After Manson’s arrest the music of Laurel Canyon and much of the rest of white Los Angeles turned away, somewhat, from social engagement. The newer music emphasized the centrality of private personal experience in the wake of a sense of countercultural failure. We should take note of Joni Mitchell’s trajectory from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, and particularly her adoption of the politically passive, valedictory stance in her 1971 song “California,” wherein the singer acknowledges that fighting for peace was just a passing fantasy. The distance traveled in this California/Manson art might be measured in the move (as rock critic Robert Christgau put it) between Mitchell’s 1969 record Clouds to her 1970 release Ladies of the Canyon: recognizing Mitchell’s new reliance on keyboards, after the acoustic guitar–based palette of Clouds, Christgau described the trajectory as a shift from “the open air to the drawing room.”29 That drawing room imagined by Christgau was in the Laurel Canyon house where Mitchell lived with Graham Nash. The real anthem of this move from open air to drawing room is not a Mitchell song, but Nash’s composition “Our House” (released on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Déjà Vu in 1970). The political communion at the heart of so much countercultural subversion of public, white mainstream American culture is gone, replaced here by the pleasures of private romantic love and an invitation to play for an audience of one. Graham Nash and others have actually underscored this turn to the “power of the personal” as a victory of individual vision in response to the “failure of the collective.”30
While the popular arts would continue to host a conversation about public and private, about what was normal and what was “freaky” (particularly in the Black music of the mid-to-late 1970s), the central cleansing drama of the post-arrest period took place in the courtroom. Recall Rachel Adams’s claim that one central element of the “freak” challenge to straight culture was to “perform” outlandish acts in sites usually reserved for serious business. The political aim of the strategy was to upend the authority usually taken for granted in the assigned space. In the case of courtroom dramas, the goal of such acting out is usually quite clear—it is meant to call into question who is judging whom. Manson’s performance at his trial demonstrated without question that the defendant was hoping to turn the court into his own sideshow. Much of the early drama at the trial circled around the question of whether Manson would be authorized to act as his own counsel. Judge Charles Older—with a name and bearing sent directly from central casting—refused Manson’s request to represent himself but “allowed” him to choose Irving Kanarek, a remarkably anarchic performer in his own right, as his lawyer. In the courtroom dialogue Manson and Older engaged in, Manson repeated that his first choice was to serve as his own counsel, but that his “second alternative is to cause you as much trouble as possible.”31 Manson engaged in all kinds of theatrics. First he got into character by carving the infamous X on his forehead; he broke out to sing “The Old Gray Mare” at one point; he held up a copy of the Los Angeles Times with the headline that President Nixon had declared “Manson Guilty”; he used his co-defendants as a Greek Chorus of sorts, commenting on the matters at hand; he made scary eyes at witnesses and he jumped over the defense table and leaped up to try to attack Judge Older with a pencil.
Manson never took the stand himself—which might have been a bad decision in terms of how fully he could “freak out” in court—but he did deliver a statement during which he played a number of different roles. One significant role Manson took on was as simple and humble naif: “I never went to school, so I never growed up in the respect to learn to read and write so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid, I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up. . . . Hippie cult leader . . . that is your words. I am a dumb country boy. . . . I went to jail when I was eight years old and I got out when I was thirty-two. I have never adjusted to your free world. I am still that stupid, corn-picking country boy that I have always been.”32 Manson’s efforts were not inconsequential, but ultimately they were neutralized by the prosecutor’s success in rendering Manson as a fringe figure—not a norm-challenging freak, but as a slightly pathetic striver who did not have the talent or cultural capital to help him earn the mainstream success he so desperately craved. In essence, what Bugliosi constructed for the jury was a Manson tale that explained away his capers as the desperate efforts of a “failed musician” who could not make it in a more conventional way. As early as the December 5 Grand Jury hearing Bugliosi was using Melcher and Jakobson to begin building this characterization.
At the first trial (of Manson himself, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten) in 1970 and at Tex Watson’s trial in 1971, Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi collaborated with some key members of the new Los Angeles cultural leadership to publicly purge Manson from the music scene he had broken into so dramatically. If Manson had rearranged some of the furniture of the Los Angeles’s cultural scene, then it was going to be Bugliosi’s job to get the house back in order. The Golden Penetrators had a particularly crucial role to play, from the convening of the original Grand Jury, through the long trial of Manson and the girls, and the later trial of Tex Watson. The purifying rituals that took place in the context of these courtroom dramas had a few key components. First, the trinity of the Golden Penetrators came to at least an implicit agreement that Gregg Jakobson would do most of the heavy lifting when it came to explaining how Manson had come to be such a central part of the Los Angeles music scene. This was the first move in depreciating Manson’s cultural assets. Much of Bugliosi’s courtroom portrait of Manson would rely on a complicated math: the prosecutor needed to present the leader of this family as totally in control of his small kingdom, but off the rails with respect to understanding his place in the wider culture—mildly delusional but not totally insane. Bugliosi used Manson’s attempts to break into the music business to help establish that Manson was operating from organized, if deeply daft, motivations. Also important at the trial was that the Family as a unit needed to be constructed as an anthropological curiosity—certainly worth paying attention to (and perhaps even worth “recording”) but not to be mistaken for peers or potential colleagues. Implicit in all this, too, was an argument that this Family sure did not look like your family. Finally, Bugliosi—with the help of his key witnesses—would need to help the jury understand what it meant to be a professional musician in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969 in order to make clear how little Manson had in common with the real musicians with whom he came in contact.
