Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (19 page)

There had been race riots in modern-day American cities before—Chicago, Harlem, the spate across the nation in the summer of 1964—but none ever struck more fear in white America than this one. Part of it was the city where it occurred. It seemed logical, even predictable, that angry low-income blacks might rise up in bustling metropolises like New York
and Chicago, or in Washington, D.C., where there was such a large minority population. But to the rest of the country, Los Angeles epitomized sunshine and show business and a laid-back attitude. A massive race riot in L.A. signaled that there could be one anywhere. California governor Pat Brown organized a commission to determine the cause of the Watts debacle, and
in December it reported in stark, prescient terms that “the existing breach between rich and poor, black and white, in Los Angeles could blow up [again] one day in the future.”

For Chief Parker, the 1965 Watts riot offered a welcome chance to increase public support of the LAPD by persuading shaken white residents that without the protection of their stalwart police force, the next L.A. neighborhood razed by black rioters might very well be their own. In one TV appearance he warned, “It is estimated that by 1970, 45 percent of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro. If you want any protection for your home . . . you’re going to have to get in and support a strong police department. If you don’t, come 1970, God help you.”

In Watts life went on exactly as before, but with charred rubble on virtually every corner. Parker’s scare tactics worked, and race-related paranoia spread beyond the ghetto. After Parker died of a heart attack in July 1966 (he collapsed at an awards dinner in his honor), his successor, Tom Reddin, dutifully carried on his policies. When black outsiders turned up in white neighborhoods at any hour, it became routine for nervous residents to call the cops, and the police instantly responded. Blacks living in Watts were used to being stopped by cops and questioned about what they might be up to.
Now blacks in every part of Los Angeles found themselves fair game for arbitrary stops and interrogations.
Whites venturing into Watts were also pulled over, but in these cases the cops would warn them to lock their car doors, drive out fast, and not even stop for red lights because their lives were in danger. An ominous sense of ever-imminent racial violence settled over much of the city like the infamous brown L.A. smog. It wasn’t the in-your-face tension of major Eastern cities like New York, where every subway ride offered opportunities for racial conflict. In many parts of L.A., blacks and whites rarely came into contact. But the feeling didn’t go away.

•  •  •

The city’s growing notoriety for racial unrest was somewhat offset by its simultaneous recognition as the new center of yet another art form—one that, by the mid-1960s, frequently eclipsed all others in terms of cultural impact. L.A. already dominated film and television. Now it wrested primacy of recorded music from New York. In the mid-1950s, Hollywood movie studios identified American teens as a separate market from their parents. Some landmark productions like
Rebel Without a Cause
resulted, but many of the films tied in to the same cute teenage romance themes that typified most of the pop chart hits emanating from New York and its Tin Pan Alley songwriters. But these films had soundtracks, and many of the songs celebrated California with its sunshine and surf. California-based groups like The Chantay’s (“Pipeline”) and the Surfaris (“Wipe Out”) made considerable market impact. TV teen idol Ricky Nelson began churning out hits in L.A. studios. The Beach Boys had a string of hits about surfing and hot rods and being true to your school. By 1964 the Beatles dominated pop music, but West Coast producers and musicians were also succeeding. Market-savvy, profit-driven L.A. music moguls set out to discover and sign a new generation of teen idols. There was a wealth of available talent—Brian Wilson, Randy Newman, Frank Zappa, and Phil Spector, among others, had all grown up in or around the city. Children of the older stars got their own opportunities, in some cases because their parents owned substantial chunks of the record companies: Nancy Sinatra as a solo artist, Dean Martin Jr. and Desi Arnaz Jr. in the group Dino, Desi and Billy, Terry Melcher in several surf bands. In 1963, records produced in New York topped the pop charts for twenty-six weeks, with L.A. singles reaching number one for just three weeks. By 1965, L.A. was on top for twenty weeks and New York for just one.

