Revolution/Revelation
If anyone had asked me in March of 1969 why I
was going back to Manson, I would have said I
had no choice. Every day I stayed away from him
I felt like I was running, running away from the
place I was supposed to be, running away from
changes that were necessary for me. Charlie was
my destiny.
Even when I talked to them on the phone, the
Family women sounded different. All they could
talk about was Helter Skelter. I knew the title
from the Beatles' White Album, but I wasn't sure
what they all meant when they kept insisting that
"Helter Skelter is coming down fast, and
we're getting ready for it." Everything had
changed, they told me as they babbled on about
a club they were starting and about buying dune
buggies and about the White Album which explained
everything, laid everything out-and that I'd understand
if I'd just come out and talk to Charlie.
The next day I appeared at Spahn Ranch with my
styled hair and my silk shirt and leather jacket
and I felt like there were two of me standing
there-the old Tex whom Charlie and the girls were
so glad to see and Charles from Hollywood, noticing
the dust that was getting on his expensive leather
shoes.
That night I saw the club. It was one of the
old ranch buildings painted all black inside,
with a huge parachute covering the ceiling and
black lights and posters and HELTER SKELTER and
other lines from Beatles' songs scrawled all over
the walls in luminous paint. There was a large
jar in one corner marked DONATIONS. "That's
so we can buy things to get ready for Helter Skelter
when it comes down," one of the girls explained.
Most of the people were Family, but there were
a few outsiders too, everybody drinking beer and
smoking grass and some of us dropping acid. The
White Album was blasting from the sound system
until Charlie got up and started performing some
new songs of his, things he'd written since I'd
left the Family three months before. I didn't
completely understand what was going on, but the
new songs seemed to borrow a lot of phrases and
ideas from the White Album; they were all about
Helter Skelter and being time for someone to rise
and somebody else to flee to the desert. There
was one tune the whole Family joined in on, repeating
the chorus over and over: "You better get
your dune buggy ready . . . you better get your
dune buggy ready."
Then everybody started dancing, Susan-Sadie in
the middle of things doing her go-go number, while
Charlie and the others sang at the top of their
lungs and the psychedelic posters throbbed with
their sickly colors in the black light. I was
home.
Home had changed some. During the week that followed
I commuted between Luella and the ranch-trying
to talk her into coming with me, fighting her
insistence that I forget Charlie and stay with
her in Hollywood, freaking out some of our friends
by taking them out to meet the Family (Luella
refused to go past the front gate)-and during
that strange, fractured week I discovered that
even more had been turned around than I first
thought. Through the long summer of 1968 it had
been all love; now the Family was talking about
getting weapons and preparing for some kind of
black-white Armageddon. Earlier Charlie had preached
oneness in the Family, how we didn't need anyone
in the outside world (in fact, we'd gone to the
desert to escape that world). Now he was making
a concerted effort to get members of some of California's
motorcycle gangs to join us, especially one group
called the Straight Satans. Then Charlie had been
against materialism, money, and things, but now
the Family was scraping together all the money
it could get its hands on, using every device-from
the club itself (which turned out to be a fund
raiser for buying dune buggies) to another idea
Charlie had for putting his young loves to work
as topless go-go dancers.
Ever since I'd known him, Charlie had occasionally
mentioned that eventually there would be a bloody
conflict between whites and blacks. But a lot
of people were saying that-hadn't Watts been the
beginning? He'd also made it clear that he thought
blacks were inferior to whites and only created
to serve them, but this kind of thing had never
been a major part of his teaching. Now "Helter
Skelter is coming down fast" was the main
theme of everything he said, every song he wrote,
and it didn't take long to figure out that the
black-white terrorism and Helter Skelter meant
pretty much the same thing: violent revolution.
And now, Charlie was saying, it would be "blackie's
turn to win," the karma would roll, and the
blacks would end up on top as the establishment.
