For Charles Manson, the Beatles’ White Album joined all the remaining dots together. Even the pure whiteness of the sleeve served as a signal that his time had come. In Canoga Park, California, at his rented house in Gresham Street, which he painted yellow and nicknamed ‘The Yellow Submarine’, Manson held seminars on the album. He wanted his followers to understand that what might seem a disparate group of unrelated songs was in fact a coherent call to arms, specially encoded for his own, uniquely privileged, Family.
Manson convinced the Family that the black people of America were arming themselves, ready to rise up and kill millions of their wealthy white oppressors. This insurrection would be followed by a civil war between whites and blacks. As the slaughter took place, the Manson Family would shelter in a mystic hole in Death Valley. ‘People are going to be slaughtered, they’ll be lying on their lawns dead,’ he promised. Then the triumphant blacks would employ their ‘super awareness’ to find their true leader: Charles Manson.
These prophecies were all to be found in the lyrics of the Beatles. Paul’s song ‘Blackbird’ was an incitement to a race war. George’s ‘Piggies’ required little interpretation: life for all the little piggies was getting worse, while the bigger piggies ‘always have clean shirts … clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon’. As Ian MacDonald points out, even without misinterpretation, this is a lyric that shows ‘the misanthropy at the heart of so much spiritual piousness’.
George began writing the song in 1966, and was still struggling with the lyrics while staying with his parents in Liverpool in 1968. Never a fluent lyricist, he couldn’t think of a rhyme for ‘backing’ other than ‘lacking’, which he had already used. From out of nowhere his mother came up with the lyric ‘What they need’s a damn good whacking!’ Might Louise Harrison’s sole foray into lyric-writing have inadvertently contributed to the death of Leno LaBianca, who was found with a fork in his stomach, and ‘Death to Pigs’ daubed in blood on his living-room wall?
The Beatles themselves were the four angels charged with bringing death to mankind; the buggies on which the Manson Family rode would be their horses. From the Book of Revelation, Manson discovered that locusts would arrive ‘with scales like iron breastplates’ – these locusts of course being ‘beetles’, and their scales guitars. The Beatles would one day have a fifth member, or ‘angel’, who would be ‘given the key to the bottomless pit’: this was obviously Manson himself. Together they would wreak righteous havoc: ‘Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.’
Words conjured up as playful nonsense by the Beatles metamorphosed, in Manson’s mind, into rallying cries for a battle to the death. In Britain, a helter skelter is a brightly coloured fairground slide that spirals around a central column. But it is one of those English expressions that has never made the journey across the Atlantic. Ignorant of its meaning, Manson convinced himself that it was a call to insurrection: one of his followers said that he employed the term ‘Helter Skelter’ as shorthand for the forthcoming race war. ‘What it meant was the Negroes were going to come down and rip the cities all apart.’ In My Life with Charles Manson, one of his followers, Paul Watkins, wrote, ‘Before Helter Skelter came along, all Charlie cared about was orgies.’
At the conclusion of his murder trial in November 1970, Manson stated: ‘Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion coming down fast. If you don’t see the confusion coming down fast, you can call it what you wish. It’s not my conspiracy. It’s not my music. I hear what it relates. It says “Rise!” It says “Kill!” Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music. I am not the person who projected it into your social consciousness.’ Lyrics born of whimsy had become as menacing as machetes. Later, Manson explained that the Beatles’ music was ‘bringing on the revolution, the unorganized overthrow of the Establishment. The Beatles know in the sense that the subconscious knows.’
Even the lightest, fluffiest song was code for something much more ominous. In a merry mood, Paul had written ‘Honey Pie’, a tinkly pastiche of 1920s ragtime, as a present for his jazz-loving father. But for Manson it was all about the apocalypse, the lines ‘sail across the Atlantic/back where you belong’ a clear indication that the Beatles would soon be joining the Family at their ranch in Death Valley. Accused at his trial of ordering the murders, Manson replied, ‘It’s the Beatles, the music they’re putting out. They’re talking about war. These kids listen to this music and pick up the message. It’s subliminal.’ His followers scrawled the words ‘RISE’ and ‘DEATH TO PIGS’ in blood on the wall of their victims’ home, and ‘HEALTER SKELTER’ on the fridge.
Listening on headphones to ‘Revolution 9’, Manson was sure he could hear the Beatles saying, ‘Charlie, Charlie, send us a telegram.’ Peter Brown and Derek Taylor later remembered getting a stream of phone calls from Los Angeles from a woman who called herself Squeaky Fromme. She kept burbling on about a guy called Charlie.
As he listened to ‘Revolution 9’, Charlie took to screaming ‘Rise! Rise! Rise!’ For him, it was just like Revelation, Chapter 9:
And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were not allowed to kill them but only to torture them for five months.
After Manson’s arrest, Family members couldn’t work out why the Beatles hadn’t come to Charlie’s rescue, just like Charlie said they would. ‘Tell them to call. Give them our number,’ they told two writers from Rolling Stone. Manson himself instructed his attorneys to call the Beatles as witnesses: he knew they would support him. His attorneys obeyed his instruction; but their letters went unanswered.