Even the most cursory reading of the trial records reveals this interesting fact about Dennis Wilson: The Beach Boy did not sing. During the discovery period before the first trial, according to Vincent Bugliosi, Wilson initially “claimed to know nothing of importance.” Ultimately Wilson agreed to “level” with Bugliosi but held fast to his refusal to testify. Ed Sanders suggests in the Los Angeles Free Press that Wilson had, in early interviews with Bugliosi, taken a decidedly “mishiga” approach and was making it clear to the prosecutor that he would act crazy on the stand if forced to testify.33 By his own admission Wilson would not testify because he was scared—and by most accounts the musician had reason to worry.34 In addition to creepy crawling Wilson’s house, Manson also directly threatened to hurt Wilson’s son.35 Dennis Wilson’s intimate involvement with the Family left him vulnerable to its threats—Manson and his followers certainly knew where Wilson lived. The time the Family spent at Wilson’s Sunset Boulevard home was crucial to its overall growth and to its access to some of the most powerful figures in the film and musical worlds of Los Angeles. During this Sunset Boulevard spring, the Family doubled in number and gained some key male members, including Tex Watson, Paul Watkins, and Brooks Poston. These few months also resulted in the Family developing its “star map” of Los Angeles; through Wilson they met Jakobson, Melcher, and Rudi Altobelli, an agent for a number of Hollywood figures and owner of 10050 Cielo Drive.36
Wilson was also something of a believer. He appears
, actually, to have been more convinced by Manson’s philosophy than by Manson’s music. When Terry Melcher finally ended his radio silence in 1974 to speak with Rolling Stone (as part of a promotional effort on behalf of his first solo record), he noted that Dennis Wilson thought Manson was “some kind of guru.”37 Melcher may not, however, have been forthcoming about his own seduction by Manson. According to Rudi Altobelli (who lived in a guest house on the Cielo Drive grounds), “Terry and Gregg Jakobson were always talking about Manson and his philosophy.”38 Altobelli thought that the two were, possibly, trying to get him interested in taking Manson on as a client.39 For his part, Dennis Wilson seems to have been happy to share his home, his cars, his wardrobe, and more with Manson and the Family. Wilson obviously enjoyed the relationships he forged with the women of the Family, but he also seems to have embraced the spiritual connection he felt with Manson. This was not the first time Wilson threw his lot in with a charismatic spiritual leader. A year earlier Wilson had concluded the same thing about the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (also the Beatles’ guru for a brief time) that he later felt about Manson, and he encouraged his bandmates to engage with the holy man’s teachings.40 But the key difference separating his dalliance with the Maharishi and his involvement with Manson was that even as Wilson acted as an acolyte to both, it was only with Manson that Wilson could so completely exercise class privilege. After developing a deep and meaningful relationship with the Family leader and aspiring musician, Wilson was able to cut ties completely, to construct an impermeable boundary between himself and Charles Manson. It was an open secret in 1969 that “Never Learn Not to Love,” at the very least, had its roots in Manson’s “Cease to Exist.” After Manson was arrested, Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme showed up at Gregg Jakobson’s house demanding money for the composition, which was not forthcoming.41 Whether his relationship with Manson is construed as a business matter or a social relationship, Wilson’s privilege enabled him to make this problem go away. The Beach Boys did not pay royalties to Manson and Wilson did not have to testify about his relationship to Manson at the trial. While the whole episode may have left enduring marks on Wilson’s emotional landscape, as some have suggested, the Beach Boys’ drummer was able, more or less, to hit a rim shot and move on.
In 1976 Wilson said definitively, if not particularly clearly, that he would not talk about Manson: “I think of Roman and all those wonderful people who had a beautiful family and they fucking had their tits cut off. I want to benefit from that?”42 A year later Wilson revisited his categorical refusal to talk, telling the editor of a Beach Boys’ fanzine that he knew “why Charles Manson did what he did. Someday I’ll tell the world. I’ll write a book and explain why he did it.” That book did not get written.43
For his part, Terry Melcher simply created as much distance as he could between himself and Manson, particularly in the testimony he gave at Manson’s trial. He did this, as I suggested above, by treating the Family as worthy (maybe) of a type of quasi-anthropological interest and by emphasizing that what he was—a professional producer and musician—had little in common with the sit-around-the-fire-and-sing rituals of Manson and his followers. In Melcher’s testimony Manson emerges as admirably charismatic (i.e., somehow he was able to control all these women) but not as a talented performer or competent social actor likely to make it in the complex Los Angeles music industry.
