Charles Manson

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“Spahn Also Came To Know The Young Man Who Seemed To Be In Charge Of The Group”

October 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Daily Beast has reprinted Gay Talese’s 1970 Esquire article, “Charlie Manson’s Home on the Range,” which looks at living arrangements of the madman and his minions when they set up house on the desolate land outside of Los Angeles of blind, lonesome rancher George Spahn. An excerpt about when the iceman first cometh:

Then one day a school bus carrying hippies arrived at the ranch and parked in the woods, and young girls approached Spahn’s doorway, tapping lightly on the screen, and asked if they could stay for a few days. He was reluctant, but when they assured him that it would be only for a few days, adding that they had had automobile trouble, he acquiesced. The next morning Spahn became aware of the sound of weeds being clipped not far from his house, and he was told by one of the wranglers that the work was being done by a few long-haired girls and boys. Later, one of the girls offered to make the old man’s lunch, to clean out the shack, to wash the windows. She had a sweet, gentle voice, and she was obviously an educated and very considerate young lady. Spahn was pleased.

In the days that followed, extending into weeks and months, Spahn became familiar with the sounds of the other girls’ voices, equally gentle and eager to do whatever had to be done; he did not have to ask them for anything, they saw what had to be done, and they did it. Spahn also came to know the young man who seemed to be in charge of the group, another gentle voice who explained that he was a musician, a singer and poet, and that his name was Charlie Manson. Spahn liked Manson, too. Manson would visit his shack on quiet afternoons and talk for hours about deep philosophical questions, subjects that bewildered the old man but interested him, relieving the loneliness. Sometimes after Spahn had heard Manson walk out the door, and after he had sat in silence for a while, the old man might mutter something to himself— and Manson would reply. Manson seemed to breathe soundlessly, to walk with unbelievable silence over creaky floors. Spahn had heard the wranglers tell of how they would see Charlie Manson sitting quietly by himself in one part of the ranch, and then suddenly they would discover him somewhere else. He seemed to be here, there, everywhere, sitting under a tree softly strumming his guitar. The wranglers had described Manson as a rather small, dark-haired man in his middle 30s, and they could not understand the strong attraction that the six or eight women had for him. Obviously, they adored him. They made his clothes, sat at his feet while he ate, made love to him whenever he wished, did whatever he asked. He had asked that the girls look after the old man’s needs, and a few of them would sometimes spend the night in his shack, rising early to make his breakfast. During the day they would paint portraits of Spahn, using oil paint on small canvases that they had brought. Manson brought Spahn many presents, one of them being a large tapestry of a horse.

He also gave presents to Ruby Pearl—a camera, a silver serving set, tapestries—and once, when he said he was short of money, he sold her a $200 television set for $50. It was rare, however, that Manson admitted to needing money, although nobody on the ranch knew where he got the money that he had, having to speculate that he had been given it by his girls out of their checks from home, or had earned it from his music. Manson claimed to have written music for rock-and-roll recording artists, and sometimes he was visited at the ranch by members of the Beach Boys and also by Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher. All sorts of new people had been visiting the ranch since Manson’s arrival, and one wrangler even claimed to have seen the pregnant movie actress Sharon Tate riding through the ranch one evening on a horse. But Spahn could not be sure.

Spahn could not be certain of anything after Manson had been there for a few months. Many new people, new sounds and elements, had intruded so quickly upon what had been familiar to the old blind man on the ranch that he could not distinguish the voices, the footsteps, the mannerisms as he once had; and without Ruby Pearl on the ranch each night, Spahn’s view of reality was largely through the eyes of the hippies or the wranglers, and he did not know which of the two groups was the more bizarre, harebrained, hallucinatory.•

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“Psychotropics Should Be Available To Any ADULTS With Psychiatrist Spirit Guide To Help Them”

October 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Holy fuck, Wavy Gravy is still alive. Known as Hugh Nanton Romney (Romney 2016!) before adopting his meat-sauce moniker, he was the Woodstock Era’s psychedelic drum major, and he has some amazing stories to tell, none of which he can remember. WG just did an AMA at Reddit, in which he dosed the entire Internet. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Do you think the pranksters changed culture? What are your thoughts on the medical uses of psychedelics?

