The music of Freak Out! was packaged as a double gatefold LP and it is important to pay attention to the appearance of the record along with the music inside. All of the music of Freak Out! is framed by the record’s cartoon cover art and the manifesto of sorts that Zappa includes with the liner notes. The manifesto makes clear how individual transformation can lead to social change:
On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express CREATIVELY his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole. Less perceptive individuals have referred to us who have chosen this way of thinking and FEELING as “Freaks,” hence the term: Freaking Out.
Zappa is acknowledging here that in his moment “freak”—as noun or verb—is generally understood to have strongly negative connotations while hinting at the radical potential of reclaiming the word—and the behaviors associated with it— as a badge of social resistance:
On a collective level, when any number of “Freaks” gather and express themselves through music or dance, for example, it is generally referred to as a FREAK OUT. The participants, already emancipated from our national social slavery, dressed in their most inspired apparel, realize as a group whatever potential they possess for free expression.
We would like to encourage everyone who HEARS this music to join us . . . become a member of the The United Mutations . . . FREAK OUT.”
The serious purpose of Zappa’s Freak Out! was leavened with plenty of parody. On the record jacket itself potential freaks were offered help on their journey with the image of a map to “Freak-Out Hot Spots,” which would lead them to freak nightclubs, restaurants, “and many more interesting places,” and which would also give information on “where the heat has been busting frequently with tips on safety in police-terror situations.” These liner notes promise that a full version of the map—in “magnificent color (mostly black)”—could be had for a dollar. Zappa’s tongue-in-cheek consumerist anti-consumerism was itself a “freak” act.21 Not everyone in Zappa’s orbit embraced his freak politics, of course. Don Van Vliet, leader of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, was particularly upset by what he perceived as attempts by Zappa (serving as his producer) to make him “into a horrible freak.”22
The Freak Out! sleeve also features names of artists who had become important to Zappa’s development; these people were listed under the heading “These People Have Contributed Materially in Many Ways to Make Our Music What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against Them.” Later, Zappa would say that the whole package was meant to be “as accessible as possible to the people who wanted to take the time to make it accessible. That list of names in there, if anybody were to research it, would probably help them a great deal.” Musician and producer Don Was, who bought the record in the summer of 1966, says the package worked just so for him: this was, he remembers, the “first time I heard of Charles Ives, Willie Dixon, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Eric Dolphy.” Intent on joining the “freak” movement, Was says that he and a friend left Michigan in the summer of 1966 and “took a trip to LA . . . just to check out all the locations that Frank listed as freak out hot spots. When we finally reached the hallowed portals of Ben Franks restaurant on Sunset, we felt like we’d become part of a movement—even if it was 10 a.m., and there wasn’t a freak in sight!”23
“Freak” lived as an important social category for quite some time. As Rachel Adams explains, the “young people of the 1960s voluntarily adopted the name freak as a banner of rebellion against the authority of parents, schools, government” and “rebellious young people embraced freakiness as a sign of social dissidence.”24 Jimi Hendrix waved his freak flag in “If 6 Was 9,” a song he first released in 1967, but which also made an impact in 1969 as part of the Easy Rider soundtrack. One of the signal achievements in the world of visual popular culture in the late 1960s, Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (which debuted in 1968), established that “freak” had developed a countercultural cachet well beyond Zappa’s Los Angeles circle. The word remained ripe with energy as the decade turned: on the one hand we find David Crosby singing about why he decided not to get a haircut and turning the (non)event into a freak’s declaration of independence from “straight” norms; out on the more political edge of the counterculture, “freak” was being drafted into active duty by the radical Weather Underground, which, in its very first of a series of communiques declared categorically that “Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks.”25 This political declaration, circulated in 1970, is one indication of how fully the name and role of the “freak” had been transformed by the activity of the 1960s counterculture to become a sign of thoughtful and energetic insurgency.
