Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (42 page)

I now knew I was on the right track.

O
nly on one point did Jakobson’s recollection of Manson’s interpretation differ from that of the others. The first verse of Revelation 9 refers to a fifth angel; the chapter ends, however, referring to only four. Originally there were five Beatles, Gregg explained, one of whom, Stuart Sutcliffe, had died in Germany in 1962.

Poston and Watkins—who, unlike Jakobson, were members of the Family—interpreted this much differently. Verse I reads: “And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.”

To members of the Family the identity of that fifth angel, the ruler of the bottomless pit, was never in doubt. It was Charlie.

Verse II reads: “And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.”

The king also had a Latin name, which, though it appears in the Catholic Douay Version, was inadvertently omitted by the translators of the King James version. It was Exterminans.

Exterminans, t/n Charles Manson.

As far as Jakobson, Watkins, and Poston knew, Manson placed no special meaning on the last verse of Revelation 9. But I found myself thinking of it often in the months ahead:

“Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.”

“T
he important thing to remember about Revelation 9,” Gregg told me, “is that Charlie believed this was happening
now
, not in the future. It’s going to begin now and it’s time to choose sides…either that or flee with him to the desert.”

A
ccording to Jakobson, Manson believed “the Beatles were spokesmen. They were speaking to Charlie, through their songs, letting him know from across the ocean that this is what was going to go down. He believed this firmly…He considered their songs prophecy, especially the songs in the so-called White Album…He told me that many, many times.”

Watkins and Poston also said that Manson and the Family were convinced that the Beatles were speaking to Charlie through their music. For example, in the song “I Will” are the lines: “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…” Charlie interpreted this to mean the Beatles wanted him to make an album, Poston and Watkins said. Charlie told them that the Beatles were looking for JC and he was the JC they were looking for. He also told them that the Beatles knew that Christ had returned to earth again and that he was living somewhere in Los Angeles.

“How in the world did he come up with that?” I asked them.

In the White Album is a song called “Honey Pie,” a lyric of which reads: “Oh honey pie my position is tragic/Come and show me the magic/Of your Hollywood song.” A later lyric goes: “Oh honey pie you are driving me frantic/Sail across the Atlantic/To be where you belong.”

Charlie, of course, wanted
them
to sail across the Atlantic, to join him in Death Valley. While residing in the Gresham Street house (in January and February of 1969, just after the White Album was released), Manson and the girls sent several telegrams, wrote a number of letters, and made at least three telephone calls to England, attempting to reach the Beatles. No luck.

The line “I’m in love but I’m lazy” from “Honey Pie” meant to Charlie that the Beatles loved JC but were too lazy to go looking for him; also, they’d just gone all the way to India, following a man who they’d finally decided was a false prophet, the Maharishi. They were also calling for JC/Charlie in the first eight lines of the song “Don’t Pass Me By,” in “Yer Blues,” and, in the earlier Magical Mystery Tour album, in “Blue Jay Way.”

Much of this I would never use at the trial; it was simply too absurd.

The Beatles’ White Album, Manson told Watkins, Poston, and others, “set up things for the revolution.”
His
album, which was to follow, would, in Charlie’s words, “blow the cork off the bottle. That would start it.”

Much of the time at the Gresham Street house, according to Poston, Watkins, and others, was spent composing songs for Charlie’s album. Each was to be a message song, directed to a particular group of people, such as the bikers, outlining the part they’d play in Helter Skelter. Charlie worked hard on these songs; they had to be very subtle, he said, like the Beatles’ own songs, their true meaning hidden beneath the awareness of all but the tuned-in people.

Manson was counting on Terry Melcher to produce this album. According to numerous Family members (both Melcher and Jakobson denied this), Terry had promised to come and listen to the songs one evening. The girls cleaned the house, baked cookies, rolled joints. Melcher didn’t show. Manson, according to Poston and Watkins, never forgave Terry for this. Melcher’s word was no good, he said angrily on a number of occasions.

Though the Beatles had made many records, it was the double-disk White Album, which Capitol issued in December 1968, that Manson considered most important. Even the fact that the cover was white—with no other design except the embossed name of the group—held significance for him.

It was, and remains, a startling album, containing some of the Beatles’ finest music, and some of their strangest. Its thirty songs range from tender love ballads to pop parodies to cacophonies of noise made by taking loops of very diverse tapes and splicing them together. To Charles Manson, however, it was prophecy. At least this is what he convinced his followers.

That Charlie had renamed Susan Atkins “Sadie Mae Glutz” long before the White Album appeared containing the song “Sexy Sadie” was additional proof to the Family that Manson and the Beatles were mentally attuned.

Almost every song in the album had a hidden meaning, which Manson interpreted for his followers. To Charlie “Rocky Raccoon” meant “coon” or the black man. While to everyone except Manson and the Family it was obvious that the lyrics of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” had sexual connotations, Charlie interpreted the song to mean that the Beatles were telling blackie to get guns and fight whitey.

According to Poston and Watkins, the Family played five songs in the White Album more than all the others. They were: “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” “Revolution 1,” “Revolution 9,” and “Helter Skelter.”

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night/Take these broken wings and learn to fly/All your life/You were only waiting for this moment to arise,” went the lyrics of “Blackbird.” According to Jakobson, “Charlie believed that the moment was now and that the black man was going to arise, overthrow the white man, and take his turn.” According to Watkins, in this song Charlie “figured the Beatles were programming the black people to get it up, get it on, start doing it.”

On first hearing the song, I’d thought that the LaBianca killers had made a mistake, writing “rise” instead of “arise.” However, Jakobson told me that Charlie said the black man was going to “rise” up against the white man. “‘Rise’ was one of Charlie’s big words,” Gregg said, providing me with the origin of still another of the key words.

