David Crosby-raconteur and denizen of golden throated harmonies was an enigma in the rock world. A very vocal peace and anti establishment figurehead. A famous advocate of guns (who’d shoot them off with little provocation in public), a more famous connoisseur of heroin and cocaine (he’d had a bowl of coke available for guests on his coffee table most days), usually pudgy and nude surrounded by groupies at most gatherings-the word hedonism could have his photo in the dictionary as a definition. Not all that talented as a guitarist (he quickly was removed as bassist in the Byrds for being unable to play along with the drums), not well known as a song writer (he demanded writing credit for the Byrd’s signature 8 Miles High despite only contributing a single line to the lyrics), famously cantankerous, David Crosby cruised through life like the rules were not made for him. But his passing in January 2023 was still felt keenly by folk rockers and fans of his most famous band, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young across the world. Just what made this guy who he was is still shrouded in tales and legends that obscure, exaggerate and confuse most rock scholars. One thing is for certain, he grabbed for the brass ring of success early and held on for dear life.
Am I the only one who tunes?
Byrds
Crosby got his start in the folk rock band, the Byrds. The Byrds were an early 1964 amalgam of folk musicians and early boy band ‘who cares if you can play if you look the part’ vibes. (Oddly this same crew mixed with the Monkees, used the same backing musicians, yet the Byrds were ‘real’ and the Monkees ‘fake boy band’. Hmmm. Steven Stills later auditioned as a Monkee but was beaten out by Peter Tork who had better teeth) Roger (then Jim) McGuinn put some Beatles into his folk rock and decided to get hip. With Gene Clark in tow, McGuinn and Clark decided that despite Dylan’s rising star in New York, the Beatles and the British wave were to be the future. So they ditched their band name, and similarly misspelled their band name in tribute to the Beatles and proceeded to try to take the West Coast scene by storm. It didn’t work. David Crosby came along and added harmonies, and Michael Clark came on as….well he didn’t really play anything but looked cool. So he was the drummer, a drummer banging on boxes and tambourines with his only skill really being informally on bongos and congas. As mentioned, Crosby was given the bassist job but quickly flamed out. Chris Hillman, a bluegrass mandolin player was give the bass and a week to learn it. So the fledgling Byrds went out and had few things going musically other than slick harmonies and McGuinn’s jangling 12 string electric guitar. Fans of the early albums were unaware that the record was all studio musicians holding down the fort while the Byrds sang on top and pretended to play. Their early real concerts in LA were disastrous as they couldn’t reproduce their songs onstage. Fans noticed. But they had an ace in the hole. Vito and his Freaks…..
Vito and his Freakers
Vito Paulekis was perhaps the first actual California hippie back in the late 1964 early 1965 era. He pioneered the hippie fashion of throwing together clothes designs from scraps of bygone eras, multi sources of influences to create an aura of weird, drawing artists, iconoclasts and just plain epically strange people into his orbit. Early dabblers in LSD, Vito and his dance troupe would show up at clubs and whirl spastically in the center of the dance floor-spasming semi rhythmically to the over amplified music and usually the center of attention. The GTO’s were early members of his group before Frank Zappa laid his mitts on them. Sunset Strip denizens noted that many a Byrds show was saved by Vito and his girls, taking the attention off the wavering time signatures and spotty tunings going on the stage. The band merely turned up the amps to rattle your teeth volume, and a synesthetic visual and musical effect was created. People started to dig the Byrds. The Byrds were credited with inventing folk rock, psychedelic rock and country rock in that order, perhaps not necessarily deserving it but with Columbia Records at their back and the LA music press running interference, no one was the wiser.
Trio? Solo Act?
Crosby, Stills and Nash: the Frozen Noses
Perhaps the most famous iteration of Crosby’s career was the seminal (at the time) self titled super group, Crosby Stills and Nash. Pulling together elements of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the Hollies, CSN were among the first super groups, perhaps the first as they predated Blind Faith by over six months. Crosby had been asked by the band to leave the Byrds in late 1967, Stills had broken up Buffalo Springfield in 1968 and Nash had left the Hollies at the end of 1968 and relocated from the UK to Los Angeles. How these three met up and decided to start a band is a bit mysterious (see below), but they were known for their harmonizing, creating crystalline vocal melodies in a fashion that most rock groups could never come close to. Bruce Palmer, bassist for the band recalls the formation of the band: “we started rehearsing at Stephen’s house with Crosby and Nash, it became real evident that they were nothing but backup singers. They didn’t like it and decided to change it. They couldn’t take that; they thought they were too big, too famous, too talented. They weren’t talented, they were backup singers … It looked to them as if it was Crosby and Nash backing up Buffalo Springfield, being nothing more than harmony singers for Stephen, Neil, myself, and Dallas Taylor.” He continued: “that band is 95 percent Stephen doing everything and he’s got his backup singer boys with him.” He noted that drugs were already a huge part of the band. Super groupie Pamela Miller (Des Barres) was witness to their formation and was horrified that they were actually calling themselves the Frozen Noses for their Woodstock major debut show in August 1969 in tribute to their proclivity for snorting mountains of cocaine. Cooler heads prevailed, and they decided to use just their names. Crosby contributed the beautiful Guinnevere (written about his then girlfriend Joni Mitchell) and Long Time Gone along with a sci-fi collaboration with Paul Kantner to create the powerful anti war Wooden Ships, a song done by both Jefferson Airplane and CSN. (Another song Crosby supposedly contributed just a single line to, the Airplane version remains the definitive chilling version for those fans unaware.) His association with Jefferson Airplane also dips in with the song Triad, originally recorded for the Byrds in late 1967, a homage to the menage a trois, considered too dicey for the Byrds but right in the wheelhouse for the convention breaking Airplane.
Add Young please
Their debut album was quickly followed up in 1970 with the grittier Deja Vu album, augmented by the equally gritty Neil Young, forming the on and off again super super group, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. One of the signpost albums of the late 60’s early 70’s, the singles Woodstock, Teach Your Children and Our House showed the four part harmonies they could now produce. The non album track Ohio, protesting the then current Kent State massacre didn’t make the album but remains one of their most popular and powerful anti-war songs of the generation. Crosby contributed the wistful Almost Cut My Hair and title track Deja Vu, but mostly stuck to harmonies on the album.
If you are going to own a Crosby album, this is it
Post CSN
CSNY petered out by the end of 1970, and Crosby was left to his own devices (read: partying, drugs, guns). His association with the Grateful Dead (along with Stills and Nash) in 1970 as the Dead crafted their seminal album, American Beauty brought the Dead accolades for their newly minted ability to harmonize well. Crosby took a lot of credit for this, and though his input might have been more on the chemical side, this led to the Dead helping out on Crosby’s first solo album, If Only I Could Remember My Name, a title more true than folks might have guessed. A heroin sheen floats through much of this dreamy album, which holds together five decades later pretty well. To be fair, David was not in a good place following the death of his close girlfriend Christine Hinton in a car crash in 1969. According to Graham Nash, Crosby ‘was never the same after going to identify her body’. Crosby was still dating Joni Mitchell simultaneously. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell, Stills and Nash all contributed to the all star cast. This is probably the pinnacle of Crosby’s career, and it was a slow slide from here into the abyss of drugs, guns and dodged and undodged incarcerations. And some music too.
1972 and Beyond…Lost and Found and Lost…
We In White Mountain o’ Trouble
The years following the the 1971 solo debut saw uncertainty and promise on the horizon. CSN&Y had a huge reunion tour scheduled in 1973 for the upcoming year. They were going to be huge, if they could keep their tempers in check. They couldn’t. Drug problems, girl problems, drinking problems-you name it, they had it. Nash had stolen Joni Mitchell from Crosby. Nash had stolen Rita Coolidge from Stills. Nash could hoover more coke than the legendary Crosby, a not inconsiderable feat. Stills sank into meth, downers, heroin and booze to supplement the coke. Crosby sank into a mountain of white powder-heroin? Coke? Who knew or cared? Nash sank into everyone’s ex-girlfriend while snorting more coke than Studio 54 saw in a week. Predictably, the tour was acrimonious and the sessions for the proposed album went poorly, and were finally terminated unfinished in 1974. The band seemed unaware what coke was going to do to their vocal chords, and the powerful harmonies had been reduced to a shadow of their former glory.
You take this verse, I’m grinding my teeth
Crosby and Nash teamed up on one side and plied the free and easy ‘California Sound’ that had overtaken rock n roll. Stills and Young teamed up on the other side with some country tinged California sound. Crosby and Nash put together a career that lasted until 1978. Crosby was starting to come seriously unglued due to the unending drug bender he’d been on since 1968, and ideas of touring and recording were shelved. By 1978, Crosby had a huge free-basing problem. The band had been plagued by dodgy vocals (coke) and some iterations suffered from jacked up tempos and off key delivery from the massive coke consumption. But oh that California Sound and Laurel Canyon heavenly lifestyle…
Interlude: The Government Hijacks Rock n Roll? What?
Some historians have delved into the origins of the California Sound and found that it was a very incestuous scene centered in Laurel Canyon on the outskirts of LA proper. It was a former outpost for actors in the 1920’s that had morphed into a haven for the dissipated rich and disaffected, trading actors for musicians over 40 year span.
The idea of the government trying to destroy rock n roll is not as far fetched as it might seem. It had already happened once, in the 50’s. Rock n roll was a newly minted phenomenon in the mid 1950’s. But it had some unsettling effects on the youth of America. Blacks and whites freely mixed at concerts, record stores and dances. White stations were playing black music. White girls were huge fans of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Hank Ballard–the dreaded thought of black guys and young white girls enraged most of white America. Elvis was creating a phenomenon among younger people. Riots at rock concerts were frequent. Teenage girls were throwing their underwear at black artists in concert. Kids suddenly went from the Leave it to Beaver stereotype to ‘they just don’t listen anymore and can’t be controlled!’. In short order by the end of the 50’s influential DJ’s werer arrested, Chuck Berry was under arrest and in jail. Elvis was in the army. Little Richard retired from touring and returned as a gospel preacher. Jerry Lee Lewis fell in scandal (marrying his underage cousin).
Soon this guy was the face of rock n roll.
The future of Rock n Roll, 1959
By 1959, rock was dead. But nobody planned on the Beatles. Rock once again took over the world. Throughout the 60’s rock once again grew in power, this time more sophisticated-heady ideas of counterculture were being thrown around. Governments took notice. The French government nearly fell to the nascent hippy culture and fought for control of the country. Czechoslovakia had to have Soviet troops brought in to put down the rock n roll fueled youth culture. In 1968, it was brewing strongly in America-New York, Detroit, San Francisco were hot beds of dissident rock n roll. Primitive pre-punk DIY bands were stirring shit up on many levels.
MC5
Jefferson Airplane The Fugs
Velvet Underground
Grateful Dead
The Stooges
So these bands were preaching some serious anti government stuff. Free love, drugs, anti-establishment, anti government, anti money, anti work, anti war….the US Government certainly was aware of what happened in France, Czechoslovakia and Mexico-this shit could topple a government. What to do? Lock them all up? Impossible. Steer the record industry and thus the public away from these bands? Well that one is possible. Alphabet agencies (read: CIA) had a strong toehold in Los Angeles police and newspapers. With LA as the center of media attention, it was easy to draw the focus of the country to one music scene, the LA scene.
And suddenly LA was no longer ruled by the Doors and chaos, out of nowhere came a corporate boatload of similar sounding singers and songwriters. Joni MItchell, all the iterations of CSN&Y, Jackson Browne, Loggins and Messina, Pablo Cruise, America, Poco, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers…most of these bands (barring Joni) were considered execrable by rock music fans… they all came from LA, Laurel Canyon in particular, in a two year period, as if by…design? The free wheeling bands of New York, Detroit and San Francisco-bands built on speed and LSD, were suddenly replaced by introspective singer songwriter types fueled by a good bottle of white wine and a joint. (And coke). The threat from rock n roll to topple the country, fuel a revolution, went from “we are voices of chaos and anarchy” in the Bay Area to “peaceful easy feeling” in LA in scant 24 months. Iggy Pop in his most recent documentary is quite certain that this is exactly what happened. “How did all the influential bands suddenly get overrun by a bunch of acoustic guitars and songwriters all from LA? By accident?”
A deeper and lengthy read on this, while a bit rambling, is fascinating. Read this taleherewhen you get a chance.
Back to the Story
Crosby continued downward: caught freebasing at a show in Dallas backstage, car crash with a boatload of drugs and guns, a couple of weeks later more drug and gun charges. Arrests became frequent enough that incarceration seemed likely in the face of 5 years of probation. By 1985, even Texas was unable to overlook multiple drug and gun charges and he did 9 months in lock up.
Fresh Liver For Crosby
The above was the headline in a British music tabloid in 1994 when Crosby, despite giving himself liver disease from shooting heroin and drinking a Great Lake worth of booze, managed to jump the transplant line and get an immediate new liver installed. Phil Collins bailed David out financially in circumstances still not well understood. Crosby however knew how serious it was. Graham Nash had come in to see him before the operation. He wished David well with “You leave me with fucking Stills, I’ll kill you.”
The weirdest Dead associated album ever released
Hold My Frappe
So I actually got to meet Crosby before the liver incident. I was working in a very punk rock record store. Crosby had installed his daughter at a local Seven Sisters Ivy League college. He had popped in several times, and the staff delighted in torturing the only staff member who could vaguely pass for a hippy and actually liked CSNY every time I missed him stopping in. Finally I had enough and left my post to find him outside. I brought a cassette of Seastones, a Ned Lagin and Phil Lesh project that consisted mostly of processed found sounds and blips and beeps from a Buchla modular and a couple of ARP 2600s. Also enticingly listed were Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Spencer Dryden,Grace Slick and David Crosby as guest musicians. Several close listens to the atonal random synth burps do not reveal any sign of the players listed in the randomness.
Me: ‘Hello David, I’ve missed you several times in the store. Would you mind signing this’ *proffers tape at him
“I love this record but defy anyone to find you on it:” I said smiling.
He responded: “I’m definitely on it, I assure ya”
Me: * looking at his arms filled with snacks and a large quart sized ice cream drink with straw… “Can you sign this?”
Crosby : “Ok…hold my frappe”
Legendary quote. That’s probably more Crosby than you might care to know, but someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth (more likely nose) had made a long career of having fun, and making some people pretty happy along the way. He made a career out of entitlement, but in a fashion made that into an art form. The truth hung a bit below the surface, and one had to keep an ear to the ground to start to pick up hints of trouble in paradise.
If ever there was a rock star that cruised by on their reputation without actually doing all that much, David Crosby has to be the poster boy. David Geffen had a low opinion of his input to rock: “David was obnoxious, loud, demanding, thoughtless, full of himself – of the four of them [David Crosby, Steven Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young], the least talented.” But he was in the right place at the right time enough times that one can be excused for wondering if there was some force guiding things behind the scenes. His Van Cortlandt family name contains some of the blue-est of the blue bloods in American history, and girls were lining up for some Van Cortlandt genetic injections from the free wheeling Crosby. Melissa Etheridge and her partner have two children via Crosby, and they aren’t the only ones who oddly sought out this guy.
Record Store Day has been exciting, overwhelming, disappointing, awful-it has run the gamut since its introduction in 2008 to celebrate (and support) independent record stores. Very few people were buying vinyl in those halcyon days as the resurgence in record interest was still a few years on the horizon. Dollar bins in local stores were still populated with albums that now fetch $10-25 a whack. I was lucky enough to get back on board in 2010 and start to revamp my lost collection. At the time, I thought Record Store Day was a quaint effort to revitalize a sagging industry and reward independent stores for their efforts to keep the flame flying.
Nowadays, Record Store Day can be like Black Friday: people lined up out front before the sun is up, snaking around the corner, jumbling and pushing each other out of the way to grab the last copy of some rarity once the doors finally open. Labels have realized the cash cow RSD had morphed into, and flooded the market with box sets and live albums in limited editions designed to create an artificial rarities market. What was once a yearly (April) event has now been expanded to a three event drop-April, June and November. Making folks line up early 3 times a year has dampened the magic somewhat, and the dilution of interest by spreading the rarities across the year? Well the magic is subjective these days, and the unevenness of certain drops is often compounded by the insistence of labels in re-releasing albums that are still out there used in droves in original form for three bucks or less as thirty dollar reissues. But I digress…
2007: Clean shaven and on top of his game
Record Store day this year in April 2022 was an exception as two releases seemed to slip under everyone’s radar. The first is the curiously named Roky Erickson and the Explosives-Halloween II: Live 2007. Curious because the show was actually April 15, 2007 in the Bowery Ballroom in NYC, about as far from Halloween on the calendar as you can get. I was vibrating when this release was announced, as it not only documented the return of the psychedelic giant from the brink of irretrievable madness and hospitalization, it was his first show live outside of a smattering of Texas shows since 1982. And I was there.
The Grand Daddy 1981 album you need
Hell his return to the floorboards in the early 80’s with the magnificent album, The Evil One (something everyone should own) was astounding. Roky had led the LSD charge in the mid sixties with the far ahead of their time band, the 13th Floor Elevators, a band known to trip on stage every night, pre-dating even the Grateful Dead as pioneers in this behavior. Unfortunately Texas was less welcoming to this kind of behavior than San Francisco, and the band were hounded by police into arrests, incarceration and an early forced break up. His insanity plea to avoid a lengthy sentence for a pot charge led to unwanted shock treatments that dramatically changed his persona.
Not only was this his first show in the Northeast in any form (Roky started touring in 1965), I had managed to secure tickets and got there just as the first notes of the opening song rang into the Ballroom. To say anticipation was high was an understatement, as I’d run across the Elevators and the Evil One in 1981, and had been a devoted disciple of Roky’s madness for over a quarter century. Never once would I imagine that I would be able to see the real thing in person. The anticipation was tempered with the trepidation of what I might encounter-the recent documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me chronicled a nearly incapacitated Roky, barely able to speak or function, obscured by a huge beard and eyes that had the ‘thousand yard stare’. What greeted me was a freshly shaved and energetic Roky, looking decades younger and in full voice. His guitar, more of an accessory in his later tours, was a six string razor in his hands, deftly chording underneath the muscular trio of the Explosives, his long time band. He looked and acted nothing like the geriatric depicted in the documentary. It was astounding.
He howled the opening “It’s a coooooold night for alligators…” into the microphone, and it was clear that Roky was back, and back in a way not seen since 1981-1982. The setlist covered most of the Evil One, with a few earlier singles like Two Headed Dog. The only nods to his Elevators past were the delicate Splash 1 (with the ‘I’m hoooome…to stayyy” as a poignant wink to his newfound health) and the iconic You’re Gonna Miss Me, the closest thing they had to a hit back in 1966. After the show, Roky set up a table to meet fans and sign autographs, quite the opposite of what was expected. He was clear eyed, well spoken and humbly accepted the accolades offered. I personally could not believe I was meeting a sixties hero that most had written off as the Syd Barrett of the US psychedelic movement-here still but not here for a long time. It was clear that not only was Roky here, he still had plenty of newfound gas in the tank.
The white vinyl double lp is expansively wrapped in a mind bending cover. The sound is not perfect-a DIY level soundboard recording of the ‘warts and all’ category. Still, this album documents one of the more important evenings by one of the more important artists of the last fifty years. Absolutely essential for fans of lesser known psychedelia, this record documents a restored giant thundering into the NYC evening. Needless to say, I was in line early to get this one. Go get one while you still can.
The next release is from the even more obscure band, Gong. This hybrid French/Australian/British band had their heyday from 1970 to 1976, and were in the forefront on the nascent progressive rock movement that swept across Europe in those years. Their inventive blend of psychedelia, jazz, space rock and world music was unique at the time. (Ozric Tentacles pillaged this band heavily to create their sound in the 80’s). The Radio Gnome Trilogy lies at the heart of their mystical tale, populated by pot head pixies, flying teapots, interplanetary transmissions, synthesizers that peel away your consciousness, glissando guitars mimicking the sounds of interplanetary travel…you get the idea. These guys were also at the forefront of the LSD movement in Europe, and band leader Daevid Allen was deported from France in relation to the student uprisings that nearly toppled the government there in 1968. The 1-2-3 run of Flying Teapot, Angel’s Egg and You from 1972-1974 is highly essential listening for any fan of progressive rock of the 1970’s.
Gong is no stranger to Record Store Day, with two similar looking releases in the last few years, Live in Bataclan 1973 in 2019 and Live in Sheffield 1974 following in 2020 were prominent but not really sought after RSD albums, both are still readily available in 2022. So it was with less than enthusiasm that I noted the announcement of ‘Gong in the 70’s’ as a release. Both Bataclan and Sheffield had CD releases in the early 90’s, and were well documented as some of the only soundboard recordings of the band noted for their live performances as legend making. The fact that this album had a generic feel and pretty much zero information related to it-locations, lineups, years recorded led me to believe this was a scraping of the barrel and a recycling of previous outtakes. So….I passed on this one.
But then, I read some quick reviews on a noted prog website. This album had existed as a little known CD version quietly released in 2006. Reviewers opined that this was the best Gong live album out there. Better than Live Etc, better than Bataclan or Sheffield. Ok, those are strong claims and the writers seemed to know of what they spoke. So….I ventured into town on the day after RSD to see if any copies were still out there. To my consternation, three stores still had copies of the Roky Erickson album, something I felt would be gone in the first hour of sales opening day. What the hell was wrong with people? The other side of the coin was: if Roky is available still, then Gong definitely should still be out there. It was. Bringing it home and popping the seal immediately, I quickly realized the reviewers on the prog site were correct. This album is amazing. Better than my long time favorite Live Etc? Perhaps. Better than Bataclan and Sheffield? Definitely. Although it is an admixture of rehearsals, studio outtakes and live performances much like Live Etc, there is a fluidity and variance in their setlists and in their performances here that is refreshingly new. The rarely played Blues for Finlay from the obscure film soundtrack album Continental Circus from 1972 from a radio broadcast is something we’ve never encountered. Likewise the oft heard Om riff rubs elbows with I’ve Been Stoned Before, Mr. Longshanks and Flowers Gone-all rarely heard on live releases. Tropical Fish, Never Glid Before and Selene are rehearsal versions from their communal home, and are high quality recordings never heard before. Overall Gong had a fairly short list of songs they’d slot in live, and there can be a sameiness to their live stuff on release. This one, however limited it is in background information, is a quick breath of fresh air, and shows the Gong archives are not picked clean quite yet. Great for any current or aspiring space rock fan or anyone who is curious about relocating their consciousness off planet and what might be in store for them on the green planet called Gong. A must for any long term Gong fans.
Nektar in 2020 is an odd proposition. From a seventies perspective, Nektar had their heyday from 1971 as a transplanted UK band in Hamburg (1969) helping to jump start the krautrock movement before most of the main players in Germany had even gathered. Their six album arc from 1971 to 1975 covers their essential works. The debut lp Journey to the Center of the Eye is a 40 minute single song dedicated to either communicating with aliens or a soundtrack to an acid trip-it functions well in both modes. It attracted little attention outside of the heads of Europe with a German only release. The follow up, A Tab in the Ocean garnered their first US release (four years after its ’72 release date), and was a perennial denizen of cutout bins well into the late 80’s. (a kid on my floor in college worshiped this album, claiming he only listened to it on LSD, and never any other time-a heroic claim, and apparently true). Sounds Like This was a double lp of loose jams and improvs showcasing their strengths in this area saw only a German and UK release in early 1973, mixing krautrock and west coast jam styles. They broke big in the States in 1973 with Remember the Future, once again a song cycle about aliens communicating from the future to give warnings and enlightenment. (I think the alien was in the form of a bluebird, it wasn’t really clear). This album cracked the top 20 and the band had some momentum, selling out larger theaters. The follow up, a circus themed Down to Earth gave them a single, Astral Man, and featured Hawkwind’s Robert Calvert as the ringmaster. 1975’s very solid Recycled found them in the company of synthesizer wizard Larry Fast, and brought back some of the fans unhappy with the disjointed Down to Earth.
By 1976, the band had a major label deal, but leader and guitarist Roye Albrighton inexplicably bailed, leaving the band in the hands of American Dave Nelson, and the dreaded disease to strike most prog bands in the late 70’s: “we have to do a pop album so we can get rich and famous” syndrome which killed off 95% of all prog bands to get that far. 1977’s Magic is a Child is noted mostly for the cover model being a fairly unknown 12 year old Brooke Shields skipping through the waterfall as well as being the final nail in the coffin.
From a millenium perspective, Nektar has had no less than twelve different lineups since their hesitant return to live activity in 2000. The band rotated around Roye Albrighton, and founding members Ron Howden (drums), Taff Freeman (keys), and Derek ‘Mo’ Moore (bass). The two decades leading up to this 2019 reunion saw a blizzard of changes that ultimately led to the band splitting into a German version (mostly the replacement parts) and the US version (mostly the surviving original members)
This week in a tiny club in Northampton Massachusetts saw the large Nektar entourage (seven band members and seven crew members) load onto the tiny stage. With guitarist Ryche Chiandra (of the 1978 era of the band) holding down most of the vocal parts, original members Moore and Howden, long time member Randy Dembo rounded out by keyboardist Kendall Scott, a female vocalist and original light guy and founding member Mick Brockett on light show it was a crowded stage. They put the crowd on notice immediately, opening with a 20 minute version of the side long song A Tab in the Ocean. A new song, the catchy Skywriter from their upcoming album captures their ethos well and nicely slots in with some of their classic material (possibly an unreleased tune written back in the 70’s by Chiandra during his stint in the band). Then, bam(!), all of side one of Remember the Future in all of its glory. The band really started to hit their stride and the odd double Rickenbacker bass attack of Dembo and Moore gave a strong syncopation to many of the tunes. Another new tune preceded another 20 minute suite from their debut lp, Dream Nebula/Roundabout/Drifting. This piece grew in power as it headed to the end, showcasing the musical muscle and precision the band has now that it didn’t really have in 1971’s fuzzier and looser version. Love Is/The Other Side was another 20 minute excursion from their upcoming album of the same name. Crying in the Dark (Djam) and King of Twilight was another suite from Tab in the Ocean that brought us to the end of the set. Encores of Fidgety Queen from Down to Earth was a raucous barrelhouse tune and I’m on Fire from the upcoming album rounded out the evening before we were ushered out to make room for a DJ spinning at 10 pm. Hmm.
Overall, Nektar still has it in spades. They have always used a limited chord structure and song construction to great effect (see Hawkwind), and were never flashy, more a subtle effect. Their sound in 2020 is very close to original Nektar vibes, with some ill advised dabbling that sounded like the Alan Parsons Project, but overall there are still strong hints of kindred spirits Hawkwind in there. One observation was that the modern jam band moe. strongly resembles and owes some of their distinct sound to Nektar’s occasional west coast jam excursions. Original light guy Mick Brockett sent astral projections behind the band that reminds and reinforces the fact that this is a psychedelic band at its core, once and always.
Looking at their handwritten setlist, and lamenting ‘options’ not played
So little did I know in the early 80’s when I encountered the decidedly weird Remember the Future, with its story line of a child being told by aliens of things to come in the future and a warning to remember the lessons well, and tried to catalog all the madness and chaos I’d encountered in their decidedly weird and acid soaked fans …that it would all frickin end up coming true some 37 years later. Remember the Future kids, not an easy skill to master, but sometimes it is important.
Peter Green’s first solo album, The End of the Game, released in fall 1970 was a troubling album for many. If you look up the Wikipedia entry, it links to an AllMusic review that dismisses the album as ‘Sad’ and ‘directionless’ and assigns it a rare one star rating. This got me digging a little further. Here’s what I dug up:
Step one, I found a mint copy on vinyl in a local record store, and upon playing it-it’s pretty out there. First, this album bears no resemblance at all to any of Fleetwood Mac’s output. It is all instrumental and improvisationally expansive in scope. Me? I somehow had never heard it before, and I loved it instantly. The one thing that struck me though-it sounded exactly like German bands of the 1970-71 era: Ash Ra Tempel, Can, Guru Guru, Amon Duul II, some of my long time favorite bands. How could this be possible?
The Munich Party
Long alluded to in Fleetwood Mac lore is the tale of the Munich Incident. The band had just played a concert in Munich in late March 1970, and Peter had been met by two young and attractive fans in the airport who were quite insistent that he visit their house after the show. Thinking they were enthusiastic fans, he readily agreed. The fans had other plans though.
Uschi and Rainer
Uschi Obermaier and Rainer Langerhans were a breed of hippy distinct to Germany in the late 1960’s: pushing the envelope of society further than any other country had before, with shock as the usual desired result. Free love morphed into edgier new territory: unabashed public nudity, filmed and staged aktions (read:orgies) put on as art exhibitions. Political protests of America? These guys lived in a commune with terrorists like the Baader-Meinhof Gang (later the Red Army Faction). Uschi and Rainer were considered to be the John and Yoko of the German hipster world-espousing a form of jet-set revolution and good time rock n roll. Political action and rock music were intertwined and indistinguishable in Germany.
Uschi used her charms to get much attention in Germany through modeling, revolutionary politics, and a propensity for nudity, but more importantly-she got what she wanted. She had plans for an outdoor Bavarian Woodstock, and had targeted Peter Green as the person who could make it happen. He was close friends with Mick Taylor of the Stones, and through him, Jimi Hendrix. These two bands were intended to be the cornerstones of the biggest rock festival to ever hit Europe. (and also give Uschi the chance to bang Jagger, Richards and Hendrix…which she eventually did).
Green showed up at the Uschi and Rainer’s commune in the woods, described as a psychedelic mansion, with the band’s manager and some of the band in tow. They were offered wine, which they soon found out was dosed with a large-ish dollop of LSD. The band left, and Green wanted to stay, jamming away into the night. The music and the vibes freaked out the British contingent, but Green was in heaven, saying it was the most spiritual music he’d ever played. The band ended up coming back the next day begging him come with them. Green ended up quitting the band after demanding they donate money to the angel he saw in a hallucination at the party who was holding a starving Biafran child. He ended up donating over $50,000 of his own money in the face of resistance from the band to his new anti-capitalist music stance.
Amon Duul 1
So what about the jam session? Members of the High Fish commune that was located in that mansion were somewhat associated with the more radical Kommune 1 of Berlin, but more importantly for our purposes, had their origins in the famous Munich Amon Duul commune. Nobody has chronicled what musicians were there, but Uschi had recorded with the original Amon Duul I and drummer Peter Leopold and guitarist Rainer Blauer and others would be likely in attendance as this was in the fertile period between Amon Duul II’s debut Phallus Dei and Yeti.
What is undeniable is that Green’s debut album is clearly a direct result of this Teutonic acid party. His style on the End of the Game bears the distinct hallmarks of early German krautrock of this time period. Precisely recorded by future Iron Maiden producer Martin Birch, this record is certainly not something recorded ‘after a nervous breakdown’ or ‘trying to break a record contract’, it is a purposeful message of a new musical direction. The title says it all-this is the End of the Game-no more pop pretensions, record exec bullshit or money grubbing attitudes. It was time for a new vibration, rock n roll as a social change. Which is exactly what German bands were preaching back then, with Uschi as the come hither siren proselytizing for the hairy proletariat. Peter Green answered the call, and delivered the first mescaline fueled Krautrock album outside the borders of Deutschland. Heavy guitar, bass, drums trios power jams and freakouts straight off the first two Ash Ra Tempel albums, early Guru Guru and Can circa 1970. Pure lysergic magic.
An absolute must for any genuine krautrock fan. Most pop oriented Fleetwood Mac fans should stay far away. Here is a taste, the magnificent Bottom’s Up:
PS: the German Woodstock never happened, but Uschi did bag her targets.
The summer concert season started early this year, seven days into spring in fact. One thing friends noticed was the lineup this spring and summer-Mott the Hoople, Blue Oyster Cult, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Queen, the Who, Yes, King Crimson…what year is this anyway? Lots of shows went down criss crossing the Northeast, blossoming at a furious pace, so let’s see and review what transpired: (note: some of these were intended as their own articles, but due to time constraints, have been all sandwiched into one longer piece)
Scroll down to see in order
Pat Metheny, Mott the Hoople reunion, Blue Oyster Cult, Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets Pink Floyd Extravaganza, Acid Mother’s Temple, Martin Barre’s 50th anniversary Jethro Tull reunion, Sunn O))), the Lemonheads reunion, Michael Schenker Group Festival, Judas Priest with Uriah Heep, Slayer, Musical Box
Pat Metheny – Academy of Music Northampton March 29th
This show was going to be a real unknown quantity. Although I had seen Metheny under many different guises (going all the way to the seminal American Garage tour), I had no idea what to expect here. Little did I know that although two unknowns were onstage with Pat, it would be the closest to a Pat Metheny Group show I had seen in decades. James Francies needs to be name checked here. A relative unknown and newcomer in the jazz world, he was a monster on keyboards. Piano and synthesizers danced through songs in a fashion that many would mistake for Lyle Mays. However, most of that came out of his right hand while his left hand delivered convincing and dexterous jazz bass lines-incredibly difficult to pull off for any musician.
As a guitar/keys/drums trio, several songs were very close to late 70’s early 80’s golden age of the Pat Metheny Group quartet -a stunning achievement for a trio. The show finished with an extended acoustic solo set from Pat that spanned his now four decade career. setlist here
Mott the Hoople – Orpheum Boston April 9th
Mott the Hoople in 2019? A Conclave of the 96 Decibel Freaks
I’m one of the boys One of the boys I don’t say much but I make a big noise And it’s growing alright its growing -One of the Boys 1972
Mott circa ’74
This is a show that had been on my list since it was announced. I mean really, Mott in 2019? An extremely unlikely proposition. I had been crushed that I’d missed the 2009 few show reunion in London which featured Ian Hunter, Mick Ralphs, Verden Allen, Overend Watts and Dale ‘Buffin’ Griffin (Griffin passed away in 2016, Watts in 2017), and the quick 2013 London reformation. I figured it was over.
I was wrong.
Somehow, they managed to get it together to re-create the 1974 tour, a short 45 years after the fact, for an short 8 show US tour. Now first, Ian Hunter has always been sketchy about his actual age, but it was always known that he was about a decade older than his 60’s rock contemporaries. Conservatively going by his listed birthday of 1939, it would put him in as the only octogenarian currently fronting a 70’s superstar glam rock band on the planet. Quirky keyboardist Morgan Fisher and guitarist Ariel Bender (Luther Grovsenor of Spooky Tooth provenance) rounded out the 1974 original lineup, now augmented into an octet.
They nimbly navigated an exact reproduction of their 1974 tour setlist with some alterations of lyrics (All the Young Dudes managed to change ‘speed jive, don’t want to stay alive, when you’re 25’ to ‘when you’re 95’). Hunter also acknowledged that the current era of PC makes some of their 70’s misogynist leaning and slang inflected lyrics seem out of touch. Hidden from view from most behind Morgan Fisher’s grand piano was an ice bucket with chilled wine ready to go for the band-Fisher kept a glass going perched over the 88 keys. From the opening notes of American Pie to the closing of the elegiac and retrospective Saturday Gigs, it was a blur of pure rock n roll. Brian May of Queen and Mick Jones of the Clash are quite clear that Mott were one of the reasons they became full time rockers, and though time has obscured some of their influence, it was obvious that these guys are still masters and originators in the rock field. Sure Ariel Bender still can’t really play lead guitar very well, and some songs teetered on the edge (Lounge Lizard had to be stopped so they could begin again), but this was a masters class in 70’s rock, put on by the 1974 version of the band. Spine chillingly good shit. Perhaps it is the current PC era that is out of touch–musical brutality, a touch of violence and pushing the envelope of propriety never really go out of style. The highlight of the spring. Setlist here.
Blue Oyster Cult-Academy of Music Northampton April 11th
Two days later….This show didn’t get a lot of people super excited, as BOC can be known to phone one in here and there lately, and their setlist has little variation from night to night (or year to year). The departure of dynamic former Utopia bassist Kasim Sulton has the band down to founders Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma with a supporting cast of sidemen. To be fair, the band lost their drummer and bassist pair, the Bouchard brothers in the 80’s. Allen Lanier, their last founding member to leave, departed after the 2007 tour (though he did some 2012 shows). So folks going around saying ‘there’s only two of them left’ haven’t noticed that it’s been that way for 12 years now, and there were only three of them since the mid 80’s.
This was no better nor no worse than anything I’d seen from them in the last ten years. The Last Days of May, Godzilla, Cities on Flame, Reaper-at this point you know you will here these every night. It’s the deeper cuts off newer albums that give each tour a signature feel. The evening opened with the questionable Dr. Music from 1979’s Mirrors. It was an obvious attempt at the time to garner some airplay and commercial success (somehow ignoring the massive chart success of Don’t Fear the Reaper and Godzilla over the previous two years.) It sank like a stone, like the album. Not an auspicious start. Other clunkers like the Golden Age of Leather and the Vigil slowed things down. Rarities from Agents of Fortune get trotted out (they seem to alternate True Confessions and Tattoo Vampire each night.) They started to get into gear about halfway through the show, and shook off the lethargy that seemed to grip the early part of the evening. Overall a rocking night from a seminal band, but a little more variety in their sets would be welcome.
Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets-Oakdale Theater, Wallingford CT April 12th
Nick Mason Live: ‘Oh My God, Somebody Still Fucking Cares!’
One night later…..This show was going to be another unknown quantity. Mason was never known for his solo stuff, and though his hypnotic tom tom work is integral to Pink Floyd’s soma-like trance work, he is never mentioned in the same breath as the giants of drumming of his era (Bruford, Collins, etc). Once I figured out that this show would be based primarily on Saucerful of Secrets and Piper at the Gates of Dawn era material (1968 and 1967 respectively) and try to unlock the Syd Barrett era? My hopes rose considerably. It was a hope that was delivered upon nicely.
With an eclectic band: bassist Guy Pratt from the last Pink Floyd tours, Ian Dury and the Blockheads guitarist Lee Harris, Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp and keyboardist Dom Beken of the Orb, one wouldn’t know what to really expect. (heard in crowd-‘Spandau Ballet? Well this guy has seen the error of his ways, hasn’t he?’). The show began with the one two punch of Interstellar Overdrive and Astronomy Domine, two of founding member Syd Barrett’s signature tunes. The twin guitar attack of Kemp and Harris trading leads where Gilmour would start to fade, pushing each other from the end of one solo to trade off brought the song to new heights of madness that lent a distinctly crackling edge to the psychedelic feel.
