Seventeen in '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.
And The Flowers Bloom Like Madness In The Spring
Charles Manson: “What you’re doing is you’re creating a legend. You’re creating a beast. You’re creating whatever you are judging yourselves with into the word ‘Manson’. And that’s not me at all.”Geraldo Rivera: “You’re not a beast Charlie? You are a beast.”
Charles Manson: “I’m whatever you need me to be for you.”
Spring 1988 was full of shaggy-haired, wild-eyed men. Well, two of them, at least. I was going through a phase that spring where I became obsessed with the music of Jethro Tull. A couple of years previous I’d discovered the Tull retrospective Living in the Past among my dad’s records and I was really taken with the ornate packaging, made out to look like a musty Olde English scrapbook, full of pictures of the hirsute, overcoat-wearing band members, most prominent among them leader Ian Anderson.
Aside from having heard
“Aqualung” a zillion times on classic rock radio, my interest in Anderson and Tull had been sparked by
Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn’s book Rock Dreams, a justly legendary collection of Peellaert’s wildly imaginative
paintings of rock history’s many icons, rebels and tragic figures. Peellaert
was responsible for the simultaneously silly and unnerving covers of Bowie’s Diamond
Dogs and The Stones’ It’s Only
Rock and Roll. His Rock Dreams paintings have a similar sinister dream-kitsch
quality. Each is accompanied, and enhanced, by Nik Cohn’s prose, which is
pitched somewhere between fairy tale & acid flashback. You should buy it if
you ever see it used, then buy it a second time if you see it again, so you’ll
have an extra to give to a friend.
The Tull entry in Rock Dreams is particularly creepy. It features Anderson perched on a park bench glaring wickedly at a wide-eyed little girl. (“Sitting on a park bench / Eyeing little girls with bad intent”, from "Aqualung", get it?) This image colored the way I heard Jethro Tull’s music in a sinister light. Which is a little odd to think about now, as there is very little that is sinister about Jethro Tull’s music. It’s mostly a harmless combination of British folk, heavy rock and prog/classical leanings, with emphasis on Anderson’s overflow of words and ever-present flute.
Harmless, sure, but if you want to, you can hear traces of real darkness. “With You There To Help Me”, the opening cut of Tull’s third album Benefit, became something of a keynote song for me during the early summer of ’88. These days Tull don't seem to share the same kind of 'cool' cachet that many of their classic rock peers maintain, but I’d heartily recommend this track to anyone who thinks of them merely as the band with the flute player who who stood on one leg and sang “Bungle In the Jungle” and controversially - not to mention hilariously - beat Metallica for the best metal album Grammy in 1989.
It’s a carefully built, slow-burning thing, full of tension and boiling unease. The lyrics belie the eerie feeling of the song with a hippie-dippy “back to the warmth of friendship and home” sentiment, but the thrust of the song is its mood. It’s the sound of the carnival train in the distance from Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Anderson’s flute and Martin Barre’s guitar riffs circle around the track’s bare bones, swirling and sparring until reaching a crazed crescendo that for a moment seizes on a very vivid sense of madness. Then it drifts away, Bradbury’s train passing by on its way to another town. The track seems to contain a barely suppressed sense of dread, and it haunted me that summer.
That haunting was foreshadowed in the spring when Chicago’s WGN ran a prime time special on Satanism, murder, and violence. The special featured a long interview with Charles Manson, conducted by Geraldo Rivera. Only a couple of years earlier, after weeks of speculation and anticipation, Rivera had famously opened Al Capone’s vault, anti-climactically finding only empty bottles and dust. So the Manson interview must have felt like quite a coup for him.
And it didn’t disappoint; in the footage Manson is his usual crazy-eyed, wildly gesticulating self, and Rivera does his best alpha-male-defending-the-morals-and-purity-of-America bit, baiting Manson with a series of loaded questions and accusations.
GR: Do you feel remorse?
CM: I don’t know what that is.
GR: I think you are an evil person.
CM: Right, I’m evil. I’m terrible. Oh yeah, I’m awful. I’m awful.
