Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  The Manson Family’s interaction with the new elite of Los Angeles can be best understood as a failed set of experiments aimed at erasing profound differences in class status and access to cultural capital. Most of these interactions went well beyond the simple power dynamics built into Terry Melcher’s almost-articulation of the word “charity.” But the Manson Family were certainly being creepy crawled just as intensively as they were creepy crawling. While the historical record is fairly clear about what Charles Manson wanted to get from Wilson, Melcher, Jakobson, Hopper and so on, what is less clear in the whole affair is just what Melcher et al. wanted from Manson.

  Melcher was not completely done with Manson in April of 1969. He went back to the ranch in June with musician and engineer Mike Deasy, who, according to both Ed Sanders and recent Manson biographer Jeff Guinn, had some experience doing field recordings of Native Americans; by Deasy’s own account he had hopes of recording some Native Americans.25 Jerry Cole, a member of the Los Angeles assemblage of session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, remembers Terry Melcher getting the tapes to him, asking him to “chart it up” and then organize a session—which, Cole says, ended up including legendary drummer Hal Blaine, guitarist Tommy Tedesco and other members of the Crew—to turn the rough demo into a finished track.26 This was Melcher’s standard method—to employ the best available professional musicians to play behind appealing vocal talent. Manson, alas, did not have the chops of the Byrds and Melcher finally had to break the news to him that he did not think he could do justice to these tracks.

  Terry Melcher was, on paper at least, a good pick for Manson to focus his efforts on. The rock critic Dave Marsh has called Melcher the “most underrated Hollywood [music] producer of the sixties.”27 Much of Terry Melcher’s career in the 1960s was lived right on the hinge of corporate culture and counterculture. He was a professional and, by most accounts, quite accomplished producer. When it came time to record “Tambourine Man” with the Byrds in 1965, Melcher did not let most of the band in the studio to play their instruments—he brought in members of the Wrecking Crew in to lay down the track. This work with the Byrds represented a breakthrough moment for Melcher and for the band. Most notably, he produced their folk-rock versions of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn.” It is worth pausing over these two songs for a moment to think about Melcher’s role here as a cultural intermediary—as one of the key industry figures working to translate counterculture musical contributions into a broadly popular form: both “Tambourine Man” and “Turn, Turn, Turn” went to number one on the Billboard charts. Melcher was a highly sophisticated musical, cultural, and business figure. He understood the hip cachet the Byrds brought to the table, and believed that to best capitalize on their bright vocal sound (and McGuinn’s chiming twelve-string guitar) he needed to bring in the Wrecking Crew to do the work of building a solid, professional track.

  In studying the mutual creepy crawl at work in the meeting of Melcher, Wilson, and Jakobson with the Manson Family, it is important to read Melcher’s testimony—his literal trial testimony, the songs he wrote, the reminiscences he would later share—with a critical eye. Terry Melcher spent years after the Tate killings trying to make sense of what he had done and what was done to him. In an interview with the BBC Melcher tried to sort out his relationship to the “disenfranchised” young people he met at Spahn Ranch: “All right,” he claims to have felt when he met Manson’s Family, “this is what is going on today.”28 At Tex Watson’s trial in 1971 Melcher resisted briefly when Watson’s counsel tried to pin him down as to whether he classified Watson as a “hippie” as opposed to a “straight” when he first met him. Melcher briefly tried to claim that this sort of categorization was foreign to him, but finally acknowledged that he understood what “hippie” meant and that Watson was one.29 Melcher frequently played the ingénue—perhaps no surprise given his home training as Doris Day’s son!—when it came to explaining his relationship to Charles Manson and his followers.

  What Melcher’s faux-innocent recollection (“All right . . . this is what’s going on today”) obscures is that some of the most powerful figures in the Los Angeles music and film business in the 1960s were complexly tied up with—and in fact partly defined by—a more marginal group of scene-makers who might variously be identified as “fans,” “groupies,” and “dancers.” It is in this arena that we find a major truth about the relationship of the Manson Family and the Los Angeles popular-culture elite of the late 1960s. At bottom, Charles Manson believed that he was operating in a kind of radical meritocracy that would provide opportunity even for a marginal figure like him. (His DIY approach certainly appealed to the generation of punk rockers in LA and elsewhere who would adopt Manson as something like a patron saint in the late 1970s and early 1980s.)