Seven songs from their Syd Barrett 67-68 phase graced the set, a set which for many Floyd heads had zero recognizable songs. No tunes from Dark Side of the Moon or later were included: No Wall, no Wish You Were Here, none of the radio staples of today’s classic rock station. Obscured By Clouds, More, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle? For a true Floyd head, this was a cornucopia of rarities. Mason was a treasure of tales during the whole show, sharing stories both familiar and unknown (Barrett’s troubles stemmed not from LSD overuse, but mainly from the skull popping hallucinogen STP, which took three days to recover from-likely the cause of his noted 1967 US tour meltdowns onstage, the thousand yard stare he had on TV and in interviews during that tour. Andrew Loog Oldham and Pete Townshend had similar STP related experiences in the US during 1967, bearing out the sanity zapping qualities of this little discussed drug). Mason also gestured to his large chinese gong, commenting that he finally got to play it during Saucerful of Secrets, as Roger Waters was a bit of a gong hog back in the day.
The encore of Saucerful of Secrets and Point Me at the Sky rounded out an evening that far surpassed what I had expected. I realized there are actually two kinds of Pink Floyd fans: ‘real’ ones for who this was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and the classic rock ones, those who think Dark Side is their first album and the Wall is their last album. Some were disgruntled, audibly griping about the lack of recognizable tunes, while others (like the fan quoted in the article title above, who yelled it loudly-while shirtless-at no one in particular) who knew this was a rare display of even rarer genius on display. They firmly captured the loose psychedelic feel of the improvisational era of Floyd but injected enough stability to anchor the more free flowing stuff like Atom Heart and Saucerful. Another major highlight of the spring, and highly recommended. Unlike Mott, you might actually have a chance of seeing this show. Setlist here
endnote: this was the first show of the spring where I noticed a new and very strange phenomenon-people had their heads buried in their smartphones, absently scrolling through their Facebook feeds and actively not watching the show for long periods of time. I know this is common behavior for teenagers in classrooms, but seriously? I’ve seen people film a whole show on their smartphone and watch the screen instead of the show, but….wow.
Acid Mother’s Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO – Space Ballroom Hamden CT April 19th
Seven days later…Acid Mother’s Temple rolled through town. These guys are true road warriors, check out the tour above, 46 shows in 46 days? For those who are unfamiliar with this Japanese psych/space rock band, here’s a taste of them doing a cover of Gong’s Flying Teapot:
You know you will always get Pink Lady Lemonade and Cometary Orbital Drive (they play these every night). The band does Gong/Hawkind inflected instrumental jams that are tight and upbeat-they used to do the Wizard off Black Sabbath’s first album as an instrumental. I’d known of them for a long while-to call them prolific is a serious understatement (they’ve released 60 studio albums since 1995). This was my second time seeing them in two years, and they once again were amazingly consistent from opening note to final crash of the cymbals. If you like space rock, you need to put these guys on your calendar. With 25 states on the tour, they most likely are coming to a venue near you.
Martin Barre Band 50 Years of Jethro Tull – The Academy of Music Northampton MA April 20th
Too Old to Rock n Roll Too Young to Die?
One day later…back once again to the Academy (these guys booked quite a spring). Some are unaware that Ian Anderson fired the whole Jethro Tull band to take full control of the name (chronicled here) in 2012. Anderson continues on as the only member of Tull, and has been severely restricted in his vocals for two decades now-still doggedly touring as JETHRO TULL. So for the 50th anniversary of Tull, Barre took the reins and created a full tribute to the history of the band, including getting key historical and integral members Clive Bunker 1967-1971 and David Palmer (now Dee) 1975-1980 on drums and keys respectively, as a kind of ‘fuck you’ to Ian Anderson and as a gift to the fans, basically creating two rival versions of Jethro Tull touring simultaneously.
Barre recently rearranged the set to make it a ‘true retrospective’ that flowed chronologically through Tull’s career. Vocalist and rhythm guitarist Dan Crisp has a vague similarity to Ian Anderson circa 75, and has a hint of the animated stage presence that captures the spirit that Anderson interjected into shows so well. Set one was 18 songs covering material from their debut in 1968 “This Was” up through 1971’s masterpiece Aqualung. Deep cuts that would please even the most diligent chronicler of Tull lore took the forefront. To Cry You a Song, Teacher, Dharma for One, Cheap Day Return were some of the more familiar deep cuts that Tull heads know well combined with more obscure tunes like the rarely heard For a Thousand Mothers and Back to the Family from 1969’s Stand Up. The set ended with an acoustic rendering of Locomotive breath-a clever take to finish up the first half.
A nine song second set kicked off with War Child and the obscure Sea Lion from the 1975 album of that name, then bypassing through some of their catalog-skipping Too Old to Rock n Roll Too Young to Die, pausing for Songs From the Wood and Heavy Horses, and then omitting everything else until hitting their 1987 hit Steel Monkey (ya know the one that got them the heavy metal award over Metallica in 1989. ) An electric Locomotive Breath brought the proceedings to a crackling end.
Bunker played the only drumkit onstage for the whole show, very much unlike aging classic rock drummers who many times have a partner on a kit next to them, or are absent completely (Bill Ward, Alan White, Phil Collins etc.) Pounding the skins in Tull is no easy feat for a 73 year old dude. Palmer seemed distracted at times, sometimes choosing not to play at all on songs that clearly had a strings part. Flashes did come here and there though of the rollicking keyboard spirit that once flowed from John Evans and Palmer.
Whither Tull?
So in the end, it is kind of sad that Ian Anderson couldn’t get it together for a proper 50th anniversary reunion. However, Tull fans should be extremely glad that Barre took the initiative to seek out Burr and Palmer to create a special event to commemorate the anniversary. Hell, there haven’t been three real Jethro Tull members in Tull since 1980, as they were reduced to Barre and Anderson after that. So in a way, this was actually the real Jethro Tull reunion. THIS WAS
Sunn O))) – College Street Music Hall Hartford April 26th
Sunn O))): Idiot Savants or Savage Sonic Geniuses? Live 2019
Six days later….Off to Hartford to see Sunn O))) for the first time. I had been prepared a bit, owning a few of their albums after being turned on to them by a friend who highly recommended them. He said: “here’s Sunn O))) in a nutshell-they fill the club floor to ceiling with a fog machine until you literally cannot see the stage. Then the amps start to hum loudly and they come out in black robes and hit a chord at jetliner landing in front of you volume. They let it feedback through all the harmonics and hit the same chord again. That’s pretty much it” No discernable drums, vocals or bass seem apparent. For my friend was correct, you never really see the stage. (nor were any songs apparent-they droned rhythmless for the better part of 90 minutes.)
The first song was variations on a single chord lasting 17 full minutes. The club shook and you had trouble seeing more than 20 feet. After I went downstairs to use the restroom, I noticed some phenomena they must be aware of. The pipes in the overhead of the mens room were squawking intermittently in time to the pulsing harmonics. The hand railings likewise were humming in a different frequency. The walls of the large brick club rumbled occasionally. The club was playing along as a fifth member. I thought ‘hey these guys are doing experiments with sound as much as actually playing.’ Shit like Tony Conrad and LaMonte Young used to do,(John Cale was a huge drone fan as were the Velvet Underground) and very much like Glen Branca’s over amplified guitar assault orchestra (the one that spawned Sonic Youth). Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is another very strong touchpost. Just remove the amphetamines from that album and drop in cough syrup as the replacement fuel.
Some eerie trombone cut through the mist for a while, changing the ambience ever so slightly. There seemed to be four band members onstage, but one could not be 100% sure it wasn’t a guitar tech wading into the mist to examine an amplifier crying out in pain for assistance.
They call their stuff Life Metal now, I suppose as opposed to Death Metal. In the metal world, you really can’t get any slower, more tuned down or heavier than Sunn O))), they’ve taken it to its logical conclusion. And if you think about it, literally anybody could be in the band, we’d never know. They’ve created the ultimate enigma: who’s onstage? What are they playing? Do they know they mimic early 60’s NYC avante-garde classical experiments? Does any of this shit have a song title? Good questions, no easy answers. Worth seeing for metal heads, volume freaks and fans of avante-garde noise. Setlist?? here
Don’t wear earplugs either, for full effect.
The Lemonheads – Gateway City Arts Holyoke MA May 1st
Six days later….The Lemonheads are embarking on a world tour this spring and summer, and to kick it off, they did a show before the tour started to kick the rust off at a semi secret show in Holyoke, knowing the proximity to Northampton and to local rock stars (J Mascis and Murph from Dinosaur Jr live nearby-Murph was in the Lemonheads for a bit) would bring out the 1998 hipster crowd.
Tommy Stinson, most famous as the youngster in the Replacements opened. (somehow everyone forgot he was in Guns n Roses for 18 years in the dreadful Chinese Democracy era) He came out on solo acoustic and rambled through songs: working out live what he might play on the upcoming tour. he sometimes fumbled songs quickly, stopping some completely, abandoning some after a minute, turning off his pick up and mic when he thought nobody was paying enough attention, walking into the crowd to sing from the middle, unamplified. Intimate.
The Massachusetts born Evan Dando came out onstage slowly apprising the house. Dando has been everywhere-Hollywood films, rubbing elbows with Keith Richards, sex symbol of the mid 90’s, junkie punchline in the late 90s, somehow fronting MC5 in the aughts-he has seen the pinnacles and depths of stardom and drug abuse. And yet here he was, looking spry and healthy, hopping onstage ready to rock. (an excellent article/interview on his return can be read here). He moved well and seemed infused with the spirit of the early 90’s.
The setlist leaned heavily on It’s a Shame About Ray and Come on Feel, and the drawn out alt country inflections reflected the influence Dinosaur Jr has had over them through time. The show was short, but if getting the bugs out in front of an adoring crowd was the mission, it was mission accomplished. Setlist here
Michael Schenker Fest The Palladium Worcester MA May 10th
The Return of the Mad Axeman
Nine days later…Michael Schenker Festival headed into Worcester. Not many people had any idea of what to expect (given his notorious reputation for not showing up from time to time for his own shows). I’d seen Schenker in the mid 90’s UFO reunion in NYC, and he burned the sky in a club that let in easily 500 over the fire limit. (god bless the Limelight)
What I didn’t expect was that he would feature almost EVERY singer MSG has ever had all on one stage.: Gary Barden, Graham Bonnet, Robin McAuley and Doogie White of the most recent era. It was unprecedented to see all of these egos forced to share a stage and share lead vocals on songs they thought were their own. They came out in order-Bardens (voice now thin and unable to hit the big notes, he never really could back then either), Bonnett (still sounds and looks like he did back in the day-knows his limits better than Bardens), McAuley (looking like he was auditioning for Priest, more of a yelper) and Doogie (resplendent in kilt-the least known but the most powerful singer of the four)
Schenker dragged them through a 31 song set covering UFO, Scorpions and MSG material, soloing relentlessy throughout. He stopped a few times to tell stories in halting English about how his brother Rudolph stole everything he knew musically and stylistically from him. (those Schenker brothers know how to hang on to a grudge) The trading off worked quite well as they worked in duos, trios and full quartets-sometimes trading off lead vocals, sometimes supplying powerful harmonies the material requires.
Occasionally one could see why Schenker was thrown out of the UFO reunion-too many notes. Solos cascaded perfectly but endlessly between verses, and it took a concerted effort from the band to make sure he came back on cue, which he usually did. In the past, he would blow through these on stage stop signs and solo blissfully for another five minutes-spitting notes out like a Teutonic Hendrix on speed. (Which he kind of is.) The highlight of the show had to be his signature tune, written as a teenager, UFO’s Rock Bottom. Excellent detailed tour review here
Brilliant idea to bring all the singers, I’d like to see this happen with other bands of the era, but the egos would have to be checked in rather large footlockers ahead of time.
Judas Priest and Uriah Heep – Mohegan Sun CT May 16th
Six days later….Tickets for this tour were generally expensive on Stubhub for most dates, but for some reason got down to seventeen bucks for Mohegan the day before. So once more jumping into the concertmobile, it was off to the casino.
Openers Uriah Heep had been long on my list of things to do since early college era. I had their greatest hits LP in heavy rotation for my first two years in college. One by one, the founding members of the band fell by the wayside: distinctive vocalist David Byron departed in 1976, Keyboardist and main songwriter Ken Hensley left in 1980, bassist Gary Thain was electrocuted and died onstage in 1975, drummer Lee Kerslake technically not a founder but was main drummer from 1971-2007…well you get the idea. Only guitarist Mick Box remains, leaving the air of a tribute band of sorts. Competent and efficient, it didn’t really sound much like Heep without Byron and Hensley. They are somewhat the model for Spinal Tap (though Status Quo is the main model for that film). Easy Living did get the crowd going a bit though. setlist
Good God, Pluck Me
The main event though was Judas Priest. I’d last seen them in 2008 with Ronnie James Dio’s version of Sabbath opening. Halford looked unhealthy, kept his sunglasses on full time, wandered around bored and relied on effects to fill out his faltering voice. Dio destroyed the headliner that night, despite Glen Tipton and KK Downing still being in Priest. (his last show ever was exactly a year later; he passed away less than two years after this gig)
Tonight, Halford was a new man. He doffed the sunglasses early on, and although he left the stage after nearly every song to go backstage (vocal cord treatment? Lines of coke? A hug?), he came back refreshed each time. (why the lead guitarist also went backstage nearly as much is also a mystery). With KK Downing chucked out of the band, and Tipton troubled with Parkinson’s disease and only able to play select shows, we were left with bassist Ian Hill and Rob Halford holding the fort. Richie Faulkner has proved to be a worthy replacement for KK, and has held up his end since joining in 2011. The new album Firepower is oddly also a source of strong material, the best album since 1990’s Painkiller. (which itself was an anomaly)
Halford was vocally strong throughout, far more powerful than eleven years ago. Much more animated, he brought some amazing vocal pyrotechnics to the forefront, sometimes reaching the level of the monumental Unleashed in the East live album of 1979. I had told my companion at the show that other than Freddie Mercury, Rob Halford was the most powerful vocalist in rock. As he hit his signature notes during Victim of Changes, they turned and said “ahhhh that’s what you mean” Damn straight. Setlist here
Slayer, Lamb of God, Amon Amarth, Cannibal Corpse – Great Woods Mansfield MA May 25th
Nine days later…I’d seen Slayer in August on their summer/fall leg of their lengthy farewell tour, and they were surprisingly strong. So strong, I’d decided to go to what was on paper their final US show ever (since this show, Les Claypool let slip that once they get back from Europe, the final leg will begin in Madison Square Garden and end in the LA Forum.)
Cannibal Corpse opened this show. They were rather notorious in the late 80’s for their lyrics and album covers, but didn’t sound much different than most of their contemporaries like Death and Kreator–think a bunch of ball bearings in a blender with the Cookie Monster growling on top. Recently their guitarist Pat O’Brien went on hiatus for his arrest following a break in to a neighbors house claiming the rapture was imminent. His house burned down during this event, and police ended up finding a huge cache of weapons which included two military grade flamethrowers. Throw in lead vocalist George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher and you have quite the opening band.
Amon Amarth are melodic berserkers from Sweden cut out of the same cloth as Children of Bodom. Bands like this sound generally like a drum machine banging out 180 BPM rhythms while twin guitars playing lock step full speed trebly arpeggios. This kind of stuff can run its course within a few songs, but the crowd ate it up.
Lamb of God I’d seen on the last leg and was underimpressed. They seemed to have much more in common with an extravagant Wrestlemania performance than a concert band. This night, they were a little more listenable and vaguely enjoyable. Still, all of this was only the prelude to:
Slayer Slayer Slayer….
The band hit the stage in an explosion of sound and flames. They were solid but not as tight as they were in August. One of the problems was that this was an open to the air shed. This meant their extensive front of the stage flame display was considerably toned down (to prevent an errant gust of wind turning the band into a weenie roast) and the fact that bands like this need four walls and a roof to bounce the sound off. I’d noticed this phenomenon when seeing Ministry twice in ’92 on the Psalm 69 tour, both outdoors and indoors. The sound needs containment. Although they still stood head and shoulders above the openers, I am awaiting the final leg. Hell awaits. Setlist
fake Genesis errr the Musical Box – Calvin Theater Northampton MA May 30th
The phenomenon of the high end cover band is a bit of a mystery. Dark Star Orchestra went from playing specific historical Grateful Dead shows in their entirety in clubs to festivals and theaters (with the commensurate jump in ticket prices) and the Australian Pink Floyd can play arenas along with arena pricing. Paying a $35-$60 scale for tickets for a cover band? This says a lot about the current state of rock n roll
A Genesis cover band is a rara avis in the rock world. Especially one that focuses solely on the Peter Gabriel era of Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound and the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Even rarer is a cover band approved by the parent band, Genesis and even Peter Gabriel. Like the Australian Pink Floyd, they have gone to the parent band to buy original props and light shows of the era from them.
Set one featured newer non Gabriel material from the Phil Collins era of Trick of the Tail and Wind and Wuthering. The sound at the Calvin was a bit murky, awash in too much reverb. A couple of songs got to the point where they were starting to lose each other onstage and they had to work to keep the songs from falling apart. Dance on a Volcano in particular was affected -the tight syncopation of the original was murky and lacking the tight unison slaps punctuating the song. Set two was a bit better, focusing on the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. They came to life in set three, based on Trespass, Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot and Selling England. This stuff is their bread and butter and what they built their reputation on.
Formed in 1993, they are currently on their 8th Tony Banks, 5th Phil Collins, 3rd Steve Hackett (current one wears a Hackett wig). Only faux Peter Gabriel (Denis Gagne) and faux Mike Rutheford (Sebastien Lamothe) have been hanging in there from the beginning.
How did they sound? From a critical eye, they had their ups and downs. fRuthefords’s bass sometimes sounded like it was coming from a blown speaker (fuzz box poorly applied?) and the bass pedals could use a touch more oomph. fHackett sounded far more like Daryl Stuermer’s 1978 and onward guitar version, post Hackett. He also was waaaay too quiet in the mix every time he tried to push a lead to the forefront. Part of this had to do with the reverb that was slathered on everybody onstage-things started to all recede into one big ball of blur. The band carries a fGabriel and fCollins to bring more authenticity to the proceedings, and the fGabriel guy had it nailed pretty perfectly. He also was able to play a pretty good flute as well, something that we sometimes forget Peter used to great effect from 71-74. fBanks did a pretty good job on his mix of vintage and current keyboard gear-eliciting a loud shout of “SICK” once the impressive version of Cinema Show ended. This song was the highlight of the evening. I was a little disappointed to not see them try any sections of Supper’s Ready, but the rare Can Utility and the Coastliners from the same album was a nice replacement. The encore, their version of the song that gave the band their name was properly raucous. Last year the band sold out this venue quickly, tonight it was about 1/3 of a house. Here is a taste of last year at the Calvin:
Overall, they took a while to warm up and hit their stride. Perhaps a brand new drummer and keyboardist had something to do with it. They do have a ton of equipment, and are attempting to play some of the most challenging rock music ever written. They all are able to pull out 12 and 6 string guitars, play flute, cello in addition to their main instruments, so they need to be recognized for what they are pulling off here. Perhaps the best way to describe this is they are putting on a historical play that represents a time long gone as opposed to a band. Actors change for each character, costume changes,wigs n props. But it is a fine line they are walking here.
Most telling quote: “I’m glad I went, but next time, I’d rather listen to Genesis albums on the couch and have a glass of wine”
I get that, but I might want to give them one more try. Setlist here
So, that wraps up the spring. 12 shows, 1200 miles traveled.
Cats under the stars my friends, cats under the stars.
“Say man, you got a joint? It’d be a lot cooler if you did”
No band in the history of rock has been able to assimilate their high school years and portray it as vividly as Monster Magnet. They lived like many a stoner kid in 70’s America: smoking bowls, taking shitty acid, staying out all night, wearing army coats, going to tons of concerts and listening to the classics over and over. Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Aerosmith, Judas Priest were the more familiar signposts, but these Red Bank area New Jersey kids had their finger on the pulse. Less familiar bands like Captain Beyond, Sir Lord Baltimore, Dust, UFO and Hawkwind were also strong apostles for the devoted. With CBGB’s and New York City a short ride away, the mysteries of proto punk residue (MC5 and the Stooges) and the more alienatingly tangible sounds of the Ramones, Suicide, Richard Hell and the punk wave of the mid 70’s were there for the grabbing. Of course this often meant riding bicycles for miles to grab some weed, stealing beers whenever possible, blasts of nitrous, robitussin chugging, tripping to stay awake for longer road trips and occasionally waking up in dumpsters on the lower East Side. Staying elegantly wasted full time…was a full time job for Dave Wyndorf and this pack of sketchy high school and post high school kids.
It was easy to want to emulate this drug fueled dissident behavior (think Linklater’s 1993 Dazed and Confused film), but you could only take this so far. Heroin grabbed and planted many of those who couldn’t get to the finish line successfully-many yearbooks of the era had memorial pages in the beginning with photos of those who had died tragically before graduation. (Mine had three) But there was an allure for many to aspire to be (or at least hang out with) the scuzziest drug ball in the neighborhood-they were badasses with the best record collections, knew they were cool, had access to the best drugs, scariest cars and were a beacon to those who wanted to rebel. (Another good comparison are the roller blade hockey kids from Kevin Smith’s Dogma-a Red Bank resident who witnessed all this stuff)
Shrapnel circa 1979-1980-Wyndorf center
Not to be confused with pacifist hippie bands
Where could one go next? Grow old and outgrow your army coat? The answer was easy: start a band. Loading up on a bunch of Stooges and Sabbath, Shrapnel (earlier known as Hard Attack-a band known for putting weed in their flashpots so the final explosion filled the auditiorium with pot smoke that couldn’t be traced) assaulted high school dances, dressed in army togs and even paraded out a cardboard tank toting Dave Wyndorf around. (future Monster Magnet guitarist Phil Caivano was a part of this outfit)
The public wasn’t ready for a GI Joe inspired band of New Jersey lunatics rolling around in tanks, pointing guns everywhere and pounding out the theme to Underdog as their signature moments. They did make local TV though (see above)
So Scream as Loud as You Can, I’m Not Here, Man I’m Gone
Wyndorf laid low while plotting the perfect band: Monster Magnet. They were to be the synthesis and monument to all the wide variety of decadence that any kid who grew up in the seventies had witnessed: scoring drugs, taking boatloads of said drugs and the ancillary carnival-like madness that few who haven’t been on the inside can imagine. The band coalesced around Wyndorf, guitarist John McBain and drummer (future sound/light/manager) Tim Cronin. They submitted demos, got rejected, changed their band name, re-submitted similar songs, got rejected, changed their band name again. Finally Glitterhouse in Germany was willing to take a chance on them, named now after a 60’s toy, releasing the self titled EP in 1990. It was a glorious paean to all the excesses of drug use: Tractor (‘Well my buddy Jo gave me a laughing pill..Well it tasted like shit and it gave me the chills..got a hole in my arm, when I’m driving the tractor on the drug farm’), and the debut of their perhaps all time classic, Nod Scene:
Bought another copy of Fragile Seeds were bustin’ up the spine I think I cracked my skull doin’ airplanes Not too many buds, just fine Pussy scratching sniffin a Playboy Christ I’m a good looking man…
Fifteen miles to cop on our stingrays Boys we’re gonna ride tonight Goofball’s and 70’s nipples Gotta get our heads just right Sit me on the lap of the god’s babe Cover me with skin and hair…
Bought another copy of ZoSo Seeds were bustin’ up the spine I think I wet my pants doin’ whippits Not too many buds, just fine Sit me on the lap of the god’s babe Cover me with skin and hair Ride a number one on the home train Screw you if you think I care………
This one song encompasses their whole Monster Magnet universe: weed, acid, nitrous, airplane glue, getting wasted, getting laid, giving the middle finger to cops, jacking off, riding bikes to score drugs, cranking Yes and Zeppelin…what more did a kid need? Propelled by a monstrous riff nicked from Time We Left This World Today by Hawkwind, everything that is essential to the band is in this song. (an odd aside-in interviews lately, Wyndorf claims he quit doing drugs around age 22, or right as Shrapnel was starting to break in 1979. I’d hung with the band more than a few times at shows both backstage and on the tour bus in the 1993-1999 period, and find this statement a bit hard to believe, as well as hard to reconcile with the overwhelming drug themes that pervade their classic albums)
Rare photo of John McBain in the band
The universe slowly opened: the Tab EP featured the instant classic 30 minute title song with Wyndorf whispering and yelling deep back in the mix entreaties to galactic madness and specific illegal behaviors. (the band once said they played this song for 45 minutes as their whole show on their first Europe tour if they didn’t like the club or audience) Highly recommended. And then…
1992 saw the release of Spine of God, the all time masterpiece of stoner rock, before the genre even existed. All of the excesses of the previous two releases were refined into a nine song bible of drug fueled entertainment-a well thumbed guide to life based on the 70’s life of a Jersey stoner kid that still holds up today as the pinnacle of the whole stoner genre. Sure they ended up lifting wholesale songs from bands you’d never heard of and reworked them as their own (Captain Beyond and Sir Lord Baltimore got hit up), but 26 years later, this is still one of the most important releases of the 1990’s, in any genre. This is the essential album if you are only going to have one.
Not sure why you guys keep asking about drugs
The follow ups, Superjudge and Dopes to Infinity saw the departure of McBain and the entrance of the hypnotic Ed Mundell on guitar. The band coalesced quickly with Ed and the rhythm section of Jon Kleinman (drums) and Joe Calandra (bass) and plowed similar territory as their masterpiece, and yielded the minor hit Negasonic Teenage Warhead in 1995. (this was the era of the ‘School Free Drug Zone’ shirt)
1998 was the year they crashed the big time, with the unlikely titled ‘Space Lord Motherfucker’ hitting #3 on the US charts, and their following expanded exponentially. Fame and fortune are fickle though, with the dissolution of the classic line up in the early 2000’s, things headed south. Kleinman and Calandra departed after the disappointing God Says No. Shrapnel guitarist Phil Caivano had come on board as second guitarist, freeing Wyndorf up for more visual madness.
The mid 2000’s were lean years: label changes, lineup changes, money drying up, until Wyndorf’s overdose in 2006 brought the proceedings to a halt. The band focused their efforts in Europe, and US appearances were sparse.
Monster Magnet/Electric Citizen Live at the Sinclair Boston October 2018
Which brings us up to the present day. The band has had mixed live reviews-one main complaint is their 80 minute set of the same 12 songs every night is a little paint by numbers. I had seen them in Williamsburg NY in March of this year and was underwhelmed. Dave looked like he couldn’t wait to get offstage, and the set ticked in well under 90 minutes. Don’t get me wrong, they were good, but it wasn’t the madness of the 90’s, it was a well rehearsed blast of psychedelic stoner metal-but far too short. And then they went off to tour Europe, and returned for a US tour. Boston was the last night of the tour, and things this night were quite different. The band consists of the rhythm section of Atomic Bitchwax (Ed Mundell’s side project that he somehow managed to get himself kicked out of) Bob Pantella and Chris Kosnick on drums and bass, with Garret Sweeny on guitar rounding out the quintet with Dave and Phil. This time the set was devastatingly powerful-New York was like a blueprint while seven months later Boston was like a fully built and tricked out house. Guitars crackled, with Caivano bringing a sharper edge to the sound than Mundell’s more psychedelic bent. A few times it was apparent that Sweeny was buried in the mix and significantly quieter than Caivano, but that is only a minor quibble. The setlist hit all the classics with the accent on their earliest material. Powerful, crisp and psychedelic-the band has shed some of it’s Hawkwind influenced meanderings (despite dipping into Brainstorm for a bit), and maybe that’s not for the better. The hits are behind them, and perhaps some old school explorations might perk up things. Still, this was light years better than their spring show.
Black Sabbath? Never heard of ’em
Openers Electric Citizen sounded like they had sliced up every Black Sabbath riff into six second snippets and re-assembled them in a fashion that resembled originals. Their stuff was derivative but energetic with a female vocalist stalking the stage. After their third pass through a re-imagined Children of the Grave with some Run to the Hills lingering in the background I began to wonder: “Is rock and roll really dying?”
Dave recently had this to offer:
“…at one point, rock really meant a lot to a lot of people. It was a way to talk about things that people were uncomfortable talking about. There was a lot of poetry and a lot of weird cultural insight to it – but as our culture changed, people started wanting less and less from music. They started getting what they needed by other means. People just don’t have the time anymore… they don’t read poetry.”
So the weed is gone, and there’s only a blackened pipe left. Scrape and scrape and you will find one last hit, because nature’s got a way you know?
Record Store Day. The somewhat benevolent creation of the record industry in 2007 to enervate the then fledgling recovering vinyl industry. Records had been considered dead and buried by the end of the 80’s, and vinyl pressings had dwindled to near nil from their hey day. In 1978, over 340 million albums were purchased, the peak year of album buying in America. With the advent of CDs, twenty years later, 1998 saw LP sales drop to 1% of 1978’s sales figures at just over 3 million units. By 2006, vinyl LP sales had plunged to under a million-900,000 units sold for that year. (CDs had shifted an amazing 800 million units in 1998-nearly 1,000 CDs sold for each LP sold) Records were proclaimed dead in every industry paper, folks dumped their decades long curated collections into landfills and Salvation Army bins, and the chore of lugging around hundreds or thousands of pounds of vinyl was solved.
Or so it seemed. Indie labels had never really given up on vinyl, and the cooler indie stores still stocked records by bands that most had never heard of, and sales were moderate. Albums were now pressed in the thousands (sometimes as low as 1000) per release. 2007 saw the innovation of a single day created for the indie record stores that had kept the faith through the lean years. Severely limited editions of some enticing titles were offered for sale on a single day in April, and only independent stores were allowed to order them. Soon, the buzz spread. As years went on, folks began lining up in the early morning hours to grab some genuine treasures, or get tricked into buying repackaged turds that they knew better than to drop another 40 bucks on. (the dreadful double A side 45s from WB with the original vintage single on one side and a cover by a modern band as the B side gets singled out here). Regardless, some real rarities spat out, and it became almost de riguer to jump to eBay to see what the sold out items were fetching.
The past few record store days (now doubled to twice a year-Black Friday in November joins the original April date) have shown an industry short on imagination. Flickers came here and there, but a trend towards reissuing albums at $30 a pop that are easily found across town in a vintage used record store for five bucks? No thanks. Rarely is a truly groundbreaking and definitive rarity released under the guises of Record Store Day. Until this year, where lightning struck not once, but twice.
Hawkwind – Dark Matter (The Alternative Liberty/UA Years 1970-1974) 2 lp
This one escaped almost EVERYONE’S radar. Even Hawkfans online had little idea how important a release this one is for fans of early Hawkwind (considered the definitive era by most). Sourced from the 2011 3 CD compilation Parallel Universe (in and of itself the single definitive Hawkwind collection) Somehow folks didn’t realize how important the gems contained in here were. The plethora of Hawkwind compilations-similar to Stooges releases-have made fans immune to most Hawk comps. Too many are the same things over and over in a new sleeve and a new title. For those who thought that about this release, please take a closer look.
First, this one is easy to miss on the shelf. The band name and title are nearly invisible on the cryptic alien manhole cover. Last years RSD Hawkwind release (Best of the UA Years 1971-1974) sank without a trace with zero track information on a poorly designed cover. . (both record stores in my town still have two copies each of this a year later. Many US record fans sadly would now just flip past any Hawk RSD title ) With this in mind, my early morning arrival to score what I knew to be one of the RSD treasures of the decade turned out to be unnecessary-they had plenty. Bringing this home immediately, I could not believe what was contained within. Basically this had things NEVER heard before by Hawkfans (excepting those who had been wise enough to grab Parallel Universe). And what things these were! The debut lineup of Brock, Turner, Harrison, Lloyd-Langton and Ollis doing In Search of Space material? What?? The In Search of Space lineup doing early Do Re Mi style material? Reworked versions of Hawkwind Zoo material that sound nothing like that EP? Studio versions of songs we’d only heard live? What was going on here? Was this one of the biggest Hawkwind releases in their career?
Digging a little deeper, that is exactly what we have going on here. The 1969-1970 lineup is represented on three tracks, You Know You’re Only Dreaming (which ended up on In Search Of Space) is a completely different take on the song, with only the lyrics as the common thread. It almost heads into a sound not unlike King Crimson of the same 1970 era. A fairly unique sound Hawkwind didn’t really show again. The Reason Is from their debut album is a different take, slightly scarier if that’s possible. Be Yourself is a different mix, very close to the original. Still, side A is an eye opener for a Hawkwind collection, with the Dreaming track being the real treasure. I was already blown away.
Side B kicks off with another unheard song, the instrumental Hog Farm. This contains riffs from the much later Hawklords album of 1978 and is something out of left field for a Hawkwind fan-completely unheard until today. The transition to the In Search of Space line up has happened, and vocalist/poet Robert Calvert has entered, and guitarist Lloyd-Langton has exited, with Dave Anderson from Amon Duul 2 now on bass. Rumblings of Brainstorm and Master of the Universe scuttle in and out of the jamming. Sweet Mistress of Pain (Kiss of the Velvet Whip) is another song from the same session from May 1971. Originally taken from the rare pre Hawkwind EP ‘Hawkwind Zoo’ from early 1969, this version has been pumped up several levels. Calvert carries this one along vocally, and the newly injected instrumental power makes one wonder why the band didn’t up the ante and just keep the melody and replace the puerile lyrics with something a bit more star/drug/cosmic oriented. (lyrics to this song are the low point in Brock’s canon, probably why this song never surfaced) Alas, this was a missed chance to create a truly classic Hawkwind song-still this version is heady. Seven by Seven, made famous on Space Ritual only had a studio version as the B side to the Silver Machine 45. This one here is a different version of the studio version and contains different lyrics. Again, this side is a strong argument as to why Hawkwind is a uniquely amazing musical experience. Brock and Turner are twin masters here; psychedelic voles burrowing into the deepest folds of your brain, and you are helpless in the sincerest sense of the word. The expansive wah wah use by Brock on guitar and Turner on sax create the essence of the Hawkwind sound-pounding bass and drums underneath, psychedelic warpings of guitar and sax, and wooshing chaotic underlay. This is the primordial heart of Hawkwind that perhaps even some of their hard core fans don’t know exists. The sound of In Search of Space has expanded to a more refined primordial puddle of brain bubbles than the studio album could quite aspire to.
Side three starts with another never before heard song, an outtake from Do Re Mi called Take What You Can-a fairly easy going standard Hawkwind type tune, it soon veers off into an instrumental section that features newly minted Lemmy endeavoring to tear holes in the universe before retreating back to home base and dwindling to a gentle two chord segue straight from Space Ritual (the song ends with the segue fading out). Elements of Master of the Universe are clearly evident in the riffing here. The rest of the side is taken up by the full studio version of Brainbox Pollution from August of 1973. Although this song is not unfamiliar to most Hawkfreaks, this version is. Stretched out to full length from the single edit that everyone knows, everything that makes Hawkwind special is contained in here (despite lacking the ‘horn of destiny’ call in the riff). Honestly, this version of the song would be what I’d consider what you’d come up with if you distilled the Hawkwind ethos into a single song. Side three has upped the ante, I can no longer believe that stuff of this quality has been undercover for so long-every song here would stand easily with the classics of the Hawkwind oeuvre.
Side four contains the unheard studio version of the B side It’s So Easy. (the more common version is a live one). A studio version of You Better Believe It (the Hall of the Mountain Grill version was likewise live) with the lyric ‘it’s so easy’ shows why the previous song was likely shelved from the album. Both come from the same January 1974 studio session. It’s So Easy ends with a sublime denouement you never hear from them, almost Grateful Dead-like in elegiac subtlety. A different take on Wind of Change closes out side four, a very Pink Floyd guitar attack that bring the proceedings to an end like watching the most sublime beach sunset close out a lysergic soaked day of adventure.
But make no mistake, these are powerful anthems to sheer lunacy, real howl at the moon kind of shit. The kind of stuff they don’t make anymore. This album already is insanely essential-a landmark of space rock. Nik Turner, who usually flies under the radar musically is shown to be a huge part of the sound–his carefully modulated and wah wah inflected sax sound like nothing on this earth, and provide a twisted musical continuity to most of the pieces. Brock’s likewise heavy wah use throughout most of this helps the call and response between two alien beings manning instruments not of this earth. It is not hyperbole to state that this is perhaps the best Hawkwind album since Space Ritual–the surfacing of a long lost treasure trove of relics we didn’t suspect existed, finally released a full forty plus years after being recorded. Pass the word on to your friends and Hawkfriends: “if you don’t have this album, you are missing a HUGE part of Hawkwind.”
The Residents- The Warner Brothers Album
The Holy Grail of Residents Lore Sees the Light of Day!
The second treasure of RSD 2018 is a doozy, something we were told we would never ever hear-the nearly mythical Warner Bros. Album that gave the band their name. But first, maybe we need a little background on this band.
Had this poster over my bed for the last two years of college
One of their rare appearances, pre eyeball-in fireproof suits
Their other early appearance, wrapped in gauze
The Residents in their unfinished film, Vileness Fats
The Residents are best known as the eyeball wearing quartet from perhaps San Francisco who make some of the most uncommercial, sanity threatening and mutation inducing music this side of a lunatic asylum orchestra. They had been kicking around the psychedelic scene as early as 1967, and though many collectives explored similar paths, none had the vision (or perhaps lack thereof), diligence, dedication to destroying established musical traditions and mores and the ability to excise the word ‘no’ from their vocabulary like the Residents. Getting sued by the Beatles label for their first album cover got them a smidgen of infamy (a trick later borrowed by conceptual cousins Negativland). They had to change the album cover.
