Individual works of popular culture are unlikely, according to Negativland, to have the sort of direct, operational force that Vincent Bugliosi ascribed to the White Album, or that various media sources ascribed to Negativland’s “Christianity Is Stupid,” in the wake of the David Brom murders (or that so many projected onto Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and so on). With very careful language—and incendiary verb choice—Cory Frye has underscored how “Negativland strategically stabs the word ‘stupid’ throughout, to reject hoary theories regarding popular music’s role in the instigation of violent crimes.”31 The mashup art of Negativland, on the face of things, rejects linearity, forswears simple answers to complex questions, and demotes logical reasoning in favor of allusion, juxtaposition, and repetition. In Helter Stupid, all of the most significant claims are contingent and subject to powerful counterargument. One example: Helter Stupid organizes alternating samples of the phrases “too much data” and “we don’t have enough data” and the seeming paradox itself has a tale to tell. With this seeming contradiction Negativland invites listeners to think about how abundant media does not equate simply to great wisdom. One conclusion the band reached, as a result of its own manipulation of the media, is that much of what is circulated as news in contemporary culture is neither new, nor verifiably true. Robert Barry has written that Negativland helped stir up a “kind of whirlpool of self-reference where the only sources of information were other news outlets and gaps in logic were glossed over in a haze of fuzzy language.”32
The band was clear about its intent with the hoax: “Our lie was intended for and directed to the media, and it proved very effective in exposing the unreliable process of cannibalization that passes for ‘news.’ Negativland chose to exploit the media’s appetite for particularly sensational stories by becoming a subject they couldn’t resist—the latest version of a ridiculous media cliché that proposes that rock song lyrics instigate murder. Common sense suggests that murderers purchase records that appeal to them, just as they purchase the weapons they use.”33 Stitching together twenty years of cultural investment in the idea that popular music lyrics have direct influence on individual and group behaviors, Negativland created a “monstrous joke” to call attention to the faulty reasoning and unstable projection at the heart of an “idea” whose history might be said to stretch from Charles Manson’s alleged misreading of the Beatles to the blaming of Marilyn Manson’s music for the Columbine massacre of 1999. The 1980s, as Negativland was well aware, was characterized by its own “Satanic panic” with numerous claims made—in the media, but also in American courtrooms—that secret messages were being encoded, usually through backwards masking, in heavy-metal music. The 1980s claim—essentially a charge lodged that popular musicians were purposely directing vulnerable young people to do harm to themselves or others—flipped Vincent Bugliosi’s lesson upside down; Bugliosi’s claim, of course, is that the Beatles were innocent, but that Manson’s delusional misreading of that band’s music led him to direct his followers to kill. But the interviewer for Mondo 2000 rightly noted that Helter Stupid, with its broad sweep, its inclusion of snippets of the song “Helter Skelter,” along with snatches of a speech by Manson, up against the Brom-related materials, was a way to “draw everything back to Helter Skelter, and the linking of the Beatles songs to those . . . murders, right up to the current Tipper Gore Mothers-Against-Dirty-Satanic-Rock-Songs situation.”34
Helter Stupid was an important avant-garde art project that had enormous influence on other artists. Brian Eno (might have) famously claimed that while only thirty thousand people bought the Velvet Underground’s first album, each one of them formed a band; something similar might be said about the work done by Negativland on Helter Stupid.35 With Helter Stupid Negativland was able to puncture one dominant mythology surrounding Charles Manson—the notion that he exerted a kind of magical power. When Negativland samples Manson himself in Helter Stupid, when we finally get to hear Manson bragging about how much worse things would have been at Cielo Drive if he had been there, mostly he just seems pitiable: he is bragging about something he could have done a long time ago, but that we are pretty sure he did not do. The power in Helter Stupid does not belong to Charles Manson or David Brom—it belongs to those who control the means of production. Negativland may have interrupted (or at least called attention) to this reality for the twenty-two minutes of Helter Stupid, but as the band knew well, its very well-played hoax could not ultimately compete with the power of the dominant culture’s media narratives about Manson, about families, and about the power of popular music. In fact, as the band came to realize, it would not take much time or effort for the mainstream media to stitch Negativland into the Helter Skelter story it had been promoting since 1969.