Of course “freakiness” was quickly coopted. For some early adopters, “freak” performance all too easily slid into a sort of empty self-display and self-indulgence, a cheap collation of thrift-store knick-knacks and hallucinogens. No one was more quickly and fully disappointed by how “freak” could be diluted than Zappa himself. In the summer of 1966, the Mothers were involved with a number of events in Los Angeles that Zappa hoped would help carry his arguments about the “freak out” to an even larger group of young people. These young people had been coming under increasing fire from the police (at the behest of the merchants of the Sunset Strip) largely because they loitered quite a bit—blocking the sidewalks—and bought very little. Zappa tried to articulate how this anti-consumerist orientation should not simply be chalked up to relative poverty, but could be situated at the heart of the “freak” challenge to the dominant culture. In August of 1966, Zappa and the Mothers performed to a huge audience at “Freak Out! Son of GUAMBO” at the Shrine Exposition. GUAMBO had been an earlier show, organized to celebrate the second anniversary of the Los Angeles Free Press, a major vehicle of the countercultural ethos in the city. After the success of the August show, the Mothers were booked to headline a repeat performance on September 17. In advance of this show Zappa paid to publish a four-page insert in the Free Press. It was made up of photo collages and encouraging text, meant to help his young fans see “through the lies of modern consumer society.”26 A week later Zappa took out another advertisement, and by this point his tone (and the presentation) had already radically changed. Now, Zappa is “hectoring,” reminding the audience for the Mothers that there is a “danger” in the “‘Freak Out’ becoming an excuse instead of a reason. An excuse implies an end, a reason a beginning.” “Freaking Out,” Zappa reinforces, “should presuppose an active freedom . . . liberation from the control of some other person or persons.” Zappa finishes his Free Press freak manifesto with a warning: “What WE must try to do then, is not only comment satirically on what’s wrong, but try to CHANGE what’s wrong.”27
Zappa did not stop here, instead engaging for the next few months in culture spats that essentially revolved around his sense that other people (including Vito Paulekas, and Carl Franzoni, “Captain Fuck” himself) were trying to cash in on Zappa’s “freak out” innovations. Of course, as Barry Miles points out, Paulekas had been holding proto–freak outs on his own for some time. But, as I have been trying to suggest, one major story to trace as we try to follow the Manson Family’s creepy crawl over the Strip and through the canyons, is how much the landscape was already primed, by the time they arrived, for a battle royale where the prize would be male-freak supremacy (with all the rights and responsibilities that entailed). There were many ways that the Manson Family appeared as just a slightly more extreme version of the tribes that had been established in the mid-to-late 1960s in Los Angeles, which “centered on charismatic men inside or on the fringes of the music industry.”28 Vito Paulekas, with his retinue of female and a few male acolytes (including Kim Fowley) was the leader of one such tribe; Frank Zappa, with his Mothers, his GTOs, and his Mothers’ Auxiliary (including Paulekas) and others who blew in and out of the Log Cabin was another. Musician Bobby Be
ausoleil, on a smaller scale, was developing just such a entourage when he first came in contact with Charles Manson, and some have explained the rapid development of the Manson Family as something like a merger of these two bands of freaks.
The line between “cult,” “freak family,” and “band” became increasingly hard to draw in the last few years of the 1960s. Manson was clearly on the cult side of the ledger, as were Father Yod, leader of the Source Family (also in Los Angeles, and with musician Sky Saxon of the Seeds as one of its key figures), and the Lyman Family. Lyman is often treated as a sort of sub-Manson cult leader—possibly because he did not seem to direct his followers, explicitly, to kill. Armed robbery, maybe; murder, no. But Lyman accessed a kind of cultural power that Manson never developed.