Wavy Gravy:

Absolutely. The Prankster changed the culture by driving ac across the country in these painted buses. That was something no one had ever seen before. It was like the universe on wheels.

I think that psychotropics should be available to any ADULTS with psychiatrist spirit guide to help them over the rough patches on the quest to enlightenment.

back in the day this was applicable for Henry Luce, the publisher of Life magazine, as he was pictured conducting an orchestra of daffodils in his garden, Psychiatric at the ready.

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Question:

Were you ever a fan of the group Pink Floyd? And have you heard of their new album coming out in a month? What are your thoughts on the group and what do you remember about them during their times in the late 60s/70s?

Wavy Gravy:

In 1970 we did what Warner Brothers hoped would be a sequel to the movie Woodstock. It involved a caravan of painted buses driving across America putting on shows. Sound familiar? Except this time Warner Brother would fly in their stable of amazing artists like BB King, Jethro Tull or Alice cooper, on tiny stages, or Joni Mitchel strumming around our camp fire. The tour ended with us flying Air India to England, where we did a concert outdoors with Pink Floyd. It was drop dead uber awesome and amazing.

Question:

Why hasn’t this been released?

Wavy Gravy:

It was released. It was called Medicine Ball Caravan with the sub title “We have come for your daughters.”

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Question:

Hi Wavy. I live in Sunland/Tujunga, California. There is a piece of property for sale on a hilltop here that is said to be the original home of the Hog Farm Hippie Commune in the 1960’s. Can you tell us any stories of the old days on the hog farm? Do you have any pictures you can share? Some people claim that Charles Manson was there. I find it hard to believe that you and Manson were ever friends. Can you clear that up? Thanks.

Wavy Gravy:

Absolutely! We were given this mountaintop rent free if we would tend to 50 hogs the size of a davenport. One of which we later ran for president. She was the first female black and white candidate for that high office. On Saturday nights, we would go to the shrine auditorium and do light shows for all the great bands of the 60s. On Sundays, we would have a free show on our mountaintop with different themes. Kite Sunday, no wind until night time. Mud Sunday, it poured..who could slide in the mud the furthest! The hog rodeo where we painted these giant pigs with temper paint and rode around on them, we showed film of this to Salvador Dali in Paris. He loved the hog rodeo. Many pictures and stories are in my first book The Hog Farm and Friends and beautifully documented in Avant Garde magazine back in the day.

Oh yes, Charlie Manson was no friend of mine and was asked to leave which he did. Thank heavens!

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Question:

Just firstly would like to say thank you for sharing love. Secondly, I love being warm and social with everyone but I really want to make things better like you did; any idea why protests now a days aren’t being taken as serious?

Wavy Gravy:

Some are more seriously taken than others. A lot of demonstrations have gone electronic. I am amazed at how powerful a tool the computer has become and I am a self confessed luddite.•

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“Leri Had Done Some Primatology Research In Hollywood After The Tate-LaBianca Murders”

July 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Because it was inevitable, Timothy Leary once met Charles Manson. In prison, of course—Folsom to be exact. The LSD guru had been apprehended by the FBI in Afghanistan and extradited. One of his cellmates was the Helter Skelter dipshit. Leary documented the meeting in a 1976 article in OUI, a middling vagina periodical of the Magazine Age. The article’s opening:

Commodore Leri, Agent from Central Intelligence assigned to earth, third planet of the G-type Star, sits on the bench of the holding cell of Soledad Prison, dressed in the white jump suit worn by transferees. On his left, John O’Neill, a slick good-looking big-city Irishman down for ten to life for murder two. To his right, a tall, slim, pretty cowboy named Ted with Indian cheekbones and a deep tan. Ted babbles evasively. He has been in and out of the joint for years and has the reputation of being a professional fuck-up. (‘He ain’t playing with a full deck,’ whispers O’Neill. ‘He’s one of the girls and a snitch, too.’) The three hold one-way tickets to the Dark Tower, and that has formed a bond among them. The Dark Tower is Folsom, a trans-Einsteinian Black Hole in the Earth Galaxy from which nothing ever escapes but feeble red radiation.

