Another guitar-playing Messiah figure on Hippie Hill that Summer of Love was also attracting a flock of devotees.
Earlier in the year, Charlie Manson had come to the end of seven years in prison for forging checks and jumping parole. During that time he had read up on the Bible, and Scientology. With his high IQ he had been fast-tracked by the authorities onto a special course studying How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, in the hope that it would help him forge a better, more productive life. Carnegie’s book certainly chimed with his key beliefs. ‘Everything you or I do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great,’ wrote Carnegie.
On his release that March, Manson had headed for Haight-Ashbury, fuelled by his faith in himself as a musician, and his mission to recruit followers from the 75,000-odd youngsters set to gravitate there during the Summer of Love. Unlike Manson, most of them were in search of something – or someone – greater than themselves.
Though his time in prison lasted from June 1960, when the Beatles were still the Silver Beetles, to March 1967, when they were recording Sgt. Pepper, Manson had managed to imbibe their songs on prison radios, and was in the habit of telling his fellow jailbirds that one day he would outshine them.
Coloured by his paranoia, the Beatles’ lyrics formed a vital part of Manson’s philosophy. By combining them with passages from the Book of Revelation, he constructed an urgent message of revolution and destruction. In Haight-Ashbury he passed on his findings to the starry-eyed youngsters who gathered around him, some of them sixteen years old, barely half his age.