Tonight! The Charlie Manson Band

by Michael Beiriger

  “Hard to say, Marv. We could cover this story for a long time, but we have to wrap it sometime. After the November issue, probably. Crib Notes is booked up until then.”

  Marv stopped again, his face fallen. “That’s a total bummer, man! I need that article out before the record is released! I mean,” he stopped himself, “that would be the best case for Charlie and me.”

  Alex suddenly realized why Marv had pushed so hard to get him interested in the story, and he kicked himself that he hadn’t seen it. But he was also dumbfounded to think Marv would risk so much by having a journalist like him come to this ranch, digging around. Alex had started to believe that the ranch was just a playpen for low-rent criminals.

  “Well,” Alex said, and then stopped. They had been moving toward the distant sound of music and voices as they climbed up the arroyo, and turning into a small canyon they looked down on the photo shoot.

  Manson was standing on a tall boulder, playing guitar and singing. Below, six girls, all of them naked, were dancing, singing, and spinning around with scarves flying in the air. On the ground, Spence and a girl Alex had not seen before were fucking in the sand. The “7-7-7” on Spence’s back rippled between his shoulder blades as he moved. Henry was scrambling madly, taking shot after shot in the orange sunset. He shouted encouragement and directions to the girls. Alex saw Sandy and Valley Jane share a long kiss. “Great! Great!” he heard Henry yell.

  “What the fuck …” Alex muttered.

  Marv hooted with laughter. “And I was worried because I didn’t know how Charlie and I were going to pay for the shoot. Ha! Genius!”

  “Marv,” Alex said, looking at him in the setting sun. “You do know that some of these girls are under age, right?”

  Marv didn’t look away from the porn show below. “Well, I’m guessing little details like that just won’t make it into your story. Then he looked at Alex and winked. “Will they.”

  Born To Be Wild

  1968 Mars Bonfire

  September 12, 1969

  6:00 pm.

  The dune buggy raced down a small fire road into an open piece of terrain, hit a small berm of sand and leapt into the air. This, thought Ted Johnston, is what California is all about!

  The buggy hit the ground with a hard bounce and roared on. Ted sat in the passenger seat, buckled in with a large leather harness. The driver was a long haired guy with crazy tattoos all over his body, and it was clear to Ted that he was an experienced dune racer.

  Ted had come to L.A. from Milwaukee, where he had revamped a modest pop radio station into a regional Top 40 powerhouse. He completely changed their playlists and approach and took the station to number one in the Milwaukee region in less than two years. This success attracted attention from larger stations all over the US, and Ted wasted little time deciding to accept an offer for the Program Director position at KOWL in LA. He and his wife Julie were still adjusting to California and Los Angeles after living here for a year. He found it difficult – coming from a relatively flat Wisconsin – to get his bearings when the whole city seemed to be surrounded by the hills and mountain ranges. He could never keep all their names straight. But Ted knew West meant the ocean, of course, and like most young new arrivals they tried to live as close to the beach as possible.

  Now Ted was here at the Spahn Ranch, invited to this party thrown by Marv Feld. He had only recently met Marv, and liked him well enough. Feld was way more aggressive and outrageous than most record promo guys he had met in Milwaukee. Marv had invited Ted and the other Program Directors to this party with two caveats: no girlfriends or wives (he wouldn’t explain why, exactly), and that it was all Top Secret. Marv would handle the transportation, and on this Friday afternoon the guys had all assembled at Wallich’s Music City on Sunset as Marv instructed. One guy, who said Marv was famous for his offbeat promo parties, had even flown in from San Francisco.

  They hadn’t waited long past 5 pm when an old school bus painted in day-glo ‘Flower Children’ regalia pulled into Wallich’s, creaking on its springs and spewing black diesel smoke across the parking lot. The bus squealed to a stop in front of the group of guys, who looked at each other skeptically. The bus was covered with painted flowers and peace signs and looked like a prop from a lame TV sitcom about hippies – which is exactly what Marv Feld had rented. The bus doors creaked open and Marv bounced down the steps.

