1980's rock and Charles Manson

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n 1985, a creepy-looking LP with a burning jack-o-lantern-headed scarecrow on its cover haunted browser bins at hipper U.S. record stores. "Bad Moon Rising" was the first recording of note by Sonic Youth – a quartet of NYC art-school types whose brand of noisy, experimental rock seemed doomed to the cultural margins in the heyday of Michael, Madonna, and “We Are the World.” (“We’re just dying to be mass-marketed,” bassist Kim Gordon sarcastically told Creem magazine at the time.) And doom was "Bad Moon’s" métier. A somber soundscape of de-tuned guitars and stream-of-consciousness lyrics that starts faint and finishes triple forte, the album was a bad vibes extravaganza – an impressionistic document of Reagan era unease filtered through layers of feedback and postmodern detachment. Its one moment of true catharsis – musical, lyrical, spiritual – was about the Manson murders.
Coming down
Sadie I love it
Now, now, now

But the Manson murders – especially the slayings of movie actress Sharon Tate (then eight months pregnant), four others, and businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife (“pigs” – or affluent, “establishment” types in Family parlance) on consecutive nights in 1969 – were also instant, macabre folklore, in part due to their myriad connections to potent cultural signifiers of the 1960s: Hollywood, rock 'n' roll, the ruling class and the counterculture. And Manson – a semi-literate, chronically incarcerated hood, seething with anti-authoritarian hostility, who used a domineering charisma to exploit hippie era youth’s hunger for gurus with deadly results – remains a cultural icon of enduring, if profoundly negative, resonance.

Twenty-four albums and 30 years after "Bad Moon Rising’s" release, it’s common wisdom that Sonic Youth helped midwife a musical movement for a generation born too late for '60s rock or '70s punk, yet eager to find or forge rebellious sounds of their own in a decade of glitzy materialism and reactionary politics. Called post-punk, then indie, and finally – blandest of the bland – alternative, the burgeoning genre came to encompass everything from the aggressive hardcore of Black Flag to the moody jangle pop of R.E.M., and reached critical mass when Nirvana’s "Nevermind" (1991) finally toppled the old school rock of hair metal and Guns ‘N Roses. The new music was smarter, darker, more forward-looking, and Sonic Youth’s LP – though no masterpiece and several times bested by the band – was an especially grim manifestation of the new ethos (sample titles: “Ghost b***h” and “I’m Insane”).

It also symbolically straddled those critical decades when rock was first taken seriously, the '60s and '70s, serving as a bridge between the values – roughly hippie and punk – each represented: it was beautiful and ugly, transcendent and nihilistic, California and New York. Older than many of their contemporaries, the band members had actual memories of the '60s (even of Manson: Gordon, who grew up in L.A., had an older brother who dated a young woman suspected by some of being murdered by the Family) and hands-on experience with punk at its most extreme.

Punk had made merciless fun of hippies – out of a need to destroy the old to create the new and in disgust over the perceived failure, with Reagan and Thatcher ascendant, of the '60s social revolution. (Despite mutual antagonism and contrary dark/light sensibilities, both subcultures were overwhelmingly left-ish in spirit.) With the '80s, this critical stance gained nuance: Bands gave sympathetic nods to '60s values (often via radical reinterpretations of iconic songs – e.g., Hüsker Dü’s electrifying 1983 remake of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”) but remained skeptical of the decade’s escapist tendencies – its preoccupation with what Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo (born in 1951) once called “flowers and unicorns and rainbows.”

Like many cultural icons (and all good boogeymen), Manson seemed to personify irreconcilable opposites – love and hate, peace and violence, freedom and tyranny – at a time when each was being redefined. This sociocultural dissonance still resonates because it remains unresolved. By the '80s, the Summer of Love was a distant memory and Reagan’s “Morning in America” was breezily obscuring the nation’s post-Vietnam malaise – even as his administration slashed social programs at home and armed right-wing militias abroad. For some, Manson became a canny symbol of the country at a schizoid impasse: an unseen (because locked safely out of sight) but ever-present reminder of unfinished business between right and left, old and young, hippie and punk, who terrified all because he blurred the differences between each.

If Hüsker Dü looked back to the '60s with bitter resolve, like post-punk folkies, the Sonic Youth of "Bad Moon Rising" (its title lifted from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s spooky, Tate/LaBianca-year Vietnam War song) did so with an irreverent glee worthy of the album’s grinning-pumpkin-head-on-fire cover. “Death Valley ’69,” "Bad Moon’s" explosive final track, wallows in the seediness of all things Manson with unclear motive and manic, musical overkill. Its perverse mix of taste (highbrow conceptual seriousness) and tastelessness (lowbrow scare-flick sensationalism) creates a tense art vs. trash dynamic that ultimately gives way under the sheer force of the music.