Who was actually in the Residents? No one knew. This was a more closely guarded secret than what Kiss looked like under their makeup. Unlike Kiss, few actually cared. Their debut registered minuscule sales. It was an unsettling maelstrom of music concrete, childish sing a longs, advanced modern classical riffs, homemade instruments and intentional mistakes that were the underpinning to some vocals that would disturb even Captain Beefheart. The band stayed the course for an album arc that everyone should dabble their little toes into:
The above five albums set a benchmark for weirdness that is hard to top. In fact, it’s never been topped. But as twisted as these releases are, nothing compares to the early years of the band. And so our tale begins:
Our heroes are ensconced somewhere in California. The sixties are coming to an end. This loose collective who now might include Philip Lithman (better known as Snakefinger) as a guest guitarist on top of Homer Flynn, Hardy Fox, Jay Clem and John Kennedy. (though all four claim they are managers of the Cryptic Corporation, not actual musicians) They start making serious music. Seriously damaged that is. Tapes slow down, instruments are primitively recorded: is it a kazoo? A fuzzed violin? a cat being tortured? No one knew. One never discussed item is that there was another early member of the band (often referred to as N. Senada- a pseudonym), someone classically trained on piano and composition. He became disenchanted with formal collegiate musical training and conservatory approaches, and decided to hitch his star to these acid soaked performance artists with pretty much zero musical talent. Perhaps he recognized flickers of Harry Partch, John Cage, Edgar Varese and Stockhausen in their childish dada clinking and clanking (and occasional transmission throwing out gears at 60 mph) But both factions were willing to make it a go, and the genesis of the Warner Bros. album was created. They recorded into 1971, hand painted the optimistically titled tape cover (see above) and mailed it to Hal Halverstadt, the guy at Warners who signed Captain Beefheart. (hey, if this guy signed Beefheart, he’ll LOVE us!) songlist below:
Strawberry Fields Forever (Lennon-McCartney)
The Mad Sawmill of Copenhagen, Germany
Baby Skeletons & Dogs
Bop Bop (Shoo Bop Bop)
Stuffed Genital
Every Day I Masturbate on A Merican Fag
Oh Mommy, Oh Daddy, Can’t You See that it’s True?
Baby Skeletons & Dogs (Reprise)
The Mad Sawmill of Copenhagen, Germany (Reprise)
Love & Peace
The Mad Sawmill of Copenhagen, Germany (Reprise 2)
Black Velvet Original
The Mad Sawmill of Copenhagen, Germany (Reprise 3)
Christmas Morning Foto
The Mad Sawmill of Copenhagen, Germany (Reprise 4)
In the Still of the Night
Maggie’s Farm (B. Dylan)
Snot and Feces: Live at the Grunt Festival
Sweet Meat
Oh Yeah Uhh Bop Shoo Bop
Ohm is Where the Art Is
Concerto in R Flat Minor
Gagagapiggaeioupe
Sell American
Love Theme from a Major Motion Picture
Prelude for Accordion, Sousaphone and French Horn
Oh God You’re a Pie in the Sky
Short Circuit Comes to Town
Marching Toward AEIOU Blues
In the Still of the Night Again
Oh Mommy, Oh Daddy, Can’t You See that it’s True Again
Art the White Elephant
Psychedelic and Orgasmic Finale
Unfortunately, Hal was not blown away. But with no information to go on, he was forced to mail the tape back to the return address c/o “Residents” since they had not included any names. Thus, the band was born.
But no one had ever actually heard the album outside their guarded inner circle. It went from history to legend to myth. A single play was allowed on the radio. KBOO in Portland Oregon broadcast the album once in 1977 during a tribute to the Residents. Many Residents fans (myself included) had a multi generation copy of this weirdness on cassette. But nobody thought we’d get to hear it ever again. That was certain.
How this thing got tabbed for a RSD release is beyond me. Nobody, even the most clued in and knowledgeable employees in any store I spoke with had heard of this holy grail of Residents history. I managed to grab the last copy in the 8 am scrum by the RSD release bin. By reaching through four people. Luckily I knew this one was all black, and took a chance by grabbing a jet black single lp–gawwdammmm that is it!!! That afternoon, this puppy was grabbing over $100 on eBay. Too many people found out too late what an important release this was, perhaps one of the most important releases in the whole history of Record Store Day. This record will crack your cranium open, plant little seeds of madness, then haphazardly super glue you back together. Below is a compendium of the ‘songs’ on this set of proto madness for your consumption. Country, blues, current pop music, children’s melodies, monsters under your bed and kitchen utensils get deconstructed, reassembled and collide nicely:
Addendum: Early 80’s, the band split in half at the conclusion of the Mole show tour. I seemed to be the only one to notice the band had dropped from a quartet to a duo. The band steadfastly refused to acknowledge anything of the sort. (Clues from the hard to find “Mole Comics’ printed at the time are very clear that two of the members are not happy at all cruising this mess around Europe). They returned for a 1985 tour with two members, Snakefinger and female dancers in eyeball heads. I’m pretty sure no members of the Residents had boobs. Oddly, one of my long term acquaintances managed to get a job in the periphery of the Cryptic Corporation. I confronted him one day:
‘why doesn’t the band admit they split in half and that two members disappeared in 1983?”
him: “I know nothing about that”
me: ‘mmm hmmm, I’m pretty sure in 1985 in concert in Boston I saw members in leotards with boobs dance and not play a single note.’
him: “errrrrrrrrrrrrr…”
me: ‘I’ll take that as a confirmation’
So maybe it’s not news, but Jay Clem and John Kennedy scampered away at the end of 1982. Some of you might have figured it out, some of you might not have even thought to ask, but the Residents have been a duo since then, and in recent years, down to just Homer. (who in a recent cabaret style performance admitted he had recorded most of Donkey for the huge animated film Shrek, then gotten bounced by Eddie Murphy. The vicissitudes of stardom will smack you down, won’t they.)
Two definitive albums. Two acid soaked bands from opposite sides of the world who recorded these treasures at roughly the same time, and had the results sit unheard for 47 years. Sometimes they get it right, eh?
“I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole” -the Grateful Dead 1969
“We can go where we want to, places they will never find” – Men Without Hats
Charles Manson passed away this week on November 20, 2017. For most, this was a good thing-the pied piper of wayward children, the evil mastermind of several horrific killings, the guy that killed the sixties-well you pick your label. For others he remained a fascination throughout his life-a twisted hero to the Weathermen and other edgy counter culture figures,; misunderstood musician; a government patsy to kill the sixties vibe; a forgotten icon famously promoted by Axl Rose in 1993 with his ‘Charlie Don’t Surf’ shirt worn on tour and the band’s remake of one of Manson’s songs on the Spaghetti Incident album of strange cover versions. Charlie took the secret of the motive of the slayings of the Summer of 1969 to the grave with him, as promised. “I ain’t no snitch”. Wherever you fall on the Manson spectrum, what remains true are the inordinate amount of unanswered questions and anomalies plaguing the case against him and the Family, and that one key question: ‘Why did this happen?’
For most out there, knowledge of Charles Manson comes from a single source: Vince Bugliosi’s 1974 best seller Helter Skelter. This is the book that wove the tale and the myth together for public consumption (and was the source of the powerful 1976 television docudrama of the same name). This sensationalized version of what happened leaves much of the information surrounding the events off the table, yet it is usually the basis for any media storyline about Charles Manson and the Family whenever they pop up in the news, and is accepted as the bible of facts for those who want to know the who’s and the why’s of the horrific killings-and seems to be considered definitive by nearly 100% of the mainstream media. It goes pretty much like this:
Manson is released in 1967 into San Francisco while Haight-Ashbury was spasming in the throes of hippiedom. He’d been in prison most of his life since a very young age. He played guitar in the park and parties and gathered runaway girls. They bought a bus and traveled. He fed them drugs and performed wanton acts upon them. They performed wanton acts upon him in return. They may have thought he was Jesus. He may have insinuated same. They became a family. They take lots of LSD and live a utopian sex filled and very stoned idyllic life on the road. They moved to the outskirts of Los Angeles and lived on an old movie set/cowboy ranch. They go dumpster diving in Hollywood restaurants and grocery stores and live off garbage for family meals. They gathered dune buggies to move further into the desert. Something called Helter Skelter, which they got from the Beatles White Album was more than a song, it was a rally cry. It was a philosophy of chaos-an imminent black vs white race war preached by Manson. The Family would avoid Helter Skelter by finding paradise in the desert while the cities burned. To trigger the war, Manson orders his minions to pick random strangers to kill-first actress Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski and Abigail Folger the coffee heiress at their Cielo Drive house in Benedict Canyon. They either chose a house of famous people to grab headlines or got ‘lucky’ in picking a random house that had occupants whose deaths got the attention of everyone. Sharon’s unborn 8 1/2 month baby was also a casualty. Teenage girls were the knife wielding killers. The next night they picked other random people-Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. Charlie tied them up, and sent his brainwashed drug crazed teen girl killers in to finish them off. Both murder scenes had words written in the victim’s blood on the walls. The Family gets arrested a few times for auto theft, but are not suspects in the murder. Susan Atkins is picked up and put in jail for something unspecified, and confesses the murders to two different cell mates. This implicates Manson and the Family, who are promptly arrested, and a huge trial takes up a year. Charlie puts an x into his forehead. The girls who aren’t under arrest sit on the curb outside the court full time. They carve x’s into their foreheads. Charlie shaves his head. The girls shave their heads. The prosecution accuses Manson of using Helter Skelter as the motive to kill the seven victims. Middle class America is suddenly shit scared of both drugs and hippies. Charlie and the three knife wielding girls-Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten are all convicted for murder and given life in prison. Linda Kasabian, who turned state’s evidence, is set free. Tex Watson, rarely mentioned in stories, is convicted in a separate trial of all of the murders, he likely killed almost all of the victims. One of the girls may not have stabbed anyone living but still got convicted. Charlie didn’t kill anyone but is convicted for ‘ordering them to do it.’ He is the epitome of evil, brainwashing teenage girls with drugs to go kill for him. They are in prison forever, the end.
Honestly, that is probably more detail than the average man on the street would have about the murders. But this covers the more common facts generally known, and is the narrative that has fueled every newspaper article, made for TV documentary, Geraldo interview, movie, magazine article and television news report from 1970 until today, November 2017, when Charles Manson passed away in prison. For a full 47 years this has been the only tale. You have to admit that is a pretty weird script of history above, but in reality things are exponentially far wider and far weirder in scope. And there are more stories either unwritten, untold or barely hinted at that indicate the so called ‘Manson Murders’ as told above are not really quite that cut and dried, but only the tip of a reality bending iceberg, a confluence of weirdness, pre-meditation, mysticism, people behind the scenes with multiple of motives, cover ups, intentional muddying of the waters-well shit isn’t even close to what it seems. Does anyone really know what went down? Let’s take a closer look at some possibilities and try to unravel the threads both known and ignored and see if there is an answer in there anywhere:
The Music part one
the album that didn’t crack the charts
Charlie had long ambitions to be a rock star. Few know that he came much closer to realizing his dream than anyone would imagine. He had heard the Beatles in prison, and practiced his act while in prison, loudly proclaiming ‘I can do better’. Taught guitar by Alvin Karpis of Ma Barker’s gang, Charlie put together a fairly unique act-able to riff rudimentarily on guitar while improvising twisting lyrics that were clever commentaries on society, people in front of him, current events, hippie mores, drug trips, idiosyncrasies of social situations developing in the room right as he sang-Charlie had a definite talent for capturing an audience and holding their attention. Touring the neighborhood as ‘Chuck Summers’ he caught on in some coffee houses, but his scruffy and indigent fans weren’t filling the cash register enough. People did think he had talent, but unfortunately for him, even his music business supporters thought he was much more appropriate as a live act rather than someone who could put an album out. His one album was cobbled together quickly by his jail buddy Phil Kaufman in 1970 to raise some funds for his legal defense. (Kaufman was famous for later being a Flying Burrito Brothers and Rolling Stones road manager and then for stealing his friend Gram Parsons’ body and burning it at the Joshua Tree memorial per their pre-death agreement). The album is fascinatingly uneven in quality but is a must hear for anyone curious about the supposed magic of Manson the musician (the studio sessions recorded professionally at Brian Wilson’s studio have still yet to be released, though Brian has let friends hear them). Most of this brush with fame started with the Beach Boys. Or more specifically, one Beach Boy.
Get ready to kiss these puppies goodbye!
Somehow Charlie managed to keep up a constantly evolving verbally fueled mystical image while he was rubbing elbows with LA music elite for a year. He partied with Frank Zappa at his log cabin trying to get recorded (Gary Hinman murderer Bob Beausoleil is on the debut Zappa album Freak Out, and he later unsuccessfully went to Zappa in 1969 to try to get Frank to do some recordings of the Family). Manson was a guest at John Phillips and Mama Cass parties in the Laurel Canyon area, working them for a music connection. (more on that later) Finally, he had a willing target in his sights: he moved in on Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, (two Manson girls had been picked up by Dennis while they were hitchhiking, and called up the ranch to have ‘everyone’ come over to Dennis’ house for a party-a months long party) Manson and the family lived with him in a 20 room house, and Charlie moved his harem in for Dennis and his friends enjoyment. The party eventually ended as the Family ate Dennis out of house and home, stole all of his clothes, crashed his expensive cars, stole his presentation gold record awards, did all his drugs-the kind of things that get you thrown out of even the most patient person’s house. But Wilson thought Manson had something special:
“We’re writing together now,” he said of the man he called the Wizard. “He’s dumb, in some ways, but I accept his approach and have learnt from him.”
During this period, Wilson used one of Manson’s songs ‘Cease to Exist’ as a B Side on a 1968 Beach Boys 45. It also appeared on the 20/20 album in February 1969. Wilson had taken the unforgivable step of cleaning up the lyrics to be less death-like and changed the title to a more Beach Boy friendly ‘Never Learn Not to Love’. Manson freaked, nobody should tamper with his genius. (Oddly, Mel Lyman, guru of the Fort Hill Community, a Boston commune predating but with much overlap with the Family, had an identical hysterical reaction when someone tampered with his writing-more on him later). Manson grew disenchanted with Wilson’s inability to get him signed, famously leaving a bullet in Wilson’s house while he was out as a fairly easy to understand threat. (Charlie said “I just had a pocket full bullets in my pocket so I gave him one”). Still, Charlie felt that the brass ring was right around the corner with this little taste of real record company and chart success. Wilson had had enough though, figured Charlie owed him nearly $100,000 so far, so he kept the publishing royalties from the Manson song on the album, gave himself songwriting credit for it, and kicked Charlie to the curb, and started sleeping with a gun under his pillow.
Terry Melcher with Doris Day
Wilson passed Manson on to the next level up of music stardom, producer Terry Melcher. He was the son of TV icon Doris Day, and a highly touted up and coming producer at Columbia Records. He had a lot of clout in the LA music scene, having produced the first Byrds records, gotten Paul Revere and the Raiders on their horse, signed a band fronted by Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, and helped organize 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival. Clearly this guy had clout, and Charlie was besotted. But auditions did not go well. Sessions in the studio went poorly when Charlie couldn’t take directions from the recording engineers. Another audition at Spahn ranch with the girls carefully arranged around him singing harmonies was ‘weird’. Terry dropped some cash on Manson and promised to return. In Charlie’s mind, this was a down payment on future stardom. Alas, ’twas not to be. Melcher passed. Later investigations by Tom O’Neill eventually showed that Melcher’s carefully crafted tale of removing himself from the Family early in the tale weren’t exactly true, and that he had visited the Family more than once after the murders-something carefully hidden during testimony, and actual perjury subborned by Bugliosi at the time.
Manson family recordings post Charlie
Terry Melcher passed the buck to an associate who thought the family was perfect for a documentary movie, and that Charlie’s music could be the soundtrack to the film. Somehow Manson didn’t vibe with this aspect, since this plan required a bit of time to come to fruition. He didn’t want a movie (one with the focus on everyone not just him, diluting the message), he wanted an album and a promotion so his message could get out to the world in the purest form. (dosing the producer with acid on his last visit to the ranch definitely did not help things) The family began to develop an unhealthy grudge-like attitude towards Melcher. He’d made promises, and now they weren’t happening. (perhaps prison had kept Charlie from being aware of the long trip it is to the top of the rock scene, unless you are tapped by the magic king-maker wand. He likely felt the Beach Boys and Melcher had such wand, and were refusing to use it for his benefit) . Foreshadowing enters when one day Wilson had once dropped off Melcher at the Cielo Drive address, his house with Candice Bergen and other girlfriends, while Manson was in the car. Charlie had several other visits to the future home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski while Melcher lived there, then when (this time period is very rarely spoken of) the guest house was briefly rented to a former pastor then Manson associate, guru Dean Moorehouse, father of underaged Manson girl Ruth Ann (one of Melcher’s favorites), and then next when Sharon was living there immediately after Moorehouse had moved out-even crossing her path once on site. Charlie and Tex had been there multiple times in the lead up to August 1969.(Sly Stone had said on record that he had seen Manson at Melcher’s house more than once in the time Melcher was at Cielo). But now the Cielo Drive house was now seen to be symbolic of the duplicitous enemy-Melcher. Melcher had been warned by phone and letter that he had failed to keep his promises to Manson, and that there would be repercussions. Manson knew that Melcher had moved out of Cielo. But the commonly held myth that Manson and the Family had never been there before isn’t true.
Not everyone thought Manson was of dubious musical quality. Manson had moved the family into Iron Butterfly’s mansion for a few weeks while they were on tour, utilizing the full pro musical set up there. Others championed Manson’s musical talents, viewing him as a philosophical guru with a guitar and a message. Buffalo Springfield were fans. Neil Young gave him a motorcycle. Young pushed hard for Manson to get signed, even begging record mogul Mo Austin to sign him. Young has been the most forthcoming about what effect Manson had musically: “He was great. He was unreal – really, really good. He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing. I thought he really had something great. He was like a living poet.”
Manson once grabbed one of Young’s guitars and started an impromptu audition “His songs were off-the-cuff things he made up as he went along,” Young wrote later, “and they were never the same twice in a row. Kind of like Dylan, but different because it was hard to glimpse a true message in them, but the songs were fascinating. He was quite good.”
“This guy, you know, he’s good, he’s just a little out of control.”
“I told Mo Ostin about him- Warner Brothers. This guy is so unbelievable – he makes songs up as he goes along, and they are all good. Never got any further than that. Never got a demo. Glad he didn’t get around to me when he was punishing people for the fact he didn’t make it in the music biz. That’s what that was all about. Didn’t get to be a rock and roll star, so he started wiping people out. Dig that.”
Manson started to think he was getting the runaround by music people (he was), and began to think he was being taken advantage of by the industry. Perhaps he was correct. A little seen quote related to this from Charlie: I wrote a song: “I know I know I know I know I know I know I know; I know I know I know I know I know I know I know…” It’s a meditation song. I send a tape to someone. They send the tape to the brother’s recording company, and then you hear the song, “Ain’t No Sunshine (When She’s Gone).” Charlie is a serial prevaricator, but this blast from ‘unlikely-land’ is likely true, as it is documented in a 1969 article mentioning the song’s lyrics at the time, and then the song itself was released by Bill Withers as Ain’t No Sunshine in 1971. So this may not be the only time this happened-Charlie threw out some cleverness and it got stolen. There’s probably more stories like this lurking just under the rug. But hell, people stole from each other all the time in the music world, right? Honor among thieves and jail house codes are unknown in the music biz.
The Music part two: Esalen Institute-Big Sur
Who did Charlie meet at the exclusive Esalen Institute in Big Sur a few days before the murders? Esalen was an important gathering spot/spa/think tank for the rock stars and also the political elite (read: CIA) of California. Musicians and government officials rubbed elbows and other appendages, and traded ideas. Sharon Tate and Abigail Folger were frequent visitors to the institute. Little spoken of is that they were reported to have called there on August 1, 1969, something they usually did before heading up there. Manson left for Big Sur on August 3, 1969. There is a good chance Folger and Tate were there at the institute when Manson arrived, and with the way the institute operated, crossed paths with him. Given what is known and what is even less discussed, the secret that Manson, Sharon Tate and Abigail Folger were all at Esalen together, then Tate and Folger were murdered at Manson’s behest within the week would be fairly mind blowing to all involved, and raise questions about the trial that would only multiply exponentially. If Sharon and Abigail were seen as complicit in getting Charlie bounced off the grounds in Big Sur, then everything is turned on its head. Esalen quietly issued death threats to several reporters investigating the Manson angle, including author of the definitive book on the Family, Ed Sanders. (the usually detail oriented Sanders get uncharacteristically vague in his timeline regarding Manson’s visit, likely due to the aforementioned snuff threat) Two things are for sure, Manson wouldn’t talk about what happened, and he was pissed. Nobody has ever come up with any clue as to what transpired there. People got the impression that Manson had gotten the ‘big brush off’-whether it was a badly failed audition in front of important industry people or trawling the seas for financial support-people clammed up. If it was an audition of sorts, then in the complicated psyche of the easily offended and revenge oriented, it makes Patricia Krenwinkel’s comment at a 2011 parole hearing about the Cielo Drive murders much more interesting ““Because there was no doubt that I knew that what was ever going to happen here was not going to be good. I did know that that was, the plan was to murder two women inside the house. That was given, that was a given.” It is odd that no one has asked her to explain this very specific detail in light of the Esalen connection, but it makes one ask: “when Charlie said ‘now is the time for Helter skelter’, was he simply trying to get revenge on two of the women who had gotten him thrown out once and for all from the royal ball? Woah.
Robert deGrimston, founder of the Process had lectured at Esalen at this time, and given the ferocity of denial and legal troubles encountered by Ed Sanders, this is an interesting nexus of two camps who engaged in active suppression of any investigations in their involvement.
Paul Watkins, Charlieś chief procurer, was an employee at Esalen in the 1968 time frame-an innocent coincidence most likely but still an interesting thread never investigated and never mentioned. It is possible that this is the place where Paul first encountered Charlie, and not the chance encounter he put in his book. People do underestimate the clampdown on information on any Manson/Esalen connection. One other possibility never written about before is the possiblity of the Institute’s connection with the MDA angle (see below, Drugs part 3) , something that would bring an even more draconian clampdown on anyone talking.
An even darker possibility (see below) is that this is where Charlie hooked up with his supposed ‘handlers’ and was given his marching orders. No matter what the cause, Charlie seemed positive that NOW was the time.
One thing is certain though, people underestimate the music business angle as being a huge part of the whole thing. If Charlie had gotten signed, it is very likely the course of events would have taken a dramatically different tack.
Philosopher King?
“Look down at me and you see a fool, Look up at me and you see a god, Look straight at me and you see yourself.”
Manson was considered a guru at the time, (Dean Moorehouse as well), like hundreds of bearded dispensers of hodge-podge mysticism. Every town had one in California. But what made Manson stand out? Where did Charlie’s ideas come from? It takes a lot of digging into sources and interviews, but after… decades or so of reading…..there are some very clear sources for Charlie and the Family’s philosophy. Charlies insinuated he was Christ reincarnated. He also taught that he was both Jesus and Satan simultaneously. He taught that awareness and being in ‘the NOW’ was a path to enlightenment. That there was no wrong if an act was done with love. Fear brings awareness which then brings love. Possession should be temporary. ‘Possessions were freely given and taken. Manson once was listening to a studio owner express trepidation saying that Manson and his followers wouldn’t be able to pay the studio session recording fee. Manson then left everything there at the end of the session: thousands of dollars in expensive electric guitars, acoustic guitars, amps, sitars, miscellaneous instruments-“Have ’em”‘. Sports cars, motorcycles, jewelry-Charlie was given many things and turned around and usually gave them away pretty quickly (as an example: the Harley motorcycle he was given as payment for ‘Cease to Exist’ was given away shortly after). Other beliefs: people needed to be triggered to escape their prisons (of their conditioning and mindset)-challenged in the beliefs-such as child rearing. Children should be exposed to cold, hunger and privation to make them stronger beings. And so on… Let’s see where he came up with these ideas:
1. Scientology-Terminal Island Prison, Los Angeles
2. The Process Church of the Final Judgement/London, San Francisco, Los Angeles
3. Georgina Brayton and the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O./Blythe, California
4. Fountain of the World/Krishna Venta-Chatsworth, California
5. Mel Lyman and the Family/Fort Hill Community-Boston
6. The Book of Revelations
7. and to a lesser extent, the Beatles White Album and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlen
Scientology
Manson studied Scientology heavily in California prison, as Dianetics was getting huge, and supposedly reached the level of ‘clear’. (Clear means someone who no longer has his own reactive mind, the hidden source of irrational behavior, unreasonable fears, upsets and insecurities-something that figured heavily in Manson’s deprogramming of his new recruits) Once released, he went to the Scientology center in San Francisco, and said “I am clear”, but they set him to sweeping floors. “Done that in prison already, no thanks” and he hit the bricks into the scented San Francisco air. Meeting literally hundreds of young female runaways in the midst of a sexual revolution-Charlie must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven. (sure he was a homosexual by circumstance while in prison, but platoons of unattended half naked teenage girls willing to ‘try anything’ on the streets?) Once out, Charlie slowly tried the tricks he had learned in prison-the pimp hustle rap, some basic Scientology by using their auditing techniques on the prospective members for his family for control over them. “tell me your deepest secrets and hang ups to release yourself. Oh and by the way I will hold this over you forever”. Charlie knew how to read people very well, and reflect what the person (usually lost in life) in front of him needed the most, and then tell them exactly that. He usually dealt out the idea that the person was respected, and was perfect at they were, just misunderstood. He gave them exactly what they wanted to hear. Like Charlie often said “I am a mirror, I reflect you, you will see in me what you see in yourself”. Oblique but effective, and much of it cribbed from basic Scientology. Many lost souls looking for something, any kind of validation in the sixties…fell for this doe eyed guru and his burgeoning philosophical rap hook, line and sinker. While in prison, Charlie said: “I was in prison when Dianetics first started in 1950. A lot of the guys were interested in studying ways to process the mind [in order] to clear it from past confusion – to resurrect the soul and be reborn within yourself. That’s where Scientology started. Then, they started selling it. Then it got to be The Process Church of the Final Judgment [in England]. I couldn’t go myself, but I sent some people there to do certain things – to [create] an effect. To cause an awakening – an awareness in death… ” (seems like a Bruce Davis reference in that end part-someone closely tied to Scientology and the Process who was in London at the time. Charlie is able to send representatives overseas to meet and influence Scientology and the Process leaders? Who helped with that? More later)
According to Bugliosi, part of Manson’s charismatic appeal was “his ability to utter basic truisms to the right person at the right time.” Bugliosi had failed to see some of where exactly Charlie’s truisms originated.
The Bible and the Book of Revelations and the Beatles.
One thing Manson was good at, it was knowing the story of Jesus like the back of his hand. He had been hired as a ‘Jesus Christ consultant’ by Universal Studios in 1968 for a movie under development where Jesus returns, but is black. (it stalled in pre-production). Knowing the Book of Revelations, that weird acid trip that closes out the New Testament portion of the Bible made his rap darker than most Jesus freak gurus. But Charlie knew his stuff-his deep knowledge of parables and his ability to twist them into relevant metaphors about current life. Charlie was able to rap about being up on the cross, would often strike a crucifixion pose, would talk about the last time he was here and how society rejected him then and killed him. Manson = Man’s son, dig? Family members genuinely thought Charlie was Jesus, some of them anyway. But the biggest part of his rap was the last chapter of the Bible, the Book of Revelations, with a focus on Chapter 9. This was triggered by the White Album by the Beatles. The family had been originally inspired by the good time acid sing-alongs of Magical Mystery Tour bus adventures, but the dark underside of the White Album soon spawned a dark underside to the family. The White Album pointed to the Book of Revelations as something far more important to the plan than perhaps Charlie had even noticed at first, dovetailing with the nascent Helter Skelter philosophy. Some said Charlie thought the Beatles were speaking directly to him. When Charlie was asked, here’s what he had to offer:
Can you explain the meaning of Revelations, Chapter 9?
What do you think it means? It’s the battle of Armageddon. It’s the end of the world. It was the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” that turned me on to it. (one can see how the lyric in Revolution 9 “Take this brother, may it serve you well” would have got Charlie’s attention very quickly). It predicts the overthrow of the Establishment. The pit will be opened, and that’s when it will all come down. A third of all mankind will die. The only people who escape will be those who have the seal of God on their foreheads. You know that part, “They will seek death but they will not find it.”
From an interview with Leslie Van Houten in December of 1969:
MISS VAN HOUTEN: You’re going to really think I’m nuts, but, yeah, I do. I think I’m an angel, so to speak. Not with wings, you know. Naturally I know I don’t have wings.
But, I mean, in other words, I believe I’m one of the disciples. I’m one of the people spoken about in the Bible. Maybe not mentioned, you know, like names, but I know I’m —
Drugs Part One
The Devil’s Trumpet sounds off
The importance of drugs in this tale cannot be understated. Even the police were firmly convinced the Cielo Drive murders were a drug burn gone wrong. What kind of drugs? Pick your poison: marijuana, LSD, mescaline, cocaine, MDA, methamphetamine…a rainbow of profitable illegality. Only heroin seems to be not part of the equation. One thing rarely discussed in all this is the misunderstood huge effect that telache or belladonna (actually more likely Datura root-aka Jimson weed, a kissing cousin of belladonna) had on this whole thing. It was the inadvertent key ingredient to the dissolution of reality into fantasy, in particular with key members of the family. This mind bending plant made an LSD trip look like a bowl of ice cream in comparison-you left the planet for days, and reality became quite different. It grew wild behind Spahn ranch. Tex once ate a piece, hitch hiked into Hollywood to get his motorcycle. He was found hours later gibbering on all fours crawling up the sidewalk. He was beaten up in jail for being ‘too weird and making weird animal sounds.’ His famous photo used every time he is in the news is his mug shot from that day-yet nobody knows he is completely out of his mind on belladonna in that pic. Check out that smile:
He had the shit beaten out of him by other prisoners in lock up right after this photo for trying to talk to space people he kept seeing in their own bleep bllllip language. Biker Danny DeCarlo also confirmed the power of this stuff, saying it made you see strange creatures and hallucinate wildly for days. Quotes from Paul Watkins and Tex also told of how this shit fucked you up for days at a time are both enlightening and frightening. It took a week until you recovered-and left you in a zombie-like state for days, flicking in and out of a zoned out state of reality. Charlie had suggested poisoning the water supply of LA with pounds of the root, though this may be an apocryphal tale told by Watkins in his book. Tex and others had dabbled quite a bit with this sanity challenging root in the summer of 1969-Paul owned up to about 20 trips just that summer. Tex was coming off a belladonna trip he’d taken the day before the Cielo Drive Sharon Tate house murder happened-coming to consciousness in the very late afternoon of the murder evening. According to Tex’s trial testimony, he was not only still tripping on jimson weed, but had been given a hit of acid before leaving the ranch. Others say he and Sadie were also speeding on meth to have ‘super energy’. Whatever the truth, Tex’s memory of the evening comes to him in a haze during the trial, and he asserts he was half awake and half in a dream, and not quite aware that these were people he was chasing around and stabbing. The mind zapping qualities this root has are never spoken of as something more closely related to the events than they likely were.
On the other side of the coin, folks at Cielo Drive were doing a little more than dabbling in recreational drugs, they were setting up as medium to large scale dealers. Frykowski was being set up in business by Canadian MDA dealers to be the main US distributor of the brand new drug, later versions more famously known as Ecstasy. (Folger and Frykowski were on MDA when killed). A large shipment had already been delivered and was dispersing to the heads of LA. Family members had allegedly purchased bad MDA from Frykowski at the Cielo Drive house in July 1969, according to Linda Kasabian-perhaps a desperate story made up by the girls to discredit her testimony against them. A second large shipment was due at Cielo from Canada the day of the murders. Frykowski was slated to pick the dealers up at the airport. Jay Sebring was heard grumbling about being burned for $2,000 worth of coke a couple of days before the murders-likely triggering the famous ‘buggering of Billy Doyle incident’. Sebring was not only a heavy consumer, but was often spoken of as a known coke dealer to the stars, with his traveling hairstyling house call service as a perfect cover for deliveries to the stars who could afford his services. These guys were what would be called today “players”, who may not have been aware of the circles they were starting to move in-dangerous circles.
To be clear, this isn’t drugs for personal use level here, this would be around…well $2k would be $13,000 in today’s money. There was some little discussed but fairly high level drug trafficking going on in the Polanski/Tate house in the summer of 1969. Worryingly, there was a nexus of activity in the days leading up to the murders at Cielo. Parties and gatherings were frequent as Frykowski invited one and all to party at Sharon’s house that summer, with drugs as the focus. Neighbors said that scruffy looking hippies often roamed the neighborhood looking for the Polanski place-or more correctly, looking for the house they could score from. Worlds of Manson type exiles from society and the glitterati of high society rubbed elbows out of convenience. They bought and sold to each other, a symbiotic liaison that would come to a dark denouement. But the large shipment of an exotic drug due the evening of the murders was a large waving flag that even the most oblivious investigator should have picked up on.
As mentioned, the Polanski house (though some say it was Cass Elliot’s house) was the scene of the buggery party (see above and below) in the week before the murders. Ritualistic ceremony in black robes and black hoods? ‘Oo-ee-oo’.
Drugs Part Two
Bernard Crowe, or Lotsapoppa
The origins of much of the violence associated with the Manson murders can be traced to Tex trying burn a high level weed dealer known as Lotsapoppa or Bernard Crowe. This guy entering the tale is the catalyst for all the shit that went down in the summer of 1969, that much is very clear. The apparent murder (only a wounding) of a supposed Black Panther nicknamed Lotsapoppa after an ill conceived drug ripoff by Tex went wrong on August 1, 1969-this set off a chain of events that ended in so much chaos a month later. Ripoffs and drug burns were commonplace in 1960’s LA circles. Tex planned a five thousand dollar burn on Crowe. A couple of pounds were initially agreed upon. Crowe had the cash, Tex had no weed, and ran with the money. Crowe unexpectedly kept Tex’s girlfriend Rosina Kroner as a hostage and insurance against ripoffs while Tex went off to get the non existent weed. Crowe had connections with Dennis Wilson, so had had business with Manson’s folks before. One of his heavies was a bodyguard for Dennis Wilson as well. Tex freaks out, doesn’t know what to do, and asks Charlie for help. After waiting for a bit, Crowe called the ranch and said if he didn’t get his money he would a. kill the hostage b. come over there with a carload of heavily armed Negroes c. rape all Charlie’s bitches and d. burn the motherfucking ranch down. Charlie shows up to negotiate, and after one of his usual “here’s the gun, kill me. ok, no? well then I will kill you” scenes that had been acted out over and over at the ranch in recent weeks, he shoots Crowe in the gut, thinking he killed him. (this is where Charlie acquired his famous buckskin jacket off an accomplice) He is sure that Crowe is very connected (he was) and was a Black Panther (he wasn’t). News the next day talks of an anonymous Black Panther body being dumped on a lawn dead scares the shit out of the Family, and Charlie is convinced it has to be Crowe, and that the Panthers will come and wipe them out. (Curiously, there seems to be no mention in any newspapers of the era of this ‘Panther dumping’) The Family starts to arm themselves heavily and practice military style living. Carloads of black visitors to the ranch also heighten tensions. Helter Skelter seems to be coming true, and the Family is not ready yet. Tex had triggered, perhaps inadvertently, Helter Skelter. Charlie was pissed.
Drugs also figure heavily throughout the oncoming darkness, and in the tale of the murder of Gary Hinman in late July 1969 that started things off in a really wrong direction. Once a friend of the Family, and roommate of Bobby Beausoleil for a while, he was rumored to have sold bad mescaline to Beausoleil, who sold it to a biker gang who claimed it bunk and wanted their money back. Beausoleil was in a bind, and he was in danger of a beating or worse, and needed to fix it. Hinman had been supposedly manufacturing mescaline with a couple that lived in his downstairs apartment, and using basic chemistry to extract the active ingredient in readily available peyote, one can see how too much strychnine (which lives in the protrusions of the cactus) could accidentally have gotten into the final batch. This is the explanation for the bikers getting sick and wanting their money back. Though this tale is often told, less heard is that the supposed mescaline was MDA from Frykowski’s batch. Anyone expecting mescaline would think MDA was shitty mescaline, and demand a refund-especially if they were drinking a ton of beer and whiskey on top of it, as MDA can be subtle. Scales found at Hinman’s house had an unidentified white powder on them, which according to police tested negative for narcotics. MDA would have been so new at the time, police would never have even heard of it, never mind be able to test for it, so that part of the tale remains difficult to dismiss. Testing for mescaline also would not be on the police radar. Other versions told relate that Gary had inherited $20,000 and Charlie wanted a piece. (Actually, Linda Kasabian’s husband Bob’s traveling partner Charles Melton had inherited $20,000, so someone either altered the facts of Hinman’s murder to keep the plot intact for Helter Skelter-likely Bugliosi, or folks were so addled they couldn’t keep their story straight). In the end, Hinman was murdered by Beausoleil for ‘not making it right’. Words written in blood on the wall show up for the first time, trying to shift blame on to the Panthers. For some reason he returned days later to try to wash the pseudo Panther message from the wall. No one ever asked why he did this.
Other notable drug connections: Joel Rostau, a well connected high level drug dealer was said to have gone to Cielo Drive the day of the murders to bring mescaline and cocaine to Sebring and Frykowski, according to Sebring’s secretary in her testimony to LAPD. Sebring’s secretary was dating Rostau at the time, so…she would know. Tex bragged on more than one occasion that his drug connection was a mob guy who used vending machines as a front for his real business. In addition to Rostau as the main drug dealer to Sebring and Frykowski-another character enters the tale: Eugene Massaro, Rostau’s business and drug partner, known mob guy, and someone who used a vending machine business to cover his drug smuggling business, according to FBI files. Further investigations were thwarted when Rostau ended up found in May 1970 in the trunk of a car with his skull caved in right before testifying.
Rostau was dating Jay Sebring’s secretary, Charlene McCaffrey. Rostau and McCaffrey had been robbed in April 1969 and relieved of unknown amounts of cash and drugs by…some claim it was Tex Watson (Rostau was shot in the foot during this encounter). Though masked, the unknown robber fit a profile: Tex lived close by in the neighborhood, was swinging large amounts of drugs, would have been aware of Rostau’s illegal source of income, was called Charles by his accomplice, and Tex fit the physical description of the robber. Not exact proof, but another thread tying the players together may exist here (and one that points to Tex as far more connected than he has been portrayed.) Other researchers have concluded the masked man was Tex. And what of Tex’s mob drug connection and Rostau’s partner, Eugene Massaro? Massaro had been arrested dressed up as a policeman trying to rob dealers of tens of thousands of dollars worth of coke. Massaro’s partner was killed in the attempt. Drug burn once again. But Massaro and Rostau show up as a dealers connected to both the Manson Family and Sebring and Frykowski. Hmm.
