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Well, I’m a barrel of laughs with my carbine on
I keep ’em hopping until my ammunition’s gone
But I’m still not happy
I feel like there’s something wrong

I played it for Crosby and he said, “Don’t sing about that. That’s not funny.” It spooked people. They were spooky times.
— Neil Young (2013)

“Revolution Blues” is the first of three On the Beach songs with “blues” in the title (the others are “Vampire Blues,” about the oil industry, and the wearily hopeful set closer, “Ambulance Blues”). Built around a simple, barbed wire guitar riff played by David Crosby atop the fierce rhythm section of The Band’s Levon Helm and Rick Danko, Young sings it with a snarl and plays lead guitar between verses (there is no chorus). Syncopated and irregularly metered, the lyrics have a dashed-off but devout feel, and are sung from the point-of-view of a Manson-like hood – a trailer-trash, would-be revolutionary, disgusted by the gaudy rich and hungry for apocalypse. Young’s artless tenor, redolent of the Appalachian “high lonesome” in gentler fare, sounds snide and ruthless, brimming with resentment and in love with chaos. The effect is all the more chilling because he sounds like he means every word. You begin to wonder if Young is revealing a facet of himself – basically, his inner Manson – we might not want to see.

I got the revolution blues
I see bloody fountains
And ten million dune buggies coming down the mountains
Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars
But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars

Crosby at first wanted nothing to do with the song. The former Byrd – a friend of Terry Melcher and too many other dramatis personae of the Manson saga – was deeply spooked by the murders and had a fear of over-zealous, drugged-out fans. Plus, he knew that Young knew Manson – had met him at Dennis Wilson’s house in 1969 and been sufficiently impressed by his music to recommend him to a record executive. “His songs were off-the-cuff things he made up as he went along,” Young recalled years later. “And they were never the same twice in a row. Kind of like Dylan, but different because it was hard to glimpse a true message in them. But the songs were fascinating.”

Charles Manson: “Cease to Exist” (1969)

Manson’s music is critically divisive. Much scrutinized due to his infamy, assessing its quality is difficult for the same reason. Among his cadre of boosters, too many have obvious, often arrested adolescent, agendas of their own. Certainly the songs he pitched in the late ’60s – collected on the semi-legal LP Lie: The Love & Terror Cult (1970) – are largely undistinguished and forgettable. Melodically indistinct and stylistically derivative – less of folk or blues sources than radio crooners from Manson’s youth, like Perry Como and Nat “King” Cole – what’s inevitably most striking is their sometimes morbid or psychotic-sounding lyrics. Consequently, it’s music mostly for voyeurs. “Charlie doesn’t have a musical bone in his body,” Dennis Wilson said, two years after adapting one of his better compositions (“Cease to Exist”) for The Beach Boys.

Still, Young was on to something. Manson does impress – or at least “fascinate” (in Young’s nomenclature) – when he’s at his most free-form, as Young heard him in 1969. Unhindered by studios, Family backup singers, or the constraints of commercial songwriting, Manson finds his sinister, shamanic groove in largely improvised compositions driven purely by arcane motivations of his own. This side of Manson’s music – not for everyone but compelling in its way – is heard on another dubiously legal recording, Charles Manson Live at San Quentin (1983): an hour of uninterrupted performance recorded in his cell, semi-arbitrarily divided into tracks with titles like “Marilyn Monroe Was My Childhood Shame.” For added ambiance, men curse, cough, and occasionally flush toilets in the background.

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