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Leri had done some primatology research in Hollywood after the Tate-LaBianca murders and was fascinated by the wave of fright that swept through the film colony. The chic reaction was to install gate locks, which were opened by remote control after visitors identified themselves over an intercom. Whatever solace this arrangement provided, it certainly would not have thwarted the creepy-crawly Mansonites, who avoided the gate at the Tate house because they suspected that it was electrified. So Leri wrote a memoir for OUI magazine to show that none of the human fears that Manson systematically exploited can be neutralized by external defenses. These terrors, he wrote, are internal neurological reactions and, in order to understand Manson, one must understand the neurology of human fear.

Manson, it was said, stimulated fear in others in order to gain power.

‘One aspect of Manson’s philosophy especially puzzled me: his strange attitude toward fear,’ Vincent Bugliosi says in Helter Skelter. ‘He not only preached that fear as beautiful, he often told the family that they should live in a constant state of fear. What did he mean by that? I asked Paul [Watkins, Manson’s second-in-command].

‘To Charlie, fear was the same thing as awareness, Watkins said. The more fear you have, the more awareness, hence the more love. When you’re really afraid, you come to ‘Now.’ And when you are at Now, you are totally conscious.’

Let us give credit where credit is due: Manson’s manipulation of fear has its roots in the paranoia behind the Cold War military posture, the antidrug scare campaigns, the addictive success of the most-popular movies and crime shows, the actions of all bureaucracy and law-enforcement agencies, and the operation of our penal institutions.

Before we can understand Manson, we must realize that a prison system is a microcosm of a culture and that the American prison system is run on raw fear and violence.”•

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Leary (sans Manson) interviewed at Folsom.

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“When You Want To Be Arrested, You Can Never Find A Cop”

February 10, 2014 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

Here’s an odd pairing: Timothy Leary, famous salesman, just two years before his death, interviewed in 1994 by Greg Kinnear on Later. The LSD guru and software developer discusses once sharing a cell block with Charles Manson, whom he describes as a “right-wing, Bible-spouting militarist.” He also gives partial credit to Marshall McLuhan for the famous phrase: “Tune in, turn on, drop out.” Begins at 11:45.

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“His Uncle Takes One Of His Daughter’s Dresses And Orders The Boy To Wear It To School”

August 11, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening David L. Ulin’s Los Angeles Times review of the first comprehensive biography of Charles Manson, who remains as inexplicable as he is despicable four decades after this scar of a man taught American parents that their children were, to an extent, unknowable–strangers, even:

“Early in Jeff Guinn’s Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, the first full biography of the infamous mass killer, there’s a moment of unexpected and discomforting empathy. It’s 1939, and Manson — 5 years old, living with relatives in West Virginia while his mother is in state prison for armed robbery — has embarrassed himself by crying in a first-grade class. To toughen him up, his uncle takes one of his daughter’s dresses and orders the boy to wear it to school.

‘Maybe his mother and Uncle Luther were bad influences,’ Guinn writes, ‘but Charlie could benefit from Uncle Bill’s intercession. It didn’t matter what some teacher had done to make him cry; what was important was to do something drastic that would convince Charlie never to act like a sissy again.’

That’s a key moment in Manson — both for what it does and for what it cannot do. On the one hand, it opens up our sense of Guinn’s subject, establishing him in a single brush stroke as more than just a monster, as a broken human being. On the other, it ends so quickly, without revealing what happened once he got to class, that it never achieves the necessary resonance.”

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“I’m The Hottest Thing In Hollywood”

July 10, 2013 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Did you have encounters (sexual and otherwise) with Liberace, Loretta Lynn, Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson? Of course not. But Scott Thorson, the source of Behind the Candelabra, says he has. He stopped by Howard Stern’s show recently to overshare about these people and so much more. Language absolutely NSFW, unless you work in an S&M dungeon.

Scott and I are just friends.

Scott and I are just friends.

