Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  Manson’s function as culture-generator from the late 1960s until our own time depends on flexibility. While Charles Manson is hardly a blank slate—you cannot simply bounce anything off of him—he has been the launch pad for a stunningly broad range of expressive forays. All evidence suggests that however often and in whatever ways the Wilson sisters protest the “incorrect” reading of “Magic Man” there continue to be powerful agents and vehicles of reception (i.e., you, me, and the Internet) continuing to insist on the Manson reading. For what it’s worth, Hall and Oates have been similarly plagued by the Patty Hearst reading of their 1977 hit “Rich Girl”!

  Waves of Mutilation

  If we are going to conduct a serious evaluation of Manson art—works inspired in one way of another by his charismatic leadership, his nonconformism, his scary eyes, the murders he was convicted of directing, the landscapes he and his Family inhabited, and so on—we will have to pause to acknowledge at least briefly that Manson himself was some kind of artist. Numerous observers have emphasized what Bugliosi referred to as the “certain amount of theater” involved in the killings; Ed Sanders called him a “performance killer.”1 But the musical creation that was at the heart of Manson’s search for a platform in the last couple years of the 1960s has not been as significant to Manson’s celebrity in recent decades as have the ways he has been deployed by and himself manipulated the forces of material culture production. Manson’s fame has spread on posters, stickers, T-shirts, and so on. Sites that specialize in such material—supernaught.com and rottencotton.com (and Etsy and eBay, to be honest)—have consistently profited from selling Manson’s image. Manson himself got in the game fairly early, offering up a “hand painted prison yard rock” (for $4,500), signed bags of snack food, paintings and sketches, and various pieces of signed ephemera (e.g., Monopoly money). Manson may not have have been able to make much of a mark in the late 1960s as a recording artist, but he did pretty well for himself as a purveyor of visual art and material culture.

  The most notorious piece of Manson-related material culture is almost certainly the “Charlie Don’t Surf” T-shirt sold by the Lemmons Brothers out of their Riot Gear store in Newport Beach, California, beginning in the early 1990s. Repurposing a phrase uttered by Robert Duvall’s character in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (there used as mordant commentary on the racism of American military violence in Vietnam) and then taken up by the Clash as title for a song on their Sandinista! album, the T-shirt turns serious critique into sophomoric kitsch. According to their own account the Lemmons Brothers cleared their T-shirt plan with Manson and arranged a royalty deal with him. The money earmarked for Manson ultimately went to the son of Family victim Voytek Frykowski. The Christian fundamentalist brothers claim that they sent their own share of the royalties to the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. Mike Rubin, writing in Spin, has suggested that “Manson’s mug” has “creepy-crawled out of the fringes” to become ubiquitous in mainstream culture. Putting an even finer point on Manson’s value in the arena of material culture, Rubin argues that “in the world of mass murderer bubble-gum trading cards, Manson is a Mickey Mantle rookie card.”2 Manson has remained a remarkably stable commodity since at least the time of the publication of Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. Our cultural investment in Manson imagery has (not surprisingly) been joined at the hip with all manner of successful economic initiatives.

  But the more T-shirts we buy, the less, it seems, we want to reckon soberly with Manson’s own musical creations. Very few have been willing to wade through the thickets of shocking imagery and biographical static surrounding Manson to engage in this kind of study. Recall how earnest Ed Sanders was, writing in the Los Angeles Free Press during the spring of 1970, about establishing Manson’s bona fides as a creative force with his insistence that the Family could easily outdo the top level of professional folk-rock musicians. Sanders rhapsodized further about this music, arguing that “No one can prevent its beauty. And its revolutionary implications.”3

  Very few observers have followed Sanders’s lead and taken Manson’s own music seriously. Scholar Mark Goodall is almost alone in trying to recuperate the Manson as a purveyor of what generally travels under the banner of “outsider” art. Calling Manson “easily as gifted as many more famous artists of the time,” and finding parallels between his work and the music of the Velvet Underground and the Incredible String Band, Goodall explains Manson’s failure to capitalize on recording opportunities as a positive reminder that the singer was a “free spirit” who was “guided by whim” and could not fit into the constraints of the commercialized world of popular music. Goodall at once wants to locate Manson as a colleague of the “spontaneous” folk singers of the 1950s who emphasized communal creation above all other goals and as a sophisticated individual artist who frequently deployed sophisticated musical strategies: “He makes use of the sixth and unresolved major seventh chords that are more commonly found in Latin music.” In his close reading of Manson’s song “Maiden with Green Eyes,” Goodall notes that the song uses a “rhumba rhythm,” along with a “medieval narrative sensibility” and the overall tone of “1950s doo wop.” Trying to summarize a number of other Manson compositions, Goodall describes a particularly effective melding of “folk protest” and doo-wop characteristics.4

