ALMOST ALONE

DON’T BLAME THE BEATLES: FAMOUS MUSICIANS IN THE MIX WITH CHARLES MANSON #3 - NEIL YOUNG

Back in 1968, a man named Charles Manson, like a great deal of the youth at the time, felt an affinity with the music of popular Liverpool beat group The Beatles. Whereas a lot of people related to the messages of peace; the winking drug references; the constant, quick paced innovation; and the musical palette–the jaw-dropping depth and variety of which remained unchallenged–Manson simply heard coded messages, warning him specifically of an impending apocalyptic race war. Art is subjective, after all. And while The Beatles White Album has long been cited as the record that triggered the Manson Family killings (he even referred to the forthcoming war as ‘Helter Skelter’ - no doubt causing the shredding of thousands of similarly branded Beatles tees) there were numerous other popular ‘60s musicians who were way more involved in Manson’s life in the period leading up to the killings.

THIS IS PART THREE OF A SERIES  |  CLICK FOR PARTS 1 | 2 |
by Nathan Jolly

Neil Young

Neil Young and Manson were both musicians in the fertile Topanga Canyon/Laurel Canyon music scene in 1968. Young blew in from Canada in 1966, and firmly embedded himself into the music scene, hanging with Crosby, Still, Nash and… Manson. In reality, Young was a regular visitor to Dennis Wilson’s house around the time Manson started making himself very much at home, and unlike numerous others in the scene, who derided Charlie as a talentless hack, Young seemed taken by him, declaring to NME journalist Nick Kent that Manson was “great, he was unreal. I mean, if he had a band like Dylan had on Subterranean Homesick Blues…” obviously leaving that quote hanging because nobody would suggest that a sluggish rhythm section sparked the Helter Skelter murders.

Don’t follow leaders…

While other musicians who had a passing association with Manson during the period have not-surprisingly distanced themselves from the whole murky affair, Young has never really had any qualms with his relationship with the cult leader, singing his praises openly in his biography Shakey, referring to Manson as “stone-brilliant”, “a frustrated artist”, and “real smart” throughout the book’s pages. 

Young, in a monumental understatement, retrospectively described Manson as being “a little too intense” in a documentary, but nevertheless openly fuelled his dreams of pop stardom, even going so far as to recommend Manson to Mo Ostin, president of Warner Brothers. Young, for his part, was genuinely impressed with Charlie’s music, telling another executive at his label, Reprise: “This guy, you know, he’s good. He’s just a little out of control.” 

Manson seems to recall his friendship with Young favourably, stating from his Vacaville prison cell in 1995 that all the other Laurel Canyon musicians wrote him off, and “didn’t give a shit” - except for Neil Young.

“Charlie remembers me too, huh?” Young remarked when told of Manson’s fondness. “Everybody else ripped him off. I gave him a motorcycle. I turned out to be a good guy.”

In case you skipped over this fact: Neil Young gave Charles Manson a motorcycle. And then seemed genuinely surprised that Manson even remembered him at all, despite this generous gift in the face of almost universal disdain, and the fact that Young has gone on to become one of the most successful artists of the past fifty years. 

Young later wrote the track Revolution Blues about Manson, which Dave Crosby was too scared to perform, lest the message be potent enough to inspire a series of copycat killings. Maybe if he’d put it on Harvest…

DON’T BLAME THE BEATLES: FAMOUS MUSICIANS IN THE MIX WITH CHARLES MANSON #2 - THE MAMAS AND THE PAPAS

Back in 1968, a man named Charles Manson, like a great deal of the youth at the time, felt an affinity with the music of popular Liverpool beat group The Beatles. Whereas a lot of people related to the messages of peace; the winking drug references; the constant, quick paced innovation; and the musical palette–the jaw-dropping depth and variety of which remained unchallenged–Manson simply heard coded messages, warning him specifically of an impending apocalyptic race war. Art is subjective, after all. And while The Beatles White Album has long been cited as the record that triggered the Manson Family killings (he even referred to the forthcoming war as ‘Helter Skelter’ - no doubt causing the shredding of thousands of similarly branded Beatles tees) there were numerous other popular ‘60s musicians who were way more involved in Manson’s life in the period leading up to the killings.