Other artists have attempted to disrupt the Helter Skelter narrative so powerfully prosecuted by Vincent Bugliosi in court and on the page. Perhaps most notable in the world of “high” art is the untitled word painting created by Christopher Wool in 1988 and most recently sold (in 2006) for well over a million dollars. Wool has been called the “most important painter of his generation” (he was born in 1955) but this painting is deceptively simple on its face. He takes the by-now familiar phrase Helter Skelter and chops it into stenciled pieces. In Wool’s hands Helter Skelter becomes the stuttering four-part phrase “Helter Helter”:
HEL
TER
HEL
TER
With Wool’s work comes the reminder that Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter is made up of blocks—almost like children’s toys—that can be manipulated by other people who do not share the prosecutor’s faith in simple explanatory solutions. Wool’s reformulation of the phrase and its “percussive typography” breaks down what Bugliosi has always tried to present as clarity about Manson’s inspiration to kill. The court proceedings cannot inoculate observers from the “political anxiety” and “simmering violence” that keep erupting in and around the Manson case.36
The avant-garde artistic responses of Wool and Negativland stand as important commentary on, and symptoms of, the Family’s ongoing creepy crawl of American culture, but they have not generated anything like the multitudinous responses energized by more lowbrow forms of popular culture. With respect to Charles Manson, the popular music world has been environmentally responsible: songwriters, singers, and performers consistently reduce, reuse, and recycle imagery evoking the Family and its crimes. Much of the activity I have been describing so far has been located in the sphere of punk rock and indie culture, and much of it never moves beyond the “magic” power invoked with shout-outs to the Manson Family and covers of Charles Manson’s songs. I do not pretend to have done much more than hint at how fully Manson has saturated youth-oriented popular music. Did I mention the English rock band Kasabian? Or Frank Kozik’s use of Manson’s eyes for the logo he created for Rise Records?
While the Manson Family has been especially important for (white) indie rockers and avant-garde artists, its presence has been fairly strong in hip-hop culture as well. In addition to the rap duo known as Heltah Skeltah, the underground rapper Chunk Manson, a short-lived rock-rap group known as Spahn Ranch Family, and the Southern rap collective who refer to themselves as the Manson Family, there are countless lyrical references to, and samples of, Charles Manson, at least since 1989 when Ice Cube name-checked Manson in his verse of N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton” in which he establishes his street credibility with a drive-by reference to the cult leader. These citations are mostly in keeping with rap’s normative use of hyperbole. Accessing some of Manson’s power, rappers from the most mainstream (Eminem, twice), to the more experimental and marginal (Death Grips, whose song “Beware” opens with a long sample of Manson speaking), have found Manson appealing, to say the least. (There was a decent amount of chatter after N.W.A. broke up suggesting that key members Ice Cube and Dr. Dre were working together on a project provisionally titled Heltah Skeltah. That record never came to light but former Dr. Dre ass
ociate The D.O.C. did release his own Helter Skelter in 1996.)
There is also a tiny subgenre of rap music—it really just consists of two brothers, one of whom raps as “Necro” and one as “Ill Bill” (their mother knows them as Ron and Bill Braunstein)—that we have to call Snuff Rap. Necro, in particular, is obsessed with the details of the Tate killings. In his song “Do the Creepy Crawl,” Necro creates a montage of actual Manson quotations (“Do something witchy”) and hip-hop slang (“Juxed 51 times”) along with some truly surprising word-choice (the phrase “fetal sac” does appear). The chorus of “Do the Creepy Crawl” is fairly straightforward: “Stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and . . . Stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and stabbing . . . Stab you to death!” The quasi-pornographic video for “Do the Creepy Crawl” borrows from Jim Van Bebber’s Manson Family Movies as it provides a visual landscape to match the sex and violence gore of the song. Ill Bill, with his act La Coka Nostra, is interested less in blood and guts and more in revealing the depth of his familiarity with relatively obscure facts of the case. In “Letter to Ouisch,” the rapper narrates from the point of view of the cult leader, complimenting his young follower (Ouisch, of course, was the Family name for Ruth Ann Moorehouse) for stopping Barbara Hoyt from testifying at the trial by giving her a massive dose of LSD. These usages of Manson as scare tactic represent the reductio ad absurdum of the Magic Man formulation: shouting “Manson” in a crowded cultural marketplace, they hope somebody will run screaming. There is no evidence anyone has paid much attention.
