This week marks the 46^th anniversary of the Tate/LaBianca murders committed by Charles Manson and his cult-like Family. A nightmarish event with lasting cultural impact, music is central to its story. This and next week’s posts explore the connection.

Coming down…

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969…
— Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)

In 1985, a creepy-looking LP with a burning jack-o-lantern-headed scarecrow on its cover haunted browser bins at hipper US record stores. Bad Moon Rising was the first recording of note by Sonic Youth – a quartet of NYC art school types whose brand of noisy, experimental rock seemed doomed to the cultural margins in the heyday of Michael, Madonna, and “We Are the World.” (“We’re just dying to be mass-marketed,” bassist Kim Gordon sarcastically told Creem magazine at the time.) And doom was Bad Moon’s métier. A somber soundscape of de-tuned guitars and stream-of-consciousness lyrics that starts faint and finishes triple forte, the album was a bad vibes extravaganza – an impressionistic document of Reagan era unease filtered through layers of feedback and postmodern detachment. Its one moment of true catharsis – musical, lyrical, spiritual – was about the Manson murders.

Coming down
Sadie I love it
Now, now, now
Death Valley ‘69

Sonic Youth: “Death Valley ’69” (1985)

Between 1969 and 1972, Charles Manson and his followers (including Susan Atkins – the “Sadie” in Sonic Youth’s song) brutally murdered at least eleven people – probably a few, possibly many, more. These horrific crimes, replete with ritualistic overtones and bloody writing on walls, and the bizarre beliefs that motivated them – Manson’s messiah-ship, an impending apocalyptic race war, an Elysian hideout in the California desert for him and his nomadic Family – have been documented and debated in mind-numbing detail elsewhere.

But the Manson murders – especially the slayings of movie actress Sharon Tate (then eight months pregnant), four others, and businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife (“pigs” – or affluent, “establishment” types in Family parlance) on consecutive nights in 1969 – were also instant, macabre folklore, in part due to their myriad connections to potent cultural signifiers of the 1960s: Hollywood, rock & roll, the ruling class and the counterculture. And Manson – a semi-literate, chronically incarcerated hood, seething with anti-authoritarian hostility, who used a domineering charisma to exploit hippie era youth’s hunger for gurus with deadly results – remains a cultural icon of enduring, if profoundly negative, resonance. This is the context for understanding both Manson’s impact on music and Sonic Youth’s song.

I was on the wrong track
We’re deep in the valley
Now deep in the gulley
And now in the canyon

Twenty-four albums and 30 years after Bad Moon Rising’s release, it’s common wisdom that Sonic Youth helped midwife a musical movement for a generation born too late for ’60s rock or ’70s punk, yet eager to find or forge rebellious sounds of their own in a decade of glitzy materialism and reactionary politics. Called post-punk, then indie, and finally – blandest of the bland – alternative, the burgeoning genre came to encompass everything from the aggressive hardcore of Black Flag to the moody jangle pop of R.E.M., and reached critical mass when Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) finally toppled the old school rock of hair metal and Guns ‘N Roses. The new music was smarter, darker, more forward-looking, and Sonic Youth’s LP – though no masterpiece and several times bested by the band – was an especially grim manifestation of the new ethos (sample titles: “Ghost Bitch” and “I’m Insane”).

It also symbolically straddled those critical decades when rock was first taken seriously, the ’60s and ’70s, serving as a bridge between the values – roughly hippie and punk – each represented: it was beautiful and ugly, transcendent and nihilistic, California and New York. Older than many of their contemporaries, the band members had actual memories of the 60s (even of Manson: Gordon, who grew up in L.A., had an older brother who dated a young woman suspected by some of being murdered by the Family) and hands-on experience with punk at its most extreme.

She started to holler
She started to holler
I didn’t wanna
But she started to holler

Punk had made merciless fun of hippies – out of a need to destroy the old to create the new and in disgust over the perceived failure, with Reagan and Thatcher ascendant, of the ’60s social revolution. (Despite mutual antagonism and contrary dark/light sensibilities, both subcultures were overwhelmingly left-ish in spirit.) With the ’80s, this critical stance gained nuance: bands gave sympathetic nods to ’60s values (often via radical reinterpretations of iconic songs – e.g., Hüsker Dü’s electrifying 1983 remake of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”) but remained skeptical of the decade’s escapist tendencies – its preoccupation with what Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo (born in 1951) once called “flowers and unicorns and rainbows.”

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