anticipated by Hollywood doomcryers. The Manson girls, camped outside the courthouse like a troupe of Macbeth witches with shaven heads and X d foreheads, claimed their leader had conjured it on the heads of his tormenters.
David Dalton, interviewing Manson in jail for Rolling Stone under the pretense of being a material witness, remembered one particularly spooky moment in their encounter. I was going to ask him what his sign was, but by mistake I said, You re a Scorpion aren t you? he recalled recently. In a split second his face went through a dozen different emotions. As if seen in stroboscopic flashes, his face flickered from anger to confusion to fear to a sort of demented arrogance. It was as if I had suddenly opened an emotional worm hole into his soul and could observe him as he wriggled through these states like a psychic salamander.
On April 19, 1971, all the defendants were sentenced to death. In a period of one month, from July to August 1969, Manson s followers had slaughtered nine people (he boasted that they may have killed as many as 35-40, not to mention retaliation murders ). Death threats had been made to many of those involved in the trial, hitherto the longest and most expensive in American history, and the most publicised murder case since the Kennedy assassination.
Less than a year after sentencing, the death penalty was abolished in the state of California and Manson s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was transferred from Death Row in San Quentin to the maximum security adjustment centre in Folsom Prison in October 1972 and became eligible for parole six years later.

10 years after the trial, the devil was back in vogue with all manner of burbs brats, shock-mongers and surf Nazis. In 1982, Black Flag bassist Chuck Dukowski told the NME, We get an arcane and emotional value from Manson . At the time, the hardcore band were labouring in the face of indifference and even outright hostility from the LA music establishment the grown-up hippies who were Manson s nemesis in the first place.
The sometimes violent nature of hardcore gigs in the early 80s meant that the Flag were shunned by promoters, club owners and agents of the press and radio. They retaliated through shock tactics, and with psychedelics and 60s iconography in fashion once again, Manson was a hip name to drop. Indeed, South Bay band Redd Kross had already covered Cease To Exist from Manson s Lie album (rush released by ESP records soon after the Tate-LaBianca murders). Free Charlie! flyers were circulating through the punk network, not to mention Raymond Pettibon s Fifth Beatle print which depicted Manson lurking over the shoulders of the four moptops.
New York s Sonic Youth who would soon join Black Flag s SST label and Lydia Lunch were next to succumb to Manson s gravitational pull, with their caterwauling Death Valley 69 from the Bad Moon Rising album in 1985. It remains a stunning piece of work, conjuring images of the murderers roaring out of their desert haven in souped-up dune buggies, hell-for-leathering it into a Mad Max-style doomsday scenario. The sense of vertiginous, vortical plummeting in the song still makes the stomach churn, with Lunch s bloodcurdling wails suggesting a woman plummeting towards the bottom of some parched pit, deep in the desert.
I m still not sure whether anyone should be or has been properly indicted for thought crimes, which is what Manson was guilty of, Lunch says now. Not that his hands were clean they weren t, but basically the individuals wielded the knives, the implements of murder, and there d be so many politicians in prison if, instead of looking at Manson, we looked at the bigger picture. But his parole hearings are by far the best poetry readings of the last two decades.
If Lunch and Sonic Youth dabbled with Mansonian imagery, then Henry Rollins bought into it big time. According to James Parker, by the end of 1983 Hank was exchanging regular correspondence with the killer. Charlie is my coach, he confided to Thurston Moore at a party in Torrence in December of that year, informing the guitarist that Manson had been sending polaroids of himself with a swastika cut into his forehead.
Rollins had also received tapes of music Manson recorded in his cell: freestyle, acoustic country raps with which he accompanied himself on one of his two hand-decorated guitars. These songs amounted to circular, rambling hybrids of jailspeak, street-slanguage and hazy acid-gabble, all hypnotically delivered in an almost absent-minded fashion, veering between nonsense and hypersense ( No sense makes sense ). Mellow enough stuff, apart from one tune, which dissolves into inarticulate rage, in which only the words, Burnin . . . fire . . . I m on fire come through.
Rollins meditated on the tapes for hours. According to Tom Troccoli, a friend and member of the SST crew, one night, driving back from a Black Flag show in Northern California, Henry announced, You know, the thing that I ve learned from myself about these Charlie tapes is that it would take nothing for me to kill you all right now, and tried to grab the steering wheel and run the van off the road. The band locked him in the back for the rest of the night.
By 1984, SST had begun negotiating with Manson to release the prison tapes. He s this five foot four (sic) guy, sitting up behind bars somewhere in California, and he terrifies people, Rollins told the NME that September. A lot of what Black Flag is about is looking at the evil that lies within human nature.
Manson himself had always been philosophical about his songs being used for commercial gain, reasoning, I don t sell the wind that blows through me .
After abandoning plans to embellish the recordings with country-rock backing tracks, not to mention marketing Manson under the name Chuck Willis (as in Charles Will Is Man s Son), a kind of singing hobo inversion of Hank Williams Luke The Drifter alter ego, SST eventually decided to release the tapes in their raw state as Completion.
It never happened. As rumours abounded that Manson was shopping the tapes around to various parties, including a white supremacist group, Chuck Dukowski received the last and most frightening of a series of threatening phone calls. Identifying himself as Icepick , the caller claimed that Manson, disgruntled with SST, had issued orders that various members of the organisation were to be hunted down. And while Manson himself had never voiced any such sentiments directly to the label, Dukowski decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and they binned plans for the album s release.