  The Golden Penetrators, on the other hand, operating with a stunning arrogance (let’s index this as “male privilege” and “class privilege” for now) and blithe disregard for the ardent efforts of Manson to break into their professional circles, operated from the premise that they could take whatever they wanted from Manson and his “girls” and remain safe as milk. Ed Sanders has, as I have already noted, argued that when “Manson plugged into the restless world of successful rock musicians” he found his movements constrained by the fact that this world was largely populated by “interlocking circles of young sons and daughters of figures in the motion picture and music industries.”30 Terry Melcher was the son of Doris Day and trumpeter Al Jorden (and stepson of film producer Marty Melcher), and Candice Bergen was the daughter of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and model Frances Westerman. The pre-Tate/Polanski renters at 10050 Cielo Drive were at the very inner circle of this Los Angeles nobility.

  Hungry Freaks

  Along with the significant details of how Terry Melcher, Dennis Wilson, and Gregg Jakobson interacted with the Manson Family in their “private” lives (a dune buggy ride at Spahn ranch for Melcher? A present of Beach Boys’ gold records given to Manson by Wilson? Melcher loaning his fancy car and gas credit cards to Family members? The regular and meaningful contact Jakobson had with the Family?) all three were—with varying degrees of commitment and consistency—willing to trade on the power they derived from their professional status to organize their contact with Manson and his followers.1 The Golden Penetrators tried to slot the Manson Family into two available categories—“groupies” and “freaks”—which had been well-established on the rock-and-roll scene by the late 1960s. (Cathy Gillies, before her membership in the Family, had been an avid follower of Buffalo Springfield.)2 What makes the story of the Manson Family particularly interesting is that these roles proved too constricting for the “fans”; while the Golden Penetrators were acting from a script that had been well-established, in and beyond Los Angeles for a number of years, the members of the Manson Family were improvising; insisting, in short, on telling their own story.

  Female “groupies” were widely understood by male musicians and film-industry figures to be a side benefit of their positions. There are obvious ethical and legal considerations to take into account in any discussion of young groupies and their relationship to relatively powerful male figures. The first and most important question has to do with matters of consent. Without traveling too far afield into legal and cultural arguments about age, agency, and rape, it is crucial to notice that the relationship of virtually every girl who became a part of the Manson Family and then made available to the Golden Penetrators, and various other men in the Los Angeles popular culture ecosystem, was defined by the power realities of age difference. The extreme examples (sixteen-year-old Ruth Anne Moorehouse going off with the Family, ultimately with the blessing of her father; thirteen-year-old Dianne Lake leaving Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm commune, also with her parents’ permission, to begin traveling on her own) remind us of how radically key cultural terms—“family,” “consent,” and “parent,” just for starters—were being renegotiated in this moment. It is i
mportant that we not shy away from acknowledging that what we call statutory rape was a constitutive part of this “new” culture in Los Angeles.

  The Manson girls and other groupies of the late 1960s were not simply the prey of controlling and vicious men. The most well-known groupies in the Laurel Canyon and Sunset Strip scene were undoubtedly the women who comprised GTO (Girls Together Outrageously). With Frank Zappa’s Laurel Canyon Log Cabin as their home base, and at least two of the group serving as childcare providers for Dweezil and Moon Unit Zappa, the GTOs embodied a freewheeling raunchiness. Zappa seems to have treated them as an anthropological curiosity at best, even recording an album with them, Permanent Damage, which was the second release on his companion labels Bizarre and Straight. (The debut recording was the infamous An Evening with Wild Man Fischer, a record that made hay out of the mental illness of its subject.) In his usual above-it-all and slightly cruel manner, Zappa remembers the GTOs group with boldfaced mockery, as being “totally dedicated and devoted to every aspect of rock and roll—especially the part about guys in bands who had Big Weenies.”3 It is possible that the “Big Weenies” part is just a sly joke on Zappa’s part, a reference to the GTOs’ association with Cynthia Plaster Caster, who gained some notoriety in the late 1960s for her practice of casting the penises of famous musicians. But at least lurking in the margins of Zappa’s remembrance is the indication that the emerging leaders of the Los Angeles music and film scene understood, as David Toop has so cogently summarized, that in this scene “male creativity” would be supported by “female servitude.”4