Sung by guitarist Thurston Moore and guest vocalist Lydia Lunch – then a fixture of the New York underground and a pioneer of the city’s no wave style of noise-as-rock – her shrill and affected singing does the song no favors. While Moore sings “straight,” Lunch – part of a crowd of self-consciously transgressive artistes briefly aligned with the band early in their career (including arty pornographer Richard Kern, who made a forgettable video for the song) – sings in a self-consciously flat, pseudo-evil tone that threatens to tilt the song’s art/trash balance irreparably toward the latter.

n 1985, I was one year into my own art school education and Sonic Youth was a cool, new underground band. Most of my professors were aging hippies and/or '60s radicals, and as a punk enthusiast – raised on the Beatles but radicalized by the Clash – I both envied and (as was de rigueur at the time) disdained them. But I quizzed each, fascinated, about their memories and experiences of the mythical decade, and without exception each answered the question “What killed the '60s?” with the same response: “The Manson murders.” This uniformity of reaction was striking, as was their tone of reply, which ranged from elegiac head-shaking to sneering disgust.

As a cultural force, the anti-hippie hobgoblin has had a truly profound impact on our era. While the cumulative accomplishments of '60s social movements (civil rights, antiwar, environmental, etc.) undeniably altered the country, they also drove a rancorous wedge between those who applauded and those who condemned the changes. Consequently, a broad sense of loss and betrayal was felt by those deeply invested in the dream of a fully transformed society – a freer, gentler, peaceful ideal that never came to be, much mocked in subsequent decades by conservatives, realists and cynics. Many blamed this loss, literally or symbolically, on Manson and his execrable behavior. Superficially, this meant that the Family gave hippies, free love, communal living, etc., a bad name. But at a deeper level, it meant that their vilest acts, committed less than a week before the Woodstock Festival, caused a tear in the social fabric that may never be sutured: a legacy of reflexive doubt that routinely scorns idealism as hopelessly naïve – the stuff of “flowers and unicorns and rainbows.”

Before True Crime was a bookstore section or Amazon.com category, only a few such tomes existed. One of them, common in middle-class homes when I was a kid, was "Helter-Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders" (1974) by Vincent Bugliosi (with Curt Gentry). Written by the L.A. County deputy district attorney who tried and convicted Manson and four of his followers for the Tate/LaBianca murders, "Helter-Skelter" was a riveting piece of crime reporting and remains a classic of the genre. Forbidden access to it by my parents, I read it piecemeal, in surreptitious glances at paperback copies in stores, neighbors’ houses, or in my own home when no one was looking. I especially remember its black-and-white crime scene photos, with the bodies discreetly “whited out” (a respectful gesture unimaginable on the Internet, where ghastly photos – including of the Manson victims – can be found in seconds). "Helter-Skelter" fascinated and frightened me. A minimalist epigraph at the book’s front said simply: “The story you are about to read will scare the hell out of you.” It did.
The other Ur-text every Manson buff reads is "The Family" (1969) by Ed Sanders, a poet and member of the satiric '60s rock band the Fugs. Sanders not only offered a (highly critical) countercultural take on Manson, but also uneasily befriended Family members still living at Spahn’s Movie Ranch – the remote Hollywood film set and locale of a hundred B-movie westerns where the Family squatted for much of 1969-1970. Some of them were later convicted of murder. "Helter-Skelter" is the more trustworthy account, but "The Family" better evokes the weird, witchy tenor of the times.

But rock 'n' roll is where Manson’s malignant influence was most keenly felt and lingers still. Inspired in prison by the Beatles’ success, Manson – a competent guitarist and singer – became convinced that his meager musical skills and unorthodox philosophical insights (“No sense makes sense,” “Total paranoia is total awareness,” “You can’t kill kill”) would rocket him to stardom once he was released into the hedonistic wonderland of '60s California. His consequent failure – despite some surprisingly high-profile support in the music industry – played a critical role in his shift from sex-and-drugs messiah to vengeful maniac.

[url= a broad sense of loss and betrayal was felt by those deeply invested in the dream of a fully transformed society – a freer, gentler, peaceful ideal that never came to be, much mocked in subsequent decades by conservatives, realists and cynics. Many blamed this loss, literally or symbolically, on Manson and his execrable behavior. Superficially, this meant that the Family gave hippies, free love, communal living, etc., a bad name. But at a deeper level, it meant that their vilest acts, committed less than a week before the Woodstock Festival, caused a tear in the social fabric that may never be sutured: a legacy of reflexive doubt that routinely scorns idealism as hopelessly naïve – the stuff of “flowers and unicorns and rainbows.”