Rant #2,424: A Time For Remembrance

The title of today's Rant comes from a not-very-well-known song by The Cowsills, that popular family act that had a couple of big hits in the mid to late 1960s, was the basis for "The Partridge Family" TV show, and whose surviving members still tour today.

Purveyors of what is known as "Sunshine Pop," this act has pretty much nothing to do with what I am going to talk about today, but they represented the 1960s quite well with their music.

Some believe the end of the 1960s as we know it did not come with the end of the Woodstock concerts in upstate New York, or with the horrible happenings at Altamont.

The end of the 1960s actually came today, 50 years ago, at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, when the minions of Charles Manson began a two-day murder spree that killed several people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate.

Manson was a product of the 1960s culture in Los Angeles,where drugs. mixed with rock and roll, seemed to permeate the air on the West Coast.

He was a loner who so wanted to be a rock star, but he never had the real talent to live out his dream. He also had some type of mental illness that drove him to assemble a group of fellow loners and non-entities, who carried out his plan to the letter, keeping his hands dry of any blood shed during the murder spree.

Renting out the apartment there was Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, who was becoming a red-hot rock producer at the time, steering both the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders to stardom. He shared the apartment there with Mark Lindsay, the pop idol lead singer with the Raiders, who soon moved out when he judged that three was a crowd, as Melcher was getting heavily involved with actress Candice Bergen.

But one of the hangers-on at the apartment had been Manson, who tried to pedal his tunes to among others, Melcher and Brian Wilson, the latter the driving force of the Beach Boys.

Lindsay has since said that Manson was a strange cat way before he turned to violence; he recalls one encounter where Manson was blocking the kitchen of the apartment, and even after repeated askings, Manson would not move, so he basically had to push by him, and he said to Melcher something to the tune of "Who is this guy?"

Anyway, Melcher had moved out of the apartment by the time Manson and his followers came there to commit murder. Occupying the apartment at the time was movie actress Sharon Tate, a rising star in Hollywood who was pregnant; her husband, new wave film director Roman Polanski, and several others.

Manson and his followers planned what he was calling a "revolution" for late August 8, which would throw not only the apartment into turmoil but would also set the world into a cataclysmic war which no side would win.

He laid out his grandoise plot to his equally drugged up followers--Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian--and they carried out a 24 hour period that was full of mayhem, turmoil and bloodshed.

Without going into detail, the murders made international headlines, the group, along with Manson, was soon apprehended, and have pretty much spent the rest of their lives in prison.

A book and a movie on the murders, "Helter Skelter," brought the story of this horrific set of events into fuller focus, and Quentin Tarantino's newest film, "Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood," brings the murders to the fore once again, but surrounded by a completely fictional setting.

So all the flowers, rainbows and love beads of the 1960s counterculture pretty much got thrown out the window when these murders occurred, and with Manson living a long life in prison--he died in 2017 at age 83--and his semi-frequent outbursts while imprisoned that always made the news--and made him fodder for every television news magazine worth its salt up until his death--the murders have fascinated the populace, almost making celebrities out the participants.

Incredibly, Manson's pretty much homemade musical recordings have been available for decades first on LP and later on CD, and even more incredibly, the Beach Boys actually recorded one of his songs, or at least took the guts of one of his songs, and made it their own, so in the end, Manson kind of got what he wanted, to a degree.

In 1968, the Beach Boys put out a song called "Never Learn Not to Love," which was the California singing act's spin on Manson's song "Cease to Exist."

The problem was that Manson was not credited on the recording in any way. Drummer Dennis Wilson--the first Beach Boy that Manson had met before the others--was given sole credit as the writer of the song, and this was one of the things that incensed Manson.

He was never the same after this rejection, and as the story goes, he became so incensed that after a fist fight with Wilson that Manson did not win, he decided that something had to be done, and the murder spree was the way to do it.

Again, that is simplifying something that is a bit more involved and heinous, but the song was released just several months before Manson and his cult did its dirty deed,

Fifty years later, what can we take out from his horrific episode?

We can take out of it that the 1960s were not all fun and flowers and love beads.

There was a dark side to it, personified by Manson and his cult.

Their actions snuffed out lives, and made an indelible mark on a generation of young people.

Nothing more needs to be said, and this 50th anniversary certainly isn't a happy one by any stretch of the imagination.