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“Spooky times,” Young called them. 1968 proved to be the most volatile year of a tumultuous decade: its notable events included the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, the RFK and MLK assassinations, the Paris student revolt, and the Chicago DNC riots. The Beatles recorded three songs that year with “revolution” in the title (“Revolution,” “Revolution 1,” and “Revolution 9”), each of which influenced Manson. Lyrically, the first two supported revolutionary change but were ambivalent about violence. But the third sacrificed lyrics wholly for sound, allowing listeners to project their own concepts onto its aural typography.

The Beatles: “Revolution 9” (1968)

“Revolution 9” was an eight-minute sound collage – an anarchic but artful assemblage of classical music, backwards rock, disembodied voices, machine-gun fire, etc., inspired by modern composers such as Stockhausen and Varese. Like Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising, seventeen years later, it was also a bad vibes extravaganza. Perhaps inevitably, it became The White Album track Manson fixated on above all others, telling anyone who’d listen, in the months before the Tate/LaBianca murders, that it described in sound the bloody war he’d prophesied. Unlike anything else in the Beatles’ catalog, the track’s collage aesthetic and genre-breaking ambition also link it to one of the most striking works yet inspired by Manson.

The Manson Family: An Opera (1990) is an avant-garde classical work by composer John Moran that uses the traditional form to tell the story of the Family (from the 1969 murders through the trial) in a highly unorthodox way. A protégé of minimalist composer Philip Glass, Moran shares with his mentor a passion for repetitive structures, but creates his from fractured text and sound effects – snippets of cartoons, circus music, crowd laughter – as well as conventional melodic motifs in his mostly electronic score. The result is engrossing and unnerving. Like traditional operas, Moran’s work is driven by a dramatic – if loopy and surreal – narrative. Its characters include Manson, Susan Atkins, Squeaky Fromme, and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (incongruously recast as “Hawaii Five-O’s” macho cop, Steve McGarrett). Proto-punk rocker Iggy Pop sings the latter role in a dour basso profundo – one of two familiar names (the other is folk-pop singer Terre Roche as Squeaky) in a cast of lesser-knowns. Moran himself voices Manson with eerie sound-alike accuracy.

For its libretto, spoken as much as sung, The Manson Family strings together allusive phrases and fragments of speech – much like Sonic Youth did in “Death Valley ’69,” but in far more deliberate fashion – evoking the chaos of Manson by creating a new, non-linear language to describe it.

John Moran: “The Manson Family, Act 2: Charlie in a field forever” (1991)
(Note: Explicit Language)

Charlie:
I been tryin’ to help ya’ I’d get through that, Red
I been tryin’ to help ya’ I’d see ya’ in September er somethin’
But it’s in your programming
Your programmers were programmed and it’s just like you
Yeah, it’s just like you …

The written word doesn’t do this nightmare tongue justice – it must be heard. After a while, combined with the tense, fun-house music, it starts to sound “Bosch-like” – as if the weird demonic creatures that festoon the Hell panel of the artist’s uncanny Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500) had come to life  in order to perform some macabre masque or mummers play.

We’re all fallin’ in the same submarine of a solar system
But when are you gonna give yer fear to me?

For all Moran’s mesmerizing impact as Manson, it’s the women who truly haunt. In a tragedy so borderline gynocentric – from Manson’s mostly female followers to his prominent women victims (one of whom, Sharon Tate, was days from giving birth when slain) – this feels appropriate. Sadie and Squeaky both sing soliloquy-like arias (“Susan Atkins on Night Highway” and “Squeaky in a Boat”) that – despite the near-impenetrable language – are so mournful in tone the listener is reminded that they too essentially lost their lives in the Manson madness.

If the tale that is unfolding were not so monstrous, aspects of it would break the heart.
— Jean Stafford

In my mind’s eye my thoughts light fires in your cities.
— Charles Manson