Look at me and I will turn you on,
Don’t try to think because your mind is gone.
The Ballad of the Hip
Death Goddess, Ultimate Spinach.
I’ve
been reading The Family, Ed Sanders’
1971 chronicle of the events which culminated in the notorious Tate/LaBianca
murders of ‘69. The second-hand copy I
chanced upon is pretty much like the one pictured above, except more lurid and
groovy as the colour scheme is reversed and Manson’s bug-eyed face is
GREEN. It’s the first full length book
that I’m aware of on the subject, followed in 1974 by Manson prosecutor Vincent
Bugliosi’s mega-selling Helter Skelter:
The True Story of the Manson Murders.
Sanders had his feet much more on the ground, so to speak, than
Bugliosi, being a significant figure in the latter Beat movement and subsequent
60s counterculture. Sanders started
writing poetry in the early 60s, and began publishing the confrontational
avant-garde literary journal FUCK YOU (it’s motto I’LL PRINT ANYTHING) in
1962. He was also a founding member of
the Fugs, and a significant player in the classic absurdist caper of 1967 in
which the Yippies and others performed an exorcism on the Pentagon, and
attempted to levitate it.
The Family is a hell of a read. The Manson saga itself is a source of
perennial morbid fascination – a lurid, scarcely believable story that maps out
a strange intersection between the lives of various counterculture freakniks,
bikers, dope dealers, and the glittering elites of the entertainment
complex. The Manson story captures in
microcosm the biblical and apocalyptic weirdness of American culture in the
late 60s – a time when the children started to believe that they were mutants
or aliens shipwrecked in a strange land, and large swathes of the general
population were turning to face the strange.
Sanders covered the Manson trial for the Los Angeles Free Press, and gradually became obsessed with the
case. Over a period of year and a half,
he gathered the often staggering amount of data and detail which would be
incorporated into The Family. Primarily, he was writing from a position of
considerable anger, both as a result of the savagery of the crimes themselves,
and of Manson’s betrayal of the countercultural ideals which he held so
dearly. As Richard Christgau observed in
his New York Times review of The Family, “Sanders really does believe
in expanded sexuality, sacramental and recreational psychedelics, and
non-rationalistic modes of knowing”, and Manson had left all of these things
open to the paranoid caricatures of the conservative Right. Despite the righteous anger, however, what
makes The Family a gas to read is its
distinctive hardboiled-hippie prose, an overripe style which sometimes captures
the cadence of old social guidance/mental hygiene films:
There
had been a year of flowers. But sometime
in the summer or spring of ‘68 a change occurred in the family. Into the mix of flowers, sex, nomad-community
walked Satan, devil-worship and violence.
Perhaps it was the will to change – the need to maintain that magnetism
– that caused Charlie to groove with gore.
It
seems to me that perhaps Sanders was slyly lampooning his mass market
audience’s expectation of condemnation mixed with titillation; the style also
brings to mind the spate of hippie/devil-worshipper b-grades that blazed
through the grindhouses in the wake of the Manson furore. The most notorious and hilarious of these
that I’m aware of is the immortal I Drink
Your Blood:
The
well-worn tale in brief: on March 21, 1967, Charles Manson was released from
Terminal Island federal prison. Born in
Cincinnati, Ohio, to a sixteen year wild child and alleged prostitute, Manson
had spent more than half of his 32 years in correctional facilities and prisons. He had become so institutionalized by this
point that he asked the guards to take him back in. Manson would be re-arrested (for the final
time) on October 12, 1969 in Death Valley; one of the most striking things
about the whole saga is how quickly it all went down. Despite his initial trepidation, Manson
acclimatized himself quickly to the anarchic and surreal America which had
slowly blossomed while he was behind bars.
He became a migrant troubadour, having learned how to play guitar in
prison. He washed up on Haight-Ashbury
street, just as its Utopian idealism was degenerating into a predatory and
lysergically burned-out rat-hole. The
Haight was a mecca for middle-class runaways who had roundly turned their backs
on the country and reality that their parents were living in. Possessed of a prodigious charisma and the
ability to lay down all kinds of convincing raps about Truth, Charlie quickly
went from being a petty criminal to a small-time, short-change guru. He honed in on troubled and alienated runaway
teenage girls, and gradually accumulated the beginnings of the harem or cult or
fellowship that infamy would later know as the Manson family.
At
first, it looked on the surface like Manson and his girls were riding the crest
of the 60s zeitgeist in high style. He
offered his followers a participation in something like a modern variation of the
more orgiastic of the mystery cults, mixed with a psychoanalytic encounter
group. LSD and transgressive, communal
sex was the initiation, the first Breaking of Set. From there, the idea was to strip away all
the trappings of the programmed social identity, all the hang-ups and
inhibitions, until you got to the core, the authentic, unfettered self, the Soul.
