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Death Valley ’69: How Charles Manson Murdered the ’60s (Part One)

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Deep in the valley…

I’m the last guy in line but I’ve got all the thoughts for the balance of order and peace with a one-world government if we are all able to survive.

Easy,
Charles Manson

(Letter to President Reagan, 1986)

Underground comix legend Robert Crumb parodies Manson (1970) (Image: rcrumb.com)

In 1985, I was one year into my own art school education and Sonic Youth was a cool, new underground band. Most of my professors were aging hippies and/or ’60s radicals, and as a punk enthusiast – raised on The Beatles but radicalized by The Clash – I both envied and (as was de rigueur at the time) disdained them. But I quizzed each, fascinated, about their memories and experiences of the mythical decade, and without exception each answered the question “What killed the ’60s?” with the same response: “The Manson murders.” This uniformity of reaction was striking, as was their tone of reply, which ranged from elegiac head-shaking to sneering disgust.

As a cultural force, the anti-hippie hobgoblin has had a truly profound impact on our era. While the cumulative accomplishments of ’60s social movements (civil rights, antiwar, environmental, etc.) undeniably altered the country, they also drove a rancorous wedge between those who applauded and those who condemned the changes. Consequently, a broad sense of loss and betrayal was felt by those deeply invested in the dream of a fully transformed society – a freer, gentler, peaceful ideal that never came to be, much mocked in subsequent decades by conservatives, realists, and cynics. Many blamed this loss, literally or symbolically, on Manson and his execrable behavior. Superficially, this meant that the Family gave hippies, free love, communal living, etc., a bad name. But at a deeper level, it meant that their vilest acts, committed less than a week before the Woodstock Festival, caused a tear in the social fabric that may never be sutured: a legacy of reflexive doubt that routinely scorns idealism as hopelessly naïve – the stuff of “flowers and unicorns and rainbows.”

Michael Wadleigh: "Woodstock" (1970) (Source: Wikipedia)

Helter-Skelter (1974) (Source: wtnh.com)

Before True Crime was a bookstore section or Amazon.com category, only a few such tomes existed. One of them, common in middle class homes when I was a kid, was Helter-Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974) by Vincent Bugliosi (with Curt Gentry). Written by the L.A. County deputy district attorney who tried and convicted Manson and four of his followers for the Tate/LaBianca murders, Helter-Skelter was a riveting piece of crime reporting and remains a classic of the genre. Forbidden access to it by my parents, I read it piecemeal, in surreptitious glances at paperback copies in stores, neighbors’ houses, or in my own home when no one was looking. I especially remember its black-and-white crime scene photos, with the bodies discreetly “whited out” (a respectful gesture unimaginable on the Internet, where ghastly photos – including of the Manson victims – can be found in seconds). Helter-Skelter fascinated and frightened me. A minimalist epigraph at the book’s front said simply: “The story you are about to read will scare the hell out of you.” It did.

The Family (1971) (Source: TrueCrime.net)The other Ur-text every Manson buff reads is The Family (1969) by Ed Sanders, a poet and member of the satiric ’60s rock band The Fugs. Sanders not only offered a (highly critical) countercultural take on Manson, but also uneasily befriended Family members still living at Spahn’s Movie Ranch – the remote Hollywood film set and locale of a hundred B-movie Westerns where the Family squatted for much of 1969-1970. Some of them were later convicted of murder. Helter-Skelter is the more trustworthy account, but The Family better evokes the weird, witchy tenor of the times.

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Death Valley ’69: How Charles Manson Murdered the ’60s (Part One) — 9 Comments

  1. This is a GREAT article. Thank you so much. Never heard a more chilling song than Neil Young’s Revolutionary Blues… it amazing at the same time.

    • Thanks, Steve. Will check it out. A lot of great music related, directly or indirectly, to Manson (and more covered in Part 2 of the article — especially Neil Young). There was a lot more I’d liked to have covered if not for space constraints.

  3. interesting read. love sonicyouth. did u find any evidence in yr research that manson actually killed anyone? I couldn’t be sure. yet we fixate on him. one thing to tell someone to go kill but another to actually plunge the knife in sharon tate’s body. its like we fictionalized it right as it happened, ignore the girls doing violence, focus on the man who told them to. I feel its a strange kind of mysogyny to act like these girls were brainwashed, as if that’sa thing. as if they were less guilty than manson. we all have potential to be knife wielders, but I dont think manson did much beyond telling stories. its like listening to knoxville girl and then murdering. crazy. scary.

    • Thanks, Rennie. Manson shot a drug dealer named Crowe and left him for dead (he lived). He stabbed music teacher Gary Hinman but left him for his followers to finish off. He bound the LaBiancas, but left before the killing began. He participated physically in the murder of Donald “Shorty” Shea. Other than that no one knows for sure. Manson was an ex-con who knew what would and wouldn’t land him in the gas chamber. The D.A. had to prove that he ordered the Tate/LaBianca murders knowing that his followers would do what he told them to (he used to order them to do outlandish, non-homicidal things to test them, Binding of Isaac-style). Obviously, the Tate/LaBianca killers did what he told them. But only some Family members participated in violence while others, though devoted to Manson and the group, refused and/or left when things turned bloody. This implies that some were already capable of (even enthusiastic re:) coldblooded murder while others weren’t. The fixation on Manson as “worse” than the other killers began almost immediately in 1969. But he was far from a mere storyteller. In Ed Sanders’ words, he “grooved with gore.” He was 33 while his “girls” were mostly teenagers. He beat them, raped them, fed them after the dogs at mealtime, trained them with guns and knives, and did all the standard cult isolation stuff to break down their sense of independence. There’s plenty of guilt to go around but Manson was guilty as hell (IMO). One of the problems writing this was that, because I wanted to focus on the music and the impact of Manson’s mythic role on culture, vis-a-vis “the sixties,” I had to skip the details of the crimes, investigation, and trials (hence my disclaimer about “have been debated in mind-numbing detail elsewhere”). Opinion on the part of folks who know vast amounts about this stuff range from Manson was the devil to Manson was a gentle hippie and was framed. (People sure do project their own inner conflicts on others.) Such questions and those that you ask are fascinating and vital to pose … but it’s a music blog so I tried to behave and stay on point. Thanks for your note. SLJ

  4. Nice piece. Interesting to consider the evolution of rock: How it affected culture and how the culture affected it.

    • Thanks, Laura. The Manson tale was such a nexus of various cultural threads that impacted each other — one of the reasons I think it continues to fascinate.

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