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So you be good to me and I’ll be good to you
And in this land of conditions
I’m not above suspicion
I won’t attack you, but I won’t back you

In the early ’70s, Young’s career was at a crossroads. A veteran of ’60s band Buffalo Springfield, but best known as one fourth of folk rock super-group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, he had launched a successful solo career in 1968, with and without his band Crazy Horse. By the turn of the decade he was, in his own words, a “rich hippie.” But despite wealth and critical accolades, he seemed squirrelly and discontented – especially within the confines of the country-tinged singer-songwriter genre he’d helped to pioneer. “One of you fuckin’ guys comes near me,” he snapped at a cameraman before his CSN&Y debut at Woodstock, “and I’m gonna hit you with my fuckin’ guitar.” His best songs with that band (the keening “Helpless,” the fiery “Ohio”) outclassed those of his smoother-voiced collaborators. Always an odd mix of hippie and punk (before the latter term existed), his agrarian folkie sensibility meshed uneasily with his shrewder, mocking side.

He was also dogged by tragedy. In 1972, he was badly shaken by the overdose death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten. A subsequent tour became a rickety, if riveting, affair with Young debuting new material – at times drunkenly – in loose, harder rock arrangements than his fans were used to or sometimes wanted (heard on Time Fades Away). When his friend roadie Bruce Berry followed Whitten (who had introduced him to heroin) to an early grave the following year, Young hit bottom. Live shows became near-funerary rites: spooky, bluesy, musical wakes where Young confronted, night after night, the demons unleashed by his friends’ deaths (Tonight’s the Night documents the trauma). Amidst the turmoil, his first child Zeke was born with cerebral palsy. Another disabled son, Ben, was born in 1977.

These records and Beach took their place beside other albums of stripped down, end-of-the-’60s rock like John Lennon’s brutal break with The Beatles, Plastic Ono Band (1971), and Sly & The Family Stone’s chilly negation of Woodstock era optimism, There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1972). “The dream is over,” sang Lennon, and while he wrote the line about The Beatles, it was clear it applied to the peace and love decade as well.

Land of conditions…

Well, it’s so good to be here asleep on your lawn
Remember your guard dog?
Well, I’m afraid that he’s gone
It was such a drag to hear him whining all night long

The Family’s final flame-out began on August 21, 1971, when five members and a white supremacist from the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang stole 143 rifles from an L.A. gun shop. Their intent was to free Manson – either by busting him out of jail, or by hijacking a 747 jet and killing one passenger every hour until his release. A silent alarm alerted police and an argument over whether to kill the store’s captive clerks and customers (lying terrified on the floor) delayed the thieves long enough to thwart their escape in a gun-filled van. The LAPD arrived and a brief shoot-out occurred. Remarkably, no one was killed. But the subsequent arrests and convictions removed some of Manson’s most hardcore disciples from the streets. As did the 1972 slayings of a young ex-Marine and his wife in Stockton, California – both found shot to death, the former decapitated and buried near a hiking trail, the latter in a freshly dug grave in the dirt cellar of a rental home. Charged with murder or accessory were two Aryan Brotherhood members and two female followers of Manson – all later convicted. Eerily, the dead couple’s infant daughter was found in the care of the Manson women.

The Stockton crimes are the last known murders with clear links to the Manson Family. With the bulk of his most steadfast supporters behind bars, Manson’s media sheen dulled: he became, over time, less a demonic archetype of the age than a morbid curiosity of a bygone era. Separated from their abusive, surrogate father figure, most of his followers – bourgeois teenage runaways who came under his influence at their most vulnerable and easily manipulated – regained their sense of self and gradually woke from their collective nightmare.

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