HELTER SKELTER: MUSIC FOR THE END?
Charles Manson believed The Beatles were communicating with him directly and chose the band’s White Album as the soundtrack to his apocalyptic programme for social breakdown in Sixties America
“HEALTER SKELTER” (sic), the bloody writing left at the LaBianca residence, was a reference to “Helter Skelter”, a Lennon and McCartney song from the 1968 album The Beatles (aka The White Album).
Paul McCartney named the song after the traditional English fairground ride and claimed its lyrics about ascents, descents and return trips “back to the top of the slide” were meant to evoke the “rise and fall of the Roman empire”. It is likely that McCartney also had the post-1960s state of the British Empire in mind. Anthony Mann’s film The Fall of the Roman Empire had made the rounds in 1964 and this, combined with the continued availability of its source text, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (177689), had helped to establish “the ruins of Rome” as a tool for understanding the increasingly de-colonised state of Britain’s overseas territories. 1
Manson had heard The White Album shortly after its release in November 1968. ‘Helter Skelter’ along with John Lennon’s ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ and George Harrison’s ‘Piggies’ became touchstones for him and the internal belief system he was generating for the Family. (The word ‘Pig’ was found scrawled in Sharon Tate’s blood on the front door of 10050 Cielo Drive, while “Death to Pigs” was written on the walls of the LaBianca home in the victims’ blood).
Manson believed the Beatles were trying to communicate with him directly, and what he got from the songs was not a reflection on Empire but a message of imminent societal breakdown. “Look out”, said ‘Helter Skelter’, things are “coming down fast”; life’s “getting worse”, said ‘Piggies’, because the “bigger piggies” in their “starched white shirts” are “Stirring up the dirt”. They need “a damn good whacking”, an intention that would lead to the empowerment, satisfaction and “happiness” of the “warm gun”. Ensconced at the Spahn Ranch, a dilapidated former movie ranch on the Santa Susana Pass, the Family allowed this paranoia to boil away until ‘Helter Skelter’ came to name an event they were actively preparing for.
Whether Manson really believed this weirdly messianic personal narrative, the outline, as prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi discovered during the trial proceedings, went as follows. The modus operandi of the Family was to incite an apocalyptic race war between black and white America. They would do this by committing atrocious acts of murder in the homes of affluent white people, leaving suggestive evidence that the perpetrators were black. In the general chaos, as decades of racial tension and mutual distrust came to the fore, the Family would retreat to the desert of Death Valley in a convoy of highpowered dune buggies and descend into a secret subterranean world. There, in the company of the Beatles themselves, they would sit out the destructive black revolution. They would hide until the members of the newly sovereign black nation inevitably faltered in their unfamiliar role as leaders. At which point Manson, his growing band of disciples, and the Beatles would re-emerge from “the bottomless pit” and assume their place as rulers of the new dawn. This was ‘Helter Skelter’: the moment when the world as we, the squares and the straights, knew it would end and all that remained would come down to Manson as his rightful inheritance. 2
1 Origins of ‘Helter Skelter’ discussed in Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now
(London: Vintage, 1998), pp487-488; ‘Ruins of Rome’ from Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (London: Vintage, 2008) p.xv. 2 Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (USA: W.W. Norton, 1974), p76, pp324334.