Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  John Phillips’s first solo record, John, the Wolfking of L.A., was one of the first major pieces of Los Angeles art to enact that desire for distance from such marginal figures as the men and women who constituted the Manson Family. As product, Phillips’s record represents a sort of muscle-flexing of Los Angeles musical power—produced by Lou Adler, it features not only the usual suspects (members of the Wrecking Crew) but also Elvis Presley’s guitarist, James Burton. The record does not shy from hard tales—“Topanga” is a sketch of the ravages of Phillips’s drug addiction—but makes its impact, above all, as a bit of reportage from Los Angeles’s musical aristocracy: the entire record is keyed, unironically, around the the idea that the elite of Malibu have got life pretty much all figured out.

  The musical palette is organized to communicate “sincerity.” This effect is accomplished mostly through the regular deployment of gospel-style piano (Larry Knechtel of the Wrecking Crew) and background vocals (Darlene Love, Jean King and Fanita James) and two different steel-guitar players—Buddy Emmons, the premier steel player of the post–World War II Nashville music scene, and Red Rhodes, a Los Angeles mainstay. That “sincerity” is used to frame not only the love stories (“April Anne,” “Someone’s Sleeping”) but also one tale (“Drums”) about the people who stole a set of thirty-dollar Blackbird drums from the singer’s car. The singer is flabbergasted—though an earlier song found the narrator going up to Topanga to meet his own dealer—that such people exist. He makes a point of suggesting that the thieves (does he have film of the robbery?) have converted musical instruments into injectable drugs. The emotional distance between the troubled protagonist of “Topanga” and the belittled drug users of “Drums” neatly encapsulates the us-and-them dynamics of post-arrest Los Angeles.

  Terry Melcher did not make his own debut solo album until 1974, but he did get involved with another “family” almost immediately after his experience with the Manson group. In 1970 Melcher brokered an agreement between John Phillips and Sly Stone (of Sly and the Family Stone) to have Stone move into the Bel Air mansion that Phillips and his wife Michelle had previously lived in. Stone was particularly happy to have a house with a recording studio built in. He was beginning work on the record that would, in 1971, be released with the title There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Embodying the more general retreat from the communal and collective, Stone’s work at this time was done independently, largely through overdubbing; the fierce and passionate group work of Sly and the Family Stone (narrated in its own 1968 hit “Dance to the Music”) is here replaced by layer after layer of Stone’s own voice. (Family saxophone player Jerry Martini has explained that this was the era he called “guns and dogs,” going on to note that this was “an insane time. That’s when Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, sleazebag motherfucker, was around . . . very bad person.”)11 There is a privatization in Stone’s music in this era that is in keeping with the Los Angeles elite’s turn away from the possibilities and dangers of the open-door era.

  Two regular guests to the Bel Air house in 1970 and 1971 were Bobby Womack and Jim Ford, both of whom, by most accounts, also played on Riot, though the LP has no credits. Ford would later write “Harry Hippie” for Womack, allegedly inspired by stories about Womack’s own brother, but important here for how it cruelly dismisses poor hippies. On some level, “Harry Hippie” seems like a dark answer song to the Hollies’ 1969 hit, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” The relatively high diction of the verses of the Hollies’ song and its ennobling message is met in “Harry Hippie” by offhanded indifference: Harry Hippie is mostly content to sleep, walk around, and sing to himself, and maybe—in a pinch—sell a few copies of the Los Angeles alternative weekly paper as he makes his way down Sunset Strip. The song’s narration (supported by Womack’s dig-deep soul vocals and terse guitar lines) appears rational and, in a strange twist, socially responsible. Ultimately “Harry Hippie” prepares listeners to sympathize with the singer’s cruel disavowal of Harry: he will not be carried by the narrator. As the song comes to an end, Womack’s narrator invites the listeners to join in the cruelty by singing along. In the great gospel and soul tradition the prescribed “response” of the audience is built into the “call” of the singer.

  This quick tour of post-Manson, Los Angeles–based works by John Phillips, Sly Stone, and Bobby Womack is meant only to give a brief indication of how the profound creepy crawl performed by the Manson Family was neutralized by a sort of music-industry backlash organized around drawing clear demarcations between the freaks and the hippies on the one hand, and the entertainment-industry elite on the other. Of course this was neither a linear nor a systematic “movement”—there was no manifesto or action plan. The retreat to “Our House” was part of an anxiety-driven and unruly set of cultural assumptions and articulations. There were of course, numerous challenges to the music industry’s denial and rejection of the freak, including Steely Dan’s remarkably empathetic “Charlie Freak,” released on 1974’s Pretzel Logic—the group’s first record to feature major contributions from Los Angeles session musicians (who did their work at Cherokee Studios in Chatsworth, not far from Spahn Ranch). The song’s narrator tells the tragic story of a character who dies from an overdose after he sells a gold ring—the only thing he owns of value—in order to get some money to buy drugs. Where the narrator of “Harry Hippie” can barely stand to look at the title character, “Charlie Freak” ends with a communion of sorts. The narrator of the song hears the news and rushes to the morgue to return the ring to Charlie’s finger and carry the body to its final resting place.