On the “band” side of the equation, we can certainly comfortably place Zappa’s Log Cabin, the Grateful Dead (with its group house at 710 Ashbury Street in San Francisco), Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Historians have not been able to resist the Manson Family analogy when discussing the complex work–life arrangements developed by these acts. Harvey Kubernik, for instance, describes Quicksilver Messenger Service as living one version of the hippie dream at “a commune in Marin County where all manner of musicians, old ladies with babies, dope dealers, and human driftwood coalesced into a barely functioning whole. It wasn’t exactly the Spahn Ranch, but it bordered on the hairy edge of calamity.”29 It has become even more commonplace to describe the late 1960s existence of the Magic Band with language inspired by the cultural creepy crawl of the Manson Family. One friend of Don Van Vliet (a.k.a. Captain Beefheart) describes the Magic Band’s experiment in communal living as “positively Manson-esque” and notes that while “Don was taking vitamins and eating well,” the remainder of the band were maintained on “a barely liveable diet.” Additionally, the “ongoing regime of control,” established by Van Vliet (as with Manson’s strategy) relied at least in part on the strategic use of hallucinogens.30
This communal experiment culminated in the appearance of the record Trout Mask Replica, released just a few months before the Tate-LaBianca killings. Guitarist Bill Harkleroad (known in the Magic Band context as Zoot Horn Rollo) recounts that this period of the group’s life was marked by “brainwashing sessions” during which Van Vliet “turned on one of the group and systematically criticized him to break him down.” This period in the Magic Band’s history is summarized by Harkleroad as being characterized by a “Mansonish Gestalt Therapy kind of thing.”31 Manson rarely seems to have used such direct means, favoring more of a theatrical and allegorical approach to attacking the ultimately constricting boundaries of “ego.” As Gregg Jakobson put it at the Tex Watson trial (skittering dangerously on the edge of breaking into the opening lines of “I Am the Walrus”), the “overriding philosophy” was that “he is me and I am him and I am you and you are me.”32
When Charles Manson and his Family let their “freak flag fly” it was recognized by a surprisingly large number of powerful industry figures as an appealing invitation, a gesture of peace and goodwill, and an emblem of alliance. “Freak” was a key word, a densely packed concept, central to the Los Angeles counterculture’s sense of its own identity as anti-establishment; for a time Charles Manson was able to wield his own freakiness as a calling card, a high sign that he flashed that helped him gain entrée to the clubs, recording studios, and private homes of Los Angeles. How did Charles Manson install himself as a “freak”? The dance floor was a major venue for him to establish his freakiness. By the time of Manson’s arrival on the scene, Los Angeles rock-and-roll performers and audiences were already well prepared—by Vito Paulekas and his troupe, among others—to understand dancing as a site of important social activity. In his recent biography of Charles Manson, Jeff Guinn makes the smart decision to open his entire book with a description of Manson accompanying Dennis Wilson (along with the other two Golden Penetrators) to the Whisky in 1968. While the three other men made their way to a reserved table, Manson peeled off and headed to the dance floor. In one of his more fanciful passages, Guinn imagines that Jakobson, Melcher, and Wilson let him go—fully expecting to see Manson receive his “comeuppance” on the dance floor and return quickly to their table. But then Manson, a “whirling dervish,” springs into action and takes over the floor; while all three of the celebrities had seen Manson dominate smaller-scale social events before, this was unexpected. Jakobson summarizes this surprising evening by saying this is when he and his compatriots realized, for the first time, that “Anytime, anywhere Charlie wanted to be the center of attention, he could be.”33 A new Vito (with more than a little bit of Captain Fuck rolled in, of course) had arrived!