  “OK guys – who’s ready to party?!” Marv shouted. Dressed in bellbottom jeans, an Indian cotton shirt and strings of beads, he herded the PDs up the stairs and into the bus. Inside, the seats had all been removed, old Oriental rugs put down on the floor, and a colorful array of cushions, pillows, and young girls were lying around the perimeter.

  The bus ground into gear and maneuvered back onto Sunset. Each guy had an attending girl with his name on a nametag pinned across her chest. A silent, burly guy drove the bus, and a small radio played KMMT, an L.A. FM station. Marv passed out Cokes and endured mock outrage from the PDs, each demanding that the radio be tuned to their own stations and proper stiff drinks.

  When the bus was off the city streets and well north on the 405 Freeway, Marv opened another cooler and poured everyone Margaritas in the paper Coke cups. A cheer went up, and the mood brightened a notch further, the talking and laughing getting louder.

  “Drink up, guys!” Marv encouraged them. “Just be ready to toss it down if we get pulled over! There’s more when we get there!”

  “Where the hell are we going, Marv?” the San Francisco Program Director asked.

  “Well, boys,” Marv said as he squeezed Sandy to him, “it’s kind of an L.A. Shangri-La!” All the girls giggled. “A beautiful spread up in the hills near Chatsworth. Trust me – you’ve never seen anything like it before. I’m producing an artist who lives on the ranch with these beautiful women, and he has a new single coming out on my label!”

  All the guys on the bus booed and catcalled, and threw crumpled paper cups and ice at him. “No more work!” they started to chant.

  “I know, I know. What a surprise, right? But, really – it’s a very cool scene. We’re all here just to have an outasight time tonight!”

  After a forty minute drive the bus arrived at the ranch turnoff and rumbled down into the broad dirt plaza of the ranch. It came to a stop in front of the old Western town movie set. This is really cool! Ted marveled. Another group of women trooped down the steps of the ‘Rock City Café’ toward the bus, cold beers in hand. As everyone got off the bus, Ted could hear Janis Joplin’s music playing loudly from somewhere around him. He looked at the sprawling ranch and the girls, and realized he didn’t know how he was going to explain any of it to his wife, at home in Mar Vista with their two year old girl.

  “All right!” Marv yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth like a fake megaphone. “Courtesy of MaxTone Records, you are now free to …”

  Everyone stopped and turned to face the direction of screaming motors they heard nearby, out of sight beyond a hilltop. A dune buggy leaped over the crest of the hill and landed on a fire road leading down to the little fake town, creating a big dust cloud that drifted away toward the west. They watched as the buggy fishtailed down the path, then made a beeline toward them all standing in front of the café. Instinctively, people moved apart and back, but the dune buggy came to a sliding stop without hitting anyone.

  The driver climbed up from his seat and hopped to the ground. He was a short man with long black hair, wore dirty denim jeans and shirt covered with dust that he was trying to slap off with his palms. He leaned back into the buggy and pulled out a clear plastic bag full of joints.

  “Boys,” Marv said proudly, “say hello to Charles Manson!”

  This Is Dedicated to the One I Love

  1961 Lowman Pauling, Ralph Bass

  September 15, 1969

  11:00 am.

  Alex Swain leaned back in his creaky wooden chair at the Superior Courts building in downtown Los Angeles. He put his hands behind his head and tried to st
retch – tried to regain some focus in his mind. After getting the green light from Phil he’d started writing the article in earnest. He had come here to research Charlie Manson, to find any indication of previous arrests or jail time for the Family’s leader - at least in California. Alex felt sure he would find something.

  It was hard to stay awake in the hot, dusty stacks of the Hall of Records. The process of checking out arrest and conviction records was tedious. But he found at least one reference to Mr. Manson so far: somehow, Charlie had stolen a car while locked up at the Terminal Island facility in 1957, a stunt that bought him a full ten more years there.

  He read on. “Upon release protocol in March 1967, inmate Manson requests permission to stay in the facility permanently. He claims that living outside the prison system is beyond his abilities, particularly because of his history of being incarcerated from an early age. Request denied.”

