Los Angeles: Manson is Innocent!
On the evening of 9 August 1969, the heavily pregnant Sharon Tate, a B-movie actress, invited friends round to her home at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles. The property belonged to the record producer Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day, who leased it to Roman Polanski, Tate’s husband. Keeping Tate company that evening were the coffee heiress Abigail Folger, her lover Wojciech Frykowski, and Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hairstylist.
Shortly after midnight, a car drew up. Out stepped Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkle, Susan Atkins and Linda Kassabian, all high on psychotropic drugs, all on a mission to murder. Steven Parent, a passer-by, unfortunately witnessed their approach. He begged for mercy; they shot him. Reacting to Parent’s murder, Kassabian lost her nerve and retreated to the car. The other three then barged into the house. ‘I am the devil!’ Watson shouted; ‘I’m here on the devil’s business.’ When Sebring tried to defend Tate, he was shot, then kicked repeatedly about the head. Amidst the chaos, Folger and Frykowski escaped. They were caught on the front lawn, and stabbed to death. Their work nearly complete, the murderers turned on Tate, who pleaded for her unborn child. ‘Look, bitch, I don’t care about you,’ Atkins bellowed. ‘I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby . . . You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.’ She was stabbed repeatedly until her screams quietened. Atkins then wrote ‘PIG’ on the front door, using Tate’s blood.1
The following night Leslie Van Houten joined Watson and Krenwinkle on a second murder mission, their victims this time the supermarket magnate Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. Accompanying the group was their spiritual leader, Charles Manson, a thirty-eight-year-old psychopath who wanted to make sure the murders were carried out correctly. Police gave up trying to count the stab wounds. This time, the message in blood read: ‘DEATH TO PIGS’.
Manson had spent most of his adult life behind bars. Prison reports from as early as 1950 described his intense need for attention and his uncanny ability to manipulate. Psychologists judged him totally incapable of rehabilitation. After being released from prison in 1967, he went to Haight-Ashbury where he worked as a pimp and drug dealer, preying on the innocence of hippies who thought they had discovered Shangri-La. Like moths to a shining light, a group of drug-addled misfits were drawn to Manson and became his Family. For them, he was Jesus Christ, or sometimes the Devil. On first encountering the Family, the journalist David Dalton noticed how ‘their heads swiveled in synch when anything . . . caught their attention. Their pupils were dilated and they stared like the children in Village of the Damned.’ Most came from stable middle-class backgrounds – former campfire girls, Boy Scouts, cheerleaders, honour students.2
The Family eventually settled at the Spahn ranch in the foothills of the Santa Susana mountains, north of Los Angeles. They consumed copious quantities of drugs, participated in robotic orgies, and dutifully acted out Manson’s bizarre fantasies. He told them that a hole in the desert provided entry into a secret world where they would find serene refuge during the impending Armageddon. Long hours were spent looking for that hole. Manson drew cosmic revelations from The Beatles – his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He became convinced that the White Album – songs like ‘Rocky Raccoon’, ‘Revolution 9’, ‘Piggies’ and ‘Helter Skelter’ – was an oracle written for him. ‘Helter Skelter’ supposedly foretold a race war that would escalate into nuclear apocalypse. It would be ‘all the wars that have ever been fought, piled on top of each other’. ‘Revolution 9’ referred to ‘the battle of Armageddon’ foretold in Revelations chapter 9. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ he explained. ‘It predicts the overthrow of the Establishment. The pit will be opened, and . . . a third of all mankind will die. The only people who escape will be those who have the seal of God on their foreheads.’3
During the Tate–LaBianca trials, which lasted from June 1970 to January 1971, the Family laid claim to some thirty-five killings. They might have been boasting but, then again, they might not have been. Horror of that magnitude was not beyond Manson’s capability. ‘There’s no need to feel guilty,’ he confessed in 1987. ‘I haven’t done anything I’m ashamed of. Maybe I haven’t done enough; I might be ashamed of that, for not doing enough . . . Maybe I should have killed four or five hundred people, then I would have felt better. Then I would have felt like I’ve really offered society something.’4
The Manson murders, impossible to forget, have too often been perversely remembered. For nearly forty years, thousands of people (ranging from normal to seriously disturbed) have spent far too much time trying to make sense of the crimes. Since psychopaths exist in every era, one might ask why the story deserves telling here. The answer lies not in its macabre allure, but in the fact that the murders were a portentous moment at the cusp between two eras. They mark the point at which the Sixties turned into the Seventies.