While dance-floor theatrics were never a major part of Charles Manson’s repertoire, this appearance at the Whisky along with his ability to regularly hold the floor (at Wilson’s house first, and then later at Spahn Ranch) as a solid, improvising musician were crucial to establishing his freak credentials. Paul Watkins, a one-time Family member, is one of the few people besides Neil Young to credit the freaky power of Manson’s music-making. In his memoir, published ten years after the murders, Watkins spends considerable space trying to capture the functional vigor of Manson’s jam sessions:
Those who have written about Manson have always implied that drugs and sex were his primary means of programming the Family. But music was perhaps even more influential. No other art form better expresses the nuances of the soul. While Charlie was never a great instrumentalist, his voice was strong and he had a good range. He could wail, croon, and get funky. . . . He got it moving by making up songs, singing nonsense verses with uncanny timing. I felt completely relaxed and into it. When he suddenly began a new verse, then hesitated halfway through it, I obeyed an impulse and sang the rest of it.34
Much of what Watkins says about Manson’s freaky and powerful music making could be drawn from the most conventional narratives of a certain strand of California’s countercultural music culture—the Northern California kind, that is. Here Watkins emphasizes the spontaneous, the communal, and the everyday, the significance of individual and group improvisation over the Los Angeles scene’s increasing emphasis on the rehearsed and polished.
Paul Watkins’s thoughtful evaluation of Manson’s freak improvisations could have been drawn from any one of literally dozens of accounts of the Grateful Dead. Carole Brightman, in her book Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure, boils down the role of improvisation to the Dead’s music with the observation that it represented “chaos accepted and embraced.”35 Avoiding the “slick” approach of Los Angeles professionals, Manson deployed the freak strategy of improvisation to signal that he was operating in a musical democracy—that his music was meant to convene not “fans” but co-creators. Watkins is aware of how Manson’s work as a performing artist involved walking on a tightrope. On the one hand his singing and playing inspired devotion on the part of his female followers. Describing young Ruth Anne Moorehouse (Ouisch), Watkins writes of how she watched Manson, “her eyes wide, her mouth slightly ajar. She reminded me of a teenager watching Elvis Presley in his prime. All eyes, in fact, were riveted to Charlie.” On the other hand, Manson was careful not to let his performances create too much distance between performer and audience or to emphasize technical accomplishment over “feeling”: “Though Charlie was always the lead vocalist, everyone got involved in the music. . . . Nothing brings people closer together than their own voices in song.”36
Manson’s appearance on the Los Angeles freak scene was an important continuation of the détente of Northern and Southern California that the Monterey Pop Festival had first brokered. Of course, Manson himself (after his release from Terminal Island in 1967, during the “Summer of Love”) followed a path that took him from the Haight-Ashbury to Southern California in an old school bus the Family had painted black—possibly a parody of the multicolored bus Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters took on their trips. More important t
han his physical journey from North to South, however, is the way that Manson brought elements of Northern California’s musical culture to Los Angeles: the open-ended jam, the shaggy communalism, and the belief that music could be a vehicle for spiritual growth were all hallmarks of the “San Francisco Sound,” which Manson helped introduce to Dennis Wilson, Gregg Jakobson, and many others who engaged with the Family in the last two years of the 1960s. At just the moment when Wilson’s brother Brian was making deep investments in the notion that the art of the Beach Boys would be a studio art, relying not only on the professional musicians of the Wrecking Crew but also on an assumption that the studio itself had to be approached as if it were a sort of meta-instrument, Dennis Wilson was acting out a small-scale rebellion through his embrace of Manson’s folk-oriented, extemporaneous creations.
Manson and the Family would not have been able to infiltrate the freak scene of Los Angeles if they had not also looked the part. Manson and his Family obviously did look like freaks. They wore the right clothes (or didn’t wear the right clothes, as the occasion required) and the right accessories, their hair was freaky, and their talk was freaky. On Freak Out! Frank Zappa had included throwing off “outmoded and restricted standards of . . . dress” as part of the necessary reinvention of the “freak” who is trying to alter “his [sic] relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.”37 With the requisite long hair on men and the leather thong around Manson’s neck and the girls—when clad—wearing the kind of second-hand hippie finery that was first sold at Szou Paulekas’s “Freak Boutique” (located above Vito’s clay studio), the Family made a visual claim to territory on the Strip, in Laurel Canyon, and in Dennis Wilson’s home. Even the renaming of the tribe (Gypsy, Katie, Ouisch, Squeaky, Snake, and so on) had its parallels in other freak “families.”38
Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl Page 18
