Death Valley ’69: How Charles Manson Murdered the ’60s (Part One)
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The wrong track…
The whole meaning of America is death.
— Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth, 1985)
In this context, revisiting Charles Manson – once described (by his own defense attorney) as a “right-wing hippie” – made sense. Loathed by conservatives, both as a killer and a sex-drugs-and-rock & roll degenerate, his philosophy – autocratic, patriarchal, sexist, racist – was regardless far right of center. Equally despised by liberals, some leftists nevertheless portrayed him (mostly before his murder conviction) as a righteous revolutionary – most infamously, Weather Underground provocateur Bernadine Dohrn, who in a 1969 speech described the Family’s use of its victims’ own cutlery to desecrate their corpses with an approving, right-on-from-hell “Wow!”
Like many cultural icons (and all good boogeymen), Manson seemed to personify irreconcilable opposites – love and hate, peace and violence, freedom and tyranny – at a time when each was being redefined. This sociocultural dissonance still resonates because it remains unresolved. By the ’80s, the Summer of Love was a distant memory and Reagan’s “Morning in America” was breezily obscuring the nation’s post-Vietnam malaise – even as his administration slashed social programs at home and armed right-wing militias abroad. For some, Manson became a canny symbol of the country at a schizoid impasse: an unseen (because locked safely out of sight) but ever-present reminder of unfinished business between right and left, old and young, hippie and punk, who terrified all because he blurred the differences between each.
Deep in the valley
In the trunk of an old car
I’ve got sand in my mouth
You’ve got sun in your eyes
If Hüsker Dü looked back to the ’60s with bitter resolve, like post-punk folkies, the Sonic Youth of Bad Moon Rising (its title lifted from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s spooky, Tate/LaBianca-year Vietnam War song) did so with an irreverent glee worthy of the album’s grinning-pumpkin-head-on-fire cover. “Death Valley ’69,” Bad Moon’s explosive final track, wallows in the seediness of all things Manson with unclear motive and manic, musical overkill. Its perverse mix of taste (highbrow conceptual seriousness) and tastelessness (lowbrow scare-flick sensationalism) creates a tense art vs. trash dynamic that ultimately gives way under the sheer force of the music.
Despite the song’s atonal attack and subversive spirit, its structure is fairly traditional – a long, taut, near-monotonal midsection book-ended by a thrashy power chord chorus, similar in structure to Pink Floyd’s 1967 psychedelic warhorse, “Interstellar Overdrive.” Musically, it delivers the cathartic goods the rest of the album’s slow crescendo promises. Lyrically, it strings together artless quotes and phrases related to the Manson murders, evoking their frenzied horror through allusion and indirection.
And you wanted to get there
But I couldn’t go faster
So I started to hit it
I had to hit it
Sung by guitarist Thurston Moore and guest vocalist Lydia Lunch – then a fixture of the New York underground and a pioneer of the city’s no wave style of noise-as-rock – her shrill and affected singing does the song no favors. While Moore sings “straight,” Lunch – part of a crowd of self-consciously transgressive artistes briefly aligned with the band early in their career (including arty pornographer Richard Kern, who made a forgettable video for the song) – sings in a self-consciously flat, pseudo-evil tone that threatens to tilt the song’s art/trash balance irreparably towards the latter.
With three decades’ hindsight one wishes the band had foregone Lunch’s histrionics for Gordon’s husky sensuality, but her status as Sonic Youth’s second lead vocalist/front woman wasn’t fully established in 1985. YouTube makes multiple live versions – of varying sound quality but sung by Gordon and Moore (and Ranaldo) – available for contrast. The best of these, though lacking Bad Moon’s conceptual framing, topple the art/trash scales altogether, revealing “Death Valley ‘69” as art rock in the best sense – a dark tone poem of layered guitars, pulsing drums, and passionate vocals performed by a quintet of now middle-aged NYC art school types.
Sonic Youth: “Death Valley ’69” (Live, 2010)