The night that Charles Manson met Neil Young: “You can never forget him”
For decades now, the edgelords of music have been trying to shock people by saying, “y’know, say what you like about him, but Charles Manson was a pretty good musician.”
It works on a number of levels. The biggest one is that Charles Manson is a murderer and a Nazi, so obviously painting him as any kind of talent is a shocking thing to do.
The other level is that you can sort of see where they’re coming from. If you’ve ever gone back and listened to the few recordings he’s made (that were, unsurprisingly, an absolute nightmare to make, apparently), the guy’s not a hopeless case as a musician. He can strum his guitar and carry a tune. If you heard him busking it wouldn’t ruin your day, but that’s as far as it goes.
He’s completely unremarkable as a musician. We wouldn’t think twice about him if it weren’t for the fact that he was, y’know, Charles Manson, which is strange on the surface. The guy was dead set on being a musician and was completely convinced that, given a shot, he would become the most famous and beloved person in the world. A man who would inspire not the kind of devotion that The Beatles and The Rolling Stones enjoyed, but more comparable to The Pope and the Dalai Lama. If it were anyone else, I’d admire their ambition.
However, Manson wasn’t just some insane creep ranting about his divinity. He was an insane creep ranting about his divinity with a surprising number of people who agreed with him, not only with his worldview, but also with his divine talent as a musician. While the records might not be much, perhaps we just needed to be there, as no less a talent than Neil Young himself had some pretty glowing words for what happened when you actually sat down with Manson and let him freestyle.
What did Neil Young say about Charles Manson?
Young met Charles Manson through The Beach Boys‘ Dennis Wilson, the most high-profile fan of the Manson family patriarch’s music. In the late 1960s, Wilson was using his myriad of industry connections to try and secure a record deal for Manson, and while on this industry blitz, he introduced Manson to Neil Young, who at the time had just left Buffalo Springfield to pursue a solo career. Wonder how that worked out for him?
In an interview conducted in 1985 with Musician, Young talked about this meeting and, hauntingly, spoke quite similarly to other people who’d sat in with Manson when he’d played his music. “He had this kind of music that no one was doing. He would sit down with the guitar and start playing and make up stuff, different every time, it just kept comin’ out, comin’ out, comin’ out. Then he would stop and you would never hear that one again. Musically, I thought he was very unique. I thought he really had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet. It was always coming out.”
This meeting evidently left a mark on Young because in 1974, he released a song explicitly about Charles Manson called ‘Revolution Blues’. One that so disturbed Young’s backing band that they refused to play it live. Young was clearly morbidly fascinated in Charles Manson, the same way that countless people have been in the decades since his terrible crimes were committed. After all, he finished talking about him in that interview quoted earlier by saying, “Once you’ve seen him, you can never forget him.”
Truer words, Neil, truer words.