Drug dealers mentioned in most tales-Harris ‘Pic’ Dawson III, Thomas Harrigan and Billy Doyle mingled with shadowy fringe figures rarely mentioned-Charles Tacot and Daniel Stanland. (Doyle and Harrigan were close friends with Folger and Frykowski-drug buddies) According to the Second Homicide Investigation Progress Report from 1969, Tacot shows up a couple of times as someone mentioned as either involved or in the know with the murders, and his claim of involvement in marijuana films and association with federal treasury agents in San Diego and Mexico city, yet his name disappearing from the tale could lead one to suspect something about him was being witheld. Stanland, Tacot and Doyle rented a house in Jamaica in the summer of 1969 from July to November 1st of that year. However, they quickly modified their lease in the wake of the August 9th discovery of the murders, and all three were in the wind and gone from the house in nine days. Stanland was a Pan Am pilot and buddies with Voytek Frykowski and was suspected by police of using his status as a cover for flying drugs into LA. John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas (mentioned several times as a possible suspect in the murders) heading down to Jamaica to investigate shadowy figures suspected in the murders is interesting especially in light of Phillips’ shadowy military past, molestation of his own daughters and generally debauched demeanor. Was he heading down to help or cover up tracks that might lead back to his cozy canyon? The lack of really any mention of Tacot and Stanland in any literature as time went on hints at active suppression of their names, for reasons unknown. Some suspect that individuals like this had jobs that were a cover for something else. Pan Am tried to cover up and deter any information on Stanland from being circulated, perhaps to avoid unwanted attention for the company, or perhaps for other reasons. Another name that rarely pops up is Harvey Dareff, an associate of another early original suspect, Ed Durston. More about them later.
Stranger In a Strange Land
The similarity of the Manson Family to Valentine Michael Smith family in the Robert Heinlen’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land is hard to ignore. Despite strongly referenced evidence to the contrary (coming from a single source ) repeatedly quoted on the internet to distance Heinlen from Manson that Manson ‘hadn’t read it’– this denial of any connection is clearly false. J. Schulman’s printed references in 1991 asking Manson in an interview if he had read the book and based the family on it was met with a ‘no’ from Charlie. But one must remember that Manson did not suffer fools, and an unschooled and distracted reporter champing at the bit for any answers? They would usually get the opposite of the truth from Charlie, so this one source certainly is not gospel. Let’s see: Charlie’s first kid was named Valentine Michael Manson-same name as main character (V. M. Smith instead of Manson), the protagonist was surrounded by young promiscuous women who he used to recruit members, he was seen as the second coming of Christ, set up shop in San Francisco and gathered women, moved to LA, (disguised as Florida in the book) and then they all lived away from society to have their own thing. They also had weird ideas about death and killing. Discorporation as a euphemism for death is in the book and was used by the Family. That’s plenty of consonance there. Sure, let’s take Charlie’s word that he never heard of the book, and then ask where the hell Valentine Michael Manson came from? Why did they refer to Charlie’s parole officer as ‘Jubal’, the parole officer in the novel? Any search of the internet will always throw up that Schulman interview as solid evidence to claim no relation at all between Manson and the novel. In the end, it is hard to see how this could be considered true, considering the plethora of contradictory primary sourced information if one digs a little bit.
Eyewitnesses and close associates think the connection is much closer than suspected today. According to a 1970 LA Times article by Robert Gillette, people close to the family at the time knew they were acting out themes from the novel. “In the opinion of a close acquaintance of Manson’s, these and numerous other parallels between the book and reality are not coincidental for it appears that Charles Manson has spent the past two years acting the key elements of the plot.” Dr. David Smith had been working with the Family in the early days of San Francisco, and his associate lived with the Family in order to gather data for a paper for the Psychedelic Journal on communal living. “The drug researcher who knew Manson well says he read the book “over and over”and seemingly integrated his life with that of the book’s main character—a young man named Valentine Michael Smith whose description is strikingly Mansonesque: Small, notable for his sexual prowess, a gleam in his eye, and a hypnotic collector of women.” The drug researcher was Al Rose, who had lived for weeks with the Family at Spahn Ranch to gather data. These are clearly more reliable sources on the Heinlen angle than the 1991 Schulman article claiming an interview with Manson. Perhaps Manson is correct in claiming he never read the book fully cover to cover, but the Family certainly seemed to be acting out threads of this plot with Charlie clearly aware of where this came from (as the family often play acted many scenarios), and people were sure Charlie actually had read the book more than once. (a copy of it was found in a back pack during a Spahn ranch raid and booked into evidence in 1969). Finally, while in jail, Gypsy had written a letter to Heinlen asking for help, pointing out they were being persecuted for living out ideals in the novel. Heinlen actually wrote back, saying there wasn’t much he could do. This essentially dispels the myth promoted by Schulman, and proves that he is incorrect. In reality, far from there being no connection, there is pretty strong evidence that the connection of the Family to the book was very real and important to the early mores of the group. In addition, Heinlen had laid out the first pop ideas of what would be later called communes-
Fort Hill Family-Mark and Daria
Communes Part One: Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Community
“I tell you I am the greatest man in the world and it doesn’t trouble me in the least.”-Mel Lyman
Communes were everywhere in the area of LA, and were a common way of life in the 1968-1969 time period, taking the load off the faltering Haight-Ashbury San Francisco community, and Manson’s family was not different than many other better organized communes in the area. On the opposite coast, the Manson Family had a Boston counter part. This group is something that is little discussed as an influence on the Manson family — the Fort Hill Community, a Roxbury area, overtly hippie, but in reality a well off (and anti-black) internally borderline nearly fascist commune organized around guru Mel Lyman, someone who, like Manson, led his believers to believe he was Jesus Christ incarnated. And like Manson, he didn’t hint at it, he told them point blank that he was. Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme had reportedly stayed with Lyman at one of the Fort Hill houses they owned in the Los Angeles area, while Manson and Lyman wrote to each other exchanging ideas communicating their ideas-many of which were derived from both leaders late 1950’s brushes with Scientology. Much of this tale is understandably vehemently denied by the Fort Hill family, yet according to Curt Rowlett in SteamShovelPress:
Members of the Lyman commune, like the Process Church before them, did little at the time to quash the sordid speculation (of Manson Family involvement): it was reported by several people that the group paid homage to Charles Manson by keeping a poster of him hung on the wall under which they placed a vase full of fresh flowers daily. And according to another source, Manson family member Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme used to visit and occasionally stay with Lyman in a home he owned in Los Angeles and that Manson and Lyman corresponded with each other for a brief period. Jim Kweskin (famous folk era musician), a member of the Lyman family, who, upon learning that his group had been compared to Manson’s, ominously and jokingly quipped that:
The Manson family preached peace and love and went around killing people. We don’t preach peace and love.”
There are many similarities between these two camps, and people at the time thought the Manson family was heavily influenced by their older East Coast brethren (the Lyman family had started in 1966). Like Manson, Lyman used regular LSD sessions to reprogram his followers. Unlike Manson, he used some skull cracking heroic doses-in the range of well over 1000 micrograms per dose to crack reality and break down a member. (a 250 mic dose in the 60’s was considered ‘very strong’) Both Manson and Mel’s family members believed:
using the music business and record companies to promote their message
reprogramming initiates to have new identities and leave their former family
give all of their money and possessions to the family and guru
were encouraged to leave their children to be raised not by the mother, but by the community
believed children should be exposed to cold and hunger to make them stronger
used massive amounts of LSD to brainwash away former belief systems
used fear and violence to get people into the ‘NOW’
followers devoted their whole lives to their guru
followers believed their guru to be Jesus reincarnated
guru stated specifically that they were Jesus reincarnated
Had gurus that would publicly freak out if anyone changed any tiny bits of their writings
Followers intimidated and roughed up people who they disagreed with, and definitely didn’t always espouse hippie ideals–especially while toting guns.
were not allowed to leave the family willingly
These two groups knew each other. They had a very specific overlap. It is interesting they used similar tactics in trying to attract famous figureheads as the Process (Jagger, Marianne Faithful) and Scientology (insert Scientologist film star here) in trying to get celebrities involved as a draw for more membership. Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, stars of the counterculture film Zabriskie Point were inner circle members of the community. Halprin managed to extract herself, but Frechette was caught robbing a bank (strangely, not for the money, but for a violent thrill to come into the ‘NOW’) and died a few years later in prison under mysterious circumstance. The same author from Rolling Stone that did the expansive Manson piece in June 1970, David Felton, did an expose on the inner workings of Lyman and the Fort Hill community. A rarely read and highly recommended piece detailing the Zabriskie Point actors and the madness associated with Mel Lyman can be read here.
Interlude-The Source Family
Father Yod’s clan, no dumpster diving allowed
Contemporaneous with the Manson Family in LA in 1969 was Father Yod’s high profile Source Family. Numbering originally just Father Yod and his 13 young (and sometimes underage) wives, this family swelled to over 150 at its peak. Their highly profitable Source Restaurant was a vegetarian gathering spot for the rich and famous on Sunset. Mark Ross, a late arrival to the Manson Family joined up with the Source Family shortly after, later to be known as actor Aesop Aquarian (who eerily played a Manson-like cult leader in a Starsky and Hutch episode in 1977). Father Yod’s first Family wife, Robin, had dated UK rock personality Graham Bond while he was in LA (self proclaimed illegitmate son of Aleister Crowley and heavily into magick) and she was friends with Sharon Tate. Supposedly she was to hitchike to Sharon’s the night of the murders but ended up spending the evening with Father Yod instead, which come the next morning convinced her to join the Source Family.
The Source Family was a much more benign version of the Manson family, but nevertheless the Manson murders caused this family no end of trouble in LA, and eventually forced a break up in Hawaii when suddenly no one trusted hippies, and all communes were supposedly offshoots of the Manson family. An efficient pooching of the hippie dream was borne out. More about this decidedly strange group here.
Communes Part Two: The Fountain of the World
The Fountain of the World, the true source of Manson’s philosophy. Yet it is something rarely written about. They were crumbling in 1968 when Manson and his girls crashed their Box Canyon digs in their schoolbus. Their guru had been wiped out in a horrific suicide bombing in 1958, and Manson may even grokked enough to have intimated he was the same guy returned-something the hardcore members were still waiting for. They wanted their guru to reappear as he had promised he would do. Alas, very quickly the remaining members realized this wasn’t true, Charlie wasn’t Krishna Venta, and they decided that they had seen enough. The girls were allowed on site and stayed in the commune dormitories, and Charlie was relegated to the commune parking lot where the bus was parked. Who were these guys and how did nobody on the prosecution team notice that Helter Skelter as a philosophy came verbatim from this 1950’s Jesus freak group?
According to the LA Weekly in 2016: “The W.K.F.L. Fountain of the World was founded in 1948. Its leader was a man who called himself Krishna Venta. Venta, who was called “the Master” by his 100-odd followers, was a handsome charismatic. His long hair and beard, yellow robes and dirty, bare-feet were used by his followers as proof that he was, as he said, the reincarnation of Christ. On the surface, Venta was a proto-new-age hippie who preached equality, service and tolerance. But in reality, he was a far more nefarious figure, both in his doctrines and in his actions.” Sound like Manson? In the imminent era of international gurus, this guy was far ahead of the curve. His followers were likewise barefoot and robed, calling each other brother and sister. They preached the eleven commandments of Venta:
1. To forget the outside world.
2. To become familiar with the inside workings of one’s self.
3. To become unified with one another spiritually, mentally and physically.
4. To forget self.
5. To create a desire within one’s self toward higher spiritual equality.
6. To obtain wisdom.
7. To search for understanding in all things.
8. To face problems without thought of escape.
9. To become absorbed in love toward all things, seen and unseen, and so fulfill the laws of God.
10. To let the spirit descend upon you.
11. To become a teacher, not in the world, but in the Fountain, that all men who come out of the world shall find comfort in our midst.
Not all that creepy on the surface, but echoing strongly things either eventually or simultaneously taught by many sources from Scientology to the Process to the O.T.O.—finally ending up in Manson’s lap. But it gets weirder for those who are acquainted with some of Manson’s deeper preachings. The LA Weekly continues:
“But all was not as it appeared. When Venta was home, he spent countless hours lecturing his disciples on the darker parts of his doctrine. Venta, like many cult leaders, ardently believed that the end of days was fast approaching, and that only his followers would be spared its horrors.
Using the book of Revelations as a loose template, Venta preached that it was his duty to gather 144,000 men, women and children before World War III, which would be fought between communist Russia and capitalistic America, engulfed the planet. He claimed that a race war between blacks and whites would ignite America in 1965. At this point, he and his followers would go to a secret location, perhaps in the desert, to wait out the war.”
Venta never got the chance to meet Manson. In 1958, two former members of the cult-in what is one of the first modern suicide bombings in history-strapped 20 sticks of dynamite on, walked into the main building and detonated, vaporizing the building while killing Krishna Venta and nine others. It’s not hard to picture Manson grooving on the weirdness of this, and looking back…the Family did spectacularly but not literally explode in a ball of flame.
Yet somehow nobody noticed this stuff is almost word for word what Charlie preached. Venta was correct in predicting Black/White riots happening in 1965 several years before the event-so he gets points for being weirdly right there. In the aftermath of the bombing, The Fountain of the World was low key and just up the road in Box Canyon near the California desert. So to recap: in 1968, the remnants of the guru-less organization was where Manson and his harem landed. Over the next year, the Fountain of the World was viewed as a second home location by many Manson-ites. Manson lived there for months until he was caught giving drugs to the brethren and sisters of the Fountain-eventually banished to sleep on the bus until his family found housing. Once they relocated literally over the hill at Spahn some of the girls still lived at the Fountain for extended periods of time-either needing a break from Charlie or temporarily exiled by him. The interaction between these groups was significant. The specificity of guru Venta’s belief system was stolen lock stock and barrel in its entirety, and one can see how some would even believe Charlie was Venta returned. But it is the brilliant twist Manson put on this…. ‘ok, here, we have the tenets, but let’s exclude puritan sensibilities about sex, and rather than banish folks for drugs, let’s celebrate them as a sacrament, like the disciples that lived with Jesus in the desert.’ Hell let’s go to the desert, because we are disciples ourselves, just like them. We came back. 2,000 or so years later. Disciples, Message, Jesus. Let’s tweak it a little bit so it is more late 60’s than late 50’s vibrations.’ Even today, you can see how some would be unable to disagree with this philosophy. One thing is certain, the Fountain of the World is the single most consistent source of Manson philosophy in anything that people decided to call….
Helter Skelter
The motive of Helter Skelter was highly touted as the motive by Vincent Bugliosi. (recent documents show that Bugliosi was already crafting his book illegally before the trial had started, which calls much of the way the trial was handled into question-Tex killing the folks who’d burned him makes a far less good read than ‘hippie mastermind wants to ignite race war’.) In a March 1978 issue of Headquarters Detective, an interview with Tex was published which didn’t mention race war, but something much larger:
Chet, I am going to tell you something no one else has ever heard before. I’m going to tell you what Helter Skelter was all about. It was like this. Charlie (Charles Manson) had a plan, a good plan, but even good plans should be tested.
Helter Skelter was an over-all plan and it had to be tested in some way. The Tate and LaBianca killings were that test!
The Tate murders were because Charlie and I more or less knew the layout of the place. The LaBianca murders were just a matter of picking out a home that represented wealth.
But neither one was anything but a test, a test for something bigger than ripping off a few people. That’s when he told me of the plan to choose three large cities on the West Coast and subject them to a massive plot, a plot to frighten and terrorize their entire populations, to literally scare the people out of their wits.
What if on a single day in these three cities, he said, his eyes dulling with the pleasure of recollection, commandos in groups of three and four were to go into the homes of five of these cities leading citizens–a well known police officer, a member of city government, a prominent corporate executive, and two rookie cops?
And while the heads of these households were away, what if any and all living things were destroyed? Just like Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas. And, after the families were killed — children, animals, anything that breathed — what if photos were taken of each victim and these were distributed on the streets, in mail boxes, to schools and campuses?
It would be warning to the population to give in to the demands of the terrorist group. And it wouldn’t take an army, just the right type of individuals.
He said they shouldn’t have been caught for the murders they had committed and that everything had gone as planned. It was a test to see if total terror in a manner of unequalled horror could go undetected. If it were successful, then the over-all plan, conceived by Manson, would have been started.
Let’s say we could have shocked the nation in our test, he said. Then certain measures were to be left to show we meant business. In widespread areas, we were to kill infants, holding them by their ankles and smashing them against fireplaces. Wives and loved ones were to be hung from the rafters.
Dogs and cats and any living things were to be brutally and viciously beaten to death. And the blood of the victims was to be used to inscribe messages of sadistic humor on the walls.
When I asked Tex what he personally thought of such wholesale and brutal slaughter, he replied, Man, I was so caught up in the whole thing. Manson had us completely. I was ready to do as was needed.
According to Tex, there was more. They were to use the cash and valuables taken during the raid to buy weapons. Charlie was going to select four of his most loyal followers and they would board planes. Money that we had gotten together would be used to bribe a certain person involved at a strategic point of entry. He would allow the four to pass through the metal detectors unhasseled. After the plane took off, they would take over. To insure that demands were met, deaths would begin within an hour after take-off, deaths of unsuspecting persons. The pilot was to be instructed to contact authorities and to handle all negotiations.
To let the authorities know they were serious, an address was sent to them minutes after a murder was committed on that location. Whoever was sent there would be greeted by a scene of horror. And a warning would be issued to expect more of the same. It would have worked too. It would have happened!
To be fair, shit was going down, not only in LA, but all over America. Hell, all over the world. Mexico, Czechoslovakia and France had almost fallen in 1968 to hippie forces, and chaos reigned in many countries. Black Panthers, the Black vs White race war wasn’t just a fantasy of Charlie, many mainstream people also ascribed to this. Little told stories from the family always make mention of Black Muslims, a phrase carefully deleted at the time and never mentioned since. The Watts riots of 1965 were world news. Black vs. white was a theme for the two years before Charlie got out. LA riots in 1969, murders of Black Panthers by police in 1969, well this gave direct evidence this was no Manson past fantasy, but coming true right in front of everyone’s eyes. People would have thought this wasn’t so far fetched at all. “Charlie may be crazy, but he isn’t stupid” was a quote at the time.
Interview with Charlie, 1970 Rolling Stone:
Q: What does Helter Skelter mean?
A: What do you think it means? It’s the battle of Armageddon. It’s the end of the world. It was the Beatles’ Revolution 9 that turned me on to it. It predicts the overthrow of the establishment. The pit will be opened and that’s when it will all come down. A third of all mankind will die. Charles Manson–May 1970
or….
There was no such thing in my mind as helter skelter. Helter skelter was a song and it was a nightclub – we opened up a little after-hours nightclub to make some money and play some music and do some dancing and singing and play some stuff to make some money for dune buggies to go out in the desert. And we called the club Helter Skelter. It was a helter skelter club because we would be there and when the cops would come, we’d all melt into other dimensions because it wasn’t licensed to be anything in particular. And that was kind of like a speakeasy back in the moonshine days behind the movie set.” Charles Manson- 1992 Parole Hearing
This nightclub part of the story is true. And the famous door taken from Spahn Ranch with the words Helter Skelter on it was used prominently in the trial to support the whole Helter Skelter hypothesis. But anyone who has been in illegal clubs before can attest to signage tending towards oblique. What if this supposed smoking gun piece of evidence was only the entrance to the illegal club with the name disguised graffiti style on it? (this joint got George Spahn ‘a healthy fine’ for operating an illegal nightclub-Manson covered the fine)
Murder for Hire and the Mob
Little discussed is the possibility that some of this mayhem were paid hits. Charlie once offered a new family male member some cash for a hit on an unnamed someone. In early June 1969 ‘Sunshine Pierce’ was another hanger on who just wanted to hang for a month, but then became closer to the inner circle. Eventually Manson took him under his wing and made some offers and Sunshine thought he was being offered a share of the loot: drugs, robberies, travelers checks etc–when Charlie said he needed help in killing someone who had screwed them (Terry Melcher), and that the pay would be good. From Sanders book, Sunshine related: “He said that he had one person in particular that he wanted me to help him kill, and he said there might have to be some other people killed” Charlie said he could scrape together around $5,000 for the job, and a motorcycle. Pierce said “no thanks” and he quit the family that day and left for Texas. Was Manson taking side contracts to do hits, not telling the family and making up stories to cover it up? Was the LaBianca murder a contracted mafia hit? Their neighbors thought so. Ask why the mob bookie up the street from the LaBianca’s moved out the week after those murders? Was there a $25,000 for a hit on Sharon Tate as told below? Some think Charlie was taking contracts and not telling even his closest associates-far fetched but with his ability to keep his actual dealings secret from everyone, not impossible.
According to Paul Watkins, (one of Manson’s original right hand men and recruiter) in his ghostwritten book, Watkins had two separate encounters with the Mob during the trial that is rarely mentioned and also troubling:
Later that same week I was coming out of the court building when a dapper little guy sporting a goatee and dressed in a double-breasted suit approached me, saying he was a lawyer and wanted to ask me a few questions. I walked with him to a chauffeured limousine and we drove up to Hollywood. He introduced himself as Jake Friedberg, saying he just wanted some information about the Family and that he’d make it worth my while to provide it. He asked if I’d mind staying at the Continental Hyatt House for a couple of days, and when I said no, he made a reservation for me in the penthouse. I spent two days there telling him what I knew; on the morning of the third day, as I was leaving the hotel, I was paged to the phone. It was Crockett; I’d called him the day I arrived and left my number.
His voice was hard and clear, like a pick against granite.
“Where the hell you been?”
“Nowhere.”
“I been tryin’ to get you. D.A.’s office called us up and said that guy Friedberg is a Mafia man… somethin’ about La Bianca’s connection with the syndicate… he say anything about it?”
“Nope.”
There was a long pause. Then Crockett spoke. “Where you tryin’ to take yourself anyway, oblivion?”
I didn’t answer.I didn’t know.
“When you comin’ out to the desert?”
“It won’t be long.”
I waited to Friedberg to come back, but he didn’t. And I never saw him again.
Then a few days later at Spahn Ranch, there was a second Mob encounter:
A couple of days later, we moved out of the Chandler Street house and back to Spahn’s. George had mellowed enough to allow us to move in again on a permanent basis….The day we moved in, I was standing on the boardwalk with Sandy when a car with two men in it pulled up beside me and stopped.
“You Watkins?” the driver asked.
I nodded. Both men got out of the car. Both wore baggy sports jackets and gray fedoras. One of them had on sunglasses. They asked if we could talk, and I led them into the saloon, where Squeaky and Brenda were sitting on the floor working on Charlie’s vest.
“We’ll make it fast,” the shorter of the two men said. “We hear Charlie wants to be sprung.”
“Huh?” Brenda stood up.
“We don’t know nothin’ about that,” Squeaky said. “Where’d you hear that?”
The man didn’t look at Squeaky. His eyes were on mine. “So what’s the deal?”
“I don’t know anything about it.” I didn’t.
The two looked at each other. Then the short one grinned. “Well, that’s cool… just forget it ever happened.” They walked out, climbed in their car, and drove away. To this day I have no idea what their visit was all about.
From an interview with Charlie:
“Leno La Bianca was killed for a black phone book with all the numbers in it – the phone numbers that control the music market” One should read ‘Mob’ in front of ‘phone numbers’ here.
Hmmm. One thing this shows is there was a side to the family that Charlie and Charlie alone was privy to. With Paul Watkins as the nominal head of the Family with Charlie inside (or perhaps a well placed police plant), the Mob was making sure that their side stayed out of the story. Clearly two Mob incidents on record with LaBianca mentioned as tied to them point towards the Waverly drive murders as being murder for hire. But nobody ever bothered to ask any questions about Mob angles. It would conflict with the Helter Skelter motive for certain.
Robert DeGrimston-Beast-lite
The Process Church of the Final Judgement, the Church of Satan, the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O. and Black Magick–High Weirdness in Extremis
The Process Church of the Final Judgement was a splinter group of Scientology that came to America in the 60’s to branch out their seemingly neo-Satanic organization. One must remember that Satan was pretty hip in the 60’s in California. Anton LaVey was sought out by the Hollywood elite, Michael Aquino of the US Army Intelligence was a highly visible and was oddly a frequent public media speaker for the Temple of Set, often on network television talk shows (Sharon’s dad Colonel Paul Tate worked in intelligence at the Presidio military base with Aquino at the time). Rosemary’s Baby was huge (and directed by Roman Polanski-Sharon Tate had been considered for the role of Rosemary originally). Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr. had been initiated into the Church of Satan by LaVey personally. Sharon had been initiated by Alex Saunders, the notorious king of the witches, while in England in 1967. Saunders later claimed that he befriended Tate on the set and initiated her into witchcraft. He said he had photos showing her inside a consecrated magic circle. Even the saintly Mary Tyler Moore twirled into a photo op with the Process:
The coincidences start to spiral out of control on the occult end of things. Here is where the play acting and real magick may have started to intersect.(aside: no one seems to have noticed that the strange ‘W’ in the word war carved into Leno LaBianca’s stomach bears an uncanny resemblance to Aleister Crowley’s hexagonal symbol for chaos) Polanski’s history of occult films with invocations, Satan, conjuring, sacrifices, witchcraft, sadism, vampirism-with Sharon in the background and foreground surrounded by real occult personages-well things could be expected to not go perfectly. Other things (read: forces)-magickally induced- may have either consciously or unconsciously blorted into some form of half reality as a result of this activity in Hollywood-on camera and behind the scenes, that could have dangled into the scene, a negative paranormal influencing the background of events, real but unnoticed.
The Process had set up in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1968, and began proselytizing. Their San Francisco headquarters on Cole Street was just up the street from where Charles Manson was living in early 1968. Brother Ely of the Process was an early close Manson Family associate. Under his real name, Victor Wild, he was a leather goods manufacturer who made goods for the Family., and was a close and reliable ally for a while. The Process had set up in LA, where they were helped by Papa John Phillips in getting local rental property on his recommendation. It was down the street from Cielo Drive where their large pack of Process Alsatian dogs terrorized Roman Polanski, forcing him to hide in a garage. The Process beliefs are oddly in consonance with what Manson later preached. According to historian Adam Gorightly:
Some observers have described The Process as a society dedicated to aiding and abetting the end of the world by stirring up murder, violence and chaos. In The Process’ End Times scenario, they would survive the wrath of the apocalypse as the chosen people, which was identical to the Manson Family worldview. The Process philosophy was summed up in Robert DeGrimston’s 1967 book As It Is:
Christ said: Love thine enemy. Christ’s enemy was Satan and Satan’s Enemy was Christ. Through love, enmity is destroyed. Through love, saint and sinner destroy the enmity between them. Through love, Christ and Satan have destroyed their enmity and come together for the End. Christ to judge, Satan to execute judgment.
It was this marriage of Heaven and Hell that Charles Manson grooved with. Manson’s cosmology—though similar to The Process—projected a more simplistic dualism, as he was known to his followers as both Satan and Christ. Like The Process, Manson preached the Second Coming, and that when Christ returned this time, it would be the Romans (i.e., the Establishment) who went up on the cross in his place. Following is a list of other similarities shared by the Manson Family and The Process:
Manson spoke frequently of the bottomless pit; The Process, of the bottomless void.
Within its organization, The Process called itself “the family,” and referred to its members as brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers.
Fear was a focal point for both The Process and Manson. A special issue of Process magazine dealt exclusively with the topic. “Fear is beneficial,” wrote the author of one article. “Fear is the catalyst of action. It is the energizer, the weapon built into the game in the beginning, enabling a being to create an effect upon himself, to spur himself on to new heights and to brush aside the bitterness of failure.”
The Process Church symbol was that of an inverted swastika, the very same symbol Manson later carved into his forehead.
Both The Process and Manson recruited biker groups. The two biker gangs closest to the Manson Family and The Process were the Satan Slaves and the Straight Satans.
The Process Church opened a chapter in Los Angeles in early 1968. They stayed in public view until a few days after Robert Kennedy’s assassination on June 5, 1968, after which they dropped mysteriously from sight.
The Death Issue, with Manson penned article
The Process went underground. This group caused no end of trouble trying to distance themselves from Manson in the wake of the murders. Yet they contradicted this stance by having Manson write an article from jail for their 1971 Death issue. This wasn’t going to convince anyone they weren’t simpatico brethren. Reports that a Process member had been working with Sirhan Sirhan the night of RFKs murder didn’t help, and neither did their bug out immediately after the RFK’s assassination. Lawsuits flew, publishers lawyered up, and damage control units were sent out to both explain and silence the inquisitive and the talkative.
From Gorightly:
In Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi recounted how Manson had been bragging about a relationship with The Process, until one day he was paid a visit in jail by two brethren of the church, “Father John” and “Brother Matthew.” After their departure, Manson seems to have clammed up for good about The Process, and since then has made no further comments. Prior to the visit by these two mysterious Processean MIB’s, Manson was asked by Bugliosi if he knew Robert DeGrimston, and his reply was to the effect, “He and I are one and the same.” After their visit with Manson, the two Process members met with Bugliosi and assured him that Manson and DeGrimston had never met.
Despite their denials, there is quite a bit of Process philosophy dancing through the main tenets of Manson’s belief structures. When Manson started preaching getting ‘the Fear’ to the Family in the summer of 1969, it is perhaps not coincidental that the Process were actively researching and preparing their ‘Fear’ issue, published in late summer 1969 after most of the Process had left the States and returned to London. It is clear that despite their denials, Manson had some considerable contact with them. Bruce Davis had gone to England to stay at Process headquarters in London. The Process sued Ed Sanders for a chapter in the first edition of his book The Family and forced subsequent editions to remove all mentions of them within it. One particularly troubling story in that edition showed Manson to be part of the inner circle of the San Francisco chapter. But it is clear that the ideas Manson espoused, such as being Jesus and Satan at the same time is heavily derived from the Process and their ideas of Lucifer, Jesus, Jehovah and Satan existing as four parts of a single unit.
Rumors at the time said that the Process offered $25,000 to take out Sharon for what she had learned about the RFK assassination via the Sirhan Sirhan connection. Supposedly, she had overheard some things while at a dinner party and had started asking questions. Whether that is true or not, it is an unsettling fact that Roman and Sharon had dinner with RFK the night he was assassinated.
Combine the Manson family’s death squads with the Zodiac killer and Los Angeles was a scary place to be indeed in 1969 (140 or so murders). Sanders reported that at least five separate sources informed him that Manson was involved with the Solar Temple Lodge of the O.T.O. (a society founded by Aleister Crowley), both at the Lodge’s desert ranch, and at one of their houses in L.A., located near the USC campus. Sander’s also claimed that a house owned by Jean Brayton at 1251 West Thirtieth Street in Los Angeles was supposedly frequented by Manson. Some say it was Tex Watson, not Charlie. (Much of this information is only contained in the first edition of Ed Sander’s book on the Family, and is now deleted from subsequent editions). Ed Sanders’ book has a large section on Jean Brayton and the O.T.O, an Aleister Crowley organization. Her group was considered ‘renegade’, but had most of the trappings of an O.T.O. lodge. Brayton had many similar beliefs as Manson regarding imminent black vs white race wars, and believed it was going to get real in LA in the summer of 1969. She predicted chaos would break out and her followers should leave the area before the summer started.
Bikers as the Army
Jean Brayton and the O.T.O. intersect with Manson on one big idea-bikers will be the army of the future. The O.T.O. thought a huge black/white war was coming to LA in the summer of 1969, much like Manson, and had tried to get motorcycle gangs to be their muscle and advocated getting out of LA before the summer of 1969 before it went down. Manson hung out there with them, and according to insiders was a member of the O.T.O. Member or not, Charlie absorbed much from them. The Process also looked to biker gangs as essential muscle in spreading the fear so their message could come to fruition.
Some of the ‘biker as an armed force’ ideas popped up even closer to home, and more current to the tale. According to Nightflight: “in fact — in yet another example of the parallels that existed between Southern California’s biker and hippie countercultures — members of Manson’s Family would occasionally drop by Paramount Ranch, located at 2813 Cornell Road, in Agoura, California, and visit the set while Laurence Merrick and his cast and crew were filming scenes (on a biker film).
It’s interesting to note that this film’s concept of pitting white against black in a race war, in the year 1969, is very similar in some respects to Manson’s concept which he called “Helter Skelter,” an apocalyptic war arising from racial tensions between blacks and white, which he believed was foretold in Chapter 9 of the book of Revelations in the bible.” Oh, and Manson mystery man Mark Ross had a cameo in the film. Merrick had co produced the famous Manson documentary in 1973 (see below). A biker themed race war film being made just up the street from Spahn ranch by future Manson film producer right when things heated up in August is beyond weird-or a nearly unbelievable synchronicity, like it was part of a larger script.
Magickal Traces and Synchronicities
So to recap: the Process moved into LA in 1968, and Manson has already consorted with them in San Franscisco. They preached that Jesus and Satan were the same thing, a thing central to Manson’s beliefs and frequent topic of his sermons. With Manson mingling in these circles, the knowledge of black magick rituals for power would not be unknown to him. Manson was said to have ‘postulated’ things they needed-wishcraft of a sort-and got results. The post Fountain of the World time is when the Family really started to believe Charlie was Jesus, because he’d made some unlikely things show up out of thin air after his ‘postulating’: large cash donations, professional musical instrument donations, free studio time in expensive LA recording studios, free use of a fully funded and huge waterfront mansion, a variety of foreign sports cars and a full on Hollywood lifestyle for a few months-even Manson probably believed he had the magic touch.
But if he upped the ante and tried some spells he’d acquired in his travels, then what the hell, you could see him saying: ‘I want to be more famous than the Beatles. I want to be remembered forever” Tempting thoughts when one is presented with a methodology to make them come true. Take a look at the results: Charlie wanted to be on the cover of Rolling Stone. That happened. Charlie wanted a TV special on ABC to reach millions of people at once with the message–that happened. But like many Black Magick spells, they never come out quite like one would intend, especially when launched by magickal novices. And the fact that these wishes did come true, albeit not in the way he wanted, just as this kind of magick often can backfire and seem to work simultaneously, is a bit creepy. (check out the creepiness of 90’s era Manson obsessed author and practicing magician Nikolas Schrek randomly getting his ear cut off in a public scuffle while he was researching Gary Hinman getting his ear cut off (before/during his 1969 murder)? That’s the kind of beyond fucked up, yet it happened-even for the most hardened reader, you have to admit that is another quantum level of coincidence.)
And Further Down the Satanic Rabbit Hole…
Some have speculated that Roman Polanski was doing a little more than dabbling in Satanic rituals. Manson obliquely referred to this in an interview:
“How does your heart beat up on this altar when you see Sharon Tate’s body laying there all naked and murdered dead. Do you think I had something to do with that? That was the altar. It had nothing to do with me. It was the turnaround of a whole world. It was the Aryan woman that was being bought up from the head for Rosemary’s Baby. They were the cult.”
At the very least, this shows that Charlie was not unaware of what was going on at Cielo behind the curtain. Like Beausoleil, Charlie seems to think that some really weird and cult-like things going on at Cielo were closely related to the murders. The idea that the murders were an intentional sacrifice of Sharon and her unborn baby at the behest of Polanski in a power ritual vaguely mimicking the plot of Rosemary’s Baby is, well, something nearly beyond comprehension. Yet Satanic trappings and rituals had bled into Hollywood society.
Perhaps Sharon’s friend Joan Didion’s quote from the day after the murders, like Gail Zappa’s similar reaction indicates some of this has more truth in it than anyone was comfortable discussing:
“Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”
The Church of Satan
Anton LaVey and Jayne MansfieldMichael Aquino, Sammy and LaVey
Satanic trappings had started to intersect the family early on in late 1967 at the famed Spiral Staircase house in Topanga canyon. A woman named Gina held increasingly frequent and increasingly weird parties there, and Manson and his small troupe of girls parked their ‘Holywood Productions’ black bus there and set up shop until the scene got uneasy. Manson himself had said that dark magical practices started to be commonplace there at a time when celebrities were starting to roll through the house, and it got too weird, even for him. (this is where Bobby Beausoleil enters the tale, and his association with Kenneth Anger and his starring role in Lucifer’s Rising being filmed at the time is perhaps one of the ‘dark practices’ being referred to.) In the mid 1960’s people were getting intrigued by the dark side of spirituality across California. The head of the Church of Satan Anton LaVey had made Satanism fashionable in the Hollywood scene. He was an adviser and played the Devil in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby film. With Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr openly preaching Satanism, it was easy to see Hollywood folks getting drawn deeper into weirdness they didn’t really understand. Oh, and Susan Atkins worked with Anton LaVey in a sensationalist Satan showpiece playing a topless blood drinking vampire before she met Manson. Pieces of the puzzle were beginning to draw together in an eerie fashion, and with occult themes as the glue binding them.
Susan Atkins at Anton LaVey Satan show-pre Manson
Secret Hollywood sex parties and Roman Polanski
“They [at the Tate house] had fallen into sadism and masochism and bestiality—and they recorded it all on videotape, too. The L.A. police told me this. I know that three days before they were killed twenty-five people were invited to that house for a mass-whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope”–Dennis Hopper
“They were fucking pedophiles, they weren’t innocent.” -Manson about Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski and Jay Sebring.
She was Sharon Tate’s best friend and Sharon had told her that Polanski was in the habit of making home movies of himself having sex with young girls and then showing them to Sharon Tate while they were making love. Jay Sebring, she said, was into some very kinky stuff. It was that kind of scene.
In an interview with Truman Capote, Bobby Beausoleil said:
“Who says they were innocent? They burned people on dope deals. Sharon Tate and that gang. They picked up kids on the Strip and took them home and whipped them. Made movies of it. Ask the cops; they found the movies. Not that they’d tell you the truth.”
Tate had been filmed in threesomes with famous Hollywood elite, and in a certain sense, was passed around as a treat by Roman Polanski. Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers and Warren Beatty famously offered a $25,000 reward for the solving of the murder. Those three also happened to be on film with Cass Elliot in a porn film found at the Cielo Drive house, and other recognizable Hollywood faces were have said to be among the ones filmed having sex with Sharon. Investigator Hal Lipset discussed some of the films confiscated and returned back to Cielo Drive, things hitting underground circles- things that those who knew spoke of quietly: Sharon Tate with Dean Martin. There was Sharon with Steve McQueen. There was Sharon with two black bisexual men. (Oddly, McQueen was on the Manson Family’s alleged celebrity snuff list.) Charlie had said in one interview that Susan Atkins had consorted with Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers and dallied up Jay Sebring. It’s sometimes hard to tell if Charlie is blowing smoke or dropping hints, but it is interesting to note he picked two of the guys on the Cass video. Knowledge of this would be a nightmare, so things were sent to the press referring only to ‘private films returned to the Polanski home’. An aspiring starlet nervously asked LAPD for some undeveloped film that had been taken into evidence, not wanting lurid scenes to be splashed across tabloids. Brynner, Sellers and Beatty likely had similar thoughts.