GR: You are a murdering dog.
CM: Oh, I’m a terrible dog. I’m a fiend.
And it goes on like that.
One of my favorite exchanges may or may not have actually occurred. I remember it like this: Manson proclaims to Geraldo: “If I wanted to, I could have your head delivered to me on a plate.” To which Geraldo gamely responds, “Do it, Charley. Do it!” Unfortunately I can’t find proof of this exchange anywhere online, so it might be a trick of my memory, or a trick of the 1988 WGN editing room. I’ve remembered that all these years, and it’s so disappointing to find out that it may not have actually happened. How many more of my memories are simply a melding of fancy and embellishment?
Regardless, nearly twenty years after the gruesome murders that got him locked up for good, the footage shows Manson retaining the same creepy combination of mystic aura and down-to-earth grit that so hypnotized the young people who carried out his awful plans. Like that other avatar of lunacy from Spring 1988 - The Joker in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, Manson has a powerful sense of iconoclasm, which he often puts across with a sense of humor, as when he attempts to explain away his evil deeds with this nugget: “I’m a hobo, man. I just fell out of the penitentiary. I hadn’t been out of jail long enough to do anything. I had a motorcycle and a guitar and a sleeping bag and a bunch of broads following me around talkin’ about I was Jesus!”
Don’t you love the casual quality of those words? It’s as though he’s saying “Yeah, what happened to me coulda happened to anybody, see?”
Also like Moore’s Killing Joke, the hints of madness and murderousness on display in the Manson interview ended up casting shadows that lingered over the next several months of 1988. Even in the good times that summer, something seemed slightly off, an odd sense of disquiet hung in the air like a question mark. As though Manson himself might be there, behind that park bench, watching, grinning, scheming. And maybe “With You There To Help Me” is playing, John Evan’s ominously elegant piano providing an appropriately eerie soundtrack to Manson’s lurking. (Though I'm sure Anderson and his Tullmates, always amiable fellows in interviews, would not likely appreciate that juxtaposition. But I don't wanna worry about that now, or else I'd have to ditch this whole post.)
Of course, it’s entirely possible that this ominous feeling is just something I’m making up to conveniently fit my memory of that time. As Manson says of himself, “I’m whatever you need me to be for you.”
Manson is a psychotic, sure, but just because he is batshit nuts does not mean that his thought processes are always completely without logic, or a certain kind of perceptiveness. And when he says that he is whatever you need him to be for you, I think he is correct. If one needs him to represent salvation, a conduit to a higher spiritual plane, as his followers did, then he can be that. If one needs him to represent the ultimate in evil, the epitome of demonic urges unleashed and run rampant up here on earth, then he can be that, too.
The truth, as hard to pinpoint in this case as it is everywhere else in life, is more likely a lot less compelling than either of those options. Manson is probably just another example of a human being with something gone fundamentally wrong in his psyche, just like so many others. Only this particular psychic dysfunction led to horrific consequences. Which is also unfortunately like so many others, though seldom are those other individuals as creepily charismatic as Manson.
I want to be clear that in suggesting that he is not actually a prophet or a demon but rather simply a massively screwed-up individual I am by no means trying to make Manson into a tragic figure. I’m merely trying to point out that we view our lives, our motivations, through whatever prism feeds our needs at the moment, in a way that justifies whatever our opinions or feelings might be. If I need an innocuous Jethro Tull song to be the sound of barely perceptible evil floating like black fog in the summer air, then I will make it so. If I need a vaguely remembered television interview with Charles Manson to serve as a harbinger of a summer full of dread and unease, then I’ll make that happen too.
“I’m whatever you need me to be for you.”
It’s tempting to be shocked when you find something insightful within an irreversibly bent individual’s rambling spew. But really, it isn’t so insightful. Ultimately, in saying this, Manson is merely stating the obvious. It’s just another way of saying that we all rationalize our way through life. That shouldn’t be news to anyone. It’s how those rationalizations affect you and those around you that counts.