  British journalist and musician Lewis Parker has been similarly interested in recuperating not only the value of Manson’s music, but that of the performances of the Family as well. Parker has written pointed prose about how masterful prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has been at “controlling the narrative” surrounding Manson. Parker’s own contribution has been, in his writing and music (he is member of a Manson cover band), to offer a revisionist take on Manson’s art—a take that, notably, revives Ed Sanders’s decades-old support of the Family’s musicality. While Parker is interested in Manson’s own performance, he is especially interested in the music Sanders heard around the campfire at Spahn Ranch, this “ultimate psychedelic music,” repackaged most recently as The Family Jams. Parker reads this music as part of the revisionist Western insurgency I will discuss in the last few pages of this section: “This is an album that expresses the vast, raw, intoxicating sense of running away, getting away with, and finally being free.” Parker makes a fascinating case that the ramshackle, half-cooked feel of the music is purposeful—that it is meant to invoke “open space, a huge trip” at just the moment when Manson and a number of Family members were facing lifelong confinement (if not death itself).5

  The details here are not nearly as significant as the revisionist approach. What Sanders, Goodall, and Parker remind us (as of course Neil Young and a few others have tried to do) is that Manson first established himself in the culture of Los Angeles as a folk musician of some merit—an “outsider” artist to be sure, but playing in the same game as the more established artists with whom he tried to forge relationships. Zachary Lazar attempts to capture this reality in his novel Sway, looking through the eyes of Bobby Beausoleil: “Other people came to Charlie as if he were a visionary, some sort of guru, but to Bobby he was another musician, someone with connections. He knew the Beach Boys, Neil Young, a man named Terry Melcher who produced the Byrds.”6 Lazar, like Goodall, acknowledges that Manson could not (or would not) simply join the commercial enterprise represented by Melcher and his entourage. Manson’s artistic attack, as Lazar renders it, embodied a highly conscious and complex awareness of performer and audience: the singer was “giving himself up to the song, but also making fun of the idea of giving himself up to the song, making fun of you for believing it.”7 Like Mark Goodall, Zachary Lazar insists that contemporary audiences take seriously the idea that the music Manson made was an important part of the larger challenges he was making against the mainstream culture he was rubbing so painfully against. Lazar also insists that Manson’s rebel stance took form in the songs themselves. This was “unusual music,” which took pains to avoid “the simple pentatonic scales of blues and rock for the mysteriou
s spirals of the Dorian mode, the Mixolydian mode. The music reflected back a range of tensions in the room, all the social hierarchies that no one wanted to admit existed anymore, drawing them out. It was not aggressive—it had an ethereal, dreamy sound—but it spread a malevolence that came at first as a faint surprise then blossomed into something so familiar that it seemed obvious. It was the music of dim rooms, or red wine in gallon jugs. It was the music of slow violence unfurling.”8

