Charles Manson & The Family - Lie [ESP/ Awareness, 1968?, 1974]
"I got the Revolution blues/ I see bloody fountains/ Ten thousand dune buggies/ coming down the mountain/ Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon / Is full of famous stars / But I hate them worse than lepers / And I'll kill them in their cars" - Neil Young,
Revolution Blues"Give my guitar to the Beach Boys" - Charles Manson
The stuff we pass around in playgrounds as kids, eh?
There seem to be any number of Manson 'albums' available now, but the only two i ever bothered with were the much bootlegged
Lie showcase with members of the Family on backing vocals and stoned giggles, and the one smuggled out of Vaccaville in the mid-eighties which goes under a variety of titles among them
Saints Are Hell On Earth and
Charlie Manson's Good Time Gospel Hour.
Lie, recorded a year to the month before the Tate-LaBianca murders and first released on the obscure ESP/ Awareness label is the only semi-official vinyl. Knowing what was to come, it's impossible to be objective about Charlie's debut. Perhaps without the murders,
Lie would be .... a bit strange but unremarkable for the time in that Manson's targets are no different to those of any common or garden Woodstock generation peacenik. The album is weird for sure - virtually every record made over 1967-1968 is weird - but hardly in the same league as Frank Zappa's contemporary "field recordings" of Wild Man Fischer ultimately let loose on the world as
An Evening With .... That said, there's enough here to suggest Manson
might have done himself OK out of the singer-songwriter vogue when it came into it's own at the tail end of the decade and, given the wealth of rotten experience he had to draw on, mutated into one of the more interesting exponents of the form, a granite edged alternative to other terminally introspective but irredeemably middle-class acts from the James Taylor mould. He could certainly write, or at least,
Look At Your Game Girl and
Cease To Exist are decent acoustic numbers to these ears while
Mechanical Man and the equally unsettling
Ego are not far removed from Lou Reed came up with in his more surreal moments. Other highlights include the notorious diseased sing-a-long
Garbage Dump, the girls' genuinely spooky, unaccompanied
Never Say Never To Always, prison song
Big Iron Doors and the ironic-in-every-sense-of-the-word
Don't Do Anything Illegal. Perhaps most chilling - in the light of Helter Skelter -is the embittered
People Say I'm No Good, a losers anthem replete with all the frustration, self-pity and resentment that entails. And then there's
Sick City which comes on like the bastard brother of whoever it was the Mothers were commemorating on
I'm Not Satisfied; "This town is killing me/ Got to put an end to this restless misery/ I'm just one of the restless people/ Can never seem to be satisfied .... going on the road/ yeah, I'm gonna try/ to say Sick City so long, farewell and die."
Expect to part with any number of limbs for the original vinyl in the
Life mock-up sleeve, but i wouldn't be surprised if you can find some version of
Lie on CD in your local HMV these days..
Saints Are Hell On Earth, recorded live in his cell, finds an ecologically aware and heavily sedated Charlie struggling to make himself heard above the mass-flushing of
the prison toilets and the incessant drone of a television. There's also a strange gurgling noise midway through, allegedly the contribution of an inmate trying to throttle himself in the adjoining cell, though it might just be one of Manson's more 'experimental' vocal improvisations - it's really hard to tell what's going on with all that din. Charlie complains about what man is doing to the trees, wishes "Peace on you" (presumably he wasn't expecting any Black or Jewish listeners) and avows "Marylin Monroe was my childhood Saint." A number of the songs - sorry, don't have a track listing - are autobiographical and, provided you don't remind yourself just who that sensitive and thoughtful guy actually is, oddly moving at times. Black Flag were due to release this on their STT independent ("We're planning to pay the royalties real quick" deadpanned Gregg Ginn), but after the customary death threats against Manson's lawyer that all fell through. I don't know who was first put it out, but it's widely available at time of writing.
..... which was about ten years ago. There's a second part looking at Manson's influence on musik biz, cover versions, etc., if i can endure typing it up. Strange how parts of Lie make for quite pleasant listening on a hot summer day