Elements of the story give it a Sixties feel. Without the evil, the Family resembles a hippie commune. ‘He played the guitar, he sang, he preached love and peace and all that’ went the standard refrain. There were orgies, drugs, flowers with power. Within Hip Nation, Manson and his acolytes were accepted and trusted because weirdness was shibboleth. Dalton explains:
The only credentials you needed were long hair, a liking for drugs and the peace sign. Charlie easily infiltrated the far too gullible counterculture and began assembling his demonic crew from the countercultural wreckage – those shattered by the mind-crunching disorientations of psychedelic drugs, radical politics, mystical aspirations and a dissolving sense of reality. As if playing some satanic poker game, he took our fantasies and turned them into phantasmagoric realities.
The laid-back lifestyle was built on a foundation of trust – hippies were incapable of evil. In the mellow of marijuana, vigilance relaxed, and wickedness slithered inside. ‘Manson lucked into a situation where the elements around him allowed him to get away with that stuff,’ Pamela Des Barres, quintessential rock chick, recalled. ‘He couldn’t have done it in the 50s and he couldn’t have done it in the 70s.’5
In the LA canyons, money, music, drugs and sex were blended like margaritas. Sometime in 1968, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, feeling lonesome and horny, was cruising Malibu in his Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. He picked up two girls hitchhiking, took them to his mansion, told them to make themselves at home, and then went to a recording session. When he returned early in the morning, his guests had multiplied like a fungus. A dozen strange freaks greeted Wilson, among them a bearded character named Charlie who insisted on kissing his feet. Like a voracious parasite, the group doubled in size over subsequent months, despite Wilson’s persistent hints that they had outstayed their welcome. Unable to lever the Family out of his home, he decided instead to move out. For his troubles, he ended up with a trashed house, a wrecked Mercedes and the ‘largest gonorrhea bill in history’. He nevertheless reckoned that he was ‘the luckiest guy in the world, because I got off only losing my money’.6
The Family’s ready supply of drugs made it easy to overlook their faults. Back then, the connection between drugs and evil was not firmly established; in fact, a fondness for pot, acid and even heroin was proof of virtue. The counterculture was deeply embedded in a short and tragic love affair with outlaws, people whose goodness was measured by their badness, since their badness seemed the fault of the ‘establishment’. As the rock critic J. Marks explained, Manson was the offspring of ‘the marriage of two outlaw cultures: the hood and the head . . . it was inevitable that the Charles Mansons would appear in our image and enact insane rituals in our name. It is even inevitable that we would then embrace them, defend them and care about them since it is our prime virtue and prime weakness to love and to protect the foundlings of our parents’ cruel society.’7
Fancying himself a rock star, Manson tried to use the Wilson connection to launch his musical career. The Beach Boys recorded a Manson song, but when they changed the lyrics Dennis got a silver bullet in the mail. Though Wilson thought ‘Charlie never had a musical bone in his body’, that didn’t stop him from introducing him to friends in the business, among them Neil Young, who initially thought Manson was ‘great’. ‘He was unreal. Really, really good – scary.’ That scariness eventually proved too hard to ignore; Young decided to ‘get out this guy’s way before he explodes’. Like a deadly game of ‘pass the parcel’, Young sent Manson to Mo Ostin at Warner Brothers. When Ostin failed to recognize Charlie’s genius, Manson’s grudge against the industry grew toxic.8
