Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  Melcher’s next record would be called Royal Flush. Its title—with its secondary and tertiary suggestions of being a washout and being embarrassed—featured the song “High Rollers.” But Terry Melcher is also shot through with gambling men. Among the cover versions Melcher presents here is a truly distraught version of “Just a Season,” a song he produced for the Byrds just a few years earlier. Nicking the structuring riff of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” with hints of the Byrd’s “Ballad of Easy Rider” in the lead acoustic guitar, Melcher’s arrangement hints at nostalgic regret before we hear even a note of the vocal. The song also borrows Mitchell’s catalog-style of lyric writing. In his delivery of the song, Melcher bears down especially hard on a line about fooling gambling men with his face.

  When Roger McGuinn sang it with the Byrds, “Just a Season” was just gorgeous—and I mean “just” in two ways. McGuinn delivers the song with his usual unflappable one-two punch: a beautiful reedy voice echoed by his ringing twelve-string guitar line. But Melcher’s “Just a Season” trades the twelve-string for the mournful acoustic and McGuinn’s boyish tenor for his own very adult and anguished vocal. As with virtually every song on the record Melcher is reminding listeners that he is not all right, that (since his encounter with the Family) he has not been able to get back on his feet again. On this song (as with most of Terry Melcher) it is not hard for listeners to tell when it is time to pay attention for real. Melcher lets us know by going up as far in his vocal register as he comfortably can and then jumps off the edge of his normal range into falsetto when he can go no further. He uses this move, for instance, when bragging about fighting bulls without ever getting hurt, and the effect is to throw the boast immediately into doubt.

  The song selection itself is interesting. Here “season” summons not the ennobling Ecclesiastical inevitability of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” but rather the humbling existential pointlessness of the rock-and-roll tour. After acknowledging that he had his fun with young female fans, the singer admits that being a star was pretty simple. Melcher makes one significant lyrical change in this song as well. The Byrds sang “mummers shrouds,” underscoring that “Just a Season” is, ultimately, a song about being on the road (the mummers are, I suppose, the band). But Melcher, strikingly, changes “mummers” to “murmuring,” and in doing so has transformed this song into the soundtrack of his haunting. The dead of his old home at Cielo Drive continue to speak to him and they are not alone.

  The gambling the narrator does in “Just a Season” appears too in “These Days,” performed on this record as a duet with Melcher’s mother, Doris Day. When the singer describes finally giving up gambling, it sounds not so much like the result of a positive resolution but as a diagnosis of the moment when he lost his will to live. Nothing you might know about Day’s usual attack will prepare you for the anomie that characterizes her harmony vocal here. Sounding like some arty forgotten godmother of Lana Del Rey, Day joins her son in offering a version of this Jackson Browne song that—amazingly—sounds far more alienated than Nico’s original. A few years earlier there was a very popular rumor circulating in Los Angeles that proposed that Day was preparing a duet with Sly Stone on her own “Que Sera, Sera.” This rumor seems to have been a corollary of an even more pointed rumor that held that Day and Stone were sexually involved (which likely built on another rumor that held that Doris Day and African American baseball player Maury Wills were in a relationship). Terry Melcher had helped install Sly Stone and his Family in Papa John Phillips’s Bel Air mansion in the early 1970s during the time they were working on There’s a Riot Goin’ On, as I have discussed. At least one observer suggests that Day and Stone did perform an impromptu duet of sorts on “Que Sera, Sera” at her house during this period.6 But the rumor of the romantic meeting between the older mainstream white woman (“Doris Day” had come, by this point, to be a synonym for “white bread”—her singing of “Hooray for Hollywood” is a pretty funny punchline in Paul Mazursky’s 1970 film Alex in Wonderland) and the younger countercultural African American man outlines the sort of LA mixing that Terry Melcher pulls dramatically back from. Singing in his chains, the famous son invites his mother into the studio to help sing about his social isolation.7

  The record reaches its strange peak with the “Medley” that brings Melcher’s “Halls of Justice,” together, oddly, with two Bob Dylan songs. In “Halls of Justice,” Melcher finally gives his version of meeting Manson. What the singer believes is going to be a standard audition turns into something much more complex. The shift to “Positively 4th Street” and “Like a Rolling Stone” captures in a very efficient way the dramatic imprint the Manson family made as they creepy crawled not only through the homes of Laurel and other Canyons, but also through the minds of major players in the cultural scene in Los Angeles.

