“Cease To Exist” - Charles Manson :: “Lie: The Love and Terror Cult” - Awareness Records
There are many lysergic-soaked layers within the Glass Onion of the cultism and murderous melody when it comes to the universally unhinged world of Charles Manson, born Charles Milles Maddox on November 12, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio. With the immaculate publication of Tom O’Neill’s recent magnum opus “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties”, and not to mention the countless books, documentaries, filmography adaptations and Tarantino’s cosmically coincidental blockbuster hit “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” kicking up the dysfunctional dust of the mad man and his family of fanatical freaks, there’s really not much else we can say, or elaborate on that hasn’t already been covered by some of the history’s leading heads on the subject, but if there's anything that's in dire need of a closer look or more cautious listen with explicitly eager ears, it's his music.
“He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing. He would sit down with the guitar and start playing and make up stuff, different every time. Musically I thought he was very unique. I thought he really had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet.”
While most of the world and its growing interest in the murders, compelling conspiracies, government influence and other countless exciting elements of the legend, Manson’s love and personal connection to music was simply cast to the side as chaos began to ensue and hysterically unravel after the summer of 1969. Both deranged and mysteriously dissonant, Manson’s metaphysical brand of music was poetically parallel to some of the more familiar sights, sounds and sonic similarities coming out of the West Coast at the time, but even prior to the historical murders, his tonality and looming lyrical lunacy could be sensed as being nothing short of melodic madness. Having learned to play the guitar in prison during his more formal imprisonments in the early 1960s, Manson would eventually make his way to San Francisco to the growing Haight-Ashbury scene after having been behind bars, or in group home for more than half of his life up to this point to and with all conspiracies aside, in order to pursue a potential career as a singer-song-writer during the great counterculture boom of the decade. A political patsy? A poet? The ‘Pope of Dope’? What if, for a moment, he was just some psychedelic personality equipped with so much personal trauma and pain, that the only way out was through poetic process and meditation of music and music only? The late Dr. Thompson said it best — “there he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
“That particular album was made off a little old $7 tape recorder, and it was put together as a promotion angle, and the guy made six or seven hundred dollars for that. My music is not on tape.”
The following summer, after the infamous Summer of Love in 1967, Manson was encouraged by the great Phill Kaufman, who he had met while in prison, to not only focus on his songwriting, but to capture his work on tape in order to prioritize pitching it to labels, radio stations for airplay and other various outlets for potential exposure. With a monumentally historical connection to The Beach Boys’, brothers Carl and Brian decided to personally produce some of Mason’s earliest material at their home studio, which had never been heard by the public in over half a century. Manson would later go on record saying that he had taken part in — “a pretty fair session, putting down about ten songs" and that the band’s manager, Nick Grillo, also confirmed that there were at least 100 hundred hours of recordings across several 8-track tapes. To be a fly on those feverish walls would have been both exhilarating and exciting to say the least, as there hadn’t been any murders, or total societal fall-out at that point. It’s been reported that Dennis Wilson destroyed the tapes saying "the vibrations connected with them don't belong on this earth”, but what most would come to know as the 1970 album “Lie: The Love and Terror Cult”, was merely just another fractured memory fortunately captured during the multi-sessions dates of June 1967, September 11, 1967, and August 8–9, 1968.
A total reincarnation of some psychotic, peddling Peter Pan type hidden in the deep dark depths of fictitious folklore, while simultaneously gaining poetic praise from the likes of Neil Young and some of California’s scene legends at the time, his dormant aggression and alchemical attitude stirred up the fundamental frequencies of nightly activities by incorporating a sort of calculated charm, whereas his aggravated attempts of penetrating the music industry were nothing short of diabolical and dangerously denounced by his peers and thus the public at large. But water always finds a way in and Kaufman made sure to hold up his end of the deal by not only mastering the album, but also raising a meager $3,000 dollars in order to help finance the record due to absolutely zero interest from surrounding labels during its digitized metamorphosis and for good reason. The album was subsequently released in early March 1970, just 10 months before Manson and the Family were sentenced to life in prison on January 26th, 1971. Murder, melody and members of chaos all echoing throughout the cosmic canyons of California and beyond, what better way to make history by turning society, culture and its youth upside down and shaking it for everything it's got? “Never Say Never To Always”…
Happy Halloween!