Melcher, another Wilson friend, was likewise briefly charmed by Charlie. ‘[Melcher] told me about this exotic, charismatic guy who lived out . . . in the Valley,’ the rock guitarist, Ned Doheny recalled. ‘There were all these girls hanging around, and they were living out of dumpsters. Terry said we should go out and visit.’ Like Ostin, Melcher soon discovered that Manson was a distinctly average musician – and a lunatic. He thought Charlie ‘sounded like a man relating a grotesque, incomprehensible nightmare’. When Melcher gave the thumbs down, Manson’s grudge metastasized. ‘Charlie got pissed off that they didn’t think he was a fucking genius,’ Denny Doherty, of the Mamas and Papas, concluded. ‘His attitude was, “Who the fuck is Terry Melcher? He can’t even sing.”’ Police later speculated that the Tate murders might have been revenge against Melcher. In truth, that’s probably too logical.9
When Dalton heard of Manson’s arrest for the Tate–LaBianca murders, he smelled a rat. He’d been out to the Spahn ranch and had grown fond of the Family. Granted, they seemed weird, but murderers? No way. ‘He looked just like one of us. He had long hair and a beard and, although skinnier, resembled Jim Morrison or maybe Jerry Garcia. We knew that anybody who looked like that could never have done these horrible things . . . It was just the Pigs picking on some poor hippie.’ Many a Sixties radical joined the chorus of disapproval, including Phil Ochs and Jerry Rubin, both of whom visited Manson in prison. ‘I wanted to believe that the charges against Manson were an FBI frame-up,’ Rubin confessed in 1989. ‘I was so into romanticizing outlaw behaviour that I looked for any possible explanation to find something good in the outlaw . . . And that attitude was part of the madness of the times.’10
Intent on rescue, Dalton phoned Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. ‘I said I thought there was more to the Charles Manson story than was being told. I felt the whole counterculture was on trial here and we needed to tell our side of the story. Jann, in his characteristically enthusiastic way, said: “Let’s do it! We’ll put ‘MANSON IS INNOCENT!’ on the cover.”’ For Dalton, this was more crusade than commission; he was ‘fight[ing] for the life of the counterculture itself – one of our own was being martyred, our most cherished beliefs were being trashed by the cynical establishment and their lackeys, the LAPD’.11
Dalton interviewed Manson in jail. ‘He seemed a little more slippery (and creepier) than I had imagined, but this might be accounted for by the fact that he had been touched by some terrible truth, been struck by some divine lightning.’ He grew more convinced than ever that Manson was being crucified for the entire counterculture. ‘It was just like Charlie had told us, “Anything you see in me is in you. If you want to see a vicious killer that’s who I’ll be . . . If you see me as a brother that’s what I’ll be . . . I am you and when you admit that you will be free. I am just a mirror.”’12
While waiting to see the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, Dalton was shown some photos from the LaBianca murder scene. ‘The moment of truth came for me when I saw “HELTER SKELTER” written in blood on the LaBiancas’ refrigerator,’ he recalls. Charlie had earlier explained to Dalton the revelations hidden within the White Album. ‘I now knew they had done it. I may have thought that the LAPD stormtroopers were capable of almost any kind of sleazy frame-up but daubing Beatle lyrics in blood on a refrigerator was a little beyond their imagination.’13
Realization stabbed like a knife in the gut. While Dalton was being shown incontrovertible proof of Manson’s guilt, his girlfriend was out at the Spahn ranch riding horses and getting stoned. Dropping everything, he rushed out to the ranch and somehow managed to spirit her away. ‘Seeing the Spahn ranch recede through the rear-view mirror it felt as if we were rowing furiously away from the Isle of the Mutants in a small dinghy as a pack of zombies wailed their anguished cries from the dock. We had escaped from Dr. Manson’s fiendish experiments just in the nick of time.’14