Desperados under the Eaves
For almost fifty years now, Manson has been used as a sign of social refusal, of an unwillingness to conform to cultural norms surrounding appearance, sexuality, work, consumerism, romantic arrangements, and so on. The landscapes inhabited by the Manson Family—the actual geographic landscapes of Los Angeles, Chatsworth, and Death Valley and the cultural geography of how they lived—have become templates for a range of artists working in film, sculpture, fiction, photography, and music. But if we are to understand the breadth and depth of Manson’s influence on the arts, we must acknowledge that his presence does not always announce itself directly. Indeed, some of the most significant Manson art features what we might, following the lead of cultural studies scholar Michael Denning, refer to as Manson accents rather than Manson Family plots. Our work is to explore how the story of Manson and the Family has inflected all manner of cultural productions even when those works do not announce themselves as Manson-related.1
It is interesting in this light to think about Then It All Came Down, a musical project launched by JR Robinson with his collective Wrekmeister Harmonies in 2014 in a Chicago cemetery. Robinson’s composition borrows its title from an interview Truman Capote did with Bobby Beausoleil in 1973 and ultimately published in his collection Music for Chameleons (1980). While Beausoleil has, on more than one occasion, renounced the accuracy of Capote’s work and grieved over what he sees as its negative effect on his life in prison, Robinson finds in it an apt summary of the forces of anarchy and destruction swirling around the Manson Family. Robinson’s music (and the accompanying liner notes he wrote) make it clear that he is particularly interested in how English occultist Aleister Crowley’s dark magick seeped into the American counterculture of the 1960s.
Robinson works deftly in Then It All Came Down to evoke Beausoleil and his historical moment without ever resorting to cheap sound effects or literal textual reference. The musical building blocks in Then It All Came Down include black-metal vocals, guitar drones, and beautiful female vocals. Robinson is composing from within a tradition that includes the doomy meditations of Ed Sanders, Truman Capote, and Zachary Lazar, for instance, but not the rational chronicling of Vincent Bugliosi or Jeff Guinn; the music of Wrekmeister Harmonies (whose own name is something of a joke on a Béla Tarr film of almost the same name) is dense, allusive, and full of chaos. Robinson has explained that in his composition he was “trying to communicate the whole story of Beausoleil’s involvement in the murders”:
His chugging down the PCH on a bike represented by the hypnotic acoustic guitar, the melodious singing of “the girls” repeating the phrase “beautiful sun” which devolves into the Leviathan growling vocal section introducing the idea of Bobby’s murder of the drug dealer, which in turn leads into the “metal section” representing the violence of the Manson situation and the cultural fallout that it incurred. All of this might appear chaotic to a listener. . . . But from my point of view, there was a very direct compositional narrative that sustains itself through the use of a range of (mainly negative) emotions and in the end does resolve that tension in an almost post-apocalyptic way, with the string section again emerging, sounding almost wounded from the entire experience, as I believe most of America felt at that time, and most definitely Los Angeles.2
Then It All Came Down is impressive as composition and as performance, but also, in a more general sense, as rhetorical gesture. Robinson, with his musical collective, enters the arena of Manson art with a score to play but none to settle. Above all, Robinson seems interested in tracing the influence of Aleister Crowley on the American counterculture. As he puts it in the liner notes to Then It All Came Down, “there is a direct line” from Crowley’s motto “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law” to the hippie credo “do your own thing.”3 In its way Robinson’s composition serves a revisionist purpose; its burden is to retell Bobby Beausoleil’s dark tale as a central theme in countercultural history, rather than as some perverse deviation from it.