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“He Was Charged With Sending Four Docile Girls And A Hairy Male Acolyte Off To Slaughter Strangers”

December 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Those who feared (envied, perhaps) the new freedoms enjoyed by the young people of the 1960s found their counterargument in Charles Manson, a pathetic slip of a man who somehow fashioned himself into a poisonous pied piper capable of leading children to their demise. In the White Album, Joan Didion wrote about the crimes in the broader context of the wide-open Los Angeles of the era, where rumors of horrible occurrences had previously been spoken of only in hushed tones. “Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable,” she wrote, the words bleeding out like a threat. In the aftermath of the horrendous 1969 mass murder carried out by the former bright-eyed children of the Manson Family, Life magazine made the ringleader its cover subject and published a long article by Paul O’Neil about Manson and his minions. The opening:

“Long-haired, bearded little Charlie Manson so disturbed the American millions last week–when he was charged with sending four docile girls and a hairy male acolyte off to slaughter strangers in two Los Angeles houses last August–that the victims of his blithe and gory crimes seemed suddenly to have played secondary roles in the final brutal moments of their own lives. The Los Angeles killings struck innumerable Americans as an inexplicable controversion of everything they wanted to believe about the society and their children–and made Charles Manson seem to be the very encapsulation of truth about revolt and violence by the young.

What failure of the human condition could produce a Charlie Manson? What possible aspects of such a creature’s example could induce sweet-faced young women and a polite Texas college boy to acts of such numbing cruelty–even though they might have abandoned the social and political precepts of their elders like so many other beaded and bell-bottomed mother’s children in 1969? Some of the answers seemed simple enough if one weighed Charlie Manson on the ancient scales of human venality. He attracted and controlled his women through flattery, fear and sexual attention and by loftily granting them a sort of sisterhood of exploitation–methods used by every pimp in history. He sensed something old as tribal blood ritual which most of us deny in ourselves–that humans can feel enormous fulfillment and enormous relief in the act of killing other humans if some medicine man applauds and condones the deed. But Charlie was able to attune his time-encrusted concepts of villainy to the childish yearnings of hippie converts–to their weaknesses, their catchwords, their fragmentary sense of religion and their enchantment with drugs and idleness–and to immerse them in his own ego and idiotic visions of the apocalypse.”

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“Authorities Say Most Of The Runaways Come From White, Middle-Class Families”

June 26, 2011 in Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

This telling segment July 31, 1971 Huntley-Brinkley Report (which was Chet Huntley’s final broadcast) is a pretty tremendous capsule of ’60s youth culture run aground, as there are accounts of rock festivals cancelled, the Manson Family murder trial in progress and Berkeley police attempting to shutter communes. Young reporter Tom Brokaw handles the Berkeley story.

The opening of the December 19, 1969 Life report about the Manson murders: “Long-haired, bearded little Charlie Manson so disturbed the American millions last week–when he was charged with sending four docile girls and a hairy male acolyte off to slaughter strangers in two Los Angeles houses last August–that the victims of his blithe and gory crimes seemed suddenly to have played only secondary roles in the final brutal moments of their own lives. The Los Angeles killings struck innumerable Americans as an inexplicable controversion of everything they wanted to believe about the society and their children–and made Charlie Manson seem to be the very encapsulation of truth about revolt and violence by the young.”

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“Charles Manson And Some Of His Group Just Showed Up At The Spahn Ranch And Started Living In The Movie Sets”

May 3, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “Manson: An Oral History,” Los Angeles Magazine‘s 2009 recollection of the man behind the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, which rocked Hollywood and shocked a nation:

Bill Gleason, Los Angeles County deputy sheriff assigned to probe auto thefts. He is 77 and retired.

Charles Manson and some of his group just showed up at the Spahn Ranch and started living in the movie sets. Most of the buildings were false fronts, but they made them into rooms. I thought they were just a bunch of hippies, but we started getting reports that members of the Straight Satans, a motorcycle gang from Venice, were going to the ranch on weekends and partying. The word was that they were trading drugs for sex with the women there. Some of the women were runaway juveniles who provided Manson with cash and credit cards stolen from their homes. We also had reports that members of the group were shooting a machine gun. The Manson people were also stealing and building dune buggies and driving them onto adjoining properties, creating a nuisance. A couple of nights before the raid, we hiked into the ranch and found a stolen, brand-new 1969 Ford and a stolen Volkswagen. That was the main basis for our search warrant—to recover these vehicles and try to identify who stole them.

I really didn’t pay much attention to Manson. We’d already taken most of the adults out, and everyone was saying, “Where’s Charlie.” He was hiding under one of the buildings. The deputies had to go in and forcibly remove him. I arrested them one week after the Tate murders, but none of them said anything. Everybody just sat there.”

“The Family” is arrested, December 2, 1969. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who is interviewed in this report. tried to assassinate President Ford in 1975.

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