“From the beginning, Charlie believed the Beatles’ music carried an important message – to us,” Manson Family member Paul Watkins wrote in his book, My Life With Charles Manson. “The Beatles know in the sense that the subconscious knows.” “This music is bringing on the revolution, the unorganized overthrow of the establishment,” Manson told Rolling Stone in 1970.
Bugliosi interviewed several Manson Family members, including those who were not facing criminal charges, and found consistency in their descriptions of his mythology surrounding the White Album and the garbled connections he made between it and the Book of Revelations, which depict end-times. “I mean, I knew Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate and, God, it was a rough time,” Ringo Starr said.Īlthough he would deny being into the Beatles years later (“I am a Bing Crosby fan,” he declared in 1985 – despite inmates at a prison Manson stayed at in the early Sixties claiming he was obsessed with the Beatles), Manson discussed the group enough with his followers that his warped reading of the Fab Four’s most adventurous album resounded throughout the trial. “It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson,” George Harrison said in Anthology. “Manson was just an extreme version of the people who came up with the ‘Paul is dead’ thing or who figured out that the initials to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ were LSD and concluded I was writing about acid.” “It has nothing to do with me,” John Lennon said in a 1980 Playboy interview. It was frightening, because you don’t write songs for those reasons.” But he interpreted the whole thing … and arrived at having to go out and kill everyone…. “I still don’t know what all that stuff is it’s from the Bible, ‘Revelations’ – I haven’t read it so I wouldn’t know. “Charles Manson interpreted that ‘Helter Skelter’ was something to do with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse,” McCartney said in the 2000 book T he Beatles Anthology. But when the battle never began, he decided to kick-start it with the murders.Ĭhasteness, Soda Pop, and Show Tunes: The Lost Story of the Young Americans and the Choircore Movement In Manson’s mind, benign songs like “Blackbird,” “Piggies” and, most prominently, “Helter Skelter,” foretold a bloody, apocalyptic race war.
When Charles Manson and his followers faced a judge for the crimes a year later, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi explained that the motive for the killings came from Manson’s twisted misinterpretation of lyrics on the White Album, which was released in November 1968, months before the murders. The words “Healter Skelter” had been painted in victims’ blood on the LaBiancas’ fridge, but the reference’s significance did not come to light until the trial. It’s subliminal.”Ī half-century has passed since the Manson Family carried out the brutal, stunning Tate-LaBianca murders in August of 1969, and their supposed link to the Beatles remains confounding. “These kids listen to this music and pick up the message. Charles Manson had an easy explanation for why he ordered the deaths of the family of Leno LaBianca and residents at Sharon Tate’s house at the hands of his “Family”: “It’s the Beatles, the music they’re putting out,” he told the district attorney who sent him to death row.