Perhaps because he had drawn so close to the psychotic centre of the Manson saga, Dalton noticed something others missed, or have ignored. We conveniently forget that the yearning to kill ‘pigs’ was frequently expressed by radicals of the late 1960s. ‘Kill all the rich people,’ Billy Ayers once told the Weatherman faithful. ‘Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.’ At a Weatherman rally in 1970, Bernardine Dohrn paid tribute to Manson – his willingness to kill white pigs and spread honky fear seemed admirable. ‘Dig it!’ she shouted. ‘Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.’ The Sixties radical Tom Hayden likewise felt pulled by the ‘charisma of violence’. ‘The mystery of what was out there, beyond normal experience,’ he wrote, ‘was magnetic to some from bourgeois backgrounds.’ As Dalton recognized, however, Manson was different. Unlike Dohrn or Ayers, he acted on his fantasies. ‘The children’s crusade of the late sixties dreamed terrible dreams not that dissimilar to the ones Charles Manson dreamed. White radicals routinely planned such atrocities . . . But due to our inhibitions . . . we were powerless to carry them out.’15
Because the Manson story smells like the Sixties, it has often been made into a morality tale – the inevitable consequence of all that hedonism and idolatry. While that is probably unfair, there is nevertheless no denying that a fin de siècle feeling existed at the end of the 1960s, to which Manson provided an exclamation mark. ‘Perhaps the one thing that most determines the way we think about Manson was his timing,’ Dalton thought. ‘When you need a monster one will appear . . . He is a demon of the zeitgeist, immaculate in his terror and confusion. It’s as if he were summoned up out of the churning wells of our own fear and doubt. Appearing with almost supernatural precision in the last months of the ’60s, he seemed to call into question everything about the counterculture. His malign arrival synchronized so perfectly with America’s nervous breakdown that it is hard not to bestow occult meanings on him.’ The composer Van Dyke Parks agreed that the killings were a ‘collective sin’ that ‘forced everyone to think about the idealism that had gotten us to that point.’ ‘We were dying,’ J. Marks concluded. ‘Dying of our own massive appetite for humanity: the act of faith which had directed us not only to imbibe mysterious potions which changed our heads, but also directed us to engulf and to absorb huge, fatal doses of derelict humanity . . . antisocial psychopaths were . . . turning into mad dogs and destroying those who had welcomed them.’16
The new decade would be different. The fact that the horrors were revealed in a trial that took place in 1970 drove home the sense of before and after. Manson had demonstrated that Sixties naivety could be fatal. Innocence, previously glorified, suddenly seemed dangerous. ‘Perhaps the most unsettling thing about pulling away from the Spahn Ranch that afternoon,’ Dalton concluded, ‘was that we were also leaving behind part of ourselves, our Edenic others who had once believed we could create a new heaven and a new earth.’ Paranoia and distrust, those terrible establishment traits, now seemed sensible. Long hair and faded jeans were no longer proof of righteousness.17 Hitchhikers suddenly found it difficult to get rides.
Before the Manson murders, the television series Hawaii Five-O seemed like just another assembly line cop show, its only redeeming feature being its paradise location. After the murders, the show suddenly went psychedelic, with its criminals frequently taken from the hippie underworld. Drugs provided a recurrent subtext. As the show demonstrated, hippies had become public enemy number one. Book ’em, Danno.