Both the Tate and LaBianca murders had occurred in “the dead of night.” However, if the parallel had special significance to Manson, he never admitted it to anyone I interviewed, nor, if he knew it, did he admit the dictionary meaning of the phrase “helter skelter.” The song “Helter Skelter” begins: “When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide/Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride…” According to Poston, Manson said this was a reference to the Family emerging from the bottomless pit.

There was a simpler explanation. In England, home of the Beatles, “helter skelter” is another name for a slide in an amusement park.

If you listen closely, you can hear grunts and oinks in the background of the song “Piggies.”
*
By “piggies,” Gregg and the others told me, Manson meant anyone who belonged to the establishment.

Like Manson himself, the song was openly critical of the piggies, noting that what they really needed was a damned good whacking.

“By that he meant the black man was going to give the piggies, the establishment, a damned good whacking,” Jakobson explained. Charlie really loved that line, both Watkins and Poston said; he was always quoting it.

I couldn’t listen to the final stanza without visualizing what had happened at 3301 Waverly Drive. It describes piggy couples dining out, in all their starched finery, eating bacon with their forks and knives.

Rosemary LaBianca: forty-one knife wounds. Leno LaBianca: twelve knife wounds, punctured with a fork seven times, a
knife
in his throat, a
fork
in his stomach, and, on the wall, in his own blood,
DEATH TO PIGS
.

“T
here’s a chord at the end of the song ‘Piggies,’” Watkins said. “It goes down and it’s a really weird chord. After the sound of piggies snorting. And in the ‘Revolution 9’ song, there’s that same chord, and after it they have a little pause and snort, snort, snort. But in the pause, there is machine-gun fire.

“And it’s the same thing with the ‘Helter Skelter’ song,” Paul continued. “They had this really weird chord. And in the ‘Revolution 9’ song there’s the same chord again, with machine guns firing and people dying and screaming and stuff.”

T
he White Album contains two songs with the word “revolution” in their titles.

The printed lyrics of “Revolution 1,” as given on the jacket insert, read: “You say you want a revolution/Well you know/We all want to change the world…/But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me out.”

When you listen to the record itself, however, immediately after “out” you hear the word “in.”

Manson took this to mean the Beatles, once undecided, now favored the revolution.

Manson made much of these “hidden lyrics,” which can be found in a number of the Beatles’ songs but are especially prevalent in the White Album. They were, he told his followers, direct communications to him, Charlie/JC.

Later on the lyrics go: “You say you got a real solution/Well you know/We’d all love to see the plan.”

The meaning of this was obvious to Manson: Sing out, Charlie, and tell us how we can escape the holocaust.

Of all the Beatles’ songs, “Revolution 9” is easily the weirdest. Reviewers couldn’t decide whether it was an exciting new direction for rock or an elaborate put-on. One critic said it reminded him of “a bad acid trip.”

There are no lyrics as such, nor is it music in any conventional sense; rather, it is a montage of noises—whispers, shouts, snatches of dialogue from the BBC, bits of classical music, mortars exploding, babies crying, church hymns, car horns, and football yells—which, together with the oft reiterated refrain “Number 9, Number 9, Number 9,” build to a climax of machine-gun fire and screams, to be followed by the soft and obviously symbolic lullaby “Good Night.”

Of all the songs in the White Album, Jakobson said, Charlie “spoke mostly of ‘Revolution 9.’” He said “it was the Beatles’ way of telling people what was going to happen; it was their way of making prophecy; it directly paralleled the Bible’s Revelation 9.”

It was also the battle of Armageddon, the coming black-white revolution portrayed in sound, Manson claimed, and after having listened to it myself, I could easily believe that if ever there were such a conflict, this was probably very much what it would sound like.

According to Poston: “When Charlie was listening to it, he heard in the background noise, in and around the machine-gun fire and the oinking of pigs, a man’s voice saying ‘Rise.’” Listening to the recording again, I also heard it, twice repeated: the first time almost a whisper, the second a long-drawn out scream.
*
This was potent evidence. Through both Jakobson and Poston, I’d now linked Manson, irrevocably, with the word “rise” printed in blood at the LaBianca residence.

In “Revolution 1” the Beatles had finally decided to commit themselves to the revolution. In “Revolution 9” they were telling the black man that
now
was the time to rise and start it all. According to Charlie.

Manson found many other messages in this song (including the words “Block that Nixon”), but as far as his philosophy of Helter Skelter was concerned, these were the most important.

C
harles Manson was already talking about an imminent black-white war when Gregg Jakobson first met him, in the spring of 1968. There was an underground expression current at the time, “the shit is coming down,” variously interpreted as meaning the day of judgment was at hand or all hell was breaking loose, and Charlie often used it in reference to the coming racial conflict. But he wasn’t rabid about it, Gregg said; it was just one of many subjects they discussed.

“When I first met Charlie [in June 1968], he really didn’t have any of this Helter Skelter stuff going,” Paul Watkins told me. “He talked a little bit about the ‘shit coming down,’ but just barely…He said when the shit comes down the black man will be on one side and the white will be on the other, and that’s all he said about it.”

Then, that December, Capitol issued the Beatles’ White Album, one of the songs of which was “Helter Skelter.” The final stanza went: “Look out helter skelter helter skelter helter skelter/Look out [background scream] helter skelter/She’s coming down fast/Yes she is/Yes she is.”

Manson apparently first heard the White Album in Los Angeles, while on a trip there from Barker Ranch, where most of the Family remained. When Manson returned to Death Valley on December 31, 1968, he told the group, according to Poston, “Are you hep to what the Beatles are saying? Helter Skelter is coming down. The Beatles are telling it like it is.”