The testimony offered by Melcher at the trial showed a Manson as almost completely guileless when it came to his understanding of the “real” world of the music business. Under Vincent Bugliosi’s careful questioning, Melcher made it plain that Manson had been engaged in some magical thinking with respect to getting recorded and getting paid; what Melcher needed to explain to the aspiring musician was that “money derived from the sale of records were paid to the artists on a royalty basis, you know, which companies have different pay periods of six months or something like that and, you know, you don’t get a record and get paid for it. You make a record and then if it sells you get paid a certain percentage of the sale.” Melcher presented all this to the jury as a cut-and-dried matter—strictly business, nothing personal—but of course, he was not telling the truth. Offering contracts with advance money attached (sometimes held against future earnings) was standard industry practice at this point—I will just mention Los Angeles’s Buffalo Springfield and San Francisco’s Quicksilver Messenger Service as acts that received considerable money up front. But Melcher held steady here under Bugliosi’s questioning:
Q. Was Mr. Manson interested in getting money immediately, is that what he told you?
A. Yes.
Q. And you explained to him under the royalty process that it took time to get money, is that correct?
A. Yes.
From here Melcher worked with Bugliosi to establish that every bit of his conversation with Manson was in the form of “general advice”; at no time did he make a promise or offer.44 It is also worth noting that notwithstanding some problems Doris Day had vis-à-vis her husband Martin Melcher’s mismanagement of her money (Martin Melcher died in 1968), Terry Melcher himself did not seem inordinately concerned with resources. John York, who was briefly a member of the Byrds after Chris Hillman left the band, recalls that he “enjoyed working with Terry” but noted that the producer “had this annoying thing of being a guy who didn’t have to ever worry about time or money.”45
Melcher’s efforts to distance himself from Manson began right with the Grand Jury that was convened soon after his arrest. Melcher explained that “the type of music they were doing and the whole setting itself” was peculiar for “the pop music business. Melcher then spoke of his friend, Mike Deasy, who had that remote recording unit and planned to “spend a summer traveling around the country trying to record various Indian tribes doing native songs.” Melcher recounted telling Deasy that the Family “seemed to be something like an Indian tribe, they sat around and all sang together, and all participated, that perhaps that might be they type of thing he was interested in.”46 The record producer, according to his account, also told Manson about Deasy, promoting the latter as interested in “un-Hollywood or un–New York music, you know, things that came out of the roots of something . . . all the things that the word ethnic implies, you know, is what he was interested in recording.”47
Melcher’s account in court deserves some scrutiny. His fantasy—perhaps inspired by the popularity of National Geographic magazine—established a few important premises about Manson and his Family. The most significant claim here, as I have been suggesting, is that his testimony reads Manson out of the ranks of professional (or potentially professional) musicians. What the record will show, from this moment forward, is that Manson and his followers might hold some interest as the object of a professional musician’s interest—in this case, Melcher’s friend Mike Deasy—but there was never any chance that they would occupy the subject position. Deasy may have been serious about this mission Melcher described, but Melcher could not help but communicate to Manson that no one in Los Angeles took him seriously as a musician. To Melcher, Manson and the Family were folkloric, an oddity, something that might be colonized and put on display. But Manson was not going to get paid.
The countercultural embrace of Native Americans in this era has been well documented. In 1967 the Human Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park was advertised as a “Gathering of the Tribes.” Many of the participants would clothe themselves in what they understood to be garb associated with Native Americans. The “Indian” connection was made even more explicit by a poster created by Rick Griffin for the event, which advertised the event as a “Pow Wow.” Griffin’s poster featured an Indian, on horseback, holding a hollow-body (unplugged) electric guitar. Griffin’s Indian is silent and picturesque, functioning as a symbol of the tribes being convened in San Francisco. As with the infamous television ad featuring the “crying Indian” Iron Eyes Cody that would debut in 1971, the Native American is a container for white fantasies of silent nobility. In the case
of the Gathering of the Tribes, the speaking would be done by all those listed individually around the sides of the poster—Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and so on. When Terry Melcher went to Spahn to audition the Manson Family he essentially saw Manson and an undifferentiated mass of women: “There were forty or fifty, it’s hard to say exactly, they were everywhere.”48 The Manson Family, the “hippie cult,” comes to visibility in Melcher’s testimony in much the same way. Melcher admits that they held some interest for him (though this is immediately deflected onto Mike Deasy) as a “tribe” but not as actors on the scene.
Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl Page 20