  New codes of behavior were being worked out by what we can nominally call “performers” on the one hand, and “audiences” on the other. In the canyons of Los Angeles (mostly Laurel, but also Topanga and Benedict) and the clubs of Sunset Strip there was some significant cultural work being done beginning in the mid-1960s that resulted in a redrawing of the borders that previously had clearly marked off the territories of artists and audiences. Central to this process were the “freak dancers” who appeared first as an adjunct to the Byrds’ stage performances at the Whisky. The “freak dancers” were organized around Vito Paulekas, a key member of the Laurel Canyon counterculture, who among other things was part of an early 1960s Southern California social world that, as Rachel Rubin explains, became the origin point of the Renaissance Faire.5 Terry Melcher met Paulekas in 1960 when Paulekas was the proprietor of an art studio that Melcher and some of his high school friends would visit—largely, as Melcher explained, because Paulekas had nude models there.6 The importance of Paulekas to this scene should not be underestimated: as Barry Miles puts it, Paulekas and his troupe (including his wife Szou and his friend Carl Franzoni—a.k.a. “Captain Fuck”) were “the first hippies in Hollywood, perhaps the first hippies anywhere.”7 One of the major innovations of Paulekas and his group was to refer to themselves, proudly, as freaks. This group of dancers would appear regularly with the Byrds, whenever that group played at the Whisky, and they even accompanied the group on tour. Later, according to Barry Miles, they also accompanied Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, even though “Zappa’s music was never as danceable as the Byrds and required a lot more concentration.”8 Zappa was clear on the significance of Vito’s freak dancers to the success of the Mothers’ performance: “As soon as they arrived they would make things happen, because they were dancing in a way nobody had seen before, screaming and yelling out on the floor and doing all kinds of weird things. They were dressed in a way nobody could believe, and they gave life to everything that was going on.”9

  Vito and his freaks “lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could.” Paulekas was much older than most of his freak colleagues (already in his fifties by the mid-1960s) and with Captain Fuck he acted as what Barry Miles calls a “sexual predator” who would focus “his attention upon the teenage girls who hung around the dance troupe at concerts.”10 About Franzoni, Zappa said simply that “Carl doesn’t get along with people who don’t fuck him.”11 In retrospect, Los Angeles music producer and impresario Lou Adler described Paulekas and his troupe as being like “a nonviolent Manson situation, a little cult.”12

  While “hippie” has been defined, diagnosed, contextualized, buried, and reanimated, its close cousin, “freak” (which is what Vito and his troupe called themselves), has received considerably less attention. Ultimately, part of what made the Manson Family so unsettling to the cultural leaders of Los Angeles is that they seemed, at first, to be modeled on just the kind of safe freaks they had been surrounded by for some years. Michael Walker is correct to note that Manson set himself up in the Los Angeles music world as parallel to other freak cliques. But while Frank Zappa’s group of freaks was more or less headquartered at the Log Cabin, and Vito Paulekas and his freak dancers were mostly to be found at the Whisky, Manson’s freaks seeped: they broke through walls, and later through windows, at 10050 Cielo Drive.13 One of their great sins in the eyes of the musicians and film people with whom they interacted is that they did not seem to understand the rights and responsibilities of ownership. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys summarized the troubling freakiness of the Manson Family by saying that they “had weird names, they were dirty, they showed little respect for our property.”14