Said Manson in an interview with Ron Reagan Jr.:
“Did they tell you about all the film that they got with the dogs and chauffeurs, that came out of the black and white, when Yul Brynner and Peter Sellers paid $30,000 to get the videotapes back that they had done with the pornography, where they were gobbling on each others knobs in the closet with poor Sharon, beautiful Sharon?”
A bit of silence instantly descended on sex parties where Manson girls and Charlie intermingled with the famous at some weird parties. Nuel Emmons published this likely true tale in his book:
“We had long ago chucked our inhibitions about sex,” Mr. Manson supposedly said. “But chains, whips, torture and other weirdness were not part of our routine.” The book also recounts a supposed ménage à trois with Mr. Manson, a male movie star and his television actress wife, after which the man, one “Mr. B,” “slipped five one-hundred-dollar bills in my pocket.”
That’d be three grand in today’s money.
Manson had corroborated tales of large scale sex parties at Dennis Wilson’s house (ask Mike Love, he has spoken of these events) and the Family were getting known on the Hollywood scene as ‘people to invite’.
Angela Lansbury’s kid Didi was in the family, with a note from mom approving this arrangement. A huge scandal almost ensued. She was 14. Do you need a famous Hollywood daughter getting fucked up with the Manson Family? Cops were now wary of the Family and noted the underage membership. Deidre spent a while with them before being recaptured and drying out. But wherever you turned, orgies including underaged girls were a common lane where these two circles (Manson and Polanski) had privately also run across each other. But publicly? Only cryptically referred to.
Interlude 1: Weird Premonitions-Jean Harlow, Jay Sebring and Visions of Slaughter
Jean Harlow, sex kitten of original Hollywood, had her husband Paul Bern die under mysterious circumstances in their Benedict Canyon mansion in the early 1930’s. This house was said in the intervening decades to be decidedly creepy. Which made the following even weirder:
Harlow’s Benedict Canyon mansion at Easton Drive had ended up three decades later as home to Jay Sebring, the “hairstylist to stars”, the ex-boyfriend of Sharon Tate’s and one of Cielo Drive’s 1969 fellow murder victims. Tate was house-sitting at this very same residence one night while Sebring was away for business. She was awakened by an intruder in the bedroom.
In August 1968, Tate told columnist Dick Kleinerabout a dream she had in 1966: “I saw this creepy little man. He looked like all the descriptions I have ever read of Paul Bern.” The ghost began to run around the room haphazardly, clumsily bumping into furniture and cursing loudly, while blood spurted from the hole in his head. Frightened, Tate hurried downstairs only to be confronted by the horrifying apparition of someone bound to the newel post, with his throat slashed. Tate later said that she somehow knew that the mutilated figure was Sebring. Then, the apparition vanished. In view of what happened exactly one year after this interview, one has to wonder about the details of this dream, and how they bear more than a casual resemblance to what transpired in Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, up the street from the Sebring house. Did Sharon see the future?
Interlude 2: Weird Murders Abound
Laurence Merrick worked with Sharon Tate before her death in his acting school. He had non-US military connections. He became involved filming a movie just up the road from Spahn Ranch that mimicked Charlie’s Helter Skelter theme, and employed Manson family members. Later, with Robert Hendrickson, he moved from the biker war film to Spahn Ranch and began filming the Manson family for a documentary-one famously banned in California in 1973. According to Bryan Thomas:
Makes you wonder what kinds of conversations they were having at Paramount Ranch between members of the cast and crew and some of Manson’s followers. There were also many interesting cameo appearances, including a real member of Charles Manson’s gang, Mark Ross (he plays “Singer”), who later claimed to write a theme song for the film that was never used […]”
How much of the philosophy was cribbed from this film alone? The timing coincides with uptick in Helter Skelter talk. This story is already odd, but Merrick’s 1977 murder in public by a failed musician who may have not actually been responsible just adds to the weirdness factor in this one. Oh, and Merrick was getting documented government subsidies to sponsor his studio training and film making endeavors. Hmmm.
Interlude 3: Weird Vibrations: The Beatles took LSD in Sharon Tate’s future house on Cielo Drive?
Mia Farrow and the Beatles
John Lennon spoke to Rolling Stone in 1974 in one of his most candid interviews ever. When the tale of LSD comes up, he recounts their first time in London. Then he continues:
“The second time we had it was in L.A. We were on tour in one of those houses, Doris Day’s house or wherever it was we used to stay, and the three of us took it, Ringo, George and I. Maybe Neil and a couple of the Byrds – what’s his name, the one in the Stills and Nash thing, Crosby and the other guy, who used to do the lead. McGuinn. I think they came, I’m not sure, on a few trips. But there was a reporter, Don Short. We were in the garden, it was only our second one and we still didn’t know anything about doing it in a nice place and cool it. Then they saw the reporter and thought “How do we act?” We were terrified waiting for him to go, and he wondered why we couldn’t come over. Neil, who never had acid either, had taken it and he would have to play road manager, and we said go get rid of Don Short, and he didn’t know what to do.
Peter Fonda came, and that was another thing. He kept saying [in a whisper] “I know what it’s like to be dead,” and we said “What?” and he kept saying it. We were saying “For Christ’s sake, shut up, we don’t care, we don’t want to know,” and he kept going on about it. That’s how I wrote “She Said, She Said” – “I know what’s it’s like to be dead.” It was a sad song, an acidy song I suppose.”
Though it isn’t exactly clear in Lennon’s mind where it happened, the mention of Doris Day’s house could lead one to Terry Melcher’s property at Cielo Drive, the future home of Roman Polanksi and Sharon Tate. It was a well know short term rental property. The possible idea that Manson and the Beatles had been in the same house (separated by less than two years) and then the house door later bore words from Beatles songs yet to be written painted in the murder victims blood? It is an unclear tale and not clear location in Lennon’s telling, but would be a temporal mind fuck beyond description.
Interlude 4: Weird Confluence-President Gerald Ford, Squeaky, Tex and Bruce Davis
Squeaky immediately after trying to shoot President Ford
Bruce Davis, the forgotten assassin
Squeaky Fromme had tried to shoot President Gerald Ford in 1975, famously proclaiming “Can you believe it? It didn’t go off!”. Why she did it wasn’t really clear. Something far weirder is the tale of Bruce Davis while he was in prison. In 1984, he met Beth Wilson through his born again Christian work, and they became very taken with each other. So taken, that Beth broke up with her fiance, Steven Ford, son of former President Gerald Ford. She broke up with Ford, and married Davis in 1985. How Gerald Ford shows up twice in a Manson Family tale is beyond me.
In one of the more ill advised prison decisions of the 70’s, Bruce Davis was assigned to California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, where Tex Watson was already incarcerated. As born again Christians, they worked in the prison ministry together, and began preaching. Soon they had run of the prison, their own offices and telephones and acted like they owned the joint. Inmates complained that they together were preaching a rather weird version of Christianity-one that singled people out and sounded very much like Charlie’s neo-hippie Jesus rants from 1969. Finally cooler heads prevailed, Tex and Davis were bounced from the ministry, and the weirdness dissipated. But seriously, who thought letting Tex and Davis preach Mansonite Christianity together was a good idea? Back to the tale:
The Government Project
Some researchers see some behind the scenes manipulation of events-government manipulation. There are ideas that Manson was used to help pillory the nascent hippie movement. Far fetched? Yes and no. The guardian angel that Charlie had somewhere kept him on the streets when anyone else would have been back in the joint quickly. Leslie Van Houten’s initial interview with police mentions meetings with black leaders, and a man she was certain was government connected.
MISS VAN HOUTEN: Well, it seemed like after we knew what was going to come down we tried talking to leaders, you know, black leaders, and we saw that they were stalling.
And it was almost as though we had to make the first move for it to continue to develop, to get bigger so that it would happen because the black man loves us so much that he would be our slave and do everything we said, let us beat him and mistreat him for so many years that he almost doesn’t want to do what he has to do, but he sees that he has to do it.
And so it was up to us to start it.
MR. PART: Now, you say that you talked to some black leaders.
Who were these black leaders?
And you say it was up to us to start it.
Now, what do you mean by starting it?
MISS VAN HOUTEN: I don’t know. All I know is his name is John and he — he’s pretty big in government.
And I don’t know. He may not be, you know. But we thought he was.
And starting — starting it was that — to just start killing people. Because it’s going to be blood for blood.
Odd that nobody followed up on that tidbit. Who is this John? Why was she so convinced he was in the government? Had Charlie told her that or was it just evident? Van Houten also uses the term Black muslims frequently, interchangeable with the term Black Panthers. Either way, Black militants are expected to invade the ranch, and the family went from from peace and love to military footing.
What is one to make of this 1994 interview, with something only spoken of once:
CM: The [Oriental] came up to me and said, “You must be [the leader of The Family].” I said, “Get away from me with that.”
Q: Who’s The Oriental? Do you remember his name?
CM: A blond-haired, blue-eyed Oriental came to me and [said] “This music is mine, you little bitch. I’ll take your heart out of your chest, tramp.” Terry Melcher (Doris Day’s son) had sent this clown over to me. To Terry Melcher, Rev. Moon was “the man.” He’s not the man to me.
Q: So, it’s got something to do with Terry Melcher…
CM: The Oriental came there wanting to fight. I told him I didn’t want to fight. I ducked him and ran out behind the barn. Somebody else fought him. I [ended up] putting [a canvas bag] over his head. I laid him down and asked, “Do you want me to cut your head off? I [can] take your life right now.” I got him right up to the point of taking his life then said, “Look man, I don’t want to go to Death Row for you. I don’t want to go to San Quentin for you.” He said, “Stay out of the music or cut my head off.” I said, “Go back to your wife and get under her bed and beg her for forgiveness. Because if I take your head, it won’t be where anybody will know it.” And I said, “Now get.” I ran him off. But when I ran him off, the war didn’t end.
……………………………..
People at that ranch were mad at Terry Melcher because he didn’t [sign us to a music contract, and because] he sent somebody over there to fight. He caused some trouble. He almost got some other people killed. Some people put their life on the line because of Terry Melcher. Terry Melcher didn’t even know about it. No one ever told him about it. This is the first time I’ve ever even brought it up. A lot of that poison goes under the bridge. I just forget it, and let it go. Because it doesn’t matter… To dig it up only brings up more negativity. The time is done. The crimes are over. It went through the changes.
Or this interview with Ronald Reagan Jr.:
“Sharon Tate and those people were killed because Terry Melcher broke a contract and sent 3 Orientals with hatchets over to kill somebody else. He didn’t directly do that. What he did was he sent his mother’s man over to put the light out in another chamber.
In other words, you raise a man up in the music and everybody wants to say ‘Hey well, mine is better than his.’ and ‘What are you doing up on my stage?’ and ‘Who controls what on this set?’ and ‘Who is the man on this set? Clark Gable?’ or ‘Where is your fear?”
I honestly do not know what he is referring to there, but the details seem too specific for Charlie to be talking off the cuff about nothing. Who is this ‘Oriental’? Some of this sounds like Manson could be speaking allegorically, speaking of Melcher. Yet the mention of Melcher specifically in the story seems to contradict this argument, and it honestly seems like he is speaking about something that did happen. The fact that ‘the Oriental’ is mentioned twice in separate interviews is strange, and Doris Day being mentioned as hiring ‘heavies’ in rambling fashion makes this whole story intriguing, and perhaps based more in fact than just Charlie making up things on the spot. It remains something little discussed, like many details of this tale. *note-read the comments to this article for a reader that had the explanation to this tale
Legendary researcher Mae Brussell immediately suspected we were not told the truth about the Manson story, and immediately started investigating. Her unerring ability to ferret out government involvement suspicious events led her down some interesting avenues. She knew deep down that the expanding hippie movement was on someone’s radar, and something would be happening soon. She asked some important initial questions in an October 1971 radio interview:
“Who recognizes something good in this movement?
Who was putting it down?
What is their philosophy?
Hippies that were interviewed in magazines like Ramparts or New York Times.
What are they saying about themselves?
What are people saying about them?
I realized that it was going to be stopped in some way, because it was taking hold; It captured the basic good that is in people. Somebody was going to have to get them”
What happened was that the police had to go to where the Manson Family lived. And what did they find there? They found what the newspaper described as a ritualistic killing done by self-confessed hippies, in what they called a military-style commune.
First, the news media should define the word hippie. Because the hippies that I knew from ’67 to ’69 didn’t mean a military operation in any sense of the word, nor in anybody else’s mind in the world. Nor did it to the Rand Corporation, or the President of the United States, or John Mitchell. Hippie did not mean military; it was anti-military; it was anti-war; it was the let’s get it together generation.
So when they found the real killer and he has this beard and guitar, we just can’t call him an ex-convict. They have to call it a military-style commune. We must have military-style communes in Vietnam if a commune is where people all live together and you are military; it’s a military commune. It certainly isn’t a hippie commune, but they have to make it a hippie thing.
Now what did they have in the commune? They had shacks with lookout points; they had telescopes; they had walkie-talkies; they had military field telephones; they had collections of knives and shotguns; they had four-wheel drive [dune buggies]. The neighbors turned them in for threatening them. They drove all night and made so much noise that the neighbors said, “You know, you keep us awake.” And they said, “Oh, we’ll kill you if you don’t shut up.” They threatened their lives.
Now we go to Charles Watson: This was a clean-cut boy who did these murders. He came from Texas. And the questions are:Where was he approached? How did he get into this case? Was it of his own volition?
Last week on the Monterey Peninsula there was an article in the paper that a boy was picked up as a hitch-hiker in Santa Cruz. He was thrown out of the car near the highlands, and we talked about that a littler bit on this show. He was almost killed. And the subject of the conversation was that one of the four men who just about killed him said, “I’m from the Manson Family in Texas.” That caught my interest because something very big in the planning stage of this particular massacre took place in the state of Texas.
So I went to Community Hospital to discuss with this boy. This boy attended five years of College and the American system of education. He was about to go into the Peace Corp and go to the Philippines the next week. He was almost dead out at Community Hospital after just going down our beautiful coast and being picked up and roughed up by somebody who claimed to be from the Manson Family in Texas.
Let us pause to remember Sunshine Pierce had headed back to Texas, and that the Family had taken the bus to Texas before. But seriously, a Manson Family in Texas? Likely this would be street kid bravado to freak out someone during a bit of ultra-violence, but with Charles Watson being so Texas connected, it does leave it to interesting speculation as to who the hell those people were. If it was something real, one can see how that had to be NEVER repeated by anyone in the news media. Tex was noticeably kept out of the murder tale, but Brussell had actually noticed that considerable efforts were made to keep him away from Manson and his image:
We don’t know much—because it’s never brought out at these trials—about the background of Charles Watson, except that he did appear with a beard and became part of the Manson Family. When Charles Manson was arrested, a law firm sent two lawyers who went to Texas to see this particular boy, Charles Watson. Judge David Brown said to the lawyers from Beverly Hills, California, “You take the next plane back to California. I will put you in jail for seventy-two hours or fine you if you don’t get back to California.” And the lawyers said, “Well, wait a minute, that’s our client. We want to see him.” The lawyer that wanted to see Charles Watson was named Mr. DeLoach. He called a press conference at a Dallas Hotel, and DeLoach said this at the press conference: “I came to see my client.” Charles Watson had been in his office in Los Angeles, California thirty or forty times prior to the killing of Sharon Tate and the other six people in Los Angeles. DeLoach said his own background was that he was a Republican candidate for the State Assembly in 1964, and he was chairman for the Young Republicans. He belonged to a law firm on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. At the jail to keep Mr. DeLoach from seeing Charles Watson were twenty Texas highway patrolmen and sheriff’s deputies guarding him. And they fought the extradition for eight months.
When you’re talking about conspiracies, Watson’s defense has to go into every avenue to develop his claim that Charlie Manson masterminded him and programmed the group; that the hippie-youth-magic, Satan kind of thing, controlled him to use his knife to kill these people. Prior to meeting Manson, he was not involved in any kind of violence or altercation.
I have seen no record, publicly, that Mr. Watson had a traffic violation or any kind of problem (he had a single marijuana conviction in actuality). This twenty year-old boy needed an attorney from the Young Republican Committee forty times. I know what the expenses are to meet with any attorney, even for one hour. People use attorneys or public defenders if they have small altercations. But to go to a prominent law office of a man named Mr. DeLoach thirty to forty times prior to the time that you’re going to kill seven people is worth investigating. And it’s particularly worth investigating because the boy isn’t even really considered a criminal or a murderer. When the trial for Charlie Manson took place this boy was in Texas, and they fought the extradition, and he later wouldn’t be associated as part of that clan but as the robot or the product of that society.
When you study this, it is intriguing how much Tex Watson shows up-not in the headlines-but consistently in the background of too many tales. He came and went freely, owned his own wig shop, and was well funded and well connected as soon as he arrived in California. His final return in spring 1969 seems to coincide with the sudden paramilitary training the family went under. Prosecutors automatically assumed this was Manson driven, but there’s evidence that Tex played a larger part in all events than has ever been discussed. (such as his sudden departure before the massive August 16 Spahn Ranch raid and his setting up in Hawaii with unknown friends months later-even getting a job) In news reports, there was a careful divide, Watson was always referred to as a ‘man’, while any references to Charles Manson were ‘hippie’. If one doesn’t always trust the media, like Brussell, then this verbiage combined with the cascade of national headlines were meant to defuse and discredit the hippie movement, and the hallucinogenic aspect of it as collateral damage. Then the thesis that this was intentionally done, and the plan would to be to kill the hippie movement begins to make sense. Brussell collected headlines at the time:
December 2nd: Nomadic hippies in the Tate murders.
December the 3rd: 3 Suspects in Tate Case Tied to Guru.
December the 4th: Accused Killers Live Nomad Life with Magnetic Guru
December the 4th: Hypnotic Killers – Hippie Bands, They’re Controlled by an Evil Genius
Father Became a Hippie, Looking for Sharon Tate Clues
A Move to Indict God
The D.A. Asks Hippie-cult Indictment
Inside the Desert-cult Hideout – Family Members Talk of Black Magic, Sex, Murder
Hippie Family Member Describes the Murder
Cult Leader Plotted the War Between the Races
Hippie Satan Clan is Indicted.
Talk of Cult Leader Arraigned in Slayings
The Love and Terror Cult, The Dark Edge of Hippie Life
Check out the verbiage there. And these are headlines, mind you, not pieces or quotes from articles. Middle America would be strongly influenced by this, and hitchhiking hippies would no longer be flower children, they would be potential knife wielding psychotics. In the bigger picture, yes these kids were dangerous, but not in any way that is portrayed above. They had learned that the system they’d been taught was a lie, a huge shuck. No need to save up to buy a house and keep the real estate industry afloat. No need to buy a car and keep the automotive industry afloat. No need to buy a washer and dryer to keep the aluminum industry afloat. Hell, no need for money. We can live together in crappy housing or even the desert, we can wash our clothes in streams. We can hitchhike anywhere across the whole country for free. We can grow weed and trade it for things.
This would be considered a very real social threat to the powers that be, and would be the beginnings of not only the destruction of the economy, but the whole monetary system itself. If you think that didn’t make people sit up and take notice, you’d really have to be fooling yourself. Mae Brussell was on top of it right away. Now whether Manson was set up to mastermind this thing? Yes there is evidence this could be true. COINTELPRO was a secret FBI program designed to infiltrate and neutralize counter culture groups. Mae Brussell had smelled a rat, but it wasn’t until 1975 that the Church Committee finally exposed this domestic spying and countermeasures operation as illegal. Manson an operative? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, random acts of violence and madness or premeditated chaos with some government hand pulling strings-the folks in the media at the behest of the powers that be knew how to take advantage of the situation and got maximum mileage from the tragedy, and essentially killed the flower power ideal of the utopian hippy movement. The little discussed mutiny at the Presidio San Francisco military base in October 1968 certainly got attention within the upper circles of the government-soldiers turning hippie and refusing to obey orders? This stuff needed to be stopped before the government was swept out of power, like the waves of youth dissent flowing though Europe that summer. There certainly were many reasons to actively discredit the hippie movement. With Altamont right around the corner, that concert and the Manson murders are always spoken of as ‘the death of the hippie’.
Susan Atkins prepares for take off
How Did They Get Caught?
Ironically, it was moving to the Barker Ranch deep in the desert trying to avoid unwanted attention that got them caught. Burning a new and expensive Michigan Loader on Federal land got some police attention right away. (Charlie incorrectly thought it was there to dig trenches in the ground as traps to get him to crash his dune buggy and demanded it be zapped.) Roaring across the desert in dune buggies pretending to play a Rommel/Rat Patrol desert wargame…swooping in on unsuspecting supply depots, blowing things up, and swooping away-almost the perfect childlike game but acted out with real sub-machine guns, knives and jacked up dune buggies. The peace and love group had been overtaken by elements that were coming in larger numbers: bikers, car thieves and gun runners. With obvious car stripping workshops in the desert, there was law enforcement attention, which should have been expected. Cops had finally had enough with their unwanted and almost intentional hell raising going on, and went out to get them. They bagged some Manson Family members little mentioned: in the raid they got Charles Manson, Kenneth Brown, David Hammock, Lawrence Bailey and Bruce Davis. Brown was Zero’s friend from Ohio, and is never mentioned in any story, and David Hammock who shows up only this once in relation to the family and is likewise never mentioned in the tales. Ten women were found with sheath knives strapped to them: Beth Tracey, Diane Bluestein, Sherry Andrews, Patty Sue Jardin, and Sue Martel. (or in real life: Collie Sinclair, Diane Snake Lake, Claudia Smith and Cathy Gillies).
In reality, all of the evidence in the trial used by the prosecution originally stemmed from a muddled confession by Susan Atkins, a confession that was recorded without her knowledge by her lawyers Paul Caruso (an expensive Hollywood lawyer to the stars ‘Better call Paul’) and Richard Caballero (a close associate of prosecution), then quickly shared in detail with prosecutor Bugliosi, and then sold for profit to be published as a quicky paperback followed by headline grabbing huge articles across newspapers of America-(it was only supposed to be published in Europe). She sensed the underhanded way she had been treated by a legal team assigned to defend her, and sued for $2 million for these legal indiscretions in 1972 (but lost). Other things that didn’t sit right-Caballero had replaced Atkin’s original court appointed lawyer, and was a former deputy DA (read: high level prosecution lawyer now appointed for defense). According to a little discussed expose written at the time in the LA Free Press, this confession was colluded in for profit by Susan Atkins, her two attorneys, someone from the district attorney’s office and a multi careered man named Lawrence Schiller (one of whose previous works is a book whitewashing the Warren Commission’s report on the murder of President John F. Kennedy). In a television interview Schiller is alleged to have acknowledged that the sum of $150.000 “had already been paid, received and divided up”. Those who smelled a rat needed to look into this one a little deeper. On a quick read, this could be interpreted as a case of a defendant getting lied to and misdirected by someone assigned from the prosecution team to suddenly be asked to defend them, a seeming conflict as the whole case hinged on her statement. The large legal fees that high power attorneys like Caruso would incur make one doubt that he and Caballero were doing pro bono work-the book deal money would seem to have lined their pockets in the main. Her confession was splashed all over the headlines before the trial, including the LA Times. Only Rolling Stone magazine seemed to notice this powerful conflict of interest between Atkins legal team and the $150,000 they received for spreading the story before the trial began:
‘What possible justification could the Times editors have had in running the confessions? Where were their heads? Can an individual’s right to a fair trial, free of damaging pretrial publicity, be so relative? Can it be compromised so easily by the fictitious right of the public to be entertained? … If Miss Atkins’ confession does not constitute damaging pretrial publicity, what does? What does the phrase mean? Even if the Times could somehow prove that its confession did Manson absolutely no harm, what right did they have to take the risk? The moral decision must be made before, not after, the fact if a man’s right to an impartial trial is to be taken seriously.’
Don’t forget Nixon had already said Manson was guilty, and with this kind of information splashed across headlines in the form of such a detailed and gor-ific account of unprecedented hippie horror–most of America thought he was guilty as well. An impartial trial was going to be difficult. The prosecution had lined up Linda Kasabian, a recent Family addition to turn states evidence and Paul Watkins, someone who’d been out of the Family for a while to tell the tale as inside Manson members privy to supposed secrets. Another new Family member, Barbara Hoyt is someone else who also was instrumental in turning states witness against the Family. She was a short term fringe member of the family, but was one of the few willing to testify (especially after the Family had tried to ‘kill’ her with an LSD laden burger in Hawaii), so she was also presented as an insider. (This time coincides with Tex being in Hawaii, something never mentioned anywhere.) Her stories mirror the tale of Helter Skelter as presented by Bugliosi, and there are some marks of coaching in her statements (as are the testimonies of Paul Watkins and Linda Kasabian). Her testimony in the Shorty Shea murder was demonstrably incorrect, yet was accepted at face value, and was one of the key components in the conviction. She continues to speak against any consideration of parole at all Manson family hearings to this day. (edit: she passed away less than two weeks after Manson)
In view of what had been written across the country, the verdict was a foregone conclusion even before it started. Not without some interesting moments that Rolling Stone was witness to:
‘Manson in court today put on an act that you would not believe. Threw the Constitution in the trash can. Said to the judge, “I was going to throw it at you, but I didn’t want to hit you and I was afraid I’d miss and hit you by accident. But you don’t know what the Constitution is. I wish I could throw it at you like you’ve been throwing things at me.”
All he was asking for was a simple answer to whether or not he would agree to the substitution of attorneys for Susan Atkins.’
“Don’t I get to put on a defense? Isn’t it unusual that you won’t let the defendant even defend himself?” Manson to Judge
Despite the narrative of Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter being fairly burned into society’s collective subconscious, it is a frightening thought that large parts of the story were hidden from view, apparently deliberately, some parts were closer to fabrication, leading one to wonder if the Helter Skelter story is designed to obscure something else. One thing that clearly had to be hidden was….
Who Knew Who?
“If you were surprised by the murders, you weren’t connected to what was going on in the canyon”
The above oblique quote by Frank Zappa’s wife Gail sums it up quite succinctly. In reality, nobody was really unknown to each other in this case. This is usually little discussed. Hollywood film people knew Manson. He’d been on the payroll for Universal Studios as a film consultant (Jesus expert), and knew some movers and shakers there. Rock stars certainly knew Manson, he rubbed elbows and partied frequently with many of them. He lived near them. He was a regular at Mama Cass and John Philips of the Mamas and the Papas parties. He had arranged and supplied drugs to many of them. (Across the street from Mama Cass and a scene for even more parties lived Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski, frequent guests at Mama Cass parties) Manson had actually crossed paths with four of the five victims who ended murdered at Cielo Drive.
Other celebs had hushed up quickly, but were known to have hung out with Manson. Dean Martin’s daughter Deanna was given a ring by Manson and was asked to join the family (she kept the ring but declined the invitation). Buffalo Springfield’s Neil Young pushed hard for Manson to get signed, even begging record mogul Mo Austin to sign him. Young gave Manson a motorcycle as a gift. Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys worked hard to get Manson signed, and used one of his songs on a Beach Boys album. They partied at the Frank Zappa mansion, the Log Cabin. GTO’s and Manson girls interacted. (Frank Zappa’s infamous Log Cabin was just a stone’s throw from the Mama Cass house.) Manson and Tex Watson had been to the Cielo Drive before multiple times. Roman Polanski’s phone number was found in Tex’s little black book when he was arrested. Manson follower Dean Moorehouse, Ruth Ann’s father, crashed in the guest house by the pool on the property of Cielo Drive immediately before Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski moved in. Dean had introduced Tex Watson to the family, and Tex was a known visitor to Cielo Drive. Manson had said that he had been to the Cielo Drive house at least five times. Manson girls came over to party at the main house and use the pool there right before Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski moved in, and after. After Polanski moved in, Frykowksi was seen filming two naked women in the pool, one of whom was Susan Atkins (later confirmed by Atkins and others). Members of the family were very familiar with the guest house, main house and layout of the whole property. Trial prosecutor Steven Kay had dated Manson girl Sandy Good. Manson and most of the girls had partied extensively at their friend Harold True’s house right next door to Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Although it was unoccupied by the couple at that point, it was owned by Leno’s parents, was fully furnished and was broken into many times as a temporary crash location for couples from next door looking to hook up away from prying eyes. The LaBiancas occasionally came and went during this time, but didn’t live there. (Eventually the True house was empty after all the party crew had moved out, leaving an abandoned Manson-known party house next door to Leno and Rosemary at the time of the murders.) It was difficult for the prosecution to dance around the fact that the victims and the suspects were more than well aware of each other.
Two people who rarely get mentioned were the initial suspects in the Cielo Drive murders. Pic Dawson (on and off boyfriend of Mama Cass) and Billie Doyle (once engaged to Cass in 1969) were fairly high level drug dealers (and partners dealing to both Cielo Drive and Manson Family) who were forcibly ejected a week before the murders from a party at Sharon Tate’s house in spring 1969. Billie Doyle was the dealer that was subjected to the whipping and buggering at Cielo Drive only days before the murders. ‘Pig’ written in blood on the door was originally interpreted as ‘Pic’ and he was promptly arrested. His dad was an ‘agency associate’, and he was suspected by several researchers of being a dealer with some CIA connections. Mama Cass expired in London in 1974, and the supposed ‘ham sandwich’ story certainly isn’t true, and there are many unanswered questions about her death. If anyone knew ‘where the bodies were buried’ in the drug trade, including suspected government connections, Mama Cass would be one of them. The results of the autopsy were muddled and contradictory-you can read up on her strange death here. Right before her death, she told a friend that she had overheard that her new boyfriend had been paid to be with her. This enigmatic and troubling comment has never been explained, nor was the new boyfriend ever identified.
Michael Caine recalls attending a party in Hollywood with Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate, where Mama Cass introduced him to a ‘scruffy little man’. His name was Charles Manson. Oh, and Mama Cass had thrown Manson girls out of her parties at her house before. Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski were frequent guests at Mama Cass’. Abigail Folger’s association with the Free Clinic in San Francisco put her in close contact with the Manson Family from the early days of 1967-the two circles had swirled together many times over the years. One final example would be Mrs. Charlene Cafritz, frequent friend and lavish benefactor of Manson and his brood–she was friends with Sharon Tate and Terry Melcher, likewise filmmaker Laurence Merrick was close with both Manson and Sharon Tate. Strangers these circles were not.
Interlude 5: Weird Connections at 1211 Horn Ave
1211 Horn Ave, the Nexus of the Crisis and the Origin of Storms?
Things get weird when one investigates the confluence of players associated with this one innocuous 16 unit apartment building off Sunset Strip. Let’s see if we can quickly outline the people that were associated with the murders that flowed though this building in a few short months. Oddly, very few of the events associated with this location were looked at a little closer by the authorities at the time.
Diane Linkletter-Harvey Dareff’s live in girlfriend, supposedly committed suicide in the presence of Ed Durston by jumping out a sixth floor window, October 5, 1969. Durston lived across the street from Linkletter’s apartment, at 1211 Horn Ave. Despite prominent and widely circulated claims from her Hollywood dad, Art Linkletter, that LSD was the cause of her death, an autopsy disproved the theory. (Durston was an early LAPD suspect in the Tate murders.) Linkletter’s number was in Abigail Folger’s phone book and she knew Sharon Tate. Durston was a friend of Frykowski. Dareff was at the Cielo Drive residence the afternoon of the murders as part of a drug deal. (recall that a large MDA shipment was due to be delivered to Cielo the evening of the murders). Quite a close knit group directly connected to the victims. Many suspect she knew first hand information about the murders. Oh, and Dareff and Durston’s friend Bobby Jameson are very strongly believed to be two of the hippies in the van who famously drove caretaker William Garretson home from Sunset the evening of the murders, even to the point of insisting loudly to William that the cars parked in Cielo belonged to their friends and then getting out and ‘messing with them’. Some investigators point to Jameson also living at the time at 1211 Horn Ave. How nobody investigated this tangled web of interactions is boggling. Whew.
Toni Kay Monti-supposedly committed suicide four days later on October 9, 1969 due to a drug overdose. The cause was listed as her being despondent over Linkletter’s suicide. She lived directly across from Linkletter’s apartment and her windows looked right at the window Diane fell from. Her address? 1211 Horn Ave. She may have had a clear view of the murder of Linkletter. Durston lived in her building. Oddly, Sherriff’s office said there was no evidence she ever knew Diane.
Bernard Crowe, or Lotsapoppa, the guy who was shot by Manson in the single event that seemed to trigger the madness to come, arrested for a forgery and burglary ring in March 1970. His address listed in the report-1211 Horn Ave.
Three months later, there was a major bust at 1211 Horn Ave for stolen airplane tickets. In June 1970, 7 people were arrested for a large ring of stolen airline tickets. Three of the arrested gave their address as 1211 Horn Ave. Two others gave an address of 840 Larrabee, the home of Joel Rostau in 1969. (Rostau, a noted bicoastal drug dealer with mob connections, ended up murdered before testifying in the Manson trial the month before this bust, May 1970)
Suzan Peterson-Jay Sebring’s ‘girlfriend of the day’ was driven around by Frykowski and his artist friend Witlold K during the afternoon of the murders, August 8, 1969. This was Frykowski’s last trip from Cielo before being killed. They were tasked with taking Peterson home. Her home? Horn Ave. Frykowski had called Witold K several times the evening of the murders, up until midnight-minutes before the murders (!), trying to get him to come over, but Witold refused. Suzan also insisted she was supposed to go to Cielo the night of the murders to see Sebring, but awoke too late. Was Frykowski in the middle of a drug deal starting to sour and needed some help? Witold’s adamant multiple refusals would lead one to believe he had some idea what was going on at Cielo that evening.
Finally, near the end of Horn Ave lies the gas station that Tex stopped at to fill up after leaving the murder scene at Cielo. Not enough investigators have asked why they drove away from instead of towards their home at Spahn Ranch, and headed in the complete opposite direction to Sunset Strip. Perhaps they had intercepted a drug shipment that did arrive at Cielo and they were headed somewhere like Horn Ave to ditch them. Who knows, but it is odd they headed to this neighborhood in the immediate aftermath. Cyrano’s, located only blocks from Horn Ave, at the time was a restaurant front for the mob that dealt cocaine to Rostau, Sebring, Billy Doyle and Thomas Harrigan, and could be a place to dump some high end drugs. The latter two were involved with that MDA delivery the evening of the murders. (Sebring’s house was also in this neighborhood). They were looking for something or someone, but no one investigated this question any further.
Multiple unexplained deaths in the immediate aftermath of the murders, two people who were at Cielo Drive the DAY of the murders who just happened to be drug dealers, a symbiotic forgery unit for all ID and passport needs in one apartment with a stolen plane ticket country wide ring in another (Santana, Linda Ronstadt and Eric Burdon were all stopped in airports for using tickets from this source), stolen securities….all these interconnections with the victims, and all with a locus of a single apartment building is a little, um strange.
Who Killed Who?
Did Susan Atkins kill Sharon Tate as she originally said? She recanted that part later. Did Beausoleil kill Hinman? Did Charlie? Bruce Davis certainly left fingerprints on the gun that killed Zero, despite the ‘russian roulette’ suicide conclusion, but never was convicted. Who killed Shorty Shea? (Shorty had beaten the living shit out of Manson in the Gresham street days, and his supposed snitching might not have been the only reason for his murder). Did Tex kill everyone at the Polanksi house and LaBianca house? (almost certainly yes. and no matter where you turn online, you will read people that still think that Charles Manson killed Sharon Tate.)
Who Heard Anything?
Several neighbors testified they had heard unsettling things that night. According to the Tate First Homicide Investigation Report, the closest neighbors, the Kotts, only 100 yards away at 10170 Cielo heard four gunshots in quick succession between 12:30 and 1 am. A counselor Tim Ireland was monitoring a campout down the hill from Cielo that night and testified that he had heard things between 1 and 1:30 am. He heard screams and said he heard a male voice cry out “Oh, God, no. Stop. Stop. Oh, God, no, don’t.” Ireland said that the scream persisted for approximately 10 seconds. He drove around the neighborhood but could not find anything amiss. He was considered a very reliable witness by police investigators in both the timing and testimony.
Around the corner, neighbor Emmett Steele was awoken between 2 and 3 am by his dogs barking, and many neighborhood dogs barking. He stated the only thing that usually triggered this level of barking was gunshots, but stated he was asleep and only awoke at the sudden barking. Marcel Mounton was a neighborhood watch patrolman and testified he had heard three gunshots at roughly 3:30 am, and reported this to his supervisor. Mr. Bullington, another person out early at 4:00 am reported three gunshots to the same Bel Air supervisor (logged in at 4:11 am). Carlos Gill was situated across Benedict Canyon from Cielo (400 yards away) and reported loud arguing at 4:00 am from the direction of Cielo between 3-4 people that became very heated and loud and instantly went silent.
So we have witnesses to events between 12:30 and 1:30 that match the prosecution’s event timeline. Then we have several witnesses that back up another event at 3:30-4 am, the supposed time Manson and an accomplice had returned. Discussion of this second likely visit to Cielo was buried quickly by the prosecution.
the forgotten victim
William Garretson and Steven Parent
Steve Parent was the first one killed at the Polanski house. He is often never mentioned in stories about the massacres, which is consistently odd. He had been visiting Garretson, the lone survivor, in the caretaker house. (his car had been spotted around 5 am on the morning of August 6th outside the gate by the paper deliveryman to Cielo-indicating that he had been to visit Garretson twice in three days) He was shot by Tex Watson as he was leaving in his car and Watson, Atkins and Krenwinkel were entering the property. He was unlucky by a matter of mere minutes in timing his exit.
William Garretson is a tale all by himself. Another teenager like Parent, he was the only survivor of the Cielo Drive massacre and was the first and most obvious suspect. He had hitchhiked into town on the night of the murders. He’d also been dropped off back at home by hippies in a van, and though he said he wanted to be dropped off far away from Cielo, the occupants insisted on taking him to the gate, then inside, showing that these supposed strangers knew exactly where he lived, to the point of them going up to Sebring’s Porsche and saying ‘there’s our friends car, let’s play a prank on him’. No one has ever tried to identify these people, though there seems to be enough to figure out exactly who they were. They knew more about the place than Garretson it seems.