‘It just destroyed us,’ writes the record producer Lou Adler. ‘I mean, everyone was looking at everyone else . . . And then no one trusted hippies any more. It was a very paranoid time, and the easiest thing was to get out of it. Everybody went behind closed doors.’18
‘Jimi Hendrix died under circumstances which have never been fully explained.’ That short sentence has inspired a multitude of sordid conspiracy theories. Suspicion, like a virus, easily replicates itself in the hospitable environment of the Internet. It has been said of John Kennedy that a life so large requires a death of equal magnitude – he was too important to be eliminated by a mediocrity. The same applies to Hendrix. The idea that the greatest rock guitarist in history choked on his own vomit in a seedy London hotel lacks the magnitude worthy of the man.19
The facts seem incontrovertible – except to those who wish them otherwise. At 11.18 on 18 September 1970, an ambulance was called to a flat in the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill. The call was probably made by Monika Dannemann, one of Hendrix’s girlfriends. The ambulance arrived nine minutes later. The two crewmen, Reginald Jones and John Saua, found the door to the flat wide open and the caller gone. In the bedroom, they discovered Hendrix, fully dressed and lying in a pool of vomit. ‘We felt his pulse,’ Jones recalled, ‘pinched his earlobe and nose, showed a light in his eyes, but there was no response at all. I knew he was dead as soon as I walked in the room.’20
Attempts were nevertheless made to revive him, both at the scene and during the journey to the hospital. ‘We knew it was hopeless, nothing would have worked,’ Jones recalled. Dr John Bannister, Surgical Registrar at St Mary Abbots Hospital, confirmed that conclusion. ‘On his admission, he was obviously dead. He had no pulse, no heartbeat and the attempt to resuscitate him was merely a formality.’ Bannister saw no mystery, correctly suspecting that Hendrix had mixed sedatives with alcohol, to disastrous effect. ‘I recall vividly the very large amounts of red wine that oozed from his stomach and his lungs, and in my opinion there was no question that Jimi Hendrix had drowned.’ An autopsy revealed that Hendrix had taken nine sleeping pills. That by itself might not have been fatal, but, combined with the wine, it was. ‘My own feeling,’ Bannister reflected, ‘[was] that it was a tragic loss of a young person to the effects of alcohol.’21
In other words, Hendrix died a typical rock star’s death. But since he wasn’t typical, some find that explanation inadequate. The story is clouded by the testimony of Dannemann, who claimed that Hendrix was alive while she rode with him to the hospital. That tiny fissure in the account, caused by a ‘witness’ who was not actually present and who maintained a tenuous grip on reality at the best of times, has been turned into a chasm of conspiracy by those who want to believe that Hendrix fell victim to foul play. On the Internet, videos re-enact how he was murdered by having alcohol forced down his throat. ‘Experts’ argue that a person with his deep experience of drugs was incapable of overdosing. Cue the usual suspects: the CIA, the FBI, white supremacists and the Mob.
To believe in the conspiracy requires accepting the claims of those (like Dannemann) who had motive to lie, while rejecting the accounts of those (like Bannister, Jones and Saua) who did not. The fact that so many people easily negotiate such a precarious leap of logic demonstrates the sheer power of the cult of Jimi. As one critic argued, his concerts were like ‘religious rites’, with Hendrix the ‘high priest’. No wonder, then, that some of the devout believe he was crucified. The conspiracy theory enables one to imagine a world still blessed by this shaman; it allows the transformation of a banal story of self-destruction into a glorious tale of martyrdom. Instead of Hendrix providing a metaphor for the sad end of the swinging Sixties, he provides evidence of how the ‘establishment’ conspired to bring the heavenly decade to an end. A single parable of tragic waste becomes instead the entire gospel.22 Hendrix perfectly embodied the Sixties counterculture – the outrageousness, decadence, innocence, fun, music and drugs. Those elements were, however, dangerous when imbibed in a single cocktail, as Hendrix enjoyed doing. For his fans, he was more than a brilliant guitar player; through him, they could live vicariously the culture of excess without having to suffer its consequences. Unfortunately, he was (despite claims to the contrary) a mere human being, a man who could not for ever ignore the limits that physiology and psychology imposed. His characteristic exuberance inevitably conflicted with his other defining feature, namely his fondness for drugs. More fundamentally, his reputation as a wild man threatened to smother his genuine sensitivity, intelligence and emotional depth. He was a troubled soul who had to perform in front of fans who revered a two-dimensional stereotype. ‘Very early, it seemed that Hendrix had been almost captured by his audience . . . and he was never given room to grow,’ the rock journalist Lenny Kaye reflected. His manager, Michael Jeffrey, agreed: ‘His stage image halted him . . . and that was frustrating for him. That old ghost from the past – the humping the guitar, the “Foxy Lady” stuff . . . that wasn’t the true Jimi Hendrix.’ ‘All his audiences wanted to hear were the four big songs that they knew,’ his friend Deering Howe reflected. ‘It was like he was trapped . . . forced to play what someone else told him. He didn’t feel he could break free of that.’23