  Wow! Alex thought. He really has been through the mill - and he really knows how to play the sympathy card! He remembered that Squeaky and Kat told him they met Manson in the Haight/Ashbury area of San Francisco after his release from Terminal Island prison. Manson tried to establish himself as another aspiring songwriter and “free person.” After the initial euphoria, the Haight scene began to crumble as the peace, love, and brotherhood tenets of the scene began to dissolve. Drug use became harder and more severe, violence starting to take the place of friendly sharing. The most experienced of the hippies and hipsters began leaving San Francisco – at least moving far from the Haight neighborhood Alex had visited San Francisco in ‘66, but his interest at the time was in the Beat writers and the whole scene in North Beach and Berkeley. Hanging around Berkeley he encountered surprisingly different philosophies and perceptions about the legitimacy and purpose of ‘journalism.’ His beliefs and values were being tested by the voices of the contemporary writers he respected, and that Berkeley trip was instrumental in forming his opinions about the US, the Vietnam War, and his commitment to writing. Opinions that caused a lot of friction and heartbreak with his family and neighbors back home.

  When he returned to Ann Arbor, Alex found that writing about music and social politics both inspired him and was a good fit for his talent. He knew he was lucky to be young and focused on these things at a time when they had never been more intertwined. Like the beat of martial music, designed to hypnotize and inspire the troops, it seemed that the music of the rock generation was evolving to the same purpose. But, aside from urging kids to have sex with abandon, there was no clear direction to the music’s marching orders. The music of the late 60’s was inspiring kids to march away from the real world, from the accepted society, and toward a hazy, promised new world. Even more disorienting were the disavowals by the idols of this movement about any clear, universal destination. Goals were to be found within each individual’s desires: Everyone do your own thing.

  So, Alex mused, now we have groups of people like Manson’s Family, with nothing in common except the rejection of a previous way of life.

  He glanced at the clock in the room, and was startled to see that it was already 12:30. Alex jumped up, collected his notes, and headed out to his rental car. He was late for a date with Sandy – hoping, actually, for a more serious interview - at the ranch. But Alex had found that ranch time was a more flexible concept for them than the minutes and hours the straight world used to mark their lives.

  Alex took the 101 North (which he now knew really went east/west through most of L.A.) toward the ranch. He passed thru Hollywood where the 101 cut a gap between the Capitol Records building and the Château Élysée Hotel and its faux German castle turrets. The traffic was thick, but moving, and he turned the radio on, settling on a station playing “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” by Sly Stone and his Family. Funny, thought Alex, how much the word Family is being used now, when real families are having such a hard time staying bound together. As the song faded out, the DJ broke in with his voiceover:

  K-OWL- your home for the rockin-est (big cannon boom sound),

  grooviest ( “est ….est ….est”) hits! Twelve after one in the PM

  on this rockin’ Monday. Got a new arrival for y’all, hot off the ol’

  record press! Here is the Charlie Manson Band with

  “Look at Your Game, Girl!”

  Alex recognized the opening chords of Charlie’s record that Marv had played for him. Goddam! he thought, Marv did it! He shook his head in amazement. Of course, it was only the beginning of a long road and he was still unconvinced that Marv had the skills to be a player in the mad, frenzied world of big-time records. Charlie might actually be a better fit for that job! he laughed to himself.

  When he drove into the parking lot of the ranch Alex immediately saw a big commotion at the café. It seemed like every person at the ranch was there, standing in a line that went out the door and down the stairs. He’d never seen anything at the ranch so organized in his visits there.

  Alex walked into the café, saying hi to a few people that he recognized standing in the line. When his eyes adjusted he saw that the line ended at the pay phone and Marv sitting next to it at a table. In front of him was a pile of coins, cards, and a full ashtray. Alex said hi and sat down with the ecstatic Marv.

  “Didja hear it?” Marv yelled to him. “We’re on! KOWL, KJH, and KQ tonight!”

  “Yeah, man! I did, actually – just now! Congratulations! What’s all this?” Alex asked, nodding toward the line.

  “It’s The Manson Band fan club, man! Amazing, isn’t it? A song’s gotta be pretty hot to have this many fans so fast, huh?” Marv said with a wink, blowing smoke.