As far as the murders went, Garretson initially claimed he had the stereo on and heard nothing. When questioned a little deeper, he mentioned that he saw the handle on the front door had been tried and the kitchen window screen had been removed. His initial testimony was puzzling and it seemed like he was on some kind of drug, but results were inconclusive. His lie detector test was also inconclusive, especially on the point of what he had heard and whether he had left the guest house at any point. (although the lie detector did find that Sharon Tate had given him weed before and perhaps even that day). Gunshots literally outside the door, dogs freaking out, horrifying screams on the lawn outside his window? (The house and the guest house were only 150 feet apart) Later, Bill eventually admitted that despite his original testimony, he saw and heard plenty. He admitted that he had looked out and had seen one of the victims on the lawn getting stabbed, and allowed that he might have left the guest house and hid in the bushes to avoid detection by the invaders. And then some very weird stuff too-read his initial police interview here and listen to his very strange 2016 interview here. (The interview is in four parts, and are podcasts numbers 38-41 in the menu at the top of the page).
Re reading this, his general demeanor with the police when arrested at the time, and the honestly fantastical events he relates in his last interview make me wonder if belladonna was involved. Many of the things he said and said he saw are not inconsistent with the drug. In one interview, Garrettson mentions some girls who have come around before, including someone using one of Patricia Krenwinkel’s known aliases. Did she know Bill, and when she was sent out there to check his cottage-did they drug Garrettson with this stuff, knowing from first hand experience that he wouldn’t be able to testify to anything accurate? The girls had been known to carry the potion around to dose people with. It does go a long way to explaining the ‘mutant baby’ he says he saw among other things. On the other hand, why not just kill him?
Copycat
This is something that Bugliosi entertained as a motive, but pressed forward with Helter Skelter instead. According to this, as soon as Bobby Beausoleil called the ranch and said he was under arrest for the Hinman murder, the girls formed a plan to commit copycat murders (Tate.LaBianca) to prove Bobby wasn’t guilty since he was locked up while the new murders happened. This is also what Charlie said happened in the Nuel Emmons book-he’d arrived home from Esalen, Beausoleil was under arrest and the girls had a plan. According to Manson, his only concern was that these whacked out chicks were going to get him sent back to jail with hare brained schemes like this. Some problems with this angle, Beausoleil had returned to the Hinman house days after the murder to scrub ‘Political Piggy’ off the wall (cops agreed this happened) for some reason. (an aside: Beausoleil had kept the murder knife on his belt sheath, every day after, horrifying biker Danny DeCarlo, who was privy to the murder details-and was ordered while fleeing north at a rest stop to remove the knife by a local policeman, putting it in the trunk where it was found later. Seriously?). Elements of copycat are definitely in later events, but disregarding the Bugliosi narrative, once one looks at all of the weirdness surrounding this tale, it is hard to see how Cielo Drive and the LaBiancas weren’t both targeted intentionally.
Dennis Wilson’s crashed Ferrari, courtesy of Tex and Clem
Follow the Money
On the surface, the Family was dirt poor, eating garbage. But they spent money like it was going out of style. Dune buggies purchased. Radios purchased. Rent on Gresham street. Drugs aren’t cheap. Where did the funds come from? Acid just seemed to show up in bulk. (researchers suspect the The Brotherhood of Eternal Love..a tale of their own..shows up here). Hell, let’s roll back the clock to Manson getting out in 1967. Soon he had a schoolbus and access to gasoline credit cards to travel thousands of miles. One wonders whether there was some funding from unnamed sources at the outset. Some members brought money in. Juanita brought a large chunk of her inheritance in (it was used to pay off George Spahn’s tax debts) Linda Kasabian contributed $5k she stole. Manson had given thousands of dollars to George Spahn for various reasons, mostly associated with keeping the Family safely living at the ranch. Manson had a more than one rich patroness who donated mucho moola. One tale out there is of a mountain plane crash near the desert ranch of Vegas gambling junket-when found, the occupants were in the plane, but someone had stripped Vegas plane of all cash and valuables. Was this crash a large source? Fancy cars, fancy motorcycles are behind the media screen of dumpster diving vagrants.
More than one rich benefactor-Charlene Cafritz in particular-unloaded a ton of cash on the Family through Manson. Charlie was a beneficiary of her ministrations, and she turned over close to $100,000 to various friends, including much to Manson. When Charlie visited her in Reno Nevada where she was setting up residence for a divorce for a couple of weeks, she took several motion pictures of Charlie and his girls, yet another thing that was immediately hushed up and not discussed or seen by anyone. One strong reason would be that Cafritz was a friend of Sharon Tate, Terry Melcher and other main players on the Polanski side of the tale, so there may be films of Polanski, Tate, Manson and the girls together out there still. Oh and in December 1969, right after the Family was busted, Cafritz was arrested for selling heroin to undercover police in September 1969. Was this a set up, or was this 23 year old lady just falling apart at the seams? The date of arrest is convenient in that she would be essentially silenced in the upcoming trial. (we never found out, as she died under mysterious circumstances in early September 1970). Going even further back into 1967, several sources say Abigail Folger was kicking in money towards the Family in the early days from contact with the Free Clinic.
One thing you never see discussed is where did the Manson family get two semis? Semi like tractor trailer 18 wheelers. One was used to haul equipment, one was used as headquarters at Spahn as they prepared to move into the desert permanently. Paul Watkins is very clear in his book that they had two of these, yet they seem to appear out of nowhere. This would not be an easy purchase, but no one seems to have mentioned them or have asked where these came from?
Unsolved Murders
Here is a sampling of a few of the dozen or so murders alluded to by the family that have not been solved. There are more if you dig:
John Phillip Haught, aka Zero, a Manson family member suspected of ‘loose lips’ killed in the presence of Manson family members Catherine Gillies, Bruce Davis, Susan Bartell, and Little Patty. Despite the gun being completely full, police accepted the Russian roulette story and ruled the death a suicide. November 5, 1969. The location was Mark Ross’ house, a Manson family associate who often let the family stay there. (suspected informant Bill Vance lived there) Mark was later Aesop Aquarian with the Source family. Marina Habe and Reet Jurveson also show up as fringe characters who were murdered less than two months later, with one being mentioned as a possible girlfriend of Haught. Investigators strongly suspect these two were done in by the family.
James and Lauren Willet- murdered living in a house with Squeaky, Nancy Pittman and Priscilla Cooper. Pittman and Cooper got five years for the murders. Lauren was buried under the house and had supposedly died playing Russian roulette. Shades of Zero? November 8, 1972
James Sharp and Doreen Gaul, age 15 and 19 were young Scientology students. Doreen was said to be girlfriend of Bruce Davis. Some said they also ran with members of the Process. They were stabbed over 40 times, November 7, 1969, and their murders were never solved. The much traveled Bruce Davis had gone to London to investigate something, unload a coin collection and stay with both Scientologists and the Process at their London headquarters. Charlie supposedly had sent him on a mission never spoken of. Davis was considered the heavy of the family and was responsible for some of the more unsavory violence required. He may have been sent there to infiltrate the Process for Manson…He also may have gone to eliminate…
Sandy Good and Joel Pugh-three months before she ran away with Manson
Joel Pugh was a long time prospective fiancee of Manson girl Sandra Good. Bruce Davis was in London in 1969 and so was Joel. His wrists and throat were cut, and there were strange and cryptic writings in mirror writing around him, but not well recorded in the police report. He died on November 30, 1969, exactly one year before Ronald Hughes. If Pugh had successfully married Sandy, the cash flow was over, and he could have been murdered to keep Sandy Good’s trust fund intact and not absorbed or abrogated by marriage. ‘I would not want what happened to Joel to happen to me.’ was found in a letter in Sandra Good’s apartment, leading one to quickly suspect Family related murder. LAPD strongly suspected Davis of this murder, but to this day it remains a suicide on the UK books.
Four or more murders in three weeks in the immediate aftermath. Manson family members present for three of them, and one where a known Manson murderer was ‘on site’ in London. The timeline makes it seem like there was a concerted effort at silencing anyone who knew some of the truth, with the family as the prime movers and shakers in the effort.
Diane Linkletter
Although officially listed as a suicide, the October 4, 1969 death of Diane Linkletter, daughter of the famous television personality Art Linkletter, is suspected by many to be a murder. She supposedly jumped out a sixth floor window on LSD, the origin of the much repeated tale of the girl who died on acid thinking she could fly, a lie repeated over and over and heavily pushed by Art in the media in a concerted government attempt to demonize LSD use. There are a couple of troubling but convincing reasons to be suspicious. First is the only witness to her alleged suicide was Ed Durston (who was also the only witness to bombshell Carol Wayne’s suspicious drowning,). He was an early suspect in the Cielo murders, and he was an associate Harvey Dareff, Linkletter’s boyfriend and drug dealer. Police had information that Dareff was at Cielo Drive the day of the murders to either drop off or purchase drugs. The murder of his girlfriend less than a month later would go a long way to silencing not only the deceased, but anyone associated with her. (Ed would either be a ‘situation sanitizer’ or a victim of the most unlucky coincidences in history.)
What are we to make of Steve Brandt? Hollywood gossip columnist and connected to Jay Sebring through drug usage, he was inordinately upset over Sharon’s death. He communicated with LAPD information he had about his theories and tips. He began to become unglued in the fall of 1969, and headed to NYC to get out of LA. According to author Dave McGowan, Papa John Phillips wrote that at the end of November 1969, Brandt attended a Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Garden. He had tried to rush the stage to get to a microphone but was beaten back by security. Hours later-he was dead. He died in his NYC hotel room that night of a supposed overdose of barbiturates. Now….the peculiar part here is: why did Brandt feel so unsafe in LA that he needed to hop to the opposite coast?. Just to hang out with Andy Warhol superstars? Maybe. A bigger question would be why would a Hollywood gossip columnist with unlimited access to A-list celebrities attempt to bum rush the stage in the middle of a Stones concert? That is a mighty big question, and mighty out of character. He must have had some information that was so dangerous, to himself and others, that this was the only way for it to get out–announce it to the crowd and let it go viral from there. When the radio and TV news reporters are deliberately ignoring you, when you are getting threatened, when police seem to purposely not follow leads you give them, you’d have to turn to the alternative media. And what bigger audience of freaks likely to believe a strange set of facts than the crowd of a NYC Rolling Stones concert? Perhaps he felt this was the only way to get his unknown message out? Whatever secret knowledge he had, it died with him that night.
Manson attorney Ronald Hughes disappeared in November 1970, and Sandra Good declared he was the first of the retaliation murders. Some claim evidence is conclusive that he was actually caught in a flash flood, but that is far from true. His decomposed body was found between boulders four months later, only proving he died on scene. Autopsy results would be inconclusive, and the cause of death to this day is undetermined, with the only evidence being Good’s words. Add in Rostau, Brandt, Shorty, Charlene Cafritz (all murdered, alleged OD or alleged suicide) and others not covered-well there is a rather large amount of people with intimate knowledge of the goings on that were either murdered, most with no suspects held accountable, or died under mysterious circumstances. It is hard to not see this flurry of deaths in such a short window so close to the trial as something closely related to the events. (See the unusual deaths surrounding the Linkletter clan below)
Finally, we will end with the tale of Manson’s uncle Darwin Scott of Kentucky — he was murdered overkill style with multiple stab wounds in May 1969. Manson’s whereabouts was unclear at the time, but he was out of touch with his parole officer. He had asked to go to Texas with the Beach Boys as an adviser. An acid dispensing hippie guru going by the name of the Preacher with a carload of hippie girls had rolled into town just before the murder. Sure, there were plenty of preacher type hippies rolling through the backroads of America, but this one is a little weird.
‘and they shall be recognized by the seal of god on their foreheads’ -Revelations
Tex and the Tale of the Tapes
The tapes of Tex Watson’s initial police interviews in Texas in 1969 are still sealed today. Some claim attorney client privilege keep them sealed. This is not true as that expired long ago. The only reason given is they are evidence of unsolved murders under investigation. Yet LAPD admit that no Manson associated crimes are under investigation still. Many suspect that his version of the tale as told on tape explodes the Helter Skelter myth, exonerates Manson and some of the girls and would result in a mistrial of everyone involved, allowing their immediate release. The fight to get these tapes released is ongoing to this day.
Susan Struthers (LaBerge) and Charles Watson and the LaBiancas
This is a weird one. Suzan Struthers LaBerge, daughter of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and Tex Watson lived across from each other in an apartment complex in 1968. Were they long time friends? Did she set up her parents to get killed to get their inheritance? Why was she seen with a moving truck cleaning out her parents house before police arrived? The tale of her moving to California after befriending Tex in prison, then moving into the exact town where Sharon Tate’s sister lived and enroll her daughter in Patti Tate’s daughter’s school where the children became friends until Patti uncovered the creepy connection….now that is another really hard to fathom thread-Tex, the LaBiancas and Sharon Tate nexused through Suzan? Was Suzan hoping to knock off Patti and keep attention away from Tex’s upcoming parole hearing? Weirdness abounds on the little told LaBianca side of the murder tale. Was the whole LaBianca murder a set up by Suzan and Tex so she could grab what she could and inherit the rest? Also, Suzan’s boyfriend at the time was aspiring Straight Satan Joe Dorgan-the same biker club that Beausoleil was in trouble with, the same biker gang that had been courted by Manson to hang around the ranch all the time-with Straight Satan Danny DeCarlo as a full time Manson Family resident. It is not a large leap of logic to see the likeliness that Struthers and Dorgan had crossed paths with some elements of the family before, and the LaBiancas and the Manson crew through Struthers were not the complete strangers portrayed in the media. Dorgan was on the first list of suspects compiled by the police. Was she the person Manson called to find out if they were home yet when he suddenly made a beeline to Waverly Drive after driving aimlessly for a long while? She’d know they were on vacation and would be able to quickly find out they were home-she had been with them.
Manson girls on sidewalk of court trying not to look like a cult
Did the Family even exist? Or was it ‘family’? Or was it ‘cult’?
Charlie had a list in his head of real Family members-who was in and who was not. People came and went. The inner circle of girls knew who was in. Tex and Bobby Beausoleil are always written about as members, but were absent from the family far more than they were there. Plenty of people came and went in the early days, but as the summer of 1969 wore on, the family became reluctant to let people leave. Especially people who knew some of the secrets.
But like many communes in the late 1960’s, they did function as a surrogate family for each other. They looked out for each other, pitched in to feed each other, and considered each other to be brothers and sisters. Brothers and sisters who slept in connubial bliss that is.
Lets be real-there were hundreds of ‘Family’s’ in California. Communes by definition were large extended families. From the more famous like the Hog Farm (home to Family member Diane Lake until she was kicked out at 14 for on site jailbait nookie to protect Wavy Gravy et al) to like minded smaller ones located within a few miles of Charlie’s family.
Look at Mel Lyman’s family and the cross fertilization of ideas. Read up on the Fort Hill Community, and despite their protestations, they sound like a cult. Charlie’s group, although not a cult in name, do bear some of the hallmarks.
Who were the Informants? The Hidden Power Brokers? Did the government really know what was going on?
Yes, there were stand down orders from ‘someone above’ documented. How did Manson get arrested and let go so many times when he was out on bail unless he had a guardian angel somewhere fairly high up in the system watching over him? Charlie had meetings in Terminal Island with a lawyer before he got out. But for a career low level hoodlum, it was a very odd choice for a lawyer that wanted to meet with him. George Shibley. According to Mae Brassell– A prominent attorney by the name of George Shibley who works with groups in the Middle East (and Sirhan Sirhan)—in Beverly Hills he has powerful connections—met with Charles Manson just before he got out of jail in (Terminal) Island. No one will know what conversation transpired between Mr. Shibley [and Manson], or why he was up there. If this is accurate, why would Shibley have gone to see him? Did Manson have need for legal representation at that time? Was this a sign of some master plan for Charlie once he was out? Charlie’s original probation officer Roger Smith was connected to the Family early on and also to Abigail Folger through the Free Clinic. Dr. Roger Smith, was a research criminologist who had launched the drug treatment program at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. Dr. David Smith had founded the Free Clinic, and in 1969 clinic administrator Al Rose spent months living/infiltrating the Manson Family before things grew dark. He brought his data back and with Smith, and together published a fairly famous paper on the Family: “The Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study,”. Their probation officer and his wife were somehow allowed to be foster parents to Manson family toddlers whenever they were busted, often, then give the kids back. That seems a bit ill advised for a hippie group with so many lingering negative associations. Manson being his only client makes this something quite anomalous.
Did Al Springer or Bill Vance refuse some of the reward money because they had been directed/sent to infiltrate and be an informant? Who were later little discussed male members who took over once Manson was in jail-Dennis Rice being the best known? Who was the mysterious Manson member around the same time, Mark Ross-the guy who showed up out of nowhere and seemed to have as many big connections as he had aliases? Even the Family wasn’t quite sure who he was or where he’d really come from. He was in charge of the Family once Charlie was in jail. Why did supposed government stooge Cinque, or Donald DeFreeze of the 1975 SLA have in his record that he was assigned to monitor the Manson family’s gun transactions in 1969? Why did Charlie twice say in interviews early that he was in ‘Witness Protection’ upon release from Terminal Island in 1967? Has anyone asked questions around these topics? No one on record, that’s for sure.
How did the LaBianca hit team really get home? Who was the black guy that drove them to Griffith Park before they hitched their second ride back? Did they really stop and buy their ride breakfast on the way home? Who was in the peach colored car that brought Leslie Van Houten back to the ranch after she hitched a second ride from the LaBianca murder house? (three people were in the car) Per Snake’s interview, this guy had cut their field telephone lines from the ranch to the back house, and Leslie was scared shitless of him when he came back looking for her hours later. (side note: Van Houten had returned alone after dawn. Her hitchhike driver supposedly showed up later in the afternoon). How did this guy know they had telephone lines hung to the back of the ranch if he wasn’t part of an official surveillance team? (Much of the tale of the LaBianca murders does not really add up and is in conflict with the official story, with the coroners time of deaths a staggering twelve hours off the police timeline of the murder being the largest red flag in a field of red waving banners).
For those who see coincidences prevalent and no indication of anyone watching over the Family…Seriously, how did Charlie dodge all of this:
In 1967 Charlie was arrested in Ukiah for interfering with an officer
in 1968 in Ventura for having a false driver’s license.
In 1969 his Los Angeles arrests and citations included driving without a license, possession of marijuana; assault with intent to commit bodily harm, later changed to forcible rape; auto theft; burglary; cultivation and possession of marijuana, and the final charges for which he is currently in jail (murder); add in contributing to the delinquency of a minor, firearm theft, receiving stolen property and a couple of counts of statutory rape.
How could a guy on probation get popped that many times, and for some serious charges, and not get hauled back to jail? It was known that he was surrounded at the ranch by not only weapons and stolen automobiles, but underaged and runaway girls-both parole violations. Add in the multiple members of the Family that somehow literally just walked out of jail and were never looked for? (Clem had walked away from incarceration, yet appeared in front of the LA courthouse on camera? It is interesting to note that he is the only convicted Manson family murderer to be released from prison-1985) Was Charlie protected by someone higher up, some legal/political heavy or agency who served as his handler and his guardian angel? This has been posited before, and below is fairly thought provoking corroboration of that idea, coming from one of the officers there, not some armchair hypothesist.
From an interview with Paul Krassner, he mentioned he had spoken with Preston Guillory, a police officer that participated in both the investigation and raid on Spahn Ranch in October 1969. Here’s what Guillory had to say:
We had been briefed for a few weeks prior to the actual raiding of Spahn Ranch. We had a sheaf of memos on Manson, that they had automatic weapons at the ranch, that citizens had complained about hearing machine-guns fired at night, that firemen from the local fire station had been accosted by armed members of Manson’s band and told to get out of the area, all sorts of complaints like this.
We had been advised to put anything relating to Manson on a memo submitted to the station, because they were supposedly gathering information for the raid we were going to make. Deputies at the station of course started asking, “Why aren’t we going to make the raid sooner?” I mean, Manson’s a parole violator, machine-guns have been heard, we know there’s narcotics and we know there’s booze. He’s living at the Spahn Ranch with a bunch of minor girls in complete violation of his parole.
Deputies at the station quite frankly became very annoyed that no action was being taken about Manson. My contention is this — the reason Manson was left on the street was because our department thought that he was going to attack the Black Panthers. We were getting intelligence briefings that Manson was anti-black and he had supposedly killed a Black Panther, the body of which could not be found, and the department thought that he was going to launch an attack on the Black Panthers.
Manson was a very ready tool, apparently, because he did have some racial hatred and he wanted to vent it. But they hadn’t anticipated him attacking someone other than the Panthers, which he did. Manson changed his score. Changed the program at the last moment and attacked the Tates and then went over to the LaBiancas and killed them. And here was the Sheriff’s Department suddenly wondering, “Jesus Christ, what are we gonna do about this? We can’t cover this up. Well, maybe we can.”
I bet those memos are no longer in existence. The memos about what Manson was doing. Citizens’ complaints. All those things I’m sure have disappeared by now. It shows the police were conscious of the fact that he had these weapons in violation of his parole. You’ve got at least involvement here on the part of Manson’s parole officer, on the part of the Sheriff’s Department, probably the sheriff himself, and whoever gave him his orders. Manson should have been [imprisoned] long before the killings, because he was on parole, period. He was living at the Spahn Ranch with an outlaw motorcycle gang. I feel that, to say the least, the sheriff of Los Angeles County is an accessory to murder.
The raid was a week after the Sharon Tate thing, and the intelligence information was coming in for about three weeks prior to the raid. They just didn’t want any arrests made. It was obvious they wanted the intelligence information we were gathering for some other reason. Three days after they were arrested, 72 hours later, they were all released — lack of evidence — after this mammoth raid. This raid involved two helicopters, 102 deputies and about 25 radio cars, and all the charges were dropped against everyone.
It appeared to me that the raid was more or less staged as an afterthought. It was like a scenario that we were going through. There was some kind of a grand plan that we were participating in, but I never had the feeling the raid was necessary or that it required so many personnel. Now, if you were a police official and you were planning a raid on the Spahn Ranch, utilizing 102 deputies and helicopters and all that, one would think that with all the information coming out a month prior to the raid, wouldn’t you have them under fairly close surveillance? If you did have them under fairly close surveillance, wouldn’t you see them leave the Spahn Ranch to go over and kill seven people and then come back?
So the hypothesis I put forward is, either we didn’t have them under surveillance for grand-theft-auto because it was a big farce, or else they were under surveillance by somebody much higher than the Sheriff’s Department, and they did go through this scenario of killing at the Tate house and then come back, and then we went through the motions to do our raid. Either they were under surveillance at the time, which means somebody must have seen them go to the Tate house and commit the killings, or else they weren’t under surveillance.
You have to remember that Charlie was on federal parole all this time from ‘67 to ‘69. Do you realize all the shit he was getting away with while he was on parole? Now here’s the kicker. Before the Tate killings, he had been arrested at Malibu twice for statutory rape. Never got [imprisoned for parole violation]. During the Tate killings and the Spahn Ranch raid, Manson’s parole officer was on vacation, so he had no knowledge of Manson being incarcerated, so naturally Manson was released, but why wasn’t a parole hold put on him?
It’s like Manson had God on his side when all these things are going down, or else somebody was watching every move he made, somebody was controlling from behind the scenes. Somebody saw that no parole hold was placed. Manson liked to ball young girls, so he just did his thing and he was released and they didn’t put any hold on him. But somebody very high up was controlling everything that was going on and was seeing to it that we didn’t bust Manson.
Prior to the Spahn Ranch raid, there was a memo — it was verbal, I would have loved to Xerox some things but there wasn’t anything to Xerox — that we weren’t to arrest Manson or any of his followers prior to the raid. It was intimated to us that we were going to make a raid on the Spahn ranch, but the captain came out briefly and said, “No action is to be taken on anybody at the Spahn ranch. I want memos submitted directly to me with a cover sheet so nobody else can read them.”
So deputies were submitting memos on information about the Spahn Ranch that other deputies weren’t even allowed to see. We were to submit intelligence information but not to make any arrests. Manson was in a free fire zone, so to speak. He was living a divine existence. We couldn’t touch him….
Note the last dozen or so lines of this article
Ed Sanders had noticed some anomalies with this raid, and felt it had been staged. His attention was specifically drawn to the admixture of uniforms both official and unofficial, sometimes on the same officer-it looked like costumes from a studio lot collection in some instances. Things photographed on the site make it look like it was some training exercise. Perhaps it was. The end result was that although 102 law officers with helicopter and vehicle support managed to coordinate a perfect dawn raid, the search warrant was already 3 days out of date. The people commanding this operation would certainly have known that. Did they think the judge would ‘get their back’ and issue some new paper? Or did they know full well that none of the arrests would stick, it was only for show, but it would put the Manson thing on the public radar–for some time in the future. Manson was aware the raid was coming, who tipped him off?
So it seems that someone was protecting Manson, and those in law enforcement were aware of it. Who and why would be the question? Were they trying to protect some story that was being woven?
The housekeeper
The immediate disappearance of Winifred Chapman, Sharon and Roman’s trusted housekeeper–the first one to find the murder scene is generally unreported. Chapman is well known to most researchers, but few are aware of her oddly timed disappearance. She was a long term employee of the Polanskis, and privy to many of their secrets. So it is troubling that one never reads that she was reported missing on October 13th of 1969 by her landlord, and that she was last seen on October 10th. She left her purse and wallet with her ID in her room. Two weeks later she was still missing. The fact that she disappeared on the exact day the Manson family was arrested for good at the Barker ranch should make any investigator wonder if she was spirited away by officials or parties unknown for reasons unknown. The Family were not yet suspects at this point, yet this is an odd coincidence.
Interlude 6: Weird Connections in The Man Who Wasn’t There
Long time researcher Tom O’Neill pulled a name from the periphery of the case, and looked at closer, it is a hell of a tale. Reeve Whitson, a man with all the trappings of a CIA asset, apparently played an integral part of the story, but never was mentioned-anywhere. His name shows up a few times in the testimony associated with Sharokh Hatami, Sharon Tate’s photographer. Hatami had testified (under duress) that Manson had come to the front door of Cielo looking for Terry Melcher, and he directed him to Rudy Altobelli’s cottage on the property as he could likely answer. Reading an interview with Hatami however makes the floor fall out of the room. Hatami dropped the bombshell that Whitson had called him in the morning of the murders, and said that he was at Cielo and everyone was dead. The problem was-the bodies hadn’t been discovered yet, it would be nearly two hours before housekeeper Winifred Chapman would make the official discovery. Taken alone, this could be easily dismissed as faulty memory. Bugliosi firmly denied knowing anyone with this name. O’Neill tugged further in his continuing interviews with Bugliosi, and found that Hatami had been questioned by Whitson and Bugliosi in a room without tape recorder or stenographer (a break in protocol), and that Bugliosi was more than familiar with Whitson. Further investigations found a dozen people who corroborated much of the mystery surrounding Whitson, including the consensus that he was definitely in the CIA-which would go a long way to explain Bugliosi’s obvious feigned faulty memory. A FOIA request received the answer from the CIA that they could ‘neither confirm nor deny his employment’, a boilerplate response that is as close to confirmation the agency ever offers.
Let’s lay it out quickly, as this could be a book in itself:
Whitson called Sharon’s photographer Sharokh Hatami and said that he’d been at the scene of the murders 90 minutes before Winifred Chapman discovered the bodies. He’d threatened Hatami with deportation if he did not testify that he’d seen Manson before the murders at Cielo Drive. Hatami steadfastly refused to say it was Manson at the door, just a scruffy looking guy.
Whitson was a close friend of Roman, Sharon and Jay Sebring, and visited them at their house. He’d also been an acquaintance of Manson. (Paul Krassner also introduces the idea that Naval Intelligence was involved with Manson through another undercover agent posing as a hippy-Charles Winans, in two articles at the time. Manson in one of his last rambling interviews said the money behind most of the whole event was Navy in origin-perplexing at best, troubling at worst) Whitson’s mother Florence was friends with Sharon’s mother, Doris. It is nearly unbelievable (but true) that Whitson was also friends with the notorious Nazi SS war criminal Otto Skorzeny, the person who directed the rescue of Mussolini in 1943 at Hitler’s behest, but had been whitewashed and accepted into America as an intelligence asset. Whitson’s friendship with retired General Curtis LeMay should also raise an eyebrow or two for those who remember his ultra right agenda that led him to be George Wallace’s running mate in 1968. These connections would seem to put paid to claims that Whitson was a self delusional poseur.
Another story that makes one do a double take: Whitson told his parents that he would be at Cielo Drive the evening of the murders. When he didn’t return by the next morning, and news was full of the murders including an unidentified body (eventually identified as Steven Parent), they called the police. Family members said the police showed up, set up a command post in their living room, and tried to get to the bottom of things. When Reeve finally returned later that evening, he had an extensive debriefing with the police. This would be decidedly strange behavior for a single missing civilian. Sharon’s father, Paul Tate did know him as an invaluable close friend who could make things happen, and corroborated his powerful connections-even to the point of co-writing an unpublished book on the murders with him, Five Down at Cielo Drive along with with lead investigator Lt Robert Helder and FBI agent Roger LeJeunnesse. (Whitson had his name removed from the project, wanted no money, and appears in the manuscript under a pseudonym, Walter Kern.)
When Lt. Helder went to interview Polanski and Witlold K (who was particularly fearful and wouldn’t talk about who he was afraid of) at an apartment in Paramount Studios where they were secretly holed up for safety, Helder found Whitson already there.
Then it gets weird….Whitson was close to Robert Linkletter, Diane’s older brother. They worked together on a child proof bottle cap that was widely implemented by many drug companies, a mind blowing connection. Then, the the tale of the mysterious eyeglasses come into play.
Robert unbelievably was spoken of at the time as a suspect in the Zodiac murders, seemingly implausible at first glance, but decidedly strange when one digs into it. One example is the strange confluence of personalities surrounding the mysterious eyeglasses found at the Cielo murder scene, which the police could tie to no one. The senseless massacre of the optometrist Victor Ohta and his family, someone who people thought had made the glasses (he was optometrist for the Linkletter family) caught some attention on October 19, 1970, three days before the glasses were first mentioned in the Manson trial, and three weeks after Robert being seen in public talking with Ohta and his wife. Much of the information on this angle stems from a couple of letters written to law enforcement/Frazier’s legal team at the time by someone named Mrs. Marie Vigil indicating something unseen by law enforcement, and the letter named the murderer arrested in the Ohta killings, John Linley Frazier, and Robert as accomplices (who also closely resembled each other) likewise caught some attention. Add in the suspicious shooting death of John Zweyer, the husband of Robert’s older sister Dawn Linkletter, in their backyard a mere three weeks before the Cielo murders in mid July 1969, and his sister Diane’s untimely suspicious death three weeks after the Cielo murders in October 1969 and you have a large amount of unexplained deaths surrounding the LInkletter clan in a short three month span. It leaves one wondering exactly how many other people on the periphery of the Manson murders died in mysterious circumstances, and why? And why the nexus around the LInkletter family? One could begin to suspect rather than these events being a small part of the Manson murders, that perhaps the Manson murders were part of a far larger operation associated with COINTELPRO and CHAOS. But this is definitely a tale tangential to the murders that exhibits some prominent high weirdness, and the Linkletter angle needs some closer scrutiny.
OŃeill also uncovered another likely CIA employee inside LAPD, Lt. William Herrmann. HIs resume reads more like an agent who served many purposes for the agency than a long term police gumshoe. Investigators uncovered multiple CIA connections deep within LAPD in the wake of the 1968 RFK assassination. Many people point to the well known prohibition of the CIA operating domestically, but a quick review of declassified documents easily disproves this notion. But before we fall deeper into the quicksand, let’s move on…
Some important lingering questions about the Manson Family
Who was the Candy Man, a mysterious guy that Charlie spent a few undocumented weeks at the end of 1968 on the bus in Sacramento looking for? He is rarely mentioned, and if Charlie shared who this guy was and why they were looking for him, well no one is talking to this day. A few weeks is a long time to be wandering around looking for something that was clearly important. Who was Kim, the blonde guy who is only mentioned in Paul Watkins book, but is evidently one of the important male inner circle members along with Tex, TJ, Clem, Paul and Bruce? He is integral to most of the Family stories until he freaks out at the legendary ‘nobody caught fire when we fell into the fireplace’ tale. He left the family permanently in 1968 after this. Who were the full time members and full time mechanics and members of Bill Vance’s crew: Karate Dave, the Turk and others? (Dave walked away from jail untouched in summer 1969, much like Clem did the same summer.) Some suspect Karate Dave to be a paid informant, or undercover law enforcement.
This begs the question, how many of Manson’s crew were actually police informants or monitors? Too many of these folks either disappear off the map completely (like ‘Kevin’ who showed up briefly to become very close and then out of nowhere to disappear without a trace.) Donald deFreeze , or Cinque of the Symbionese Liberation Army of Patty Hearst fame supposedly monitoring Manson Family gun transactions would indicate there were many eyes on the Family that they didn’t know about. Hell even Charlie admitted he knew the big raid was coming on August 16th-backing up the theory that the raid was only a training exercise and Charlie had been tipped.
Beasoleil’s girlfriend Sweet Cindy, never mentioned and one of the few immune to Manson’s raps who showed up at Barker, where’d she come from, and what happened after Charlie made her walk 20 miles to the highway? Which Family members did Tex stay with in Hawaii when he went off long enough to get a job there after the murders? Who is ‘the Oriental’ Charlie referred to in his interview? Who paid for Hendrickson’s film work in documenting the Family? Film isn’t cheap, and they spent hours in front of the camera. (Combine this with the detailed study done on the Family in 1967 in the Psychedelic Journal of Medicine and you have some quite specific documentation of a single rag tag bunch of hippies while hundreds of other groups didn’t get a mention anywhere, and you might get some people to think this was a group being monitored from the get go). How did Mark Ross roll up in a brand new car and take over the family (as is clear in the Rolling Stone 1970 article where he negotiates a $50,000 network deal for the family with Gypsy-he is the point person on this with Gypsy and the rest of the Family is out of the loop). This is the same Mark Ross (as mentioned above in the Source Family) that supposedly turned Hendrickson on to the Family for the documentary-one might ask where this guy came from out of the blue? Why did Manson tell the Family as he left for Esalen that he might be gone for months? If the plan was to audition, one would assume he’d first come back to report he was off to the studio if successful.
Some important questions: Inconsistencies in the LaBianca Murders
Who drops off and let’s a murder squad hitch hike home without a ride from a messy murder scene? Why did Charlie drive around aimlessly going there as if killing time, then stop where he was said to have made a call, then suddenly drive very deliberately to the LaBianca house. Was he told that they were finally home from vacation? How well did Tex know Susan LaBerge, the LaBianca’s daughter? What murder squad takes the time in the house to take a shower, have a watermelon and chocolate milk snack before departing? (the conflicting stories from Diane Lake, Leslie Van Houten and others about: how they got home, who they rode with, where they stopped on the way home, what time they got home-combined with possible wrong times of death? Something is very wrong with the official story. NOBODY would let a murder squad hitch hike home. It is far more likely they hung around waiting for someone to come by and give them a ride. Though this is never mentioned, it seems more likely that the time of death would mean they stayed there far longer than was admitted at trial, and unmentioned parties got them out of there.) What time did the murders at the LaBianca house actually happen? Why did the coroner place the LaBiancas death at 3:30 Sunday afternoon, over 12 hours after their supposed deaths? Much evidence that supported this was ignored. Why did neighbors witness people arguing on the LaBiancas front lawn early in the morning after the supposed midnight murder? Why did a security guard working next door hear furniture being knocked over between 4:30 and 5:00 pm in the house the next day? Why was Rosemary in a hastily put on dress as if she went out at some point? Why were the keys still in the ignition of the LaBianca vehicle? Who leaves the door of their car wide open with the keys in it when they get home at 1 am from a long vacation? Or water skis leaning against the bumper? Did the family take a ride to either Rosemary’s store or Leno’s store to empty the safe of cash and or drugs? Why did a known mafia bookie Ed Pierce (or the Phantom) living on the LaBianca’s street have a rare coin collection in his possession (Leno was a rare coin collector and known heavy gambler). Why did that bookie skip town that week and never show up on the radar again? Why was Rosemary considered a millionaire in the disposition of their affairs? She owned a modest dress shop, Leno was paying back thousands of dollars to the grocery store that he owned and had skimmed from and been caught, and was not overflowing with ready funds. Why did the LaBianca’s complain about their house continually being broken into-things moved around, dogs let out when they were in, furniture rearranged, but few things stolen, as if someone was fucking with them. Who was coming in and out? Had they been creepy-crawled ahead of time, or was Suzan LaBerge fucking with them? They told their family they had little hope the police would ever find out who was responsible. Why didn’t anyone look at Suzan LaBerge’s boyfriend, a member of the Satan Slaves, a biker gang associated with Manson? Author Maury Terry in his book Ultimate Evil wrote a rarely discussed idea that Rosemary was dealing large quantities of LSD, the source of her wealth. Despite what was presented at trial, it seems that this house and the LaBianca’s were clearly the target. A paid hit? Mob connections and everything around the edges indicate yes.
Some important questions part 2: Inconsistencies in theCielo Drive Murders
Why wasn’t the whipping of the dealer, Billy Doyle, who ripped off Sebring which happened a few nights before the murders looked at more closely? Black robes, black hoods straight out of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby film, party goers in a circle on the lawn around the disgraced drug dealer who was publicly whipped and then ceremonially buggered up the ass with a large dildo by Frykowski and Sebring as punishment for selling them bad drugs. Dennis Hopper was there as a witness and said there were several other Hollywood luminaries there, including Sharon Tate. When Frykowski was found, dead on the lawn, his pants were around his ankles. Some saw this is an odd coincidence at the very least, and a strong hint of revenge killing at the most. This is one of the freakier stories that have been corroborated in the whole tale, and one of the weirdest tales in the week of the murders. One can be forgiven for seeing some cause and effect with this event and events later the same week.
Was the Family under the impression that Sharon wasn’t there? This has been stated on the record before, and that has come from several sources on both sides. Sharon was supposedly going to a dinner party at a friend’s house and canceled that night. Her car was in the shop, so any observations either from close or afar would seem to point to her absence from the house on the fateful evening. Was Garretson some kind of low level information feed to someone? His sketchy behavior at arrest and inconclusive statements lead many to suspect he was aware of much more than he volunteered.