  For its part of the medley, “Halls of Justice” has two clear targets. First, Melcher wants to make clear that he got fooled—as anybody would have—by the images of peace and love promoted by the Family. Melcher rewrites the story of his meeting with the Manson Family to stake a claim that the desperately poor commune-dwellers were actually holding the leverage in the encounter—because only they knew they planned to take advantage of the music producer. Melcher takes care of the Manson part of the song fairly efficiently; it takes him about a minute and a half. The singer then turns to Dylan to help him throw stones, first at all of the friends who abandoned him in his time of need in the Hall of Justice, and then at himself for lacking good sense. The Dylan part of the medley kicks off with “Positively 4th Street,” and the artist sings only a tiny portion of the original lyric. Melcher uses Dylan’s abrasive original text to sing of his disappointment with his absent friends and then introduces what may be a broken quotation of Stephen Stills’s “For What It’s Worth” to express his displeasure at the zero-sum reality of contemporary social life.

  Then Melcher turns to “Like a Rolling Stone.” The opening musical and lyrical salvo of “Like a Rolling Stone” is among the most recognizable in rock-and-roll. First comes the shattering drum beat, immediately joined by bass, electric guitar, organ, piano, and tambourine. And then the indelible opening accusation. But Melcher is audacious (or desperate) enough to turn the song inside out. For him the object of disappointment seems to have shifted and the “you” of the first lines is Terry Melcher himself. Melcher cannot even bring himself to sing the phrase about tossing money to poor people on the street—perhaps because it reminded him too much of what he did at Spahn Ranch when he handed Manson fifty dollars. Melcher turns Dylan’s “bums” into “bumps and grinds,” thus turning the lyric into a more general meditation on his acknowledged inability to read the encounter with Manson correctly. He thought that he was still at the Whisky dancing with the freaks and they thought he was going to give them the keys to the kingdom. This is a stunning moment as Terry Melcher comes near to its close.

  In this era, in the white folk and rock music of Southern California, only Joni Mitchell matched the effect. I am thinking particularly of her Court and Spark LP, released also in 1974, and the devastating scene of the Los Angeles gathering in “People’s Parties.” The title alone, with its sad echo of Berkeley’s People’s Park (which is also directly mentioned in the title song) signals that this will be a narrative of countercultural decline. At this party Mitchell’s narrator sees Jack the joker, nobody Eddie, and stone-cold Grace, all as miserable as the model who has convinced herself that laughing and crying provide the same catharsis. The narrator frantically tries to lighten up, and the listener can see her lip quiver as her voice shakes on the u of “humor.” The song ends with the singer bravely wishing she could laugh at all the absurdity on display at the party. Lead voice Joni Mitchell sings this line alone, but only up through “all”; then countless other, multitracked Joni Mitchells come in to sing the same line with, to, and at the narrator. The multiple voices seem sympathetic initially, but very quickly turn doubtful, worried, critical. The lonely chorus ends wi
th Mitchell at the deep end of her range—it is the obverse of Melcher’s falsetto usage and it makes clear that there will be no easy resolution to the clueless fumbling the narrator has bemoaned. (In his book on Court and Spark, Sean Nelson also makes the intriguing case that the title track is more than a little bit “sinister”: it is, after all “a song about a raving hippie with a madman’s soul showing up at your door in LA.” This, as Nelson puts it, “wasn’t exactly a lullaby in the post–Helter Skelter early ’70s.”)8