Robinson is not the first to try to revisit the Family’s story as a major narrative of countercultural confusion. One of the first major attempts to “communicate the whole story” of the Manson phenomenon came, rather aptly, from Terry Melcher. Terry Melcher released two solo albums in the 1970s and they represent a fascinating attempt to exorcise the demons of the Manson moment. They exist first as novelties—a dare accepted, a borderline freak show, the elephant dancing. He joins such similarly marginal figures as Jack Nitzsche, John Simon, and Kim Fowley, who worked mostly as producers, but ultimately could not resist putting their names on the front of the record as well.
That said, Terry Melcher, the record, is rich enough to deserve a close listen. It represents an important crossroads for Los Angeles (and Manson) art. At just the moment that rock critics such as Robert Christgau were beginning to use the phrase “El Lay” to caricature the place as if it were a David Hockney painting come to life, Melcher’s solo debut reminds us to resist this flattening of Los Angeles’s musical art of the 1970s. The record is a damning and complex memoir—a dark valedictory about the damages wrought by personal privilege and unstable social hierarchies. Terry Melcher is, at its heart, a compelling and mournful evocation of the class confusion that ensued in the wake of the Tate-LaBianca murders.
Terry Melcher is at once an expression of Los Angeles mainstream celebrity culture and a withering indictment of it. The music is played by the cream of two overlapping groups of Los Angeles musicians: the studio royalty known as the Wrecking Crew (including Mike Deasy, who, we recall, had plenty of contact via Melcher with the Manson Family) and figures from an insurgent community of country-rock players, including members of the Byrds.
While Terry Melcher offers few surprises in terms of its musical palette, it is startling for how much misery Melcher conveys vocally and thematically. According to Rolling Stone’s reviewer, Melcher sounds like “he’s given up not just on optimism but even on despair.”4 The critic is not exaggerating. This is a serious, self-lacerating piece of popular art that attempts to evaluate the social changes in Los Angeles represented by the Manson Family. These changes seem to have mostly reached this famous son as personal crisis.
The record opens and closes with “sort of” cover songs. It begins with an anguished take on the (usually) uptempo bluegrass song “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” associated most with Flatt and Scruggs. The key lyric in the refrain of this song, usually p
layed at breakneck speed, is “Lay around the shack / till the mail train comes back / And I’ll roll in my sweet baby’s arms.” Melcher’s arranges “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” as a mid-tempo soul number with bloody Memphis-style horns. His version emphasizes alienation—Melcher begins the song with a dark verse (“Where were you last Friday night / While I was lying in jail”) that usually does not appear till the back end of the song; at the song’s beginning, Melcher’s narrator is already suffering for his engagement with the legal system. Where bluegrass versions of “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” usually communicate a devil-may-care refusal to work and celebration of off-the-clock leisure, Melcher’s anguished vocal instead delivers an argument against the central proposition of the song—that pleasure and relief will always be found in the beloved’s embrace.
Terry Melcher ends with a dark rewrite of “Willie and the Hand Jive”—originally done by Los Angeles’s own Johnny Otis and released in 1958—that can’t help but suggest that the narrator is so broken down that he cannot even figure out how to masturbate on his own. The song is no longer about Way Out Willie and Rockin Millie. It’s now about “Way Out Willie and his Mama too” who are on TV (Melcher focused his career after the Manson murders on producing his mother Doris Day’s television career). The first thing to notice about “The Old Hand Jive” is that it erases the rhythm at the heart of Otis’s original. The Bo Diddley beat Otis worked with—which also, as George Lipsitz has noted, evokes “children’s clapping games and rope-jumping rhymes”5—is nowhere to be found in the Melcher song. Johnny Otis may not have meant for his “hand jive” to be widely understood to be code for “hand job”; then again, maybe he did. But there is no sex, autoerotic or otherwise, in Melcher’s version. Whatever sexual energy the singer managed to stitch into his version of “Rolling” has disappeared over the course of the album.
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