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The Song He Never Owned: The Beatles, Helter Skelter, and Manson's Apocalypse
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Charles Manson didn't just kill — he turned a Beatles song into a blueprint for apocalyptic race war, and the band was horrified by what he'd done with their music. This episode traces the White Album, Spahn Ranch, and the two August nights that left seven dead and a word spelled in blood on a refrigerator.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's something that gets overlooked in almost every account of the Manson murders. The Beatles were terrified.
To understand the Beatles connection, you have to understand where Manson was living and what he was building in the years before nineteen sixty-nine. Spahn Ranch was a former movie set on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
The Beatles released their self-titled double album in November nineteen sixty-eight. It was sprawling and experimental, ranging from acoustic folk to avant-garde noise to straightforward rock and roll.
On the night of August eighth going into August ninth, nineteen sixty-nine, Manson sent four of his followers to ten zero five zero Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon. The house was rented by film director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate.
When the murders became public and the Helter Skelter motive was established through the subsequent trial, the Beatles faced an impossible situation. Their music had been commandeered by a killer.
The prosecution of Charles Manson and his followers ran for nearly ten months and became, at the time, the most expensive criminal trial in American history. Vincent Bugliosi was the lead prosecutor.
In nineteen seventy-two, the California Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional under the state's constitution. Every death sentence in California was automatically commuted to life imprisonment.
There's a line that's been repeated so often it's become almost a cliché, but it's still essentially true. The Tate-LaBianca murders ended the nineteen sixties.
Bugliosi went on to write "Helter Skelter," the definitive account of the case, which became one of the best-selling true crime books in history. His prosecutorial framework became the accepted narrative.
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