Television reinforced L.A.’s new supremacy. In 1964 Dick Clark moved his popular
American Bandstand
program from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Soon three more network dance shows broadcast from L.A.—
Where the Action Is!
(ABC),
Shindig!
(ABC), and
Hullabaloo
(NBC). At the movies, in their cars listening to the radio, at home watching TV, California-based music, often with California-centric lyrics, permeated the lives of American teens.

Initially it seemed that the latest singing stars would not be much different from the preceding generation—essentially clean-cut kids singing about young love and, in the case of surf music, having appropriate outdoor fun. The most conservative parents would have allowed TV and recording star Ricky Nelson to date their daughters. But the emergence of the counterculture resulted in a significant change in the growing youth music market. It was impossible to be certain whether hairy message music would be a brief fad or a long-term phenomenon, but L.A. record executives didn’t care. There was a clear change in the critical youth market, and they moved to meet it.

Hordes of wannabe musicians made their way to L.A., certain that they were destined for stardom and desperate to land a recording contract. Many of them found their way to clubs along Sunset Strip that designated specific nights of the week for hopefuls to jump onstage and play one or two songs. The legendary Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard held open mike nights on Mondays. Future superstars like Jim (later Roger) McGuinn and David Crosby got their starts there. Others lucked into short stints as house bands. Johnny Rivers, the Doors, and Frank Zappa’s bizarre Mothers of Invention gained much of their early fame from regular appearances at the Whisky a Go Go. Record company talent scouts trolled the clubs on a nightly basis, often basing their signing decisions on the look more than the sound of an individual artist or a band.

The musicians might consider their songs to be spiritual or social anthems, but to the record labels the music was product. Many newly signed acts, entering a recording studio for the first time, were appalled to learn that most or all of the instrumental work and even some of the vocals would be provided by veteran studio musicians. Muffed chords and sloppy rhythm might be overlooked onstage if performers were charismatic enough, but for radio airplay—still the critical factor in sales—the sound had to be perfect. Given the multitudes panting for a chance to record, studio executives weren’t inclined to be tactful. At Columbia, Terry Melcher, at twenty-two already a veteran recording artist in his own right, was placed in charge of a promising band called the Byrds, five refugees from the folk music scene who were set to record Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Melcher quickly determined that only lead singer McGuinn
was a competent enough instrumentalist to play on the track. The four other Byrds were told to step aside for studio musicians, then and in several subsequent sessions. When the drummer complained, Melcher gave him a choice: shut up or get out. The drummer shut up, and “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a number one hit. In this as in most cases, record producers knew what they were doing. No unproven artists were allowed to do as they pleased in the studio.
The bottom line, the only factor that ultimately mattered, was whether someone could sell enough records or not. Genius on the artist’s part, whether genuine or self-perceived, didn’t matter a damn.

For those musicians who came to L.A. and made it big, stardom and all its perks were instantaneous. After one hit, especially if more of the same seemed in store, record companies offered substantial advances on future royalties. Many of the newly wealthy had no concept of money beyond spending it fast. Overnight pop stars gleefully snapped up mansions previously owned by film legends. After “California Dreamin’ ” became a smash hit in February 1966,
the Mamas and the Papas husband-wife team of John and Michelle Phillips bought the spacious Bel Air Road home of Jeanette MacDonald. Not to be outdone, their bandmates Denny Doherty and Cass Elliot respectively purchased the glamorous residences of Mary Astor and Natalie Wood. The overweight Elliot couldn’t resist also treating herself to a flashy new red Porsche, even though she was unable to wedge herself into it. L.A. music veterans with strings of hits (written, performed, or produced) also paid their way into the toniest L.A. territory. Beach Boys songwriter and leader Brian Wilson bought a Bel Air mansion and promptly outraged his stodgier neighbors by painting it purple. His brother Dennis rented a luxurious log cabin hunting lodge originally owned by Will Rogers near the far west end of Sunset Boulevard. Terry Melcher and his girlfriend, actress Candice Bergen, daughter of radio and TV star Edgar Bergen, rented a smaller residence at the top of steep Cielo Drive in the Benedict Canyon area; the house, owned by agent-to-the-stars Rudi Altobelli (Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn), was distinguished by its magnificent view of the sprawling city below.