  It is not as if members of various countercultures gave up on “freak”: Ed Sanders’s multidecade mission to untangle the Manson Family from the Los Angeles counterculture was very much inspired by his displeasure with how “violence was encroaching on the domain of the freak-out.”12 Sanders noticed immediately that mainstream coverage of the Tate-LaBianca murders and the arrests of Manson and the other members of the Family had a distinctly “anticounterculture and antihippie flavor, as if the Mansonites, by their single set of transgressions . . . had been the real funeral of Hippie.”13 The patently “fake freak” language Sanders peppers throughout The Family (most frequently “oo-ee-oo”) was one tactic the author used to underscore the inauthentic character of the Manson Family’s freakdom. Rather than retreat or turn away from the freak, Sanders, covering the trial for the Free Press, enacted a freak reclamation project. Likewise, when David Dalton and David Felton incorporated their June 25, 1970, Rolling Stone cover story on Manson into a 1972 book they included the phrase “acid fascism” in the subtitle, in an attempt to mark off Manson and his Family from other counterculture radicals and seekers.

  Of course “freak” reappeared in full force in American dance music culture beginning in the mid-1970s—now as an index of a vague but clearly celebratory attitude toward insurgent sexualities in disco, funk, and then hip-hop music.14 The peak year for this reappropriation of “freak” was probably 1978—it brought not only Chic’s “Le Freak,” but also “freak” songs by Isaac Hayes, Timmy Thomas, the Michael Zager Band, the band Phreek itself, and many others. This wave of freakiness seems to have been kicked off in 1974 when T. K. Records’ house band, Miami, released an LP called Freak Party (which featured parts 1 and 2 of “Freak Party” as well as “Freak on Down My Way”) and when Betty Davis issued her song “He Was a Big Freak” (which features a turquoise whip). There is no one single or simple “freak” story to be reconstructed from the dozens of popular song usages, but their presence helps us resist the doomy end-of-the-sixties rhetoric that has too often accompanied accounts of the Manson Family and its legacies. One obvious point to make here is that Black popular culture seems to have been relatively untouched by the hand-wringing over freakiness that plagued white Americans in the wake of the the Family arrests and trials.

  Nile Rodgers of Chic has written passionately about disco utopianism as an improvement on hippie expressive culture. Here he de
scribes a friend and her dance partners: “Karen and her stylish comrades all danced their curvy asses off. For them, the movement, in every sense of the word, was as open and communal as the forces driving the hippies of my youth. . . . I’d say they were even more expressive, political, and communal than the hippies before them, because they bonded through their bodies, through dance.”15 Rodgers is perhaps overstating the radical break represented by the disco dancers and ignores their roots in the freak dancing of Vito Paulekas and his troupe. Nonetheless, his claim is a good reminder of how powerful the dance floor “freak out” remained even in the late 1970s. The Family’s creepy crawl over and through Los Angeles was real and had a major impact on the film and music cultures of its time and place, but it did not put some kind of definitive and magical punctuation mark on the “sixties.” The summer of 1969 was the summer of the Tate-LaBianca murders, but it was also the summer of the Stonewall Riots in New York. A retreat from “freak” culture by a Papa, a Beach Boy and the son of Doris Day did not spell the end of the counterculture, the sixties, or anything, really.

  Perhaps it was true that after the murders you could hear bolts locking into place and Stephen Stills running around shrieking in Laurel Canyon. Terry Melcher had not even lived in Laurel Canyon, of course; Cielo Drive was in Benedict Canyon. But battle lines were being drawn all over Los Angeles and not just in the canyons. The promise of the idyllic private home (a backlash surely against the communal innovations of the 1960s, already parodied in 1969’s Easy Rider’s “simple food for our simple taste” commune scene) would appear, briefly, as a remedy for the social chaos thrown into stark relief by the Manson case. It would take a few years for the powerful people at the center of Los Angeles’s culture industries to hit the reset button that would allow them to retreat back into the comforts of their privileged social, economic, and domestic arrangements. It is telling, and still a little bit surprising, that the single most important actor in this process was Vincent Bugliosi, whose true-crime book Helter Skelter was at the center of a far-reaching cultural conversation held in the 1970s about criminality, families, artistic ability, sexuality, drugs, and so much more.

  The women of the Family worked for years on the vest that told their story. Sue Terry/Los Angeles Public Library.

  Charles Manson, in the vest, on his way to court. Michael Haering/Los Angeles Public Library.