  Rachel Adams has written helpfully about the changing meanings of “freak” in the course of American history, and her work can help us understand how Manson and his Family were mistakenly (and tragically) misread by their contacts in the canyons and on the Strip as representing another relatively benign tribe of freaks, right alongside Vito and his dancers, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, Zappa and the Mothers (and the GTOs). Adams explains that the twentieth-century history of “freak” begins in the sideshow (whose “scary” and “deformed” characters were enshrined in Tod Browning’s 1932 movie Freaks). After World War II the word was applied more broadly to any sort of “nonconformity such as sexual perversion or communist sympathies.”15 Adams elaborates, “As hippies morphed into freaks and the Greatest Show on Earth moved out of the circus tent and into the streets, the meaning of freak exploded exponentially.” A “freak” sea change ensued in the late 1960s, according to Adams, as a “youthful counterculture . . . made freakishness a valued sign of rebellion.” This bubbled up to leaders of the counterculture (especially Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Adams claims) who used “flamboyant . . . strategies of resistance” organized around “the figure of the freak, whose performative antics transform the serious business of courtrooms, schools, and streets into sideshows.”16

  Attempts to promote “freak” as an honored identity were not without challenges: the very familiarity of “speed freak” or “Jesus freak” as negative characterization alerts us to this reality. Just before the countercultural reformation of “freak” really took hold, Bob Dylan had already begun to destabilize it. In his 1965 song “Ballad of a Thin Man” Dylan included a verse that explicitly challenged audience members to consider the possibility that the performer (i.e., “the geek”) considers the spectator to be a freak. Here, Dylan dramatically opens questions surrounding the relative “freakiness” of performers and audience members; just when you think it is safe to gawk at the spectacle, the performer holds up a mirror so you can see how grotesque you look.17 (Manson himself knew that after his arrest he was being framed as the bad kind of “freak.” Explaining that he was living in something like a “television cell,” the prisoner complained that for prison employees, some of whom brought “their sons in on the week-ends to take a look” at him, he had become a grotesque sideshow attraction.)18 Though it would be foolish to extract a one-dimensional meaning from Dylan’s hyped-up surrealism, it does seem clear that the song is demanding that listeners consider just what they think they know for sure about freaks. This is one of two songs on Highway 61 Revisited featuring “How does it feel” as a key phrase. The first one, on the record’s opening song (“Like a Rolling Stone”), is an accusation directed at o
ne character; “Ballad of a Thin Man” (which closes Side One of the LP) redeploys the phrase so it can serve as a rhetorical question and in the process broaden the singer’s address. No one hearing the song can pretend it is about somebody else. In any event, by 1968, Tom Wolfe was writing of how “freak” had become a keyword for the hippies in the Haight-Ashbury. Freak, according to Wolfe, referred to “style and obsessions”; it was used as a simple descriptive, as in “Stewart Brand is an Indian freak.” It was not, Wolfe emphasized, a “negative word.”19

  Frank Zappa was the most important “theorist” of the freak in mid-to-late 1960s. His debut release with the Mothers in 1966 (now renamed the Mothers of Invention) was called Freak Out! Its opening song, “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” articulated the cultural battle over the word “freak” itself. According to the liner notes of Freak Out!, this song was written for “Carl Orestes Franzoni” who is “freaky down to his toenails. Someday he will live next door to you and your lawn will die.” The notes for this song go on to implore the reader and listener to “Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library.”20

  The chorus of the song establishes that the “freaks” in question are the “left behinds of the Great Society.” Musically it is defined at first by what sounds like a kazoo, but according to the liner notes must either be “tweezers” or a “bobby pin” (or an uncredited kazoo!). It is a freaky song, with freaky instrumentation. The lead vocal is doubled, and is comprised of an angry-sounding recitation by Zappa and Ray Collins. From the first verse on, Zappa makes it clear that mainstream culture is empty and dead. The emergence of the questing freaks of the title stands as the country’s only hope of redemption. The “voice” of the song is, clearly, in sympathy with the “left behinds”—uninterested in participating in the rampant consumerism of the American dream.