  These attempts to rehabilitate Charles Manson as a significant artist in his own right are valuable scholarly and artistic exercises. But they remain exercises indeed—interesting theoretically but lacking the force to alter the main currents of Manson art. Manson’s music, notwithstanding the revisionist efforts of Goodall, Lazar, and a few others, mostly lives as punch line. In our own time Manson’s own music is an Internet curiosity even as it remains available in physical format. His Lie record, originally produced for release by self-described “Road Mangler Deluxe” Phil Kaufman, was reissued in the 1980s as a bootleg by Welsh label Fierce Recordings. But it is cover versions of Manson songs—primarily by punk, industrial, and heavy-metal bands—that have kept him most fully present as a musical force. Redd Kross, of Hawthorne, California (also home of the Beach Boys), helped kick off the 1980s wave with their record Born Innocent—the title a reference to Exorcist-star Linda Blair’s television movie (1974) about juvenile prison. The LP is drenched in Manson. Most directly it features a version of “Cease to Exist,” the original title of the Manson-penned song ultimately released by the Beach Boys as “Never Learn Not to Love.” Redd Kross also offers up an original they titled simply “Charlie,” which is a sort of punk-rock haiku of the Tate murders keyed around descriptions of Tate’s dead body and the fetus inside of her, which is described either as “little” or “widdle”—it’s hard to tell. The singalong that follows is much more clear in its incitement to kill piggies. Born Innocent also includes a cover of “Look on Up at the Bottom” from 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a satirical follow-up to Sharon Tate’s original Valley of the Dolls. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, according to screenwriter Roger Ebert, was partly inspired by the Tate-LaBianca murders. Redd Kross’s Jeff McDonald (yes, he has almost the exact same name as the convicted “Green Beret” killer) has, in later days, admitted that the main target of the band’s Manson material was his parents. As McDonald writes, “We used to just tell our parents we were into Charles Manson just to drive them crazy. . . . They were furious we were on the cover of Flipside magazine in our garage and we were holding this picture of Charles Manson. . . . We were laughing. They were not happy.”9

  Redd Kross’s early 1980s Manson art statements were joined by numerous others in the 1980s and beyond. Boston’s Lemonheads released their Manson cover in 1988, with its version of “Home Is Where You’re Happy” and liner notes that thanked “Susan, Lynette, Gypsy, Katie, Mary, Sandra, Leslie, Snake, Ouisch, Little Paul, and, of course, Charlie.” Bandleader Evan Dando would evince an ongoing interest in figuring out what he could “do” with Manson as source and image. The alternative music culture’s fascination with Manson crested in the first half of the 1990s as Brian Warner created a performing persona which was more or less a double cover version: Marilyn Manson. At the same time Guns N’ Roses recorded Manson’s “Look at Your Game, Girl” (with royalties ultimately going to the son of Voytek Frykowski). The culture of Manson covers was relatively tame, organized as it was around the sophomoric notion that surely somebody’s parents could still be upset by a loud and fast version of a Manson song.10

  This quick summary of revisions of Manson’s music in the 1980s and 1990s is meant mostly as a counterpoint to the body of work that has used Manson as a truly generative reference point—a place from which to initiate artistically rich and culturally challenging explorations. In this light it is worth thinking about “Wave of Mutilation,” released by the Pixies in 1989. Rather than indulge in the limited act of actually covering a Manson composition, the Pixies instead built a complex allusion into the first line of their song, which first invokes the Beach Boys conversion of Manson’s “Cease to exist” into “Cease to resist,” and then follows the narrator as he says his farewells and kills himself and his family by navigating their car into the ocean. Lead singer Frank Black (a.k.a. Black Francis) has explained that the first verse of the song is about Japanese businessmen driven to desperation by feelings of shame surrounding business failure; he also acknowledges that the opening line is a joke on the Beach Boys and Charles Manson. As the singer explains it (with some rudimentary level of understanding of actual historical fact), they “hung out all together . . . . And he wrote this song called ‘Cease to Exist.’ And supposedly the Beach Boys used a lot of his lyrics and gave him a sports car or something. And they had this boys loved girl song where they went ‘cease to resist’ and changed his lyrics around. They couldn’t have ‘cease to exist’ because it was all powerful suicide stuff!”11 The accomplishment here is the invocation of Manson and the Beach Boys in three words to act as a sort of foreshadowing of the deaths to come. In the Pixies’ song, the other side of the Pacific Ocean from Southern California represents not the Endless Summer (to borrow the title of a Beach Boys’ compilation from 1974) of that band’s most optimistic songs, but the destruction following in the wake of Charles Manson’s meeting with Dennis Wilson in Los Angeles. “Wave of Mutilation” goes one step beyond the cover image of Neil Young’s On the Beach: here the car has crashed not on the sand, but in the water.