  John Waters’ Playdate (2006) Silicone, human and synthetic hair, cotton flannel and polar fleece, Manson: 19 x 14 x 11 inches, Jackson: 15 x 13 x 27 inches, Edition of 5, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

  The 1971 comic book that insisted on the Manson/Lieutenant William Calley link.

  Apocalyptic cover of Neil Young’s On the Beach (1974).

  Manson helping to move product for Rise records.

  An example of Raymond Pettibon’s work for Black Flag in the early 1980s.

  Raymond Pettibon, No Title (The family dog), 1990, Pen and ink on paper, 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm), © Raymond Pettibon, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

  Christopher Wool’s HELTER HELTER. Untitled, 1988, Enamel and flashe on aluminum, 96 x 60 inches, (243.8 x 152.4 cm), © Christopher Wool; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

  Negativland’s Helter Stupid (1989).

  Derek Erdman’s Charles Manson in a Cubs Hat (2008), courtesy of the artist.

  Banksy’s Manson (2005).

  Joachim Koester’s Barker Ranch series, #2 (2008).

  Koester’s Barker Ranch series, #4 (2008). From a series of four selenium toned silver gelatin prints, each 44 x 58, 3, courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner

  Part III

  Creepy Crawling Truth: Charles Manson and Our Crime Tales

  The Bug vs. the Fug

  In 1988, the Irish rock band U2 opened their double-live LP and film Rattle and Hum with a version of “Helter Skelter.” Introducing the song to the crowd, the band’s ever-understated lead singer Bono announced, “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.” The claim here is simple and clear and more than a little misleading. Charles Manson never “owned” the brand on Helter Skelter; prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (known to the Family as “the Bug”) has cornered that market ever since he obtained convictions of Manson, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Susan Atkins in 1971. Helter Skelter was the motive Bugliosi insisted upon at the trial even though—as he has explained numerous times in numerous venues—prosecutors do not even have to prove motive, they only have to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that the person charged with a particular crime in fact was responsible for that offense.

  In legal terms, as numerous observers have pointed out, Helter Skelter was gravy: Bugliosi did not need to prove motive to obtain convictions. Much more important is how Helter Skelter has become a cultural and economic phenomenon—the cornerstone of Vincent Bugliosi’s true-crime empire. U2’s Bono may have thought he was taking aim at big game on Rattle and Hum, but really he missed the target completely. To be sure, Charles Manson was obsessed with the Beatles’ 1969 double album as a whole and the song “Helter Skelter” in particular. He did, according to all credible testimony, project a wide range of disorganized but fiercely held beliefs onto this shambling collection of songs. To put it in the psychological vernacular, when Manson put on the White Album, he “heard voices.” Manson thought the Beatles were communicating directly with him and that belief, of course, might be taken as a sign (one among many) that he was mentally ill. It is standard in the study of popular music to assume that artists are not in complete control of the meanings of their work: “what if rock stars don’t know what their own songs are about?” is how music critic Rob Sheffield has recently made this challenge.1 The marginalization of Manson’s reading of the White Album has been shaped by a prosecutor who had a whole lot riding on making Manson’s basic approach to music fandom appear insane. But critics and historians of our own time have successfully argued with Bugliosi’s dismissal of Manson as a listener. The literary critic Michael André Bernstein rejects Manson’s approach to the White Album as a “paranoiac over-interpretation of a few lyrics,” but I prefer the argument of another literary critic, Nicholas Bromell, who has slyly suggested that what Manson heard in this album was “what every attentive Beatles fan found there: a message, an authorization, an affirmation of one’s understanding of the ’60s.”2 (I should also note that Manson was not the only one to torture hidden meanings out of the White Album; “Revolution 9,” with its putative secret message—“Turn me on, dead man”—is, of course, the locus classicus for the idea that playing a record backwards would reveal dark secrets. “Manson was insane,” Bromell concludes, but “he was also representative.”)

  Devin McKinney has taken this approach even further, suggesting that there is nothing delusional about the broad contours of Manson’s reading of the White Album. As McKinney puts it, the White Album “is also a Black album: haunted by race.” Trying to put the record back in the actual context of its making, McKinney provocatively claims that “Black rage and Black music are in the air these songs breathe.” McKinney refuses the simple corrective claim that the song “Helter Skelter” itself was about a big slide; the performance of it—the “chainsaw” guitars and hysterical vocal—index an anarchic cultural moment.3

  Perhaps a more efficient way of getting at the argument I am trying to hint at here is to describe a picture Family member Leslie Van Houten drew of the jury during her trial. I am not interested in the art so much as the caption, which read “All the Lonely People Judgment.”4 Van Houten here was applying what she had learned from the Beatles’ 1966 song “Eleanor Rigby” in a manner that many in the surrounding culture would have considered measured and appropriate. She is expressing something like sympathy for what she imagines to be the barren lives of the jury members—even as she creepy crawls them a bit by labeling each figure by name.