Why were there uncorrelated bloody footprints (boot heel) on the porch-hell why was there so much of Sharon’s blood on the porch if she was only in the living room? Did Manson return after the murders to see what had happened, and if so did he try to hang butchered bodies on the porch? Why was there a blood stain on another beam in the house from a rope being hung over it – never mentioned later but caught in initial police photos? Police said there was evidence of the bodies being moved after death. Who left the eyeglasses in the entry way that didn’t belong to anyone known to be associated to the house? Who were the unknown people that left the over a dozen fingerprints that were from unidentified people? (remember the police had nearly 200 print sets of known visitors, workers, friends and family on record to use as matches). Why did Tex and the rest drive in a direction away from Spahn Ranch when leaving Cielo? They headed to near Sebring’s house, and were in the neighborhood of known dealers. Were they trying to unload the large MDA shipment that many suspect was delivered that day? Most of these questions went unasked and unanswered.
Drugs part 3: Where did the MDA go?
Why this question has never been asked is a head scratcher. There is a plethora of evidence dancing in the background that a huge MDA drug deal was going down at Cielo the day of the murders that has been ignored by most investigators. MDA is mentioned by the Family as a motive, Frykowski and Folger were on MDA when murdered, the Canadian MDA dealers ancillary to this angle were excised from the tale, Sebring peeling out of Cielo in his sports car with unknown tandem vehicle at high speed in the early evening of the murders, Linkletter’s drug dealing boyfriend Dareff at Cielo the late afternoon of the murders, a Frykowski friend insisting he’d received a call from Viktor begging him to come over at midnight when the official story has Frykowski asleep at midnight mere minutes before the murders commenced shortly after midnight, reported arguments and gunshots in the 3 am time frame, documented death threats from Canadian dealers, Tex driving around Sunset Strip looking for something/someone instead of heading home immediately after the murders? The easy answer for naysayers would be: ‘there was never an MDA deal, it didn’t happen’. Much of the tale above and below calls that into question though. The large amount of scantly investigated evidence points towards the drug being delivered, which begs the question: ‘where did it go?’. And where that MDA ended up would be a large arrow pointing at the real motives and real culprits never disclosed. Some of this is hard to reconcile for those unwilling to consider this as a lead possibly being a large undiscussed part of the story, and a large international high stakes drug deal gone sour should have been looked at as more than a mere possibility. A darker connection could be the previously mentioned Esalen Institute in Big Sur. In view of the Human Potential Movement research going on at Esalen, the institute would have been a logical connection to this drug that 20 years later as MDMA was still looked at as magical by the medical therapeutic field in unlocking certain unrecognized potentials within the mind–until it was banned in the mid to late 1980’s. This would be the strongest reason ever posited for Esalen bringing down a death threat curtain over the whole Manson question. A quick review of the known facts gives us:
What did Witold K (Kaczanowksi), a close friend of Frykowski know? He was in fear for his life in the immediate aftermath, and rightly so. He had been present for discussions on the MDA deal, and had said that things had gone awry:
“Witold K. told police that Frykowski was offered an exclusive dealership to sell the drug MDA, evidently in the Los Angeles area. Subsequent friction developed, he claimed, and one of the suppliers threatened Frykowski’s life. Witold K. claimed not to know the names of the possible killers but to know them by face only. And that they were Canadian”
More interesting is that Frykowski called Witold K at midnight, insisting he come over to the Polanski house. According to police:
“At a time (estimated about midnight) Friday night, Frykowski called, presumably from the Polanski residence, to Kaczanowski’s art gallery and asked Kaczanowski why he was not up to the house. Frykowski in the conversation admonished Kaczanowski that he was spending too much time at the gallery, working too hard, etc. Kaczanowski declined the second invitation and stayed on at the gallery. He returned to the Woodstock house at approximately 0300 hours, 8-9-69.”
Either Frykowski called Witold K literally minutes before the Tex and the girls entered the house, or the Manson family had already arrived as a part of the MDA deal, either as participants or unwanted interlopers, and Frykowski was calling for help in mediation of some sort. Regardless of what happened, Witlold K was adamant that he would not visit Cielo that day, even after two insistent invitations to be there. The midnight call should have been looked at much closer by police.
One thing that many have used to dispute the ‘drug deal gone wrong’ angle is that there were recreational amounts of cocaine, marijuana (over three ounces), a half ounce of hash and a dozen or so MDA tablets in the house? Chump change. If there was a major deal going down that got interrupted-well they would have just taken what they came for and no one would be the wiser. Same for the LaBiancas. If they found what they were looking for? We’d never know, they took it and fled. So pointing to the small amounts of drugs everywhere being evidence of there being no theft is like pointing to small buds of weed on the floor of a warehouse and saying ‘nobody was here for drugs, they left all this…’ when in actuality two thousand pounds had been stolen leaving just the crumbs. Absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence so to speak. The absence of a large amount of recently arrived pills would never be noticed, even though police did allow that some MDA pills were located at the scene.
And yet, Frykowski had told a close actor friend, Mark Fine, that he couldn’t meet him on August 6th because he was picking up friends from Canada at the airport instead. The next day, August 7th-the day before the murders, housekeeper Winifred Chapman had seen Frykowski and Thomas Harrigan drinking wine together discussing a situation involving a large MDA delivery being imminent, indicating the Canadian friends (Harrigan being one of them) had arrived. Abigail Folger was part of this conversation as well. He was there for a couple of hours and departed before dinner. The day of the murders, August 8th, Sebring was seen at 6 pm speeding away from Cielo Drive in his Porsche, followed closely by an unfamiliar person driving a sports car also speeding closely behind. The witness, Mrs. Terry Kay, said that Sebring didn’t acknowledge or wave to her like he usually did and both cars tore off together. This short 3 day timeline is illuminating. It is hard to not see a major drug angle flag waving here, and police certainly suspected the Canadian dealers knew far more about this than we were told. The tale of Polanski and Sharon Tate’s house being a drug dealing den run by and occupied by movie producers, an A-list hairdresser and a very rich heiress would not play well in Hollywood and would be a tale that would have to be actively surpressed. One might wonder if Stanland’s name starts to get excised from the tale at this point. Pan Am certainly went to lengths to keep their employee (and pilot) out of the tale.
The MDA deal would seem to be a rather larger part of the tale than showed up in the trial or any literature afterwards.
Some Important Questions part 3: Inconsistencies with the timeline
The coroner had set the deaths of the LaBiancas as well after the supposed murder time of 1 am given in the trial. Multiple witnesses to events 12 hours later the next day support the event happening much later, and Bugliosi had difficulty in presenting the evidence and coaxing the testimony to prevent this discussion. Evidence that things were going on hours after the supposed murders combined with the coroner’s time of death being the next day would raise plenty of questions and would make for a sticky situation for the prosecution, so this was artfully obfuscated.
Frykowki’s call from Cielo to Witold K being nearly concurrent with the timeline of the initial assault at Cielo is troubling. Supposedly Frykowksi was asleep when Tex entered the house. How had he made a phone call, then instantly fallen fast asleep? Something does not add up there.
Evidence of something happening at Cielo long past their supposed 1 am departure raises plenty of questions. Multiple people near Cielo likewise heard things that conflicted with the official timeline. Neighbors heard yelling and gunshots that all landed in the 3:30-4 am window, evidence of some activity. One person could be mistaken, but three all pinning the same time? Something happened. But it is kind of weird. Why would timelines be shifted unless some information needed to be actively left out of the trial?
The Second LaBiance Homicide Progress Report-How Did They Miss This?
The list of suspects in the LaBianca is extensive, and Leno’s Mob ties were tangentially extensive: board of directors at a Hollywood Mob bank, horse ownership, bookies, Vegas-his gambling debts were extensive and the list of those who could have had an interest in getting him bumped off wasn’t small. The police report chronicling September to October 15th covers a multitude of embezzlement events and financial irregularities over decades that nearly crippled the family company. The list of suspects that were grilled (some cleared, some not found) was long and detailed. Yet at the bottom, the final suspect was Charles Manson, with a rather large amount of detail and some astonishing observations from the police:
MANSON, CHARLES
Investigators contacted Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau requesting information on murders that were similar to the LaBianca murder. Deputy Guenther informed investigators that he and his partner, Sgt. Whiteley, were presently investigating a homicide that occurred at 964 N. Old Topanga Canyon Road, Topanga (Malibu area), on 7-25/26-69. The victim, Gary Hinman, lived alone at the above location. ln the case the words “Political Piggy” were written on the wall of the victim’s residence in his own blood.
There are two suspects presently in the Sheriff’s custody for this murder. The first, Robert Kenneth Beausoleil, male, caucasian, 21 years; and the second suspect, Susan Denise Atkins, female, caucasian, 21 years, is presently being held in Inyo County Jail on another charge. A hold has been placed on her for murder by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Katherine Lutesinger, female, caucasian, 17 years was arrested by Inyo County Sheriff’s Department on a grand theft auto charge, and she was also listed as a missing juvenile by Devonshire Division. Guenther had information that Lutesinger had possible information regarding victim Hinman’s missing vehicles and death. When she was interviewed, it was learned that she had been living with a group of 30 to 40 hippies and motorcycle riders (Satan Slaves) on the Spahn Ranch in Devonshire Division. She informed investigators, and it was confirmed by other members of her group, that the leader of the people living on the ranch was Charles Manson. Manson was known as “Jesus Christ” and “God and the Devil” by the people living on the ranch. Sheriff’s investigators have been unable to confirm that he directed members of the group to rob and steal for him. Lutesinger told sheriff’s investigators she heard a story (source unknown) that Manson had directed Beausoleil and Atkins to go to victim Hinman’s residence and take money from him. Lutesinger related that a fight had ensued between the two suspects and the victim. The victim was killed.
Sheriff’s investigation to date shows that the two suspects went to the victim’s residence on 7-25 or 26 and attempted to get money from him. They forced the victim to endorse the pink slips to his two vehicles transferring ownership to them. The suspects held the victim captive for two days and then suspect Beausoleil murdered him. The victim received two stab wounds in the chest. These wounds were in length 1 ½” length anu ½ ” in width. The victim also sustained a third wound from the rear of the left ear to midway along the cheekbone, approximately 5″ long and ½” deep, severing the ear in half. The wounds, according to Guenther, were similar to the wounds received by some of the victims in the Tate murder. Guenther witnessed the Hinman and Tate murder autopsies.
Guenther showed investigators the pictures from the Hinman murder crime scene. One of the photographs of the scene show the words “Political Piggy” written on the wall above the location where the victim was found.
The Sheriff’s crime lab has established that the victim’s blood was used to write the words. Investigators believe it is noteworthy that this murder, which occurred on July 26, 1969 was followed by two other murders, to wit Tate on August 9, 1969 and LaBianca on August 10, 1969. All three murders have the unique characteristic of the suspect using the victims’ blood to write on the wall. This characteristic takes on a greater significance in that in each instance the words make reference to “pig” in one form or another. Other similarities between the Hinman and LaBianca murders were the placing of a pillow over the victim’s face, and the use of a knife as the death weapon. The motive for the LaBianca murder is unknown. There is the possibility that it was a residential robbery.
Investigators are presently working with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s investigators to collect the names of everyone living on the ranch. Their fingerprints and samples of their handwriting will be obtained and checked. Manson and Lutesinger will be interviewed first and other members of the group at a later date. Investigators are planning interviews with Beausoleil and Atkins. Although Beausoleil was in custody at the time of the LaBianca murder, Atkins had not yet been apprehended.
Read that bold section again, ‘noteworthy that Hinman, Tate and LaBianca all shared a unique characteristic-writing in victims blood and that the characteristic takes on a ‘greater significance’ that ‘pig’ was written in each murder on the wall.
Seriously? They had this in front of them but took two more months to crack the case, and at that it took Susan Atkins blabbing the story to a couple of people to do it? Once again, with this level of evidence right in front of them, one would have to suspect that Manson was being protected from investigation by some higher level of law enforcement. The LaBianca team had the right guy very early on, yet nothing came of it. Charlie was once again charmed.
Straight From the Horse’s Mouth-Charlie in His Own Words
Charlie’s rap is super acid rap – symbols, parables, gestures, nothing literal, everything enigmatic, resting nowhere, stopping briefly to overturn an idea, stand it on its head, and then exploit the paradox. -Rolling Stone June 25, 1970
To really understand some of this, one needs to hear Charlie in his own words. Sometimes, he isn’t quite as crazy as he is portrayed in the media, sometimes he is really on beyond zebra. (Don’t forget his instructions to his followers given presciently in summer 1969: ‘If I ever get taken in by the cops, I will play the Crazy Charlie persona. I will act insane, but remember it’s an act to keep from being questioned too closely.’) He’d planned this out in advance.
Here is an excerpt from an interview by David Felton in June of 1970 for Rolling Stone, when the trial occupied headlines across the world. (Oddly, Felton also wrote a voluminous expose of the Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Community for Rolling Stone a year later)
What did you mean when you once said God and Satan are the same person?
If God is One, what is bad? Satan is just God’s imagination. Everything I’ve done for these nineteen hundred and seventy years is now in the open. I went into the desert to confess to God about the crime, I, you, Man has committed for 2,000 years. And that is why I’m here. As a witness.
I have been avoiding the cross for nineteen hundred and seventy years. Nineteen hundred and seventy nails in the cross. I was meant to go up on the cross willingly.
All the wars, all the deaths, all the hunger of these nineteen hundred and seventy years of blasphemy against Jesus Christ, all the shame and guilt, all the torture, they can’t hide it any longer. And unless you are willing to die for your love, you cannot love. Jesus Christ died for your sins and for my sins, and for nineteen hundred and seventy years I have been denying Him.
The white man must pay for the deaths of all the Indians that were slaughtered in greed, and now it is time for him to die for them.
Hope? You expect hope? [Charlie puts his hands together in prayer.] Ah, yes, there must be a little hope left, yes? [He spits scornfully.] There’s no hope! You make your own world. Hope is the last thing you hang onto. Everyone expects to be saved, saved from their guilt. But they’re not going to be saved. I am not going to take responsibility for society.
So I’m here for stolen dune buggies. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. They were out to get me, and it was only a matter of time before they found something to pin on me. And they did. First they make the picture and then they fill it in. They create things so they can hide their own guilt.
I can only tell you the truth. All my life I’ve been locked up because nobody wanted me. Jail is where they put people they don’t want. They’ve got nowhere else to go, but no one else wanted them so they got buried alive. They don’t want to be there, but everything has to be on its shelf. Everybody’s got to be somewhere, and somewhere is where people who are nowhere go.
Do you think you are being persecuted as an individual?
I don’t think about myself as an individual. I just think about my love. Every day I love my world a little more. Love makes you stronger. They can’t take that away. If a man has given up everything, what can they take away?
Those Christian robes that the judge wears are stained with the blood of millions and millions of lives. Christians have defiled the cross. They wore it into battle. They took Christ into war with them and defiled His image. You know, the cells in this jail are filled with blacks, chicanos, people like me. People who never had anything.
Did you have a bike when you were a kid? I never did. I never had anything. That’s what the system is, it’s self-recurring. It just goes in circles and circles. Take away the criminal and what have you got? This society needs criminals, they need someone to blame everything on.
What do you feel about Judge Keene taking away your pro per privilege?
The judge is just the flip side of the preacher. He took away my pro per privilege because they don’t want me to speak. They want to shut me up – because they know if I get up on the stand, I am going to blow the whole thing wide open. They don’t want to hear it. That’s why they assigned me this attorney, Hollopeter.
He came to see me [Charlie mimics a fussy little man shuffling papers], sat down and started fiddling with these papers in his brief case. See, he wouldn’t look me in the eye. They sent me this guy who looks like a mouse. He was hiding behind his briefcase and his important papers.
He was saying, “Well, Mr. Manson, in your case, etc., etc.” And I said to him, “All right, but can you look me in the eye?” He couldn’t look me in the eye.
How can a mouse represent a lion? A man, if he’s a man, can only speak for himself. I said to Judge Keene, “Do I speak for you?”
Between you and me, if that judge asks for my life, I’m going to give it to him right there in the courtroom. But first of all he is going to have to deal with my music, the music in my fingers and my body. [Charlie demonstrates. His nails tap out an incredible riff on the table, the chair, the glass of the booth, like the scurrying footsteps of some strung-out rodent.]
He is going to have to deal with that power. I’m probably one of the most dangerous men in the world if I want to be. But I never wanted to be anything but me. If the judge says death, I am dead. I’ve always been dead. Death is life.
Anything you see in me is in you. If you want to see a vicious killer, that’s who you’ll see, do you understand that? If you see me as your brother, that’s what I’ll be. It all depends on how much love you have. I am you, and when you can admit that, you will be free. I am just a mirror.
Did you see what they did to that guy in the Chicago Seven trial? Hoffman saw in those guys what he wanted to see. That’s why he found them guilty. The white man is fading, everybody knows that. The black man will take over, they can’t stop it. And they won’t be able to stop me either unless they gag me.
Why do you think black people will gain power?
They were the first people to have power. The Pharoahs were black. The Egyptians took one man and raised him up above the rest. They put him on the throne and they fed all these lines of energy into him. [He folds his arms across his chest like Tutankamen, holding his pencil between two fingers like Pharoah’s rod.]
That means power. This represents the penis, the power. They built the pyramids with this energy. They were all one in him. All that concentration created a tremendous force. Love built the pyramids. Focusing all that love on one man was like focusing it on themselves.
Masons have that power. It’s a secret that’s been handed down since the Pharoahs. The secret wisdom. Jesus knew the symbols. The preacher and the judge got ahold of the symbols and they kept them to themselves.
Judge Keene uses all those symbols. He’ll make a sign like “cut him off.” Or like when I get up to speak, he’ll make a signal to one of the marshals, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of people will be let in the court and there will be all this confusion so they can’t hear what I’m saying. They use all these Masonic signs to hold power over other people.
So I started using the symbols. Every time I go into court, or have my picture taken, I use another Masonic sign. Like the three fingers, two fingers outstretched. When the judge sees it, it really freaks him out because he can’t say anything. When I see them making these signs in court I flash them back at them.
They know the symbols of power but they can’t understand it. Power without love is aggression. There has been no true love since the Pharaohs. Except for J.C. He knew what love meant.
Tempt me not. Do you remember the story about Jesus on the hill? You know, the devil takes Him to the edge of this cliff [Charlie leans over the table as if perched precariously on the edge of the void], and he says to Him, “If you’re God, prove it by jumping off the edge.” And Jesus says, “There ain’t nothing to prove, man.” When you doubt, your mind is in two parts. It’s divided against itself. See, Christ is saying, “Past get behind me.” The devil is in the past. The devil is the past. What He is saying is “Don’t think.” He who thinks is lost, because if you have to think about something, to doubt it, you’re lost already.
My philosophy is: Don’t think. I don’t believe in the mind that you think with and scheme with. I don’t believe in words.
If you don’t believe in words, why do you use so many of them?
Words are symbols. All I’m doing is jumbling the symbols in your brain. Everything is symbolic. Symbols are just connections in your brain. Even your body is a symbol.
………………………………………………………………………
How can you love and threaten someone at the same time?
Who did I threaten?
You sent Dennis Wilson a bullet.
I had a pocket full of bullets, so I gave him one.
Then it wasn’t given as a threat?
That’s his paranoia. His paranoia created the idea that it was a threat. If you gave me a bullet, I’d wear it around my neck to let them see your love for me. The only thing I’d want to do to Dennis is make love to him.
You know, I used to say to him, “Look at this flower, Dennis. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?” And he would say, “Look, man, I got to go.” He was always going somewhere to take care of some big deal. What it amounted to is that he couldn’t accept my love. I love him as much as I love myself. I refuse nothing and I ask nothing. It all flows through me.
How do you know that these things are coming about (the oncoming Apocalypse)?
I’m just telling you what my awareness sees. I look into the future like an Indian on a trail. I know what my senses tell me. I can just see it coming, and when it comes I will just say, “Hi there!” [He says it like a used-car salesman greeting the Apocalypse from a TV screen in some empty room.]
Why do you think that this revolution predicted in “Revolution 9” will be violent? Why will it be racial?
Have you heard of the Muslims? Have you heard of the Black Panthers? Englishmen, do you remember cutting off the heads of praying Muslims with the cross sewn onto your battledress? Can you imagine it?
Well, imagination is the same as memory. You and all Western Man killed and mutilated them and now they are reincarnated and they are going to repay you. The soul in the white man is lying down. They were praying, kneeling in the temple. They did not want war. And the white man came in the name of Christ and killed them all.
Denouement
The most dangerous man in the world? Some guy who proclaimed he was either Jesus or Satan-or both at the same time? Believe it or not, Manson wasn’t the only one preaching this. (see above in Process, Mel Lyman, etc.) One important thing people argued about at the time: was Charles Manson a hippie? How could he be if he spent 22 out of 34 years in prison–one would think that it would be extremely unlikely. Yes, he was thrown into the middle of the summer of love in 1967, but that would only put a veneer of hippie on the huckster. What likely got more concern from authorities was something that not many have written about, and authorities were loathe to talk about publicly-Manson was the bridge between two highly insulated anti-establishment factions: Hippies and biker gang hoodlums. The government was pretty happy that these folks were diametrically opposed. Hog Farm and Leary’s crew or Hell’s Angels and Satan’s Slaves? Ultra leftists and ultra right usually don’t see eye to eye. But at Spahn Ranch, 1% outlaw biker gangs and free spirit flower children were co-mingling freely. A union of these factions could pose problems for the Nixon minded people in an atmosphere of bubbling revolution. This is why it makes sense that this trial became so high profile-this thing had to be nipped in the bud, and at any cost. But not enough people asked the right questions at the time. What were the Manson family aims? What were they after?
If you asked them questions, the Manson Family weren’t shy, they had plenty of answers, many of them repetitive-cliff note versions of Charlie’s syncretic counterculture philosophy. In some ways, Charlie was just another guru like the Maharishi or Father Yod preaching a mystical religious and communal way of life. But it is easy to see that the Family spawned more questions than answers. Many in the counter-culture took Manson as a cause célèbre, in particular the underground newspapers-the voice of the people on the street. ‘Charlie is Innocent’ was going to be the cover of the Rolling Stone issue featuring him. He was often portrayed as a martyr to the hippie cause-a reason for the pigs to push back and take control of the streets again from the burgeoning revolutionary dialectic fueling a social insurrection. Rightly or wrongly, Manson was viewed as someone honestly fighting back against ‘the man’. The Weathermen thought he was cool, but they were literally ‘underground’, holed up and not able to walk the streets without fear of arrest. Underground newspapers proclaimed Manson ‘Man of the Year’. The average hip person on the street also thought much the same.
His followers saw a sometimes simpler reason. Bruce Davis met him early trying to return a handsaw:
“He’s got all these pretty girls around him and all they do is get loaded all day.” That attracted Davis’ attention and he went along. The owner of the saw was none other than Charlie Manson. They arrived at this house in Topanga Canyon, where Manson was staying with some of his girls. Davis was introduced to them.
As soon as they arrived they were greeted by a guy, who then guided them through the house and out into the back yard. Manson was in a large bathtub, enjoying the sun and the girls who were giving him a sponge bath. There were about 10 girls around the bathtub and according to Davis, most of them were nude and giggling through a haze of marijuana smoke. Davis claims he was absolutely blown away by the scene. “It was real nice. It looked like Elysian Fields,” he would later say.”
Two Papa’s and One Mama
The victims and the Manson family were not strangers, they had crossed paths many times. Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski ran in similar Laurel Canyon circles as Manson and his girls. Many of the players crossed paths at parties-Mama Cass and John Philips had acknowledged that Manson had been at their houses for parties more than once. (Papa John Phillips shows up in the background of many stories from both sides of this tale-Manson and Tate, but is rarely mentioned in any mainstream research-perhaps due to his rarely spoken of cloak and dagger military background which also included his parents and sister-insert Mamas and Papas song here. Don’t forget he also was the one who got the Process set up in their LA housing). Sharon, Roman, Gibby and Voytek also frequented the same parties, and lived close by-Abigail and Voytek across the street from Mama Cass actually. Hollywood elite have acknowledged that they had crossed paths with Manson many times. LA rock personalities were very familiar with Manson and his crew. Tex Watson and his drug circle intersected with Jay Sebring and Voytek Frykowski’s drug circle, with Joel Rostau as the nexus. Tex may have known those two before he even met up with the Manson family. Tex had been to parties at Cielo Drive. The idea that no one at the Polanski residence knew their killers is one of the myths that was pushed heavily at the trial, and leads one to wonder ‘why exactly did they push that angle?’. This idea still frames most of the information presented to this day. What were they trying to cover up?
One question you never see discussed that could be the powder keg that the prosecution bent over backwards to avoid was: did Sharon Tate and Abigail Folger attend Esalen Institute at Big Sur while Charlie was there ‘auditioning’ for important persons-persons unknown to this day? They had called there right before, and that was usual drill-call up first and then show up. Were those two women instrumental in getting Charlie heaved out on his ass, killing his chances forever in becoming the rock star he dreamed of becoming? Did Patricia Krenwinkel accidentally let slip a little noticed clue when she told the parole board that they were sent to ‘get two women’ at Terry’s old house? (there were only two women known to live there-Abigail and Sharon) This could go a long way to explaining the iron curtain of silence that immediately descended over the Esalen portion of the tale, the crucial week leading up to the massacres. A blinding rage fueled madness unleashed to get ‘revenge on the beautiful people’ who shunned him. Perhaps literally those people. This would be perhaps the closest guarded secret underlying the case. And as collateral karmic damage, Melcher certainly would have got the message-a massacre at his former house isn’t exactly subtle, much like the bullet left for Dennis Wilson.
Conclusions
So where does that leave us? Charlie never told. It is likely that some form of a truth yet to be told is contained on the still unreleased 1969 Tex Watson interview tapes, tapes that LAPD have fought diligently to keep from seeing the light of day. Tex clearly played a far larger part in this tale than has ever been acknowledged, and seems perhaps intentionally suppressed to keep the focus on Charlie. The lack of any publicity for Tex Watson, the guy who actually killed everybody in this tale, and a similar lack of mention of Voytek Frykowski as a lighting rod for trouble coming from different directions is definitely weird.
Incredibly, nobody seemed to notice Manson stole his whole philosophy from the Fountain of the World, who lived literally next door. Helter Skelter may have been a loose philosophy only a few believed (Bruce Davis explicitly did not) or Helter Skelter may have been the convenient excuse for a rage induced revenge on the two folks that had spiked Charlie’s musical career. Hey, maybe it was only a night club. However, drugs, theft and worryingly large amounts of cash float ominously in the background, as do strange sex practices, underground Hollywood porn, Satanic trappings. It is clear that the people living at Cielo Drive were engaging in dangerous behavior and moving in circles with dangerous people that put them in harm’s way. Leaving aside the flirtations with the dark side of the occult on both the family side and the Cielo Drive side-threesomes filmed by Polanski with random strangers brought home from the Strip for one night sex romps combined with large amounts of drugs being bought and sold can bring large amounts of trouble. It is likely that on some level they were aware that they were pushing the envelope of danger, but were confident the elite cocoon of the glamorous life would provide some level of safety. Worried? Maybe.
The LaBiancas were worried about something. Their house had been broken into so many times and ransacked that they expected it every time they came home. What were people looking for, and did Manson finally decide that the couple had to be confronted in person to give up….what? A black book of numbers? Or large amounts of LSD as some researchers believe? Far fetched on the surface, yet Joel Rostau pops up in regards to Rosemary in several tales told at the time (his involvement in security fraud like some of Leno’s associates were gives another level of possible confluence of interest). Conflicting evidence as to when they were killed combined with fairly obvious evidence that they left the house at some point during the event would seem to back some of this up. Her reported estate value of over a million dollars would be consistent with a ‘cash only’ drug business. Leno LaBianca was likely involved with the mob through horse ownership and gambling, and that is an organization that knows how to keep things under wraps while getting what they want. He had skimmed over $100,000 dollars from Gateway Markets, a chain where he was an owning partner. What prompted this quote from Leno to his close friend Peter DeSantis in July of 1969: “I’ve got to get out of this town and can’t unless I can sell my shares. It’s a matter of life and death. I’m asking for my life.” The disappearance of neighbor Eddie Pierce, or the Phantom, a mob bookie living up the street from the LaBiancas eight days after the murder should raise some eyebrows. Someone had been after the LaBiancas, and no one was talking.
This article isn’t meant to be sympathetic to Manson or the Family. Nor is it a condemnation of the victims or their lifestyles. No matter what the victims were into, you can’t just sit up and say: “they had it coming”. I do wonder sometimes though. Like some of the occult activity around Led Zeppelin (chronicled here) a few years later, the involvement of the Process and the renegade O.T.O. chapter makes one wonder if some wayward but real black magick is responsible for nudging things in certain directions.
The plethora of motives covered here: Drug burn, murder for hire, copycat, Helter Skelter, revenge for failed music career, government operation–and everything else you can find once you go down the rabbit hole–one thing is sure, the tale we were told at the time, all neatly wrapped up nicely and officially in the Helter Skelter motive, something that got Manson locked up while others committed the murders, is still very much muddied to this day. The tale told in Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter book remains the oft repeated and universally accepted tale in all stories ever written about the murders. Yet the large mountain of things ignored: drugs, mob, secret societies, magick, music and film industry, government set up…well all of them have degrees of substantial primary sourced information that should have made any investigator say “hey let’s look into this a little deeper”. All of those angles had different people involved that were either barely questioned or not questioned at all. The focus stayed narrow, and that focus was on Helter Skelter as the primary motive. Even Charlie had said that ‘they got the right people but for the wrong reason’. But all of the above, the confluence of madness that honestly isn’t in the background, but out in front demanding attention? This got pushed to the wings. One could get the impression that Charlie and the family were part of another larger plan and were merely manipulated by more powerful figures as useful tools to achieve unknown ends.
If the motive was drugs, well the police thought so too. They had tracked down and gotten statements from Canadian drug dealers Billy Doyle and Thomas Harrigan. These two had been set up in Los Angeles since early 1969 and established themselves as large scale suppliers in Hollywood, and had close contact with Sharon, Sebring, Folger and Frykowski. Frykowski was slated to pick up some Canadian dealers at the airport in the days before the murders. The day before the murders, Harrigan was documented as being seen with Frykowski and Sebring drinking a bottle of wine at Cielo, where they were heard discussing the impending MDA arrival. The next day-the afternoon of the murders-neighbors saw Sebring with an unfamiliar sports car following him speed out of the Cielo Drive gate and blow past them-something out of the ordinary as they said Jay usually waved and drove slowly down the narrow road. These events would lead anyone to believe that a large scale deal was about to go down that day. A Manson family visit happening the same evening that a large scale deal with international drug dealers is scheduled to go down should be a huge red flag waving wildly for any investigators. A drug rip off gone horribly wrong is easy to envision as the motive for the first night of murders. Abigails’s father Peter Folger throwing large amounts of hush money around to keep things quiet doesn’t add to the clarity of this angle. The involvement of many high profile Hollywood names complicit in the drug scene, along with heavy mob associations would have made for some uncomfortable decisions and put some heavy pressure on Bugliosi to look elsewhere to pin the rap on Manson. Some of this stuff just could not be even looked into for fear of the whole thing unraveling, and some stern warnings needed to be given. (let’s not forget Diane Linkletter’s likely murder at this point).
If the motive was to ignite a black versus white war as Bugliosi told us the Helter Skelter motive was, well Charlie did a pretty shitty job of it. Leave aside the hitchhiking as a getaway plan for a murder posse, one must ask “why quit after only twenty four hours of murder?” That isn’t really what I would call an effort in igniting a country wide social conflagration. The Family owning a few guns also works against this idea. While portions of Helter Skelter enter the tale as an influence, it still is a philosophy stolen verbatim from the neighboring commune, the Fountain of the World. And nobody said ‘boo’ about them, and they killed even more people than Charlie was charged with. As the full motive, Helter Skelter has been discarded by many researchers. There’s just too much weirdness in the background. Some of his followers believed this motive to be true, but even more clearly did not believe it. It would be simple for a prosecutor to hone in on the gullible followers who could parrot this story, and make them prominent witnesses in the trial.
The Mob dances in the wings in both murders-the LaBiancas were mob associated, deep in debt (likely to the mob–the reason for Leno skimming over $100,000 from his own business). Leno had something people were after, his little black book of information is often spoken of, the key to the treasure and the map to where the bodies are buried so to speak, with the appropriate names and numbers therein. Much effort went into ransacking the house the night of the murders, and it had happened several times before the murders as well. Rosemary’s name showing up in relation to large scale drug dealing is intriguing, as her past is much more colorful and checkered than the middle aged housewife portrayed in the trial. Large level drug transactions would not go unnoticed by an organization that controlled much of that traffic, so both the Cielo Drive crowd and any large scale deals on the LaBianca end would be noticed. The police thought drugs were at the root of the Tate murders, and evidence shows there is much more to this idea than was presented at the trial. Joel Rostau and Eugene Massaro were Mob associated drug dealers integral to the tale. Although the Mob are never discussed in relation to the case, the two encounters Paul Watkins had with the Mob do show that underworld figures were directly involved in these events on some level, somehow this angle was completely ignored by Bugliosi. (ironically someone accused of Mob affiliations himself) It isn’t a stretch to interpret these facts as evidence the Mob definitely had a hand in a plausibly deniable lighting of a fire under the LaBiancas which ended in death.
There have been ideas floated that Charlie and the Family were part of a much larger plan-a social experiment workshopped by some government agency. Leary’s Millbrook LSD clan eventually were shown to have CIA connections only known to some. The early days of the Mel Lyman group likewise show some agency figures dancing in the background during the early days. It isn’t out of the realm of possibility that Manson was part of some larger plan-whether nefarious or benevolent: all three groups used LSD heavily as part of a plan to create new ways of thinking, and all three involved self contained groups isolating themselves through psychedelics from society, and all three were led by god-like gurus. The CIA had been shown to be experimenting in different fields with different groups with LSD (see: Brotherhood of Eternal Love), and much of this work is still classified to this day. So in view of some of the people dancing in the background, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that they were part of some larger experimental plan. Esalen, a known incubator for early drug/mind control/human potential experiments at the behest of the CIA is of note as a common meeting ground of Manson, the Process, major LSD players and Sharon Tate and Abigail Folger? Odd in the extreme to the casual observer, highly suspicious to the wary. Add in John Phillips (someone with an unspoken of clandestine military career) as the meeting point for Sharon, Sebring, Folger, the Manson crew and Robert DeGrimston/the Process? The threats and lawsuits shielding Esalen and the Process should make many want to look there and at Phillips a little closer.
The early documentation of the Family under the aegis of Roger Smith, the use of the large and failed raid on Spahn as a training film example for law enforcement usage, and the professional documentary filmed as the family unraveled by Laurence Merrick and Robert Hendrickson combine to make a eye raisingly large amount of professional documentation for a single small hippie commune. It isn’t a stretch to say that this documentation went a long way in the media to be instrumental in demonising the hippie movement.
The appearance of high powered lawyer George Shibley meeting with Manson just before his release, and Tex Watson’s nearly forty meetings with another pair of high powered attorneys: David DeLoach (a prominent Young Republican figure) and Perry Walshin over a single marijuana charge seems incongruous and got Mae Brussell’s attention, as did the appearance of Warren Commission senior counsel Joseph Ball advising Manson and Atkins. (factor in Lawrence Schiller, someone who recorded a staged confession by Jack Ruby the day before he died-the same man who got Susan Atkins’ to turn states evidence and implicate Manson for a part of a $150,000 payout, and Ed Butler- a guy who wrote the first piece on the murders who had been one of the first to write about Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK’s assassination-and you can see how someone might see fingerprints of something nefarious and government related lurking in the background). High powered Hollywood lawyers showing up to inefficiently defend Atkins also begs several questions. One easy question no one has answered is: ‘who was paying these guys?’ It is an odd confluence of pro bono work by all involved, something the jaded might refer to as ‘stage managed’. In addition, law enforcement’s ‘hand’s off’ policy towards Manson should also raise an eyebrow or two. Even Bugliosi knew that not enough questions had been asked in certain areas, but was obviously clued in enough to avoid areas of investigation that were being actively buried.
Some folks out there know at least pieces of the truth. Dennis Wilson said several times he knew the truth, but would wait to speak when the time was right. That time never came, as he drowned before he could tell us. Some insiders in Esalen likely know far more than has been shared. Manson certainly knew, but he has left the planet. Bruce Davis and Tex Watson probably have some higher version of the truth than us, but even they might not be privy to the secrets of the inner circle. Hell, Charlie may not even have known what was going down behind the scenes, just watched it all unfold with eyes wide shut, only smiling at everything he saw.
So we have come full circle, back to where it all began, the music.
Let’s leave the final word to Charlie with a story that sums it all up:
Charlies’ philosophy of songwriting paraphrased from the 1970 Rolling Stone interview-“make a musical mistake on guitar, oops. Instead of fixing it next time through, repeat the mistake within the song, then next time through slowly abandon rest of the original song piece by piece, finally keeping only the mistake, and gradually create new music around the mistake until the only part of the original song left is that mistake. Presto-it’s a mistake no more. New song, the mistake is the inspiration, and it is perfect. Now apply this to life. ”
“I was in prison for 25 years. I have almost no intelligence. Doesn’t it make any sense to anybody that maybe I wasn’t the leader?” -Manson 1994
“No sense makes sense”
Suggestions for further reading:
Everyone should start with these two:
Helter Skelter-Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry 1974 Ghostwritten by Curt Gentry, this is the inside view from the prosecutor’s point. It is considered by the ‘straight media’ as the only accurate version of the murders and is the sole source of information for mainstream media reports on the case. Good for names/dates/places/timelines/police investigations. Considered unreliable as to real motives and behind the scenes activity. Love it or hate it, everyone should start with this one.
The Family: The Story of Charle’s Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion Ed Sanders 1971 1st edition hardcover. This is the other big one. Sanders spent nearly a year living in around and among the the Manson family. He interviewed hundreds of ancillary members of this tale–on the Manson end of things, and on the Polanski Tate end of things. Contains many details speculating on the real motives, and has very rich details on the behind the scenes activity. Probably the best source out there-contains much speculation, but was written in the immediate aftermath, and contains primary source information from people who were there. Criticized for too many ‘unnamed sources’. Make sure you get the first edition, the one that has many stories that were excised after Sanders was sued by the Process.
Manson in His Own Words: The Shocking Confessions of ‘The Most Dangerous Man Alive’-Charles Manson and Nuel Emmons 1986. Okay, this one causes a lot of controversy. How much of it is ghost written and how much is actually Manson’s words is debated in Manson circles. It backs up the version of the tale that takes Manson out of the leader’s status, and portrays events as just spinning out of control as the summer of 1969 wore on. While downplaying his own role, Charlie does eventually own up to some responsibility in the events.