‘I don’t want to be a clown anymore,’ Hendrix told Sheila Weller of Rolling Stone in 1969. ‘I don’t want to be a rock and roll star.’ Weller found that revelation worrying. ‘The forces of contention are never addressed but their pervasiveness has taken its toll on Jimi’s stamina and peace of mind. Trying to remain a growing artist when a business empire has nuzzled you to its bosom takes a toughness, a shrewdness . . . it isn’t a question of selling out but of dying, artistically and spiritually . . . I wonder just where he will be and what he will be doing five years from now.’ Rock stars, it is often said, can cope with failure; it is success that throws them. ‘Success means . . . remorseless pressure . . . to do better and better and better, till every past achievement is a yoke,’ the critic Michael Gray feels. Throw in the ‘deluge of excesses . . . more money, more drugs, more women’ and it is ‘no wonder the more sensitive people fall’. Hendrix, despite the raunchy exterior, was a very sensitive soul. The more successful he became, the more he felt alienated. His torment was magnified exponentially by Jeffrey, a leech determined to suck him dry. Drugs masked and temporarily anaesthetized his pain, but that was a zero sum game he played against himself. ‘One of the things he’d do was to get real stoned, really high; didn’t want to talk to anyone,’ said Buddy Miles, his last drummer. ‘He used the drugs to put up a barrier.’24
The demons caught up during the last year of his life. ‘I’ve had no time off to myself since I’ve been in this scene,’ he complained. He hinted at a longing to retire and ‘just disappear from the scene’, but felt that ‘there’s still things I’d like to say. I wish it wasn’t so important to me. I wish I could just turn my mind off.’ During a long European tour in the winter of 1968–9 he was criticized as ‘listless and tired’, a terrible transgression for an artist whose trademark was exuberance. When a concert at the Albert Hall was ruined because he was too stoned to play, his fans concluded that that was simply Jimi, rather than a man in trouble. He, however, had become convinced that he would not live to see his thirtieth birthday. In late July, at his last concert in the United States, the music was arrhythmic and his audience unsympathetic. ‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ he shouted. At the Isle of Wight on 31 August 1970, he was brilliant, but not in the way admirers expected. He stood stock still, lost in convoluted chords, exploring his own murky emotions. He did not smash his guitar, nor set it on fire, nor play it with his teeth, nor simulate sex with it. He just played it. Richard Neville, aristocrat of the British counterculture, saw depressing portents: ‘Farewell to the joy of Jimi, farewell to the fun at the funfair . . . Jimi failed because we all failed . . . we’ve created nothing, nothing.’ Eighteen days later Hendrix made his last recording – on an answer machine. ‘I need help bad, man’ was the message muttered to his producer Chas Chandler. Within hours, he was dead.25
For Charles Shaar Murray, a precocious eighteen-year-old, the Isle of Wight Festival seemed a long death rattle. ‘Over the course of the six-day festival I’d had most of my noble hash-pie-in-the-sky ideals burnt out of me . . . by the petty rip-offs and violence and bozos throwing coke cans at each other while the likes of John Sebastian prattled on about how rilly rilly byootiful everybody was.’ Omens abounded. ‘Young Liberals and Hells Angels and all kinds of strangeos were fighting pitched battles with the security men . . . and I was having to realise that the counterculture was prone to all the ills of the parent culture and maybe more.’ Then came Hendrix to deliver the final soliloquy. ‘The P.A. system was in its death throes and it ground the sound up like a cement mixer and spat the pieces contemptuously into the crowd while Hendrix sweated like a bull on the stage . . . his flight of doves crashed rotting to the ground and I knew it was all over now, baby blue, and that if any of us had contingency plans it was about time we activated them.’26
To Shaar Murray, it seemed that there was no place for Hendrix in the new world dawning.
I knew it was over even before Hendrix finished his set with that weird sad speech about how he wanted to thank us for a great four years and that he will see us all again . . . somewhere, sometime. I smelled death on him and on us when I saw that he didn’t have the power any more, and I knew that even the most beautiful thing in my world – the music of Jimi Hendrix – could be destroyed . . . I blundered out of there crying like a baby . . . The last thing I remember that night was pissing against a fence, still crying, while Joan Baez sang ‘Let It Be’.