Then you were finally free and able to experience the total Now. It sounded
like good clean fun. Like the Merry
Pranksters, who also aspired to exist in a kind of total Now state of mind
which they called Edge City, Manson and his crew yo-yoed around the country in
a converted school bus. Following the
tradition initiated by the beats and occultists of the fifties, they made the
desert a spiritual home and source of mystic mythology. Like Carlos Castaneda after him, Manson
identified with the tricksterish coyote:
Have
you ever seen the coyote in the desert?
Watching, tuned in, completely aware.
Christ on the cross, the coyote in the desert — it’s the same thing,
man. The coyote is beautiful. He moves through the desert delicately, aware
of everything, looking around. He hears
every sound, smells every smell, sees everything that moves. He’s in a state of total paranoia, and total
paranoia is total awareness. You can
learn from the coyote just like you can learn from a child. A baby is born into the world in a state of
fear. Total paranoia and awareness….
The Family also
began to make tentative inroads into the worlds of celebrity and music. A chance encounter between two hitchhiking
Family members and Dennis Wilson lead to the Beach Boy falling under the spell
of Manson. Wilson labelled Manson “the
Wizard” and the “most tuned-in dude I know”, and introduced him to Doris Day’s
only son Terry Melcher, the influential West Coast producer best known for his
work with the Byrds. (Neil Young was
also briefly an admirer of Manson’s scattershot and monotonous songs.) Bizarrely, Angela Lansbury’s daughter Deirdre
hung out briefly with the Family, with a letter from her mother stating that
all was kosher in the event of catching some heat from the cops. This is a pregnant connection for
conspiranoid readers of the Manson saga, Lansbury having starred in John
Frankenheimer’s mind control classic and Oswald foreshadower The Manchurian Candidate. (It was long erroneously believed that Frank
Sinatra withdrew Manchurian Candidate
from distribution because of its resonance to the Kennedy assassination about a
year later. In reality, the film had
merely outlived its commercial viability by that time. Nevertheless, you really start to go down the
K-hole when you realize that the disgruntled former Kennedy supporter Sinatra
had already starred in one Oswald
foreshadower, 1954’s Suddenly, in
which he played a war veteran who hopes to become a “somebody” by gunning down
the president with a sniper rifle. Suddenly is now thought to be a strong
influence on the Manchurian Candidate’s
source novel, and has long been proposed as an Oswald influence. In his 2007 whitewash Reclaiming History, Manson prosecutor and Helter Skelter author Vincent Bugliosi claimed that Oswald did see Suddenly on television in October ’63,
but this is widely disputed. To
complicate this stew a little more, Sinatra will later turn up briefly on the
set of Sharon Tate foreshadower Rosemary’s
Baby, but that is getting ahead of ourselves.)
From the
outside, then, the Manson family might have looked like a Magical Mystery Tour
headed for the Emerald City of the new Aquarian Age. To a lot of movie and music people,
day-tripping in the multiplying realities and hedonistic possibilities of the
times, it certainly seemed that way. But
there was only one problem: Manson remained a heavily damaged psychopathic
ex-con ratfuck, and the LSD was only finding more florid forms for that
psychopathology to express itself. He
had awakened his followers from the programmes of mainstream middle-class
American life, only to give them a new programme, every bit as authoritarian
and misogynistic as the old. Meanwhile,
his Jesus trip was becoming increasingly, frighteningly intense; in a clearing
in the desert near their Spahn Ranch hideaway, the Mansonoids staged what
Sanders calls the “world’s first outdoor LSD crucifixion ceremony.” Manson was strapped to a rustic cross while
various family members played the roles of his mourners and persecutors. Finally, Manson was resurrected, precipitating
the then routine Family acid-drenched orgy.
(In Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft, Peter Levenda argues that this ritualistic mock-crucifixion was
an unconscious, debased version of an initiatory ritual carried out by the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and that this was the moment where Manson’s
brain really and truly snapped. Whether
you buy this or not, LSD-fuelled mock-crucifixion is probably best not tried at
home.)
One of the
great ironies of the story is that Manson himself, the great deprogrammer,
couldn’t debug his own life-long patterns.
In some respects, the story could be read as a reiteration of the old cliché
that leopards can’t change their spots, and tigers never lose their taste for
raw, bloody meat. As the Family more or
less settled in Spahn Ranch, a movie ranch which had provided the backdrop for
episodes of Bonanza and The Lone Ranger, the dream started to
unravel and crash hard into petty criminality and lysergic/messianic
psychosis. Dennis Wilson and Terry
Melcher began to get cold feet, as they realized that Charlie’s world was far
too erratic and violent even for the saturnalia of 60s rock. Manson famously began to splice the Beatles’ White Album together with passages from
the Book of Revelation to create an absurd race war apocalypse scenario which
quickly became a reality in the heightened and suggestible Mansonoid Now. On the nights of August 8th and 9th,
1969, various Manson family members went on a home invasion/killing spree which
has horrified and fascinated America ever since. The motives have been endlessly theorized:
retribution for a drug burn or Terry Melcher’s fame burn; a drug-addled ploy to
get Kenneth Anger and Arthur Lee associate Bobby Beausoleil out of prison or a
mind control ploy to discredit and shut down the counterculture; motiveless
acid-frazzled madness or occult ritual, and so on, and on. The killing of eight and half months
pregnant Sharon Tate and Hollywood hairdressing wizard and bon vivant Jay
Sebring at 10050 Cielo Drive sent shockwaves through Hollywood’s hip set;
rumours of star studded pornographic films and occult kinkiness swirled in the
air like a gossipy fever-dream from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. A
post-Manson issue of Esquire ran the
cover-story “Evil lurks in
California. Lee Marvin is afraid.” A kind of Rubicon had surely been crossed
when even a bad-ass like Marvin gets the fear.
A
work of art isn’t any great shakes if it doesn’t speak to you on some kind of
personal level; however, you might want to put on the brakes if you feel like a
work of art looked YOU up specially in the phone book to pass on a message or
give you instructions….or screw with your head.
In several of his fictions, William Burroughs describes an agent who
receives his instructions from random sensory signals in the world around him:
from snatches of overhead conversation, popular songs, an advertisement seen on
a bus, and so on. Of course, Burroughs’
agent could merely be a schizophrenic; or, as in the case of Burroughs himself,
a shamanic artist or creative paranoiac.
Excessive psychedelic use can sometimes lead to a collapsing of the boundary
between the ego and external world whereby the user begins to receive
instructions from popular artworks, and a kind of chaotic rather than creative
paranoia sets in. Something like this
happened with Manson and the works of the Beatles, particularly the White Album. The following anecdote
is not directly related to the Manson story, but essays a similar cautionary
theme, with tangentially related personnel.
A
few years after The Manchurian Candidate,
John Frankenheimer made a movie called Seconds
with Rock Hudson. Seconds is a surreal neo-noir sci-fi thriller with the vibe of an extended
Twilight Zone episode:
In
Seconds, a depressed, unhappily
married middle-aged man played by John Randolph encounters a strange
organisation known only the “Company”.
The Company offers people the opportunity to “die” and be reborn with a
new identity, a premise echoed in David Fincher’s inferior The Game. (Manson offered
his followers a similar kind of death and rebirth trip.) First, their death is faked; then their
appearance is altered via extensive plastic surgery and physical conditioning;
finally, they begin their new life as a “Second.” The overweight and middle-class Randolph is
reborn as a younger artist named Tony Wilson, played by Hollywood double-lifer
Rock Hudson.
In
1966, Beach Boy Brian Wilson was working on the torturous and exhausting Smile sessions; due to excessive LSD use
and various mental problems, he was tethering on the brink of schizophrenia. Wilson arrived late at a screening of Seconds, and the first line of dialogue
he heard as he took his seat was “Come
in, Mr Wilson.” Adrift in his own total Now of heightened suggestibility,
it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Brian Wilson was profoundly spooked
by Seconds. In the months after seeing the film, he often
fantasized about escaping from the pressures of his own life in the manner
suggested by the film. On other
occasions, he slipped into a truly conspiranoid reality tunnel in which rival
pop genius Phil Spector had somehow conspired the production and release of Seconds specifically to fuck with his
mind. The experience was so shattering
that Wilson didn’t venture back into a movie theatre until ET in 1982.
Seconds is a beautifully photographed
and sorely neglected classic. Since Phil
Spector is currently doing 19 to life, it is completely safe to watch.
Continued shortly.
3 comments:
This is six kinds of headfucking, dude. lol
As research for my series of paintings (http://davidgoughart.com/Manson_gallery.html) i ruminated on the Manson case for over a year, even falling down the same rabbit hole mind fuckery of conspiranoia,on my sister blog 1500 Cielo drive so its comforting to see another blog plough the same furrow.
Anyway, the exhibit may be behind me, but Charlies shadow continues to cast its dark pall, so I look forward to reading more.
A second vote for Seconds, an overlooked slice of insanity and Hollywood self-absorption. Great article.
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