Will You Die For Me?-Tex Watson 1978 Generally dismissed as post murder prison born again Christian ramblings. Nothing of note is in here, and Tex puts it all on Charlie and downplays his own involvement. Which ignores the fact he killed everyone, and Charlie didn’t kill anyone.
My Life With Charles Manson-Paul Watkins 1979 An interesting read from someone on the inside. Watkins was once Manson’s recruiter, but had started to get freaked out by the dark vibes and moved deeper into the desert with Brooks Poston before things went down. Watkins was one of the main witnesses against Manson, so it is not surprising that most of this story mirrors Bugliosi’s version of the murders. Still, he was there and there is a richness to some details of daily life at the Ranch.
Child of Satan Child of God – Susan Atkins 1977 Like Watson’s book, a fairly dry version of the events by one of the participants. Also like Watson’s book, this is written from a born again Christian point of view. Not much of note is in there.
If You Want to Go Down the Rabbit Hole:
The Manson File: Myth and Reality of an Outlaw Shaman -Nicholas Schreck 1988/2011. A fascinating collection of tidbits, trivia and esoterica. This guy had access to Manson in prison and spoke with him many times. Takes the stance that Manson might not be guilty. A bit jumbled but it uncovers many things no one else has. Get the newer version.
The Shadow Over Santa Susanna – Black Magic, Mind Control, and the ‘Manson Family’ Mythos – Adam Gorightly 2001. Another pretty good read that focuses on the occult angle, something ignored completely by Bugliosi. Some weird stuff in this one.
Manson: Behind the Scenes – Bill Nelson This guy got a reputation, much deserved, for being a Manson Family stalker. While that is true, he managed to find out probably more information and untold stories involving auxiliary members and unknown members of the Manson Family than anyone to date.
And finally, if you really want to get freaked out, try this 86 page treatise by Miles Mathis on how the Manson Murders were staged, Sharon Tate is still alive, and more….Although there is some insanely far fetched shit in here, it does contain some interesting ideas and connects some dots and ways of seeing things that no one has thought of. Worth a read if you’ve already fallen down the rabbit hole. http://mileswmathis.com/tate.pdf
One final note: I bought the original library bound edition of Rolling Stone magazine from summer 1970 which contained not just the massive Manson article issue, but a dozen subsequent issues. Now anyone familiar with Rolling Stone of that era knows that the letters section of the following issue is chock full of comments about the previous issue. Hell, if the news was big enough, letters sometimes were in the same issue as the news broke in. So I scanned the next issue for any mention in the letters of the Manson article. There were none. Odd. I checked the following issue. Still nothing. I kept searching the next five issues and not one single mention of the Manson article. Clearly this was intentional, but the big question is ‘why’? Obviously the magazine had been flooded with letters, but not a single one was published. This had to be an editorial decision by the publisher and editors at the highest levels. Who ordered this: law enforcement? Not likely they’d listen to that. Death threats from the Manson Family still at large? Far more likely. No one has ever mentioned this ‘non-event’-obviously it was never intended to be ever mentioned, and they must have just hoped nobody would notice. Definitely one of the strangest little tidbits of hidden information I’ve ever encountered in this case.
“Just because you’re convicted of something in a court room doesn’t mean you’re guilty of something”
As chronicled last year here , summer is the time to get out there-preferably under the stars, and see rock shows like they did back in the day: grassy field, blankets and festival vibes. Like last year, this summer had a wide range of rock enticement. What was on the menu?
May 16-Jean Michel Jarre Boston
Pray to the light machine…
This was a big one. I mean this guy never tours. His first album that broke him, Oxygene, came out 41 years ago. He’d played the States exactly once, a single show in Houston in 1986, 31 years ago. A detailed review of this Boston show written at the time can be read here. Jarre is a first generation French synth giant along the order of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, the big three krautrock synth god founders of electronic music. The Bank of America Pavilion is on the waterfront, and the back of the stage is pretty much on the sea wall. Bass sequences set up standing waves in Boston Harbor, and Jarre shattered reality, profoundly Oddly, this show was completely unknown and literally unpromoted. (I wore the tour shirt to an electronic music festival later in the summer. An older fan who flew in from overseas said he was a huge Jarre fan and asked when I’d seen him. I turned around so he could read the tour dates on the back of my shirt. “Hmmm, ok, ok…..uhhhhh no, nooo, NOOOOOO!!! The tour is over?!? Why didn’t I hear about this?) Why indeed? Not one single Jarre fan I spoke to this summer had ANY idea he was coming, and all were genuinely pissed they missed it. No print ads, no radio. Unsurprisingly, the venue was only about 1/3 full. Jarre beckoned to the crowd “come closer” and gathered the faithful. He told us secrets. Setlist
June 9-Ween Cooperstown NY
Richard ‘Dick’ Smoker, Left Field
Mollusk.
Up next, and on the same date the summer concert blitz started last year, June 9 saw Ween at the Ommegang Brewery in Cooperstown (home of the baseball Hall of Fame). This one was a camping overnight on site event. Things learned? Brewery + Ween + walking to campsite at end of show = uh oh. Bodies dropped left and right into the mud trying to navigate in the dark, and last call went until well after eleven pm-strong brewery beer. I’d seen Ween five or so times since the reunion…and this band has some deep catalog to draw from. This night was no different. Setlist here. a 26 song setlist of rarities and chestnuts. A double encore seemed to precede either an extended LMLYP or Poopship Destroyer, but the oh so clever brain cell challenged neo hippie jam band element thought they would provide entertainment and rewards for Deaner by pelting him in the face with glow sticks (the thin pixie stick kind).
In their heads, they probably imagined it looked something like this:
In actuality it was much more like this:
Hit me again you fucking fuck and I’m done
This phenomenon of pelting the band with LARGE handfuls of glow sticks started at Phish shows, but thinking the band will react in any fashion other than pissed off is evidence that repeated drug use might cause the brain damage that D.A.R.E. always promised. Deaner turned to the drummer and motioned ‘this is it, last riff we are done’ ending the song while glaring back at the crowd of idiots clustered in the front. Concert ended early. Good show, and Ween in an outdoor venue with camping? Hope they do this again next summer.
June 20 – Dead and Company SPAC Saratoga NY
SPAC is a fairly legendary venue for the Dead. In 1983 I saw one of their performances of the decade here. I’d seen them last summer in Boston, and the band performed one of their dream shows, still spoken of as the best show Dead and Company have ever played. I mean Help->Slip->Franklin’s in the FIRST set? St. Stephen->Dark Star->Terrapin-> drums/space->Terrapin->Morning Dew to start the second set? Yeah that’s not likely to be topped. Combined with the rampant rumors that John Mayer tripped at the show for his first genuine ‘electric’ Dead experience, and well you have a show not likely to ever be topped. So it was with a little trepidation I rode out here, knowing that they will probably never top what I saw last summer. But hey, the Dead outside in the middle of a forest state park? Count me in. Rain is usually in the forecast, but this time blue skies guided the vehicle the whole way. Grabbed some lawn seats near the stage (this venue is notably difficult to see the stage from the field) and watched some puffy clouds gather. Then, during Looks Like Rain, well…. it started to rain. Something in 35 years of seeing the Dead that I had never seen happen before. Friends were incredulous. Definitely weird. Even weirder, as the song drew to a close, behind us this happened:
Looks Like Rain? They’re a rainbow full of sound?
Yeah it was a fucking moment. Song list trended towards ordinary, and Lost Sailor/St. of Circumstance was arranged to a point where it was barely recognizable at first. This is why many go to so many Dead shows-a deceased Jerry hasn’t curbed their propensity for dodgy shows here and there. John Mayer has definitely learned how to do a proper Jerry, and Oteil can channel Phil Lesh with much more authenticity than his early turns in 2015. Good but not great. It is disconcerting to realize they might never top what I saw in Fenway Park last summer. Mickey Hart can still create some sonic mayhem though.
July 7-Jerry Seinfeld Springfield MA
Funny and unfunny…they’re like this close
I had wanted to get down the NYC to the Beacon Theater to see Seinfeld in his residency there this year, and saw he was doing a quick one off in Springfield. His reason? “Just like you, I had nothing better to do on a Friday night, and I needed to kill some time. So I came here.” Seinfeld does a clean and non topical act-cursing and politics are off limits- and he revisited some of his older material from the show. Springfield Symphony Hall is a venue that can cater to decent sounding acts, but much of Seinfeld’s act was barely audible, inexcusable really. However familiarity with his patterns and riffs helped the long time fans keep following the thread. The free wheeling playboy Seinfeld has been hitched for a while, and semi-lamented his married status and new group of friends: “If you don’t have a wife, we have nothing to talk about. You have a girlfriend? That’s Wiffle ball. You’re playing a paintball war and I’m in Afghanistan with real, loaded weapons. A single guy is sitting on a merry-ground blowing on a pinwheel. I’m driving a truck full of nitro down a dirt road.” Funny, but one got the sense he doesn’t have to work very hard to create his act anymore. Legends are like that though.
July 20-The Who Mohegan Sun CT
Rested Daltrey + Cunty & Pissed off Townshend = Amazing Show
The Who. Only the Beatles and the Stones have the stature and influence the Who have as originators of modern rock. In truth, this band has seen all eras of rock n roll. From their first angst ridden thrashes in dance halls in 1964 to 2017-the Who have seen it all, close up and personal. Roger Daltrey, the ace mod face, and also ‘The Voice” of rock has had his share of vocal difficulties over the past twenty or so years. From vocal cord surgery in 2011 to difficulties with smoke in the audience in 2013 to postponing their 2015 fall US tour, there have been problems. But at this show, Daltrey was well rested, and in the best vocal condition I had seen him, perhaps ever. And he knew he was in good form-vocal riffs ran scales from borderline falsettos suddenly hurtling octaves into a deep familiar bass growl to end songs. Townshend was in good form, prickly and extra cunty. “We’re grateful to be here. Well I’m not grateful but I’ll bet you are…” Daltrey shot him an incredulous stare from center stage and took over…..”We are very glad to be here tonight, right Pete?” Townshend continued irritably prattling on about how he didn’t need the money and that he had just flown in to town in his million dollar private jet. Daltrey once again had to smooth things over. With Pino Palladino out on tour with John Mayer, John Button from Daltrey’s solo band stepped in, and things were quite different from the first legs of “the Who Turns 50” tour. Townshend said introducing My Generation: “I’ve written about a hundred songs, and every one is better than this one”. The song degenerated into the chaos it used to in the sixties and early seventies arrangements, and then…suddenly I looked up. What the hell was going on? The band had jumped the rails and was off in uncharted territory, with Townshend slashing random riffs and Daltrey riffing random improvised vocals. Soon it seemed to solidify into a vague version of Cry If You Want-
Microphone seeks escape velocity
Woah. The Who hadn’t let things fly like this in a bundle of decades. Bargain and Overture also had some free wheeling improv sections. Daltrey stalked around in front of Townshend in repetitive short circles as Pete thrashed his guitar with frenzied rhythmic slashes that increasingly bore no resemblance to the song. Incredible explorations, albeit short and interspersed, that hadn’t been seen live in well over forty years. The signature scream at the end of Won’t Get Fooled Again, the trademark howl of two generations? Spot on. Perhaps the best time and tightest I’d seen them in the over two decades of seeing them. I’d still pick out the Quadrophenia ’96 tour as my personal highlight, but vocally and arrangement wise, this was one powerful fucking show. The Who were famously challenged by the punk rock bands in the 70’s as dinosaurs, but the punk comet burned out early and the dinosaurs still freely stomp the earth, bringing rumbling thunder and showing that this is no damn nostalgia act, they can still rip the roof off an arena. The highlight of the summer, if not the year. song list
July 30- Blondie and Garbage Bank of America Pavilion Boston
70’s meet 90’s
I once again trundled to Boston to see Garbage and Blondie. I wasn’t really sure what this would bring, I mean Debbie Harry is much older than many think (she was in bands on major labels in 1968, and was literally born during WW2-1945 for you non historians). I’d seen Garbage last year on the first album commemorative tour, and was beyond pleasantly surprised. They were nearly as powerful as when I saw them on the first album tour twenty years ago. This time though, no such luck. Shirley Manson admitted to being way overtired and had just got into town. The setlist ignored most of their hits, and the band was listless. It was apparent that much of their set is electronically pre-recorded and triggered from the stage. Fifty grand in sound equipment but from the ninth row the guitars sounded like a Peavey Backstage and Line Six Spirit amps were in use. (translation for non guitarists-two really cheap beginner guitar amps). Butch Vig, soundcrafter extraordinaire, had no visible mics on his cymbals, indicating they were electronic as well. Odd for such a perfection based and studio sound obsessed band to have such a thin sound and low energy.
Beehive queen
Blondie however, was a big surprise. Debbie Harry came out dressed as above, but covered with a cape emblazoned “stop fucking the planet”, resembling sixties legend Moondog, statuesque and shamblingly regal. At nearly 72 years old one would assume she has the gravitas to let us know what’s up-perhaps more of an instruction in truth. Their new album, Pollinator, brings to theme Harry’s cause, which is to save the disappearing bees. The setlist was pretty much as expected, and four songs from Pollinator was a brave choice, but the new stuff really hung in there with the standards. Founding guitarist Chris Stein seemed a bit propped up on stage and shows some signs of his lingering illness that has hampered him for a long while, but his riffing quietly with Iron Man underneath band introductions…wish he’d continued it. Overall, I’d have to say one word for Blondie in 2017-impressive.
August 20-Chris Robinson Band Holyoke MA
A show in the newly created Gateway City Arts in Holyoke was one of those ‘hey they’re too famous to play here’ vibes that new venues can get. But this is a solid place to see a show. CRB is the Chris Robinson led half version of the Black Crowes while Rich Robinson has most of the rest of the band in The Magpie Salute. Will the long admired original Crowes band traditionally combative brothers ever get back together? According to Rich, not very likely due his brother’s obsession with his Dead influenced CRB: “Chris is done with it and we’re done with him, in a weird way. And it sucks, because that band could still do a lot of great things, he’s just into the Grateful Dead. That’s all he really cares about. He makes his records sound like the Dead; he hangs out with the Dead. It’s fucking crazy,” says Robinson. “But that’s what he wants to do. And if he’s happy doing it, good for him, man.”
Remember that the Black Crowes are the band that had this famous exchange between the brothers at the beginning of a tour:
Rich: If anyone gives my brother drugs, they are fired (from crew)
Chris: If anyone refuses to get me drugs, they are fired
So I was well prepared for a Dead influenced version of the Crowes. Yet most of the material was surprisingly well afar from the Crowes, and the band sounded more like a hybrid of Bobby and the Midnights circa ’83 and the Jerry Garcia Band from around the same era- a Dead solo trip hybridization, a more timid version of the Dead if you will. One of their songs sounded quite close to Birdsong, which several in the crowd noticed. Flickers of other Grateful Dead themes darted in and around what was essentially ‘Dead Lite’.
Back in the days of the Black Crowes, when Chris Robinson strapped an electric guitar on, it was an ‘oh shit’ moment. Anything could happen, often off kilter things not planned. Rich would often turn his back noticeably on Chris when he quietly riffed on a few songs. This night, Chris was an able and tasteful guitarist, trying to channel Bob Weir’s ability to lead the band places unexpected. If your tastes run more to slow burn Grateful Dead, and not expecting too much of a Crowes experience, worth seeing. Setlist
August 27-Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Edgar Winter Mansfield MA
Like last years summer kick off with Bad Company and Joe Walsh, this was another one I almost gave a miss. But when tix on Stubblehub dipped to fifteen bucks, I had to do it. I mean I’d worshiped Edgar Winter Frankenstein since it came out, had seen the holy album cover in school-a whisper time holy relic of big kid culture.
Albino Twins
This was seriously traumatic and intriguing for a pre-teen in ’73. The allure of Frankenstein and to a lesser extent Free Ride (both have the signature synthesizer gurgle swoop sound in them) influenced me on an atomic level.
Since then, Edgar has been a noted Scientologist, and scored the soundtrack to the historically execrable Battlefield Earth scifi/scientology non blockbuster. His twin brother Johnny plowed a blues furrow for decades, and Edgar…? He seemed to fade. Yet the idea of seeing Frankenstein live was a bucket list type thought. A thirty minute traffic showdown on the MassPike caused a mad high octane dash to the venue…and running up the ramp to the amphitheater one could hear the opening strains of Frankenstein, clearly the last song of the set. Winter took solo turns on drums, saxophone and of course synthesizer during the song-impressive. Forty year wish fulfillment. (Actually heard Derringer’s Rock n Roll Hoochie Koo on the way in if I remember right.) Setlist
Coop
Hello, Hooray
I really didn’t expect Alice Cooper to win the night. Recently I’d seen him headlining in a theater and was mildly impressed, and then saw him open for Marilyn Manson and found myself wondering if he really wanted to do this. Alice was never known for his vocal prowess even back in the day (it was known that it took many takes to get something good from this band), and to his credit, Alice hasn’t really deteriorated from his mid 70’s growl sing.
But this night-big stage big production dollars involved-things were different. The band played with a swagger, triple guitar attack. Songs and more expensive theater vignettes salted the show. Cold Ethyl was acted out as a love affair with a female corpse who gets brutally knifed by Alice. (Cold Ethyl is actually a love song to alcohol and a warning on its killing powers…oops. Alice was beheaded next). Seventies chauvinism was exalted and amplified at the altar of seventies excess in a paen to an era gone by. I’d only wish to see this show performed somewhere near Smith College as a writing prompt to a decade of collective indignant polemic. But in the haven of beers n bones Mansfield, no such consciousness was in evidence. In odd juxtaposition to the shock on display, Alice has been a little know born again Christian for a while. Though the setlist was fairly close to those of recent years, new songs were snuck in. Halo of Flies was the highlight, Alice’s attempt to prove to the prog rock snob crowd that ‘hey we can do that King Crimson shit too’. Decapitation, sword attacks, straight jackets, ten foot Frankenstein, electrocution….you know, the usual suspects were there to flesh out the concepts. Clear winners of the evening.
Purple Passages
Popeye? Never noticed…
Deep Purple. One of the second wave of British bands behind the Who, the Beatles, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. One of the kings of heavy, with only Led Zeppelin acknowledged as their peers in ability to improvise, vocal power (hell Ian Gillan was Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar), album sales and concert draw. One of the godlike bands of my childhood.
I worshiped at the altar of Made in Japan for decades. Whispers of Purple playing again was a heady concept. I’d known of Purple’s reunion circa 1985, that they were secretly rehearsing in New Hampshire at the time. When a sold out Worcester Centrum in 1985 announced on the radio that day of show the stage was a different shape and that 195 tickets would be released that afternoon, I bolted straight out there. The setlist of that tour stuck pretty close to Made in Japan, and during the opening chords of Highway Star, the opener, I leapt so high in the air I didn’t come down in the row in front of me, I landed TWO rows in front of me, right on top of some unsuspecting girl. I dusted off and scuttled away. They were fucking amazing, and in a form very close to their 1972 peak.
Since then, the departure of John Lord (RIP) and Ritchie Blackmore has impacted the band’s sound. Dixie Dregs guitarist Steve Morse has been manning guitar since 1994, and Purple fans seem satisfied. Blackmore is the Hendrix vibe of unbridled chaos Purple survived on, warts n all. Morse is the Robert Fripp of the band politely filtered through country precision. But as founding drummer Ian Paice has said “Life’s too short to play with Ritchie Blackmore again”
Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Ian Paice, Steve Morse and Don Airey still provide a formidable line up for any vintage rock band in 2017-essentially not one replacement part: three original members Morse and Don Airey as a longtime keyboardist of Rainbow. (Stargazer intro in keyboard solo) make this a band that has the ability to kick ass and show off at the same time. Airey mostly carried the night on a variety of keys. Gillan’s increasing resemblance to Popeye was wryly noted on his choice of apparel. His once amazing four octave vocal range is now diminished, but the power to amaze still bubbles underneath. Three new songs probably give them the illusion that this isn’t a nostalgia act. ‘The Long Goodbye Tour’ might be a sign they are actually aware, so more power to ’em or springing some cool new riffs on unsuspecting ears. Were they close to Purple in 1985 with Blackmore? No. Were they still showing signs of being able to annihilate most post 80’s bands? Yes. setlist
(On a religious front, this is about as close as Purple got to Born Again, Gillan’s underrated 1983 alliance with Black Sabbath)
September 2-Pete Townshend’s Orchestral Quadrophenia: ‘Classic Quadrophenia’
Alfie politely Roger’s Townshend
Pete Townshend’s Classic Quadrophenia is a work two decades in the making. From his first meeting with Rachel Fuller at a party in 1996, Townshend went into one of his periodic infatuations, and did everything he could to bed the then 23 year old up and coming arranger and film score artist. He finally landed her as a musical and then life partner, and realizing that his original premise to chat her up “uhh maybe we should get together, I need someone to orchestrate some Who” had to be followed up on…two decades later here we are.
Tanglewood in Lenox Massachusetts was the site of the opening night of this four city presentation. Seeing the Who within the last month was quite a juxtaposition of takes on Townshend’s underated compositional skills. Coming off one of Daltrey’s better vocal performances in decades, this one was likely to be some level of letdown. Daltrey’s place was split between two diametrically opposing fields of talent-the punk by Billy Idol (reprising his 1996 role with the Who’s first real Quadrophenia tour) and the rest by operatic tenor Alfie Boe. Pete Townshend showed up on a few songs as well. But how well can a well heeled opera and theater star fronting a top notch orchestra channel the pure angst and frustration that is Quadrophenia? This night, the results were mixed. First, the sound was spotty, with many sections nearly inaudible on the lawn. (I was front row lawn right behind the back row in the shed, so the sound deteriorated quickly as one walked back into the jam packed field). In the UK run in 2015, it was noted that Alfie was a bit too clean, no grit, and didn’t really capture the essence of the piece. At Tanglewood, it was evident he had taken steps to correct some of these criticisms, and was animated and excited. Still, the familiar growl of Daltrey is so intertwined with this album that one couldn’t help but notice some of the power gone. Also of note-Keith Moon and John Entwistle on drums and bass weave a powerful low end rumblingly delicate dance throughout the four sides of Quadrophenia. Here, the string bass and percussion section just couldn’t do justice to what essentially is the beating heart of one of the more dynamic works in the rock canon. Sure, the original album has some scattered orchestrations (mostly the work of Entwistle’s talent on all sorts of brass) which are nice reference points, but Fuller’s arrangements seemed a bit too polite in the long run. Tommy had been orchestrated in 1972, with similar mixed results, but a bit more able to capture the beating heart of that album. In the end, one question remains: “can you orchestrate one of the greatest rock albums ever? Yes. Should you?” That one is up to the listener. A noble failure.
September 3 – Venom Inc, Goat Whore, Toxic Holocaust, The Convalescence. Brighton Music Hall Boston
Venom. The band that started Black Metal 36 years ago. Just a mention of their name can still raise eyebrows across many genres of fans of heavy. Hell, they were tagged as the primary inspiration for the notorious Norwegian church burning/murder scene of 1992 (chronicled here). The band had mostly dissolved with bassist and vocalist Cronos keeping the Venom name, and Mantas (gtr) and Abaddon (drums) left to their own devices.
Abaddon, The Demolition Man, Mantas and spiritual overseer
But Satan had other ideas. At a festival in Germany, the promoter asked Mantas (Jeff Dunn) if he’d mind if Abaddon (Anthony Bray) came out to jam. They hadn’t spoken in well over a decade, but they jammed, the crowd went berserk and Venom was reborn.
So how does one follow up on Boston Symphony Orchestra doing the Who? A little Goat Whore and a lot of Venom. Arriving late with a posse, tired and still hung over, and amazed I’d talked people into driving across the state on consecutive nights, this night belonged to Venom. Brighton Music Hall holds about 400, yet there was a suspiciously large open area in the middle of the floor. A shirtless metal dude bobbed near the edge of the opening. I thought ‘hey nice place to see the band’ and then another thought crossed my mind. Before I could react, Venom hit the stage, and then something very much like this happened:
Bodies flew in all directions. Glasses flew in all directions. Bodies hit the bar-head first. Notes to self, when kids have the DRI logo on their jackets, beware. People started to rally and revive. One of our posse was fading and wanted to lie down in the car. Three songs in, all of us were head banging furiously, while one yelled out “Holy shit Satan healed me!” Things amped up even further During Live Like an Angel Die Like a Devil, one of Venom’s faster tunes, but now delivered at a mind boggling tempo. Bodies flew, sweat flew, beer flew, blood flowed. Warhead, Die Hard, Countess Bathory, Black Metal, Leave Me in Hell….Metal at its finest. God bless Venom. Satan too. Setlist here.
September 11- Roky Erickson and Death Valley Girls Brighton Music Hall Boston
If’n you’da seen what I seen…
The summer started with a legend, a cult legend to be sure, and ended with one of the most renowned ‘cult legends’ in the history of rock-60’s legend Roky Erickson. Roky’s tale is one that could easily encompass ten thousand words, but his short stint with the 13th Floor Elevators from 1966-1969 created a legend in the music world that still runs large ripples on both sides of the pond to this day. In truth, Roky is America’s Syd Barrett, the US psychedelic pioneer that was subverting the youth of Texas and promoting the nascent counterculture of dope sex n rock (and eventually launching decades of psych fans across the planet) while gobbling prodigiously large amounts of acid before the Grateful Dead even existed. And then dissolving spectacularly into madness, incarceration and retirement from public view.
From the first glorious notes of the Cold Night For Alligators until the the last reverberating chords of You’re Gonna Miss Me, the night was something completely different that what one could legitimately expect. Why? Well, Roky’s return to the floorboards in 2007 caught many by surprise. The stories of his unbridled madness: junk mail covering his walls, radios, tvs and alarm clocks jamming his house, all on full volume -a cacophony of noise that ran 24/7… his sister allowed that if the noise stopped, Roky could hear the voices again. Like Barrett, his legend precedes him in most circles. So when I witnessed a young looking and shaven revitalized Roky at the Bowery Ballroom in April 2007, he shook everyone’s preconceptions quickly. I got to a meet and greet after the show, and far from clinically mad, Roky was erudite, quite lucid, in strong voice and in command of his guitar….and ripped off the roof off the ballroom:
People were ecstatic that his return, so unexpected, could be so successful and raucous. He toured sporadically after this and his appearance and demeanor plummeted quickly, going from this to this in seven short years:
Seeing him in 2013 and 2014 I began to wonder what was going on. Roky blew lyrics on most songs, played very little guitar as it was slung prop-like over his shoulder, and seemed generally unaware of his surroundings. I began to wonder if elderly abuse charges needed to be filed against his backing band as they led him tottering to the stage, and then guided him painfully slowly off stage at the end. Roky did not acknowledge the audience as even being there.
This night, with a new band, Roky was led to the stage like usual, but this time a comfortable stool was front and center. And as mentioned, things were quite different. The new band was the most well suited to his material yet. His set list was unprecedented. 20 songs, 3 encores, NINE 13th Floor Elevators songs, an electric jug a la Tommy Hall? Christ, this was one miraculous recovery. Roky was still minimalist to non participating on guitar. But his vocals were sparkling, no cheat sheets in use (I was watching from the side of the stage), intricate lyrics delivered perfectly without any flubs. I watched as his left hand hung low by his side and twitched in an almost autistic fashion, wondering if he was suffering a level of torment. But after some observation, I realized that his hand was silently chording the guitar riffs right along with his vocal, an invisible and inaudible accompaniment, though the guitar hung unused on his neck. Fascinating insight into a mind that has been through the wringer of chemical madness. And an amazing evening with one of the last living legends of psychedelia. Brilliant stuff, akin to time traveling to a better golden age you’d thought had evaporated long ago. Yardbirds, Stones, Floyd, Beatles? Syd Barrett is long gone, but his American counterpart and pioneer is still out there infecting the masses with 50 year old vibrations. The pulse of acid inflected madness still floats in strength from Austin’s pioneering treasure, and I am damn glad he’s back in force.
Another amazing summer criss-crossing the Northeast, six outdoor shows sprinkled in. Get out there folks and spend next summer doing it right. The Who, Roky and Jean Michel Jarre were the top three shows of the summer, a fucking unbelievable summer.
Once again, let’s have Jerry Garcia Band bring us to the end:
Cats on the bandstand, give ’em each a big hand Anyone who sweats like that must be all right No one wants sometimes, no black eye Just another cat beneath the stars tonight
Cats down under the stars Cats down under the stars
Final tally: 14 bands, 9 venues, 2,095 miles traveled. Highway Stars.
Is rock n roll dying? Not rock stars, who seem to be lining up for lethal injections with great regularity lately, but rock n roll. I look at my living room floor. It is littered with Bowie, Motorhead, Mott the Hoople and Paul Kantner albums. Each new week brings another deletion from the rock n roll Hall of Famous. The detritus of the mighty beast of rock n roll lays scattered like the rubble of a childhood’s end. The recent deaths of David Bowie, Lemmy, Dale Griffin, and Paul Kantner (hey Glen Frey too) in two months is a very large hit for the rock community to take.(and now in the four weeks since this was written-Keith Emerson offed himself and Prince has checked out too) But it got me wondering about the state of rock of late. All of these platters on the rug came out over thirty five years ago (Bowie’s Blackstar being the lone exception). Turn on the radio-you hear about the same 100 songs: Bad Company, Boston, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, the Who, the Doors, Bob Seger, Elton John, the Yardbirds, Dire Straits, the Cars…..the list goes on. What do all these guys have in common? They were active and put albums out in the 1964-1979 fifteen year patch. In fact, almost every important album in rock came out between 1967 and 1977. Could it be that rock actually died, and we didn’t notice?
When the Beatles rewrote rock music history in the 1964 season, things really started to change. Groups played their own music for the first time. No longer were acts a couple of frontmen that used different back up bands at every venue, they were a full functioning self contained unit-bass, drums and guitar were now in house. Blues purist groups sprouted first, with the Rolling Stones being the best known aficionados of the new Brit craze, along with Alexis Korner and Graham Bond. The Yardbirds with Eric Clapton began their slow blues inflected ride. Mod groups popped up in the end of 1964 in the UK, with the High Numbers leading the charge into their next phase renamed as the Who. By 1965, America and the UK were teeming with rock bands of every stripe. Rhythm and Blues, pop, blues, nascent drug music, poetry bands..things started to diverge. With the introduction of LSD to England in late 1965, everything there changed. The budding post beatnik scene in San Francisco launched another center of LSD influenced music. Everyone from the Beatles on down turned on and tuned in. Take a look at what 1965 yielded: the Rolling Stones spat our an eyepopping five releases, including the groundbreaking Out of Our Heads; The Beatles four releases were topped by the awe inspiring Rubber Soul and the chart inspiring Help!-the Byrds, the Who, the Kinks, Van Morrison (Them), the Moody Blues, the Yardbirds all released their debut albums (technically the Kinks was their second). Bob Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home. Add in the Animals, the Beach Boys, and the Zombies and you have a pretty good record collection. 1966 saw even more luminaries hit the recording field: Simon and Garfunkel, and Cream hit the stage, but a new contender hit the airwaves: Psychedelic rock/protest rock/California rock? Whatever you called it, US bands fought back for control.. Buffalo Springfield (the future CSNY), Jefferson Airplane, 13th Floor Elevators, Love, Frank Zappa, the Fugs all highlighted the weirdness that was cropping up in the States with their debuts. Minds expanded, audiences expanded and the diversity of rock expanded exponentially.
It was 1967 that changed everything. LSD was ubiquitous in use, and society mirrored the kaleidoscopic sea change that the music industry went through. Topped by the Beatles Sgt Pepper, many band’s definitive albums came out this year alone: 13th Floor Elevator’s Easter Everywhere, Jefferson Airplane-Surrealistic Pillow and After Bathing at Baxters, Jimi Hendrix-Are You Experienced and Axis Bold as Love, Pink Floyd-Piper at the Gates of Dawn, The Doors-debut and Strange Days, Cream-Disraeli Gears, The Velvet Underground and Nico, the Grateful Dead debut, Traffic-Dear Mr. Fantasy, Love-Forever Changes, the Beatles-Magical Mystery Tour, the Moody Blues-Days of Future Passed, the Byrds-Younger Than Yesterday, Soft Machine debut, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Arlo Guthrie-Alice’s Restaurant, Moby Grape debut, Procol Harum debut, the Who-Sell Out-these 23 albums still form the core of many a well curated rock collection 49 years later, and are still considered the masterpiece of each bands work. And they all came out in one magic year. Rock had turned on, tuned in and turned up.
The class of 1967 spawned some fairly worthy progeny, as rock turned up, down and inside out. Add in the late comers to the scene like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Family, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Taste, the Stooges, Genesis, King Crimson, Chicago, the Guess Who, T Rex, MC5, Free, Van der Graaf Generator, Tangerine Dream, Spirit, Steve Miller, Steppenwolf, Sly and the Family Stone, J Geils Band, Three Dog Night, Grand Funk Railroad, Cat Stevens, Gentle Giant, David Bowie, Elton John, Mott the Hoople, Santana, the Allman Brothers, Joe Cocker, Fleetwood Mac, Caravan, the Band, Hawkwind, Humble Pie, Rod Stewart, Uriah Heep, Jethro Tull, Mountain, Alice Cooper, Ten Years After, the Move, Deep Purple, Kraftwerk, Can, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, James Taylor, Funkadelic…a veritable full on collection of classic rock playlist of well knowns and cult favorites, and you have a full blown scene. Just this list would form a formidable collection of pure and diverse rock n roll unmatched by any releases in the last twenty years. All of the above bands were well established by the end of 1970.(All of these bands actually put an album out in calendar year 1970). The bar had been raised considerably for any newcomers to the game.
So the 1976 punk era brought us a glimmer with the Clash, Elvis Costello, the Stranglers, the Sex Pistols, and the UK scene–the Ramones, Blondie, Television and the CBGBs scene. The synth pop and New Romantics of the 80’s? Does Duran Duran, Simple Minds and Spandau Ballet warrant attention? Joy Division certainly does. One thing that became clear though, by the end of the 80’s, the ranks of the upcoming visionaries was thinning rapidly.
The early 90’s rock revival brought us Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Janes Addiction, Alice in Chains, Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Fishbone, Smashing Pumpkins? With the some main exceptions like the daring Sonic Youth and the thoroughly acid soaked Butthole Surfers-even the good bands were starting to recycle ideas. Rock seemed out of steam. What started blossoming in 1965 had started to die on the vine only 25 years later. By 2000, the front door had been left open for the next visionaries, but nobody was waiting on the doorstep.
Which brings us to the spate of 50th anniversary tours. Never in my wildest dreams as a teenager could I have imagined that some of the best recent concerts I’ve attended would be 50th anniversary shows from the Who, the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. If a band lasted more than five years in the late sixties, it was considered a very real achievement. Tenth anniversaries used to be looked at with a mixture of imminent foreboding as well as a huge badge of honor. Hell, the Beatles never made it to ten years. Ten was a milestone, twenty went from unimaginable to a reality quickly for many in the 1970 list above. But FIFTY? No one in their right mind would ever imagine anything along those lines. Ludicrous wouldn’t even cover it if you ran this past Jann Wenner or Lester Bangs in the 70’s. Ironically, the Stones delivered one of their best tours in the last twenty years, even featuring Mick Taylor; the Who’s Quadrophenia was still spine chilling even sans Moon and Entwistle on their 2013 jaunt; the Grateful Dead? Mixed reviews of their five date summer tour didn’t negate the huge crowds they drew. Yes, Kansas and Rush trotted out 40th and 45th anniversary affairs.
Another troubling sign is the rise of tribute bands from local barrooms to sheds and theaters. Beatles tribute bands have long populated this venue hopping genre, but the mop tops stopped touring in 1965. But newer bands are now blurring the line between reality and homage, while pulling in increasingly large numbers of fans. Dark Star Orchestra, a rip on the Dead, have headlined festivals and regularly packed theaters that their mentors did in the seventies. They toured with former Dead vocalist Donna Godchaux as a member of the band. Pink Floyd? Pick your poison-The Australian Pink Floyd and Brit Floyd regularly play theaters and arenas. Led Zeppelin? The field is crowded. Get The Led Out tours the States from coast to coast filling up theaters and sheds. This is the troubling part-cover bands as bar bands? Sure that makes sense. But when these guys start crawling up the ladder of success, and rock theaters are now headlining tribute bands, one must ask-where the fuck are the real bands? Why are people still so hungry for the magic of the 67-77 era that they will shell out bucks for the ersatz versions?
So where are the next ones to step up? The thought of Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie or the Arctic Monkeys filling up Boston Garden on their 50th anniversary? I would be hard pressed to say those guys even being remotely remembered in 20 years, and would take odds they won’t even be playing an instrument then. The titanic waves generated by most of the ‘1970’ list above is now reduced to faint ripples in a pond made by the current rock cadre, barely noticeable in the bigger picture of what rock music has accomplished. Kids now flock to arenas to pray to the light machine, as shadowed figures tap at laptop computers to generate an electronic stroboscopic maelstrom, sometimes without an actual musical instrument on the stage. These are now the concerts where the ‘cool kids’ are showing up in droves-no band, no instruments, no real vocals-and riffs sampled (read: stolen) from records of the classic rock era-something very ironic and telling at the same time. Has social media-everyone with their nose pressed into their goddamn cellphones-killed rock n roll?
Something very very special happened in a ten year run from 67-77, and it has taken the last 40 years to put this in perspective. Rock used to be a form of secret communication. Sex, drugs, mysticism? All contained on the album cover you reverently held in your hands while trying to decipher what the hell any of this meant, buried in huge headphones. Rock albums were your only source of good information about how the world really worked. Album covers soon gave way to CD booklets which gave way to postage stamp size album art on an iPod which gave way to no art at all on your cellphone. Lyric sheets disappeared. Too many questions have answers only a google flick away. Mystery is gone. Rock cannot any longer reinvent itself back to those days when it held sway over pop culture like a monolithic pseudo god, and provided what honestly functioned as a religion for a huge part of the youth and aging youth of America and the UK. Concert goers are now aging. I know there are plenty of good bands lighting up clubs everywhere-but none of them have done anything new, only recycled things done many times over since the 1967-1977 decade of excellence. Some well-stirring the pot of influences into an interesting variant on a theme, some not so good. But the old guard still filling arenas speaks volumes about what has come recently. And though I shudder as I type this, may mean that rock might actually be dying in front of our eyes.
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Michael Aquino, Sammy and LaVey
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