Nevertheless, the Death Valley influence was all over the Black Flag shows and recordings of the time, particularly My War, where Rollins had seemed to mutate into some composite of Kurtz, Bickle and the original Family man. But, perhaps most explicitly, the Troccoli/Rollins acoustic-spoken word collaboration Al Jolson s Bedroom from Radio Tokyo Tapes Vol. 3 found him playing an Oedipal Morrison/Manson character identifying himself by his date of birth, a favourite tactic of Charlie s (2.13.61 would become the name of Rollins publishing company).
Manson s presence continued to make itself known in the most unlikely places: in 1988, U2 kicked off their Rattle & Hum album with a self-professed attempt to steal The Beatles Helter Skelter back from this darkest of American icons. Indeed, that band s Joshua Tree shows featured a sequence which the musicians referred to as the Heart Of Darkness , songs like the serial-killing Exit and the heroin-ballet Running To Standstill , in which Bono seemed hellbent on both absorbing and exorcising the anima of some pretty tortured characters. In retrospect, however, the singer reckons their motives for re-appropriating the Beatles tune were not so clear-cut.
Our choice of Helter Skelter for Rattle And Hum was more to do with the vicissitudes of 86, 87, 88 than any interest in Charles Manson, he reflects. We were living in the Hollywood Hills. The only devils we found there were the joggers and juicers of corporate gymnastics, Paramount Pictures who treated us really well etc. etc. Even the colour co-ordinated gangs of the Barrio used to wave as we made our way downtown to the club land of inner city LA, the Million Dollar Hotel .
In focusing on the pentagrams in the penthouse rather than backstage at Black Sabbath gigs, Bono was thinking along the same lines as Brett Easton Ellis. Indeed, the novelist portrayed the U2 singer as the antithesis to his corporate devil Patrick Bateman in the controversial 1991 novel American Psycho. In one memorable scene, Bateman even experiences a mind-meld with Bono at a 1987 Madison Square Garden gig, which leaves the killer flushed, shaking, and nursing a hard-on. In many ways, Bateman was merely Manson in Armani, and the book an inversion of The Family manifesto: a Piggy getting his kicks by preying on destitutes in New York rather than LA.
The darkness of Los Angeles is not what it s cracked up to be, Bono concludes, and in the end might turn out to be lack of resistance in short very little to rebel against . . . . This, I would suggest to you, is why The Valley , in fact all suburbia, is attracted to occult stars it s a very white preoccupation. Goth is like painting with a tube of obsidian black an easy route to drama. Robert Johnson is a different kind of deal; the devils of the Deep South Bible-belt racist Christianity he had a real understanding for. When I look into the eyes of lot of the artists who ve played up the devil, I find myself smiling at how Hallowe en it all is. It s all monkey nuts and the bogeyman.
This particular bogeyman surfaced again in December 1993, when Guns N Roses released a covers album, The Spaghetti Incident?, which contained a version of Manson s Look At Your Game, Girl as a bonus track. W Axl Rose defended the song as a study of insanity by a man who d been there, but despite the band s pledge to donate the royalties to the son of one of the Manson victims, there were calls for a boycott of Geffen. The Gunners A&R man Tom Zutaut described the cover version as being even more problematic than Rose s infamously racist/homophobic One In A Million , adding that he could never understand why the track was so important to the singer.
However, it was one of Axl s favourite artists, Trent Reznor, who took it to the limit, actually moving into 10050 Cielo Drive (which he rather dubiously renamed Le Pig ) for the recording of Nine Inch Nails second album The Downward Spiral (the house was demolished soon after its completion). On that record, Reznor found himself asking some tricky moral questions on the nature of suicide and murder, as well as combating electrical problems he half-jokingly attributed to Tate s ghost. The gravity of the house s legacy was brought home to him by a random encounter that occurred while he was working on the album.
My awakening about all that stuff came from meeting Sharon Tate s sister, he told Rolling Stone in 1997. And she said, Are you exploiting my sister s death by living in her house? For the first time the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, No, it s just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I m in this place where a weird part of history occurred.
I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don t want to support. When she was talking to me, I realised for the first time, What if it was my sister? I thought, Fuck Charlie Manson. I don t want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit .

Evil has always carried its own forbidden cachet. But if Altamont tragically legitimised the Stones as dark satanic overlords of rock n roll, one look at Gimme Shelter confirms that they were as much victims as orchestrators of those chaotic circumstances. The cult of Manson however, is another matter, reeking of the kind of sad, fecal sickness that produces LA noir characters such as GG Allin, and culminates in the culture of isolation and amorality that breeds neo-Aryan nerds like Columbine High School s Harris and Klebold. In rock n roll, as in any artform, murder remains the last taboo.
Even as recently as last June, US shlock-rock magazine Popsmear ran a photo-story cover feature recreating the Manson killings. Scripted and directed by one Legs McNeil, the piece featured rock n roll luminaries like Tool s Maynard Keenan as Manson, former Dictator Handsome Dick Manitoba as Voytek Frykowski, MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer as Leno LaBianca, New York Doll Arthur Kane as George Spahn, and one time Dead Boy Jimmy Zero as a cop.
Charlie s Lie album, meanwhile, can still be ordered on the Internet, although original copies are now collector s items. He s even been immortalised on South Park. At the age of 62, Manson has spent most of his life in prison. It is unlikely that America s favourite folk devil will ever make parole. n