THIS IS PART TWO OF A SERIES  |  CLICK FOR PARTS 1 | 3 |
by Nathan Jolly


The Mamas and the Papas

Mama Cass Elliot was a genial host, opening her house to numerous musician and artist friends. If you’ve ever seen the opening number from Austin Powers  you’ll be aware that the ‘60s were a time of revolution: the recent advent of the pill, the rise of women’s liberation and AIDS-not-being-a-thing-yet all made the latter half of the ’60s a swinging sexually-free time: this optimism, fluid sense of ownership and overall feeling of community naturally spread to every aspect of life. Being suspicious of people’s motives was square. Making a deal of the fact your best friend just boned your best girl was square. Personal space: square. Look at the cover of the Mamas and Papas’ debut record; they are crammed happily in a bathtub together. Free love.


Toilet covered with a sticker for your protection.
Click through to see the uncensored version.
(Correct punctuation in your own name: square)

Unfortunately an open-door/legs policy can lead to your living space and salsa dip being intoxicated by undesirables – say, for instance, one long-haired named Charles Manson, who had attended gatherings at Casa Cass because dropping in and dropping out was another thing that was a thing in the ‘60s. Free love, remember? But it wasn’t just Mama Cass plumping cushions around Manson and interpreting talk of an uprising as nothing more than a stoned come-on. The Manson family bus, which we can only assume was carpeted, was often seen parked outside (Mamas and Papas members) John and Michelle Phillips’ house; Manson even attended a party there on New Year’s Eve, 1968 - a lazy eight months before the killings. To his credit, John Phillips (who was actually a worse human than Manson) did rebuff several suggestions from Charlie that they record together; the fact Manson brought the subject up a few times suggests the disregard of social cues that one might expect from a man with a swastika inked on his face. 

After Helter Skelter in August 1969, and Manson’s subsequent arrest, John Phillips and Cass Elliot were slated to appear in court during the Manson Family’s trial…as witnesses for the defense! 

It seems Manson believed that himself and the Mamas/Papas were sufficiently tight that they would totally have The Family’s back regarding these pesky murders. By this point, however, Phillips and Elliot were kinda distancing themselves from the whole scrawling-on-the-wall-in-victim-blood scene, and never showed in court.

DON’T BLAME THE BEATLES: FAMOUS MUSICIANS IN THE MIX WITH CHARLES MANSON #1 - DENNIS WILSON

leopoldgursky:

Nathan Jolly, “Sydney Is for Strangers”

“The morning after we first slept together she got up early and bought me a book from the market while I was sleeping, and wrote a lovely inscription, which I memorized and won’t share because a nineteen year old wrote it, and another nineteen year old liked it, and love and life is transient so fuck you.”

(“ambitious” should read “ambition”. Damn print media)

SUMMER FLING, DON’T MEAN A THING (or the summer I sorta became a vegetarian) by Nathan Jolly