  With their ambitious reference to “Cease to Exist,” in “Wave of Mutilation,” the Pixies were extending a tradition of Manson art that reached back into the late 1970s, and that had particularly important antecedents in the punk musical and visual culture of Southern California. Here the key figures are the artist Raymond Pettibon and the hardcore punk band Black Flag, led by Pettibon’s brother Greg Ginn. Pettibon and Black Flag were connected not only by the family relationship of the two brothers, but also by the important graphic work Pettibon did for the band—a series of flyers that art historian Thomas Crow describes as having been central to the evolving thematic vocabulary of the band—not to mention that Pettibon was responsible for suggesting the name for the band and designing its logo.12 This is a key moment in the history of Manson art. Mark Jones and Gerry Carlin are surely correct to suggest that this is when Manson’s cultural presence was shifting from the “irrecuperable” to the “radical.”13

  Thomas Crow makes a convincing case that Pettibon’s work has to be understood as a commentary on all of the Manson art that precedes it: “The imagery and story of Charles Manson’s ‘family’ became a dominant theme across the entire early phase of Pettibon’s career—the aspirations of the counter-culture become sordid crime drama.”14 What Crow finds most interesting in this work by Pettibon is that it at once acknowledges the cliché about Manson “ending” the sixties, while also “refusing the complacent conclusions drawn from it.”15 This multimedia, unruly work that Pettibon has done (Mark Goodall suggests we call it his “Book of Manson,” after the artist’s own film about the Family) aims, as Thomas Crow writes, to “expose the pervasive pleasure aroused by the story” in conventional people who still manage to maintain a “murderous antipathy toward any perceived deviance or moral challenges from outsiders.”16 In his deceptively simple, text-heavy ink drawings, Pettibon repeatedly invites viewers to view scenarios alternatively absurd (there must have been a “Family” dog that participated in the free sexual life at Spahn Ranch) and poignant. Pettibon’s Manson is arrogant, baffled, martyred. Incorporating Manson as a key term into the visual language of his punk aesthetic, Pettibon makes a case for the cult leader as a master text of the marginal, the off-kilter, the perverse.

  In the late 1980s Pettibon released his full-length film, Judgment Day Theater: The Book of Manson—perhaps making a polygamy joke with his subtitle. The cast features members of Redd Kross, Black Flag, and other figures from the Southern Calif
ornia punk scene. The tone of the movie is completely deadpan. The actors generally do not try to hide the fact that they are reading lines from cue cards, and when possible they remove whatever affect might naturally emerge in their voices. Many of the lines read by the actors in Book of Manson invoke phrases familiar from general usage and from Helter Skelter’s account of Family life and the Tate-LaBianca murders. The shopworn feel of much of the dialogue is purposeful. As Thomas Crow writes of Pettibon’s ink drawings, the use of clichés is meant at once to acknowledge the power they have for so many audience members and as a way to deny the conventional wisdom allegedly built into them. The reinvigorated clichés take on even greater force when Pettibon juxtaposes them with the fresh, absurdist dialogue he has concocted for the script. So, when a character named “Norman Mailer” wanders onto the scene, announces he wants to be Manson’s groupie, and then declares “Charlie cuts right to the heart of the essence . . . you’ve made me point an accusatory finger at my corrupt bourgeois self,” it not only sounds ridiculous, but it also serves to undercut empty bromides like “Teach your children” and “You’ll never work in this town again.” It is also likely meant as a challenge to Mailer’s sponsorship of writer Jack Henry Abbott and Mailer’s support of Abbott’s release from jail; soon after his release, Abbot stabbed a waiter and returned to prison.

  Idiocy is the main tonal register of Book of Manson: Pettibon’s script and the actors’ performances seem dopey-on-purpose. A major goal of Book of Manson, in short, is to sap Manson’s power; no longer seeming capable of disrupting the counterculture, the film and music industry of Los Angeles, or anything else, Manson is revealed in Pettibon’s movie as a rather slow-witted stoner. The Book of Manson is no fun, but it is a stoner film. As with most films of the genre it is relatively static—nothing much happens for the bulk of the movie. The jabbery talk that fills The Book of Manson is mostly dumb but also wildly referential. Pettibon’s Family members seem less like countercultural renegades and more like passive consumers who have been brainwashed by what they have watched on television and listened to on the radio and the stereo. In Pettibon’s rather dim and anesthetized version of things, the Manson Family is “us”—the generic audience—strangled into semi-consciousness by the many tentacles of commercial culture.