  The popular art of Los Angeles was full of such darkly reflexive work as that offered by Melcher and Mitchell in the mid-1970s, but rarely was it so self-blaming. Randy Newman’s “Guilty,” also from 1974, comes close to the level of self-loathing and self-recrimination that saturates Terry Melcher; War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends” (1975) and Warren Zevon’s self-titled album (1976) captured some of the mood of disenchantment in putative allies that made Melcher’s debut feel so hopeless. But most of the relevant Los Angeles art of the 1970s was more interested in actual or cultural apocalypse as opposed to self-immolation. Steely Dan’s Katy Lied (1975) opens, as Greil Marcus has noted, with “a (the?) stock market crash” and gets more depressing from there; the 1975 film version of Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust is organized, of course, around a painting called The Burning of Los Angeles.9 (The Miracles’ “City of Angels,” from 1975, and Warren Zevon’s “Desperados Under the Eaves,” from 1976, worry, respectively, about Los Angeles and California falling or sliding into the sea; Neil Young’s simply titled “L.A.” (1973) has apocalyptic scenes of erupting volcanoes and earthquakes.) Similarly oriented is “Hotel California” by the Eagles, also from 1975. With a bizarrely faked “Mexican” accent, atmospheric wind effects, and a quick reference to 1969, the Eagles tell of a doomed California landscape haunted by some rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem. It is a fairly incoherent song, but it too has inspired its own set of Manson-connected rumors.

  Zeroville

  If “Hotel California” does not mean to access the events of August 1969 directly, it certainly does not mind if listeners descry a bit of Manson in the pseudomystical tale of a place from which you can “check out” but not “leave.” While “Hotel California” has rarely been validated as an example of Manson art, Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues” (1974) is widely accepted to be “about” the cult leader. Young’s biographer claims that in the song the singer adopts a “demented Manson persona,” but that is true only in an approximate and fictionalized sense.1 The generalized anger the narrator expresses, particularly in the song’s most infamous couplet (which Neil Young’s publishing company has refused to let me quote here), makes a mishmash of the facts of the Manson case. In “Revolution Blues” the killer imagines killing celebrities in a car—and now in Laurel instead of Benedict Canyon—instead of teenager Steven Parent. The song does make some literal reference to Family life—the mode of transportation coming into sight is the kind of recreational vehicle with oversized wheels made for use on the beach or in the desert, which seems like like a clear reference to Manson’s favorite mode of desert transport. But the point of the song is hardly documentary. It was meant to evoke a mood (Young’s own keyword is “spooky”) of a Southern California undergoing a siege of creepy crawl. The apocalypse is at hand, and its four horsemen, Young is clear, will be driving what the British call “beach buggies,” not horses. Young himself claims the lyrical content of the song so upset David Crosby (who plays rhythm guitar on it) that the latter begged Young not to go forward with it: “That’s not funny,” Crosby said to Young.2 As with so many retrospective accounts of Manson and the Family, Neil Young wants to communicate that the cult leader’s presence spelled the end of the surf and sun dreams that the Beach Boys had communicated to so many young Americans.

  According to Young biographer Jimmy McDonough, the recording of “Revolution Blues” was the “most deranged moment of the On the Beach sessions.” This is Neil Young in the mid-1970s, so the phrase “most deranged” must be understood also to imply “in heavy traffic.” As the band began to play the song, slide guitarist Rusty Kershaw apparently became convinced that the players were not achieving the correct pitch of intensity: “‘Look, man, you don’t sound like you’re tryin’ to start a fuckin’ revolution. Here’s how you start that.’” And then, as Kershaw explains, he began “breakin’ a bunch of shit.” “That,” he concludes, is “a revolution, muth’ fucker.” From there (according to the liner notes that Kershaw himself wrote for On the Beach) the sideman “turned into a python” and then into an alligator. Then he ate up the carpet. Then he started to “crawl up towards Neil, which is pretty spooky.” Much of this is potentially explained by Kershaw’s self-proclaimed use of “honey slides,” a combination of fried marijuana and honey.3

  “Revolution Blues” occupies an interesting place in Neil Young’s canon. Young’s willingness (unlike just about every other Los Angeles musician of his time) to admit at least a tempered appreciation for Charles Manson’s music seems to have supported the strong claims “Revolution Blues” already has to a place in discussions of popular songs connected to the case. The song is certainly loved by Young devotees. Likewise, the critical response to “Revolution Blues” was strongly and immediately positive; Stephen Holden, writing in Rolling Stone, called it, along with “Ambulance Blues” (which could, in a related way, be called the “Patty Hearst song”), one of the album’s two masterpieces.4 But it has not had a particularly dynamic life since 1974. Young has been relatively stingy with respect to live performance of “Revolution Blues.” According to one fan site, the singer has only played it thirty-eight times (compared to, just for example, the 750 performances of the equally terrifying “Powderfinger”).5 According to countless Internet commenters, Young dedicated the song to Manson at a 1983 concert in San Francisco.6 The song has also proven relatively immune to cover versions.