from Alphabet Pony #25 The Summer issue

Summer seems to slides onto your skin overnight. You feel it coming on, then wake up instantly to find yourself in the middle of it. I have always loved summer, although as a child it was less visceral and romantic, and more due to the endless parade of Holidays and Xmas and Birthdays and Parties and Capitalised Events. But summer has never been perfect; even though every year I become more aware of this, and even as I still desperately try to wring every ounce of What Summer Should Be out of each dying day, I know that I am chasing a feeling that quite possibly never existed. But I don’t care. Summer is Kubla Khan with a gentle Californian breeze and ‘50s music playing from a transistor radio (dollface). I like the salty, furious air around the beach; the footpath winding parallel to the shoreline; the weather-beaten takeaway shops with archaic arcade games and prices; seagulls and sand and burning my feet on the tar. All those things are always coupled with thudding reality, though: the sticky, sharp sand that hides needles filled with AIDS; the cold, wet, pounding, lifetaking ocean; those lobster-tanned-wet-fuckers who splash water on you when you finally dry off. The actual beach itself was only fun in fleeting moments; controlled doses. It was too uncharted, unchecked, patrolled by two teenagers and a middle-aged-man who did a course in a old town hall with unpolished floorboards, brutally-polished RSL plaques and an unused bar (except for functions or Xmas parties- I suppose we take bookings in advance. It’s highly unusual, though).

Still, from the age of 19 – when I begun to own more of summer and treat it as the religious seasonal mecca that American television teaches you it should be – I started to put into practice a lifetime’s worth of lessons taken from Beach Boys records; from Californian dramas with saxophone theme tunes; from small beach towns in a washed out Australia that I had only ever seen in old Polaroids taken during the summer my father proposed to my mother; from broken, buzzing songs yearning for that perfect summer past; from mysterious, romantic Spanish words (‘Santa Cruz’, ‘Francisco’, ‘California’; how they all roll off the tongue and only dance at night) – all carried by foreign breezes drifting in from across the ocean.

Everyone has Those Summers. There was the summer I decided, resolutely but so temporarily, not to eat meat; nineteen, in a caravan at Oceans Bay (no possessive, but $99 a weekend), daytime-drunk from the casks of wine we kept in the crisper because it was fucking awful wine and you needed to freeze the taste from your tongue. Goon-bags, they were referred to in our university town, although I never could bring myself to refer to them as that, and neither could she - it sounded so common: bogan not bohemian. We felt terribly bohemian, reading books between episodes of reality television - the mish-mash of easy cultures streaming in from pay television, old records, op-shop books and oldies radio meant that anything entertaining was of deep value to us. We weren’t into anything ironically though, nor were we into kitschy bullshit, just old sitcoms, stoned films, Simon and/or Garfunkel, Joni, Joni, and more Joni, well-meaning-but-hilariously-clunky-anti-pollution-messages in ‘80s cartoons. Living like Polaroids. Writing letters to remember it all later.

The meat I gave up for forever and a day was originally intended for our lunch one sun-speckled day. We’d been drinking slowly for a few hours because it was summer and holidays and That’s What You Do, and it was nearing 3pm so it’s more mid-afternoon drinking really, and therefore not all that bad. Plus we were eating watermelon, we were on holiday, it was summer; it was Official Summertime Fruit And Refreshments. I was crowded in the box-sized kitchen, lazily tearing the chicken apart, my back between her and our lunch so she couldn’t see me: a) not using the knife and b) using my hands to tear bits of flesh of this chicken and plunk them unceremoniously onto a large plate…and c) how I broke the rib cage in half because I was too drunk or lazy to prepare or present our meals with any form of grace. My imagination snapped, or rather, I snapped into focus. I was tearing bits of flesh off an animal, breaking its rib cage. It seemed weird tearing apart an animal corpse, and I felt strangely base: a bear, a buzzard, a beast. Not the highly evolved being I most obviously was (that summer at least).

So I swore off meat, pretending it was some form of protest; a hippy ideal, me: Snow White, surrounded by the creatures of the earth that I protected as I tssk tssk’d other lesser humans into submission with a smug eyebrow raised. It’s a daisy chain, a revolution, a flower in a rifle… and a terribly inconvenient lifestyle choice that I ditched after three months: drunk at 3am in a greasy takeaway store and deciding in a quick crack that I didn’t care and never cared, and it was mainly because crushing chicken ribs feels like crushing baby ribs if your imagination snaps. I’ll just carry on, and avoid hunting, fishing, caging animals and I’ll make sure to never wear leather… unless they play Grease on television this summer, of course.