Not all the new generation of music heavyweights felt drawn to luxury living. Some preferred country life, or at least what passed for
it on the L.A. scene. Topanga, west of an extensive state park but still within easy driving distance of the Strip and city recording studios, was a hilly alternative, and Laurel Canyon offered pleasantly rustic touches like a general store. For others who simply couldn’t live without instant access to Pacific waves, there was Venice Beach and Santa Monica and Malibu. And, for virtually everyone, there were the magic clubs on the Strip—when not performing, L.A.’s music stars delighted in dropping by the Whisky or the Troubadour, sipping drinks with their show business peers or graciously interacting with their public. Every weekend and most weekday nights the Strip was jammed with happy, hooting young crowds. After numerous complaints about underage drinking and drug use, in the fall of 1966
the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office announced joint plans to begin enforcing a previously obscure curfew requiring anyone under eighteen to be off the streets by 10
P.M
. At the same time, the County Supervisor’s Office made public a potential plan to bulldoze part of the Strip to make way for a new freeway. In November, after numerous arrests for curfew violations and the news that Pandora’s Box, a popular club, would be closed and leveled to widen the street, about three-hundred protesters surrounded the club. A city bus was overturned, but there was no other overt violence. Unlike the desperate black poor of Watts, these were mostly pissed-off, affluent, or at least middle-class, white kids, raising a little hell because they might no longer be allowed to stay out as late as they pleased. But the LAPD took no chances. There were arrests, and cops used billy clubs on demonstrators not obeying orders quickly enough to vacate the area.

Previously, most prominent white L.A. pop stars hadn’t been moved enough by social or antiwar protests to compose songs about them. After Watts,
Frank Zappa, frustrated by how widely his fellow musicians ignored the event, tried to capture the incident in song. But the Sunset “riot” caught the attention of Stephen Stills, a member of the L.A.-based Buffalo Springfield. Stills crafted a catchy tune about battle lines being drawn, and young people speaking their minds while in danger of the Man coming to take them away. “For What It’s Worth” rose to number seven on the national hit parade, and gave the impression that L.A. musicians and youth were in the forefront of what the media increasingly
perceived as a generational revolt. On April 25, 1967,
CBS aired a documentary titled
Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution
, improbably hosted by Leonard Bernstein. McGuinn, lead singer of the Byrds, earnestly declared to viewers that “We’re out to break down those barriers that we see to be arbitrary. I feel like there’s some sort of guerrilla warfare, psychological warfare going on, and I feel like a guerrilla.”

By the last weeks of 1967 there was a city-wide sense of unease in Los Angeles.
Joan Didion, reflecting later on that time and place, concluded that “there were odd things going around town. . . . Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. . . . The jitters were setting in.”
So, too, were the Santa Ana winds, hot gusts frequently topping a hundred miles per hour that annually plagued Los Angeles and the surrounding area from late fall through early spring, drying out the land and paving the way for periodic brush fires that destroyed substantial sections of the region. Local legend had it that the scorching winds were evil omens; in one of his L.A.
noir
stories, Raymond Chandler wrote that each year when the Santa Anas arrive, “meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.” And that November, along with the winds, Charlie Manson blew back into L.A., bringing with him the first stirrings of another kind of conflagration.

The school bus broke down on the way from San Francisco to L.A. and Charlie had to stop and fix it. He was an adequate mechanic, having worked in the garages of some of the reform schools where he’d spent his teenage years. Charlie was hyper during the trip; he was anxious to get and sign that recording contract. He talked about it some with the others on the bus, making sure they understood that what was good for Charlie was going to be good for them, too. Whatever this Gary Stromberg guy at Universal was like, they had to help Charlie impress him. Members of real families always backed each other up. Everyone got that a label deal was important to Charlie, but misunderstood why he wanted one so badly.
His followers had no idea that Charlie was obsessed with becoming famous; he told them that his goal, his mission, really, was to teach the world a better way to live through his songs. If he wasn’t given that opportunity, it was the world’s loss, not Charlie’s.