Because the end of Jimi coincided so perfectly with the end of the Sixties, his death was packed with meaning. Some saw it as glorious escape: an individual who embodied so quintessentially the Sixties ethos could not possibly survive in the polyester decade. The Sixties seemed over not just temporally but spiritually; Kennedy had given way to Nixon, Martin Luther King to the Black Panthers, Rudi Dutschke to the Red Army Faction, Woodstock to Altamont, the Summer of Love to Charles Manson. Jimi’s death was like a handful of dirt thrown on a coffin containing a decade full of dreams. ‘The 60s ended for me in 1970 when they announced on the radio that Jimi Hendrix was dead,’ John Marsh recalled. ‘My first reaction was I knew the 1970s were going to fuck it all. And by God they did.’27
Marsh’s retrospective reaction is a perfect manifestation of the human tendency to compartmentalize time and experience. Decades, neatly bound packages of ten diaries, are casually assigned cultural significance more appropriate to eras. Thus, the death of Hendrix was the terminus at the end of a glorious railway journey; all passengers were required to disembark and board a less comfortable train headed in a less picturesque direction. ‘I was just old enough to pick up on the vague sense of disillusionment at the start of the Seventies,’ the novelist Jake Arnott recalls. ‘I remember my oldest sister Deborah’s disappointment when she came back from the Isle of Wight festival . . . Jimi Hendrix had been so stoned that she hadn’t bothered to stay to watch all of his set. Three weeks later he was dead. All of the hope and excitement of the Sixties was coming to an end. I was just beginning to become interested in music and fashion but it seemed that the party was already over. I wasn’t yet 10 and already I was feeling disappointed.’28
Hendrix, by swallowing those pills and that wine, had inadvertently given those who wanted portents an appropriate event of solemn meaning. It seemed there were omens aplenty. Altamont was the day the music died. Janis Joplin exited just sixteen days after Hendrix, the victim of heroin. That drug was itself symbolic of sordid end, a far cry from the frivolity of pot and LSD. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan, in contrast to Hendrix, chose survival, which for him meant a family and a white picket fence. As for the Beatles, they survived, but not as a group. The Fab Four were now four separate individuals who did not like one another. After the break-up, John Lennon provided a depressing precis of a decade that had once seemed magical, meaningful and revolutionary. ‘The people who are in control and in power, and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeosie is exactly the same . . . nothing happened,’ he told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner in 1971. ‘We all dressed up, the same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything. It is exactly the same.’ The Who said essentially the same thing in ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. The new boss was the same as the old boss; the times were not a’changin’.29
The greater the disillusionment, the more important Jimi’s death seemed. No wonder, then, that some insist on conspiracy: the icon becomes confused with the era, with the result that the destruction of the former is believed to have caused the demise of the latter. That might seem preposterous, but not to those who still worship Hendrix the god. Others take solace in the assumption that he committed suicide, in other words that he saw what was coming and decided to leave. ‘He made his exit when he wanted to,’ his friend Eric Burdon concluded. ‘His death was deliberate. He was happy dying . . . and he used the drug to phase himself out of this life and go someplace else.’ Burdon later retracted that conclusion, but for many it remains a refuge.30
The flip side of this mournful song is that Hendrix’s death is made into a watershed, and everything that flows downstream is tainted. As Marsh attested, the new generation would ‘fuck it all’. Because the Sixties was so wonderful, the Seventies would automatically be crap. That perhaps explains why the Seventies usually brings to mind ABBA, disco and Gary Glitter, instead of the more sublime Jethro Tull, prog rock, Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell. While most people can recall a busload of Sixties heroes, their memories of the Seventies are crowded by Richard Nixon, Pol Pot and Idi Amin. The new decade had hardly begun before it was written off as antithesis – the price paid for dreaming. While this does not quite qualify as self-fulfilling prophecy, it does seem to be wilful pessimism. When rock critic J. Marks was lamenting the carnage at Altamont, a hippie friend offered consolation: ‘Ah, yes, it’s true, there were some terrible things that went down in 1970. But just think of it – just think what a bright, strong light it took to cast such a dark shadow!’ The Sixties generation was nothing if not possessive: ownership of an ethos was asserted by placing a strict limit on its duration.31 What some saw as watershed, others perceived as breaking point – Jimi’s death was the moment when Sixties optimism suddenly seemed unwarranted, and a crushing sense of futility took over. Flower children who once wore rose-tinted spectacles switched to dark sunglasses when the new decade began – the better to block out the harsh light. That sense of desolation annoys Hendrix’s one-time drummer Mitch Mitchell, who feels that too much meaning has been assigned to his death. ‘I think people are trying to make it like some kind of Judy Garland syndrome. It’s getting too fucking theatrical. All I hope for is the man is in peace at last. All he ever wanted to do was play his guitar.’32
For millions of parents, the Rolling Stones seemed like an outpost on the road to hell. Their lyrics seemed confrontational, their lifestyle debauched. For most of the Sixties, the Stones capitalized on that image. A drug bust, combined with rumours of Mars Bars used as sex toys, provided exclamation point to insurrectional message. Ersatz rebellion was sold for the price of a 45-rpm disc. The subversiveness was, however, purely cultural, rather superficial, and mostly contrived. ‘I like my house and horses and land,’ drummer turned country squire Charlie Watts confessed. ‘I wish things were more capitalistic, less restrained,’ confessed Mick Jagger in an accidental moment of honesty. If there was political message to any of their songs, it was drowned out by the raucous rhythm of enjoyment. The Stones perfectly embodied the sell-out central to rock music. In 1968, Jagger joined the protesting hordes outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and then made millions by recording ‘Street Fighting Man’.33
Towards the end of the decade, the Stones gave up on the pretence of rebellion. They crossed to the other side, flipping the bird at blinkered fans who desperately insisted on seeing Ned Kelly in Mick Jagger. They moved to France, mainly to escape Britain’s punishing tax laws. Fans found that disappointing, since money was not supposed to matter. Worse still, when they got to France, they lived like royalty, paying far too much attention to designer clothes, yachts and fine wines, while hobnobbing with Camilla, Chloe and Reginald. Instead of rolling, they were flying with the jet set. The tragic farce of Altamont, Jagger’s misbegotten attempt to recreate the Elysian garden of Woodstock, underlined what seemed a terminus. Afterwards, Marks wrote: ‘we began to recognise the sheer helplessness of our great pop super-fathers and prick-deities who could not turn back the sea with a single command so that we might safely stride uninterrupted toward the magic milieu of their music’.34
The final straw came when Jagger got married. Sex gods were not supposed to pledge themselves to one woman. To make matters worse, his betrothal to Bianca Pérez Morena de Macías, a Nicaraguan beauty from an ambassadorial family, seemed a calculated insult to the underground. They were married in the town hall in St-Tropez on 12 May 1971 in front of a star-studded array of guests. She wore an Yves Saint Laurent trouser suit which flatteringly disguised her pregnancy. Hippies on bicycles tried to crash the wedding, but they were shoved aside when they attempted to cross a cordon of police. Two years earlier, Jagger had pelted cops with stones. Now he demanded their protection.
Jagger – for whom publicity was oxygen – got in a nasty row with the press when he protested that he did not want to get married ‘in a goldfish bowl’. After a short delay, the ceremony went ahead and, in a stroke, destroyed the pretence of Rolling Stone radicalism. Background music was taken from the film Love Story. After the vows, a fleet of Rolls-Royces took the guests to a reception on a seventy-five foot yacht, the Romeang. The bill for champagne and caviar rivalled the GNP of Zaire. Later, the happy couple, along with a six-man crew, sailed off on a honeymoon cruise around Corsica and Sardinia, taking the illusions of millions with them. As an end to the Sixties it was pathetic; as a harbinger of the Seventies it seemed perfect.35