  Alex watched as Marv handed new callers a dime and an index card. Each card had a phone number, a station’s call letters, a DJ’s name, and the name of a city in the larger L.A. area.

  “All our ‘fans’ are calling stations to request ‘Look at Your Game, Girl’ - that groovy, incredible new song they just heard,” Marv continued. “We’ll do this all day, and start again tomorrow. Even my girlfriend Maxie is on her phone at home with a bunch of her girlfriends.”

  Manson did have a built in fan club, Alex supposed. “But why the DJ name?” he asked. “I thought you said the programmers make all the song picks now.”

  “That’s right – and it looks like they really dug that party, I would say!” Marv chuckled. “No, stroking the DJ is just a freebie – can’t hurt, right? It also makes the call more authentic – making sure which DJ is on which station when the call is made. And they always ask what city the caller is from – so they can do a shoutout when they play the request, to see where the audience is listening, and to try and make sure the calls aren’t from a phone mill operation.”

  “Which, uh, this is,” said Alex.

  “Fans, man. All fans – right?” Marv shrugged, smiling.

  Alex picked up a copy of the Charlie Manson Band single that was lying on the table. It was a standard 45 rpm record and sleeve, but the type of sleeve that was solid – no hole in the middle. Both sides had the same black-and-white picture of Charlie – a provocative, backlit head-shot of him smiling, head tilted slightly. You could also make out some of the girls, very out of focus, in the background.

  “Where is Charlie? What’s he thinking about all this?” Alex asked.

  “Charlie,” said Marv, leaning in close, “is assigned to another flank of this operation. He’s out with Sandy, Kat, and Lil’ Sue on the front lines,” he whispered, playing up the intrigue.

  No Particular Place To Go

  1964 Chuck Berry

  September 15, 1969

  12:00 pm.

  Charlie and some of the girls were cruising south on the 405 Freeway in Marv’s convertible, top down. They counted the minutes until 1:00 pm, the time Marv told them KOWL would play their single for the first time. The news came on KOWL at 1:00, reporting controversy about the body count in the most recent Viet Nam operation, that there was nothing new in the Tate murders, and a story about a rumor that Beatle Pa
ul McCartney was dead – according to cryptic messages in the group’s records. Charlie and Kat traded knowing glances. When the station returned to music the DJ immediately played “Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly Stone, without announcing it. Everyone in the car slumped in disappointment.

  “Aw …” Kat moaned.

  “I’m gonna fuck the rat bastard up!” Charlie yelled. He slammed the horn three times out of rage and got answering horns from surrounding cars. “Well, that’s enough of this shit! I know a con when I see it!”

  Kat grabbed his arm and spoke up. “Maybe we should give it the whole hour, Charlie. Maybe Marv meant sometime after one?’

  Manson said nothing. Then, as “Hot Fun’ was ending, he shouted, “I hate this fucking nigger crap!” and reached over to the radio knob. Sandy grabbed his hand.

  “I think Kat’s right, man! Wait! I don’t think Marv would screw us.”

  “Godammit!” Manson cried, and jerked his arm away. The car swerved toward another lane and got a severe honk and the finger from the other driver. As Marv’s car steadied back in the lane, they heard the DJ’s voice saying something and then – the opening of “Look at Your Game, Girl.” The girls shrieked, bouncing all over the car, hugging and kissing.

  Charlie’s face was a study in awe changing to happiness. Kat stood up in the back, wind blowing her hair back.

  “Charlie! Baby! It’s all over!” She spread her arms wide, Christ-like, and embraced the entire Los Angeles Basin as she slowly revolved. “Can you feel it? It’s all over L.A.!” Sandy grabbed Charlie from behind and kissed his face. They began to sing along with the record, exaggerating every aspect as if on stage.

  All too soon, the song faded out. “Again! - Again!” the girls shouted into the wind.

  “Well, I’ll be fucked!” Charlie said. “I thought that crazy jewboy had nothin’ going on but big talk! Girls,” Charlie said, turning to look at them, “I guess now we gotta go to work – do what he told us to do.”