O n 9 August 1969, the writing on the wall for the Sixties dream was smeared in blood . “PIG”, it read, daubed on the front door of 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, where pregnant film actress Sharon Tate and four others lay brutally slaughtered. The following night, over the bodies of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca on the walls of Waverly Drive, it read “RISE”, “DEATH TO PIGS” and, misspelt on the refrigerator