  On the Beach was, by design, about alienation and meant to be alienating. It is part of what fans and critics have come to refer to as Young’s “Ditch Trilogy,” along with Time Fades Away (1973) and Tonight’s the Night (1975). The name comes from Young’s liner notes to his 1977 collection Decade. Here Young wrote of his dismay at the popular acclaim he reaped when “Heart of Gold” hit number one in 1972: “This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I met more interesting people there.” Taken together, Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night form a remarkable “aftermath” trilogy. The key to them comes on the most upbeat sounding song of the three, On the Beach’s “Walk On,” which promises (or warns?) that the usual escapist vehicles—drugs, personal eccentricity—will not inoculate the population of Los Angeles against the infringement of the real world.

  While I am devoting most of my attention here to On the Beach, and “Revolution Blues” in particular, it would be a mistake to take that record out of its “Ditch Trilogy” context when thinking about Neil Young’s place in the history of Manson art. The three are drenched in dread and paranoia. Perhaps most terrifying is the sense given by the Ditch Trilogy that all previously trustworthy systems of knowledge and belief have broken down. Emblematic here is the stunning self-reflexive admission in “Ambulance Blues” that even the most familiar reference point for the artist—rock and roll itself—has lost its explanatory power. Tonight’s the Night has a clearer story to tell than the other two albums in the Ditch Trilogy. Most tragically it tells the story of Bruce Berry, a member of Young’s road crew, and Danny Whitten, a member of his band, both of whom died from drug overdoses. Time Fades Away and On the Beach capture Young’s desire to have his music represent the hazy, confusing atmosphere of post-Manson Los Angeles by operating in a dense and allusive mode. While working with a fairly broad palette, Young and his supporting players purposefully avoid the comparatively simple folk-rock of Harvest, the predecessor to the Ditch Trilogy.

  Some things do emerge clearly over the cou
rse of the records, most notably that the Ditch Trilogy is meant to act as Young’s great refusal, his own “No! in thunder.” The LA of the Ditch Trilogy is a poisoned landscape; moments of tenderness, of authentic human connection, or sincere generosity are most noticeable for their absence on these three records. Time Fades Away ends with a song called “Last Dance,” the final two minutes of which basically feature Young wailing the word “no” over and over again. I should mention that Time Fades Away is a live record (and the record that Young has, at least once, referred to as his worst).

  On the Beach is what comes after the Last Dance. The record cover shows Young staring out at the ocean, having just walked away from the scene of a terrible accident: a car has crashed into the beach (having fallen from the sky, apparently) and is three-quarters submerged. James Reich has written brilliantly of the cover art, a work created by Gary Burden and lettered by the poster artist Rick Griffin, who had earlier done the classic image for the 1967 Be-In held in San Francisco and the Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa (1969). Reich reminds us that the title and cover imagery cannot help but evoke Nevil Shute’s 1957 atomic apocalypse novel (and ensuing 1959 film) of the same name. Shute’s title came in turn from T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” which Shute used to provide an epigraph—including “This is how the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper”—for his book. The surrealism of Young’s cover art has roots, as Reich argues, in Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931), but also enjoyed an amazing synergy with two works of the same moment, David Pelham’s cover art for a paperback reissue of J. G. Ballard’s The Drought (April 1974; originally 1964), which also features a submerged Cadillac, and the beginnings of the Ant Farm collective Cadillac Ranch in May of 1974, “a series of ten Cadillacs part submerged in the dirt of the Texas Panhandle.”7 On the Beach was released on July 16 that same year.