I didn't understand a lot of it, especially when
he started talking about the messages the Beatles
were sending him through their music, but I knew
where I belonged. When Luella finally refused
to have anything to do with the Family, I hitchhiked
out to the ranch with just the clothes on my back
and asked Charlie to let me join him again.
He had plenty of work for me. The dune buggies
the Family was acquiring needed work and customizing
to Charlie's special purpose: escape to the desert
when Helter Skelter came down. And the girls,
Mary particularly, drew me back into the Family's
love. I spent my time working on the buggies,
dropping acid, sleeping with the group, and making
love when the drugs didn't space me so far out
that I couldn't function. Every night we'd listen
to Charlie sing his new songs and teach us about
Helter Skelter. Gradually it began to come together
for me.
The two sources of this new truth of Charlie's
seemed to be the Bible and the Beatles' White
Album, the one he'd heard for the first time that
day in Topanga when I ran away from him. Although
I got it in bits and pieces, some from the women
and some from Manson himself, it turned out to
be a remarkably complicated yet consistent thing
that he had discovered and developed in the three
months we'd been apart.
The central doctrine of Charlie's new teaching
was Helter Skelter-Armageddon, the Last War on
the Face of the Earth, the ultimate battle between
blacks and whites in which the entire white race
would be annihilated. As the Beatles sang, this
was not some event in the distant future, it was
"coming down fast." We were living in
the last few months, weeks, perhaps days, of the
old order.
Although, as he had always taught, Charlie still
insisted that blacks were less evolved than whites
and therefore only fit to be their slaves, he
said that now all the centuries of oppression
and exploitation for blackie were over, his karma
had turned, and it was time for him to rise and
to win.
The rebellion would begin with a few isolated
incidents in which blacks would slip out of the
Watts ghetto (for some reason Helter Skelter always
began in Los Angeles) and into the establishment,
pig neighborhoods like Beverly Hills or Bel Air,
where they would perform murders so hideous -
stabbing, mutilation, messages written on the
walls in the victims' blood-that the white establishment
would be thrown into mass paranoia and go on a
rampage in the ghetto. They would slaughter thousands
of blacks, but actually only manage to eliminate
all the Uncle Toms, since the "true black
race" (sometimes Charlie thought they were
the Black Muslims, sometimes the Panthers) would
have hidden, waiting for their moment.
After the orgy of killing ended, true blackie
would come out of hiding and say to whitey: "Look
here; see what you've done to my people."
This would divide the white community between
hippies and liberals on one side and conservatives
on the other, and they would launch a fratricidal
war that would make the War Between the States
look tame by comparison, a war that would divide
families, with parents shooting their own children
and children slitting the throats of their parents.
When it was done, the few whites that were left
would be killed off by the blacks and that would
be the end of the white race-except for a chosen
few who would have escaped all this by going into
secret hiding in the desert and under the desert-led
by Jesus Christ.
Who were these chosen ones? The Family. And we
already knew that Charlie was Jesus Christ.
Charlie said that during all the battle and slaughter,
the Family, the chosen ones, would go down under
the desert into the Bottomless Pit (spoken of
in both Scripture and in Hopi legend) where there
is a city of gold and the lake of life with its
twelve trees. While there, we would multiply to
144,000 people. This was no mean feat for a Family
of less than forty, but necessary according to
the way Charlie read chapter 9 of the Revelation
of Saint John, and when blackie finally. got complete
control he'd blow it. He'd realize he couldn't
run the world, realize he wasn't good for anything
but serving whitey and copying what he did. So
the blacks would turn to the only white man left
with the smarts to help them; they would turn
to Charlie, to Jesus Christ, who would lead the
144,000 chosen people out of the Pit to rule the
world forever.
It was exciting, amazing stuff Charlie was teaching,
and we'd sit around him for hours as he told us
about the land of milk and honey we'd find underneath
the desert and enjoy while the world above us
was soaked in blood. It was coming soon, he kept
insisting, very soon; the Beatles knew it and
had made it clear to anyone with the ears to hear:
"Look out . . . Helter skelter . . . She's
coming down fast . . . Yes she is."
That wasn't all the Beatles knew, either, Charlie
added. They knew that Jesus Christ had returned
to earth and was somewhere near Los Angeles. Their
White Album, he taught, was both a message to
this returned Jesus to speak out, to call the
chosen, and a preparation for Helter Skelter-planting
the seed and setting the stage for the message
that Charlie himself was supposed to give the
world in an album he would produce, an album that
would light the fuse the Beatles had prepared.
It was all there in the music, he'd say; just
listen to the music. Didn't they have a song about
"Sexy Sadie" that described Susan Atkins
to a tee, long after Charlie had christened her
Sadie Mae Glutz? Didn't they tell blackie it was
time for him to rise up, when in their song "Blackbird"
they said: "Blackbird singing in the dead
of night . . . . /All your life/You were only
waiting for this moment to arise . . . "?
And there was more, much more. The proof that
the Beatles knew about Charlie, knew that he was
in Los Angeles and were urging him to speak out,
to sing the truth to the world, was in their song
"Honey Pie":
Oh honey pie my position is tragic Come and
show me the magic Of your Hollywood song . .
. .
Obviously they wanted Charlie to make his album.
And if they weren't so exhausted from their fruitless
trip to find the true Jesus (Charlie) in the Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi in India (whom they had written off
as "the fool on the hill" in an earlier
song that was referred to in the White Album's
song "Glass Onion"), they would come
looking for him in California - they'd join him.
After all, didn't they say as much when in "Honey
Pie" they sang: "I'm in love but I'm
lazy"? They even went so far as to beg Charlie
to come to them in England:
Oh honey pie you are driving me frantic Sail
across the Atlantic To be where you belong .
. . .
And if that weren't enough to show their encouragement
to Charlie to speak the word and make his album,
in "I Will" they cried out to him:
And when at last I find you
Your song will fill the air Sing it loud so
I can hear you Make it easy to be near you .
. . .
There were other songs in the White Album in
which the meanings were even less obscure. "Piggies"-complete
with oinks in the background-described the pigs-establishment
whites in their formal clothes-out for the evening
with their piggie spouses-and said that "what
they need's a damn good whacking," a phrase
that Charlie especially liked. "Revolution
1" had lyrics that were printed in the album
as:
You say you want a revolution . . .
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out.
But when you listened to the record a voice clearly
sang "in" immediately afterward, saying-according
to Charlie-that while they had been on a peace-and-love
trip before, now (even if they couldn't admit
it to the pig establishment) the Beatles were
ready for the violence of Armageddon, waiting
for Charlie to sing the word that would set it
off, as they added later in the song:
You say you got a real solution Well you know
We'd all love to see the plan .
Then there was the song "Helter Skelter"
itself. None of us had any way of knowing that
in England this was another term for a slide in
an amusement park. When Charlie interpreted lines
like "When I get to the bottom I go back
to the top of the slide . . ." as a description
of our coming back up out of the Bottomless Pit,
it seemed to make sense to us, as it did when
he used other parts of the song to plot out our
escape route to the desert.
To Charlie, however, the most significant band
on the album wasn't a song at all. "Revolution
9" was a strange collage of taped sounds
and snatches of music-warfare, church hymns, crying
babies, football games, BBC announcers, recited
dance names, rock music and on and on-thrown together
in overlapping patterns that made it either pointless
noise or secret code, depending on your point
of view.
Charlie pointed out the repetition of the word
rise, first whispered strangely, then screamed
until almost unrecognizable. This was the Beatles'
way of calling blackie to rise up and begin Helter
Skelter, he said, and it was no coincidence that
RISE was printed in blood on the walls the night
of the second murders, along with HELTER SKELTER,
just as PIG had been scrawled on the door of the
house on Cielo Drive in Sharon Tate's blood.
He showed us how the same weird chord that ended
the song "Piggies" appeared later in
"Revolution 9," followed by the sound
of machine-gun fire and the screams of the dying.
The interpretation was obvious. Most important,
because it tied together the two parts of Charlie's
apocalyptic puzzle, was the constant repetition
of the chant "number nine, number nine"
throughout the piece. This, Charlie said, referred
to the ninth chapter of the last book of the Bible-Revelation
9-in which lay both the prophecy of what was now
coming down and its explanation.
I don't know how Charlie happened to discover
the ninth chapter of the Apocalypse of John, but
its florid imagery and graphic symbols of death
and destruction fit both his purposes and his
style only too well. Christian scholars are divided
over the exact meaning of this strange picture
of death and destruction let loose on the world
in the form of avenging angels sent to punish
the evils of mankind. But to Charlie this one
chapter contained all the basic elements of his
Helter Skelter doctrine, spelled out clearly and
validated by divine imprimatur. The fact that
the rest of the Bible had absolutely no meaning
in our life in the Family did not lessen its authority
in the least when Charlie chose to use it to his
advantage.
Where the Scripture spoke of four angels, Charlie
saw the Beatles, prophets bringing the word of
Helter Skelter and preparing the way for Christ
(Manson) to lead the chosen people away to safety.
The avenging locusts that are mentioned were also
a reference to the rock group, he said, since
locusts and "beatles" were virtually
the same. In the King James Version that Charlie
used, these locusts are described in verses 7
and 8 as having faces like men but the hair of
women, and it seemed to be a clear description
of the Beatles' long hair, while the "breastplates
of iron" were their electric guitars. The
fire and brimstone recorded as pouring from the
mouths of the horses in verse 17 were to Charlie
the symbolic power of the Beatles' music to ignite
Helter Skelter.
As for the "seal of God" on the foreheads
of some men that keeps them safe from the plagues
of the angels (verse 4), Charlie never explained
what it was, but he made it clear that he would
be able to see it, and it would divide those who
were for him from those who were against him and
who would thus die. He also found references to
the dune buggies we were gathering and to the
motorcycle gangs he was trying to recruit into
the Family in the passage's descriptions of "horses
prepared unto battle" and horsemen that would
roam the earth, spreading destruction. As for
the one-third of mankind that the writings say
will be destroyed, Charlie interpreted them as
the white race, wiped out in Helter Skelter for
"worship of idols of gold, silver, bronze,
stone and wood" (verse 20)-cars, houses,
and money, according to Charlie.
Finally, and most importantly, there was a fifth
angel given the key to the shaft leading down
into the Abyss, the Bottomless Pit. Charlie himself
was that fifth angel, he taught us, and he would
lead us, his chosen, into the safety of that Pit.
Although he never told us (perhaps he didn't know),
the translation of this angel's name - Abaddon
in the Hebrew, Apollyon in the Greek-is "destroyer."
One other element I didn't learn until a few
months later was the fact that Terry Melcher also
figured in all this. During the months I was away,
Charlie had spent most of his time working on
the new songs for his album, the one that would
follow up the Beatles' White Album and strike
the spark for Helter Skelter. They were message
songs, like the Beatles', with lots of subtle
symbols aimed at the different parts of society
that would be involved in what was coming. They
were the "plan" which the Beatles were
asking Charlie to reveal in "Revolution 1."
Terry Melcher was the one that Manson had decided
should produce this special album. According to
his version of events, Terry went so far as to
promise to come out and hear the new music one
evening. The girls spent the whole day preparing
food and joints, fixing up the house in Canoga
Park where the Family was spending the winter.
Melcher never showed up.
Once again Terry Melcher had failed Charlie.
More than ever, Terry Melcher-in his house at
the top of Cielo Drive, with his power and his
money-was the focus for the bitterness and sense
of betrayal that the Family felt for all those
phony Hollywood hippies who kept silencing the
truth Charlie had to share. These "beautiful
people," Terry and all the others, were really
no different from the rich piggies in their white
shirts and ties and suits. And just like them,
they too deserved a "damn good whacking."
(Will You Die For Me? Copyright 1978, by Ray
Hoekstra. Published by Cross Roads Publications,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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