manson's helter skelter scenario interpreting the percieved race war of the 1960's as invoked by the beatles
The murders perpetrated by Charles Manson and members of his "Family" were inspired in part by Manson's prediction of Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war he believed would arise from tension over racial relations between blacks and whites.[1] This "chimerical vision," as it was termed by the court that heard Manson's appeal from his conviction for the Tate-LaBianca killings,[2] involved reference to music of The Beatles and to the New Testament's Book of Revelation.[3]
Manson had been predicting racial war for some time before he used the term Helter Skelter.[4][5] His first use of the term was at a gathering of the Family on New Year's Eve 1968. This took place at the Family's base at Myers Ranch, near California's Death Valley.[6][7]
In its final form, which was reached by mid-February 1969,[8] the scenario had Manson as not only the war's ultimate beneficiary but its musical cause. He and the Family would create an album with songs whose messages concerning the war would be as subtle as those he had heard in songs of The Beatles.[4][9] More than merely foretell the conflict, this would trigger it; for, in instructing "the young love,"[10] America's white youth, to join the Family, it would draw the young, white female hippies out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.[11][12][13] Black men, thus deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them, would be without an outlet for their frustrations and would lash out in violent crimes against whites.[14][15] After a resultant murderous rampage against blacks by frightened whites would be exploited by the Black Muslims to provoke a war of mutual near-extermination between racist and non-racist whites over the treatment of blacks, the Black Muslims would arise to finish off sneakily the few whites they would know to have survived; indeed, they would kill off all nonblacks.[16][17]
In this holocaust, the members of the enlarged Family would have little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city that was underneath Death Valley and that they would reach through a hole in the ground. As the actual remaining whites upon the war's true conclusion, they would emerge from underground to rule the now-satisfied blacks, who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the world; Manson "would scratch [the black man's] fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton and go be a good nigger."[18][17]
The term Helter Skelter was from the so-named Beatles song, which Manson interpreted as concerned with the war.[4] The song was on the so-called White Album (formal name, The Beatles), first heard by Manson within a month or so of its November 1968 release.[19] For Manson, almost every song on that album had a meaning connected with the events he and, in his view, The Beatles were foreseeing. Because the meanings were coded, Manson had to lay them out for his followers.[20]
As is detailed below, White Album songs specifically known to have been connected with the prophecy are:
- I Will
- Honey Pie
- Glass Onion
- Don't Pass Me By
- Yer Blues
- Sexy Sadie
- Rocky Raccoon
- Happiness Is a Warm Gun
- Blackbird
- Helter Skelter
- Piggies
- Revolution 1
- Revolution 9
- Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey (connected to the prophecy by Family member Charles "Tex" Watson, not necessarily Manson)
Beatles songs that are not on The White Album but are also known to have a connection to Helter Skelter are "Blue Jay Way," "Fool on the Hill," and "Yellow Submarine."
In the months before the murders were conceived, Manson and his followers began preparing for Helter Skelter, which they thought inevitable. In addition to working on songs for the hoped-for album, which would set off everything, they prepared vehicles and other items for their escape from the Los Angeles area (their home territory) to Death Valley when the days of violence would arrive. They pored over maps to plot a route that would bypass highways and get them to the desert safely. Indeed, Manson was convinced that the song "Helter Skelter" contained a coded statement of the route they should follow.[21][22][23]
Manson had said the war would start in the summer of 1969.[24] In late June of that year, months after he'd been frustrated in his efforts to get the album made,[25] he told a male Family member that Helter Skelter was "ready to happen."[26] "[B]lackie never did anything without whitey showin’ him how," he said. "[I]t looks like we’re gonna have to show blackie how to do it."[27]
On August 8, 1969, the day Manson instructed his followers to carry out the first of two sets of notorious murders, he told the Family, "Now is the time for Helter Skelter."[28] When the murderers returned to Spahn Ranch, the Family's Los Angeles area headquarters, after the crime, Manson asked Tex Watson, the sole man among them, whether it had been Helter Skelter. "Yeah, it was sure Helter Skelter," Watson replied.[29]
At the conclusion of the second set of murders, the following night (August 9-10), one of the killers wrote "Healter [sic] Skelter" on the refrigerator of the house in which the murders took place. That, along with other references to Beatles songs, was written in blood.[30]
References to the Beatles and the Book of Revelation:
When The Beatles first came to the United States, in February 1964, Charles Manson was an inmate in the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island, where he was serving a sentence for attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check;[31] he was twenty-nine years old.[32] His fellow inmates found his interest in the group "almost an obsession." Taught by inmate Alvin Karpis to play the steel guitar, Manson told many persons that "given the chance, he could be much bigger than the Beatles."[33][34]
To the Family, a few years later, Manson spoke of The Beatles as "the soul" and "part of 'the hole in the infinite.'"[35] When he delivered the Helter Skelter prophecy around the campfire at Myers Ranch, the Family members believed it:
- [A]t that point Charlie’s credibility seemed indisputable. For weeks he had been talking of revolution, prophesying it. We had listened to him rap; we were geared for it – making music to program the young love. Then, from across the Atlantic, the hottest music group in the world substantiates Charlie with an album which is almost blood-curdling in its depiction of violence. It was uncanny.[35]
In My Life with Charles Manson, Paul Watkins wrote that Manson "spent hours quoting and interpreting Revelation to the Family, particularly verses from chapter 9."[36] In an autobiography written with assistance some years after the murders, Tex Watson said that, apart from Chapter 9 of the Book of Revelation, the Bible had "absolutely no meaning in our life in the Family."[4] (Even so, Watson stated that "we... knew that Charlie was Jesus Christ.")[4]
For a period in his childhood, Manson lived with an aunt and uncle, while his mother was in prison. He later told a counselor that the aunt and uncle had "some marital difficulty until they became interested in religion and became very extreme."[37]