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| Just yer typical relationship counselor, who can help you with your codefendancy issues |
One of my most vivid childhood memories is of first hearing of Charles Manson, a musician who had become famous in Los Angeles in 1969. It was during the trials of him and his so-called Family, who seemed to have codefandency issues, the following year. Throughout the 1970s, Manson/Family were a constant buzz in the background noise of popular culture, and in the 1980s the leading-edgy hipsters proclaimed it to be cool to be "into" Manson, visit Spahn Ranch, trade assessments of which "Manson girl" one found most attractive, and anti-virtue-signal by rockin' the Manson-face t-shirt or poster. Owning a copy of the Helter Skelter book was de rigeur, but possessing a copy of The Family was for the cognoscenti.
Then came the albums of Manson's songs, some of which I truly appreciate. (Takes one to know one, I suppose.) I won't go into which I like and wherefore, but his having gained the admiration of his peers is a more suitably objective testament. His singing on some songs is remarkable. In a phone interview during his final years, Manson briefly described the surprisingly-complex music theory in one of his songs, demonstrating that he really knew his stuff. If he'd just stuck with the music thing, he might have scored his own musical variety show on TV in the early '70s. Those things really, really sucked, but Charlie as host would have been a lot more engaging. TV's all about hypnotic mind-control programming, anyway.
I myself was never "into" Manson, probably because I knew too many dangerously-crazy people in real life, and Charlie didn't seem that messed-up and diabolical against the baseline for my reference. During the summer of the worldwide medical-tyranny event of 2020, I had a lot of time on my hands, which I partly filled by reading books on Manson & Family – from The Family to Chaos, with Family members' autobiographies in between; including Manson in His Own Words, in which Charlie revealed more about himself than he believed that he was concealing by bullshitting, though also by being brutally candid. Susan Atkins' principal autobiography (photo above) sports a pretty portrait of her on the cover – looking like a promotional shot of yer typical relationship counselor. The Family is important for historical context and contemporaneous insight. Chaos is a most important book. It not only indicates how and why Family members came to kill with glee but points to a lot of extenuating, even current, social-engineering efforts of the Spooks – and it shows what a lie-upon-lie "what we know" about Charlie and his crew always really has been.
After a summer immersed in this lore, I had to suddenly recoil and stop reading about it. I was beginning to realize the reason for my personal fascination with Charles Manson, the Family, their crime sprees, their notoriety, and their inverse-idolization in popular culture: it was all too monumental to have been random. I've always had the feeling that something important about it had gone unspoken, that there were some blanks to fill-in. Cults form around educated, erudite types, not around hillbilly career criminals. Cults require self-abnegation and discipline; the Family was hedonistic and loosey-goosey to the extreme. The official motives for the Tate/La Bianca murder spree didn't make sense or seem clear. The recurring episodes of the Charlie Manson Interview TV Special also seemed too stagey. Why make that man into a celebrity, if he's so bad? Why was it necessary to keep the public "reminded" of him and those crimes – or of the official versions thereof, which were rendered more and more threadbare by alternate information in books and articles that every so often would come out?
My "summer reading" drenched me in awareness of the trials' being rigged, witnesses and suspects being bargained into giving misleading testimony; Charlie flashing Masonic semaphores to the judge; prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's concocting the motives and the methods of the murders; the codefendant "Manson Girls" (Atkins, Van Houten and Krenwinkel) being paraded before reporters, without handcuffs and in hippie dresses rather than in prison garb, and singing songs by Charlie; President Nixon's declaring Manson guilty before the trial had begun; a book on Manson and the case being published before the trial had begun; the involvement of the Process Church (which also was behind the Son of Sam murders in 1977); Manson and family having sex and/or doing drugs with half the people in Hollywood during their short year-and-a-half there (Charlie himself was Dennis Wilson's lover, and (allegedly) Peter "Columbo" Falk had him some Charlie as well); Tex Watson's confessing to having done all the Devil's business at the Cielo Drive house, but all of his taped confessions to his lawyer in Texas having been disappeared by the LAPD; two of the CIA's top mind-control operatives working at the San Francisco Free Clinic – one being Charlie's P.O. (with Charlie being his only case); the other being the CIA's principal specialist in hypnotic implantation of unrecalled suggestion and of false memory, as well as Jack Ruby's examining psychiatrist after Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald; Sharon Tate's having been to the Spahn Ranch multiple times while the Family was residing there, and Charlie and Family's having been to the Cielo Drive house while she (still) lived there; Terry Melcher's having hung-out with Charlie after the murders (which blows Bugliosi's premise that Melcher had been the main intended target); Charlie's and Family members' repeatedly being arrested for felony offenses but being let-go by LAPD; Charlie's having shot a drug dealer in L.A., by his own admission, but instead being tried for murders which he himself had not committed; the La Biancas' guard dog licking Charlie's hand when he and the girls broke-in to their house (showing that Charlie had previously become friendly with the dog, indicating him to be no stranger to the La Biancas); and (among many other things) the Family's having done other murders and sold drugs and prostituted and done porn of and snuff films for rich and powerful Hollywoodians – which could be used for controlling those people, forcing their hands and feeding them lines offstage (as it were), or keeping them quiet about some nefarious things between the government and the entertainment industry.
There was nothing criminal that the Family didn't do – and "everyone" in Hollywood at the time was involved in or knew about it. My fascination with Manson & Co. is fueled by awareness of the machinery behind the scenes of popular culture and politics, and how everything that the public was told or led to believe about them and the famous murders was disinformation, misdirection, and deliberate myth-making. The death penalty in California was repealed soon after they were sentenced to die in the gas chamber – convenient to having the cast of characters dusted-off and trotted-out to chat with Charlie Rose, Diane Sawyer, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Snyder, et al., every few years. Not even the most evidently sincerely repentant of them was paroled. They were worth more to the memetic engineers as notorious drug-crazed evil murderers in prison than as rehabilitated productive members of society.
If you've not heard Charles Manson's songs by now, look them up on YouTube. From the comments beneath the videos, it's apparent that one day, in the foreseeable future, he will be remembered more for his musical legacy than for his criminal history.