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There’s something wrong…

By the mid-’70s, most of Manson’s followers had denounced him, and those not imprisoned were in hiding. The bombastic exceptions were Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sandra Good – Satan’s most strident cheerleaders, nicknamed “Red” and “Blue” by their leader according to a new color-coded faith he devised called the Order of the Rainbow. Manson was now primarily preoccupied with man’s abuse of Planet Earth (the Order would eventually evolve into ATWA – for Air, Trees, Water & Animals), and Red and Blue proselytized passionately for him, writing press releases and admonishing corporate polluters for their sins. Like Manson, they became clichés out of time – bobble-headed revolutionaries wandering Sacramento in long, hooded robes, unaware that the ’60s had ended. They also became pioneering eco-terrorists, sending threatening letters (“… your homes will be bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca houses and Mi Lai [sic] put together …”) to the CEOs of ecologically unsound multi-nationals – a federal offense that landed Good in prison.

The final incident of this footnote to the Manson affair occurred on September 4, 1975, when flame-haired Squeaky, resplendent in scarlet gown and matching pixie cap, pointed a .45 automatic at Gerald Ford in a Sacramento crowd. The gun failed to fire, and in fact had no bullet in the chamber (though the magazine was loaded). This led some to conclude that her assassination attempt was a bluff – a desperate attempt to refocus dwindling media attention on the Manson cause, or simply get her beloved leader/lover/father figure’s attention and, perhaps, win his approval.

Every girl should have a daddy just like Charlie.
— Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (1971)

From here, the road between Young’s “Revolution Blues” and Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ’69” can be navigated with relative ease. If the Manson murders were the symbolic death knell of ’60s idealism, they cast a long shadow on the cynical decade that followed. For prime players in both eras, like Young, the ’70s must have seemed especially purgatorial – a druggy, after-party hangover of torpor and decay, with flower children sleazily reborn as junkies, pimps, and coked-up A&R men. And when your faith is gone, nihilism beckons: “Though your confidence may be shattered,” Young sang on another Beach track, “it doesn’t matter.”

The cover for On the Beach showed Young standing on the shore in gaudy yellow polyester – a rich hippie surrounded by a few comfort items (a potted palm, some beach furniture, a mostly-buried ’59 Cadillac). He stares out at sea, his back to the camera, as if waiting for the end of the world. (The image alludes to the album’s namesake – Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, made into a film in 1959, about a group of people awaiting the arrival of deadly, wind-borne radiation after a nuclear war.) But no such reckoning came: the counterculture fell, was debased, and the ’80s brought spectacle, escapism, and bland reassurances as state power reasserted itself to tepid opposition. In between came punk, which more than any other musician of his generation, Young welcomed and understood.

Coda

Why should things be easy to understand?
— Thomas Pynchon (1977)

One of the perverse ironies of the Manson affair is the central role inadvertently played by the Beatles. Manson became convinced in the late ’60s that the band was sending him coded messages in their music, a relatively banal conceit for the trippy times, but the meanings he gleaned – about a coming race war he dubbed “Helter-Skelter” (after the noisy Beatles song) and his own installation as a despotic world leader – were so spectacularly weird and bloodthirsty they boggle the mind. “I don’t know what ‘Helter-Skelter’ has to do with knifing someone,” a bewildered John Lennon protested in 1970 (a helter-skelter is a spiral sliding board popular at British fairgrounds). Not that The Beatles’ music was all “flowers and unicorns and rainbows” – they too had their dark side. But it’s telling that Manson found most of his portentous “clues” on their 1968 “White Album” (actual title: The Beatles) – a sprawling, double-LP collection that contains some of their most unsettling material (“Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” “Sexy Sadie,” “Cry Baby Cry”). Still, it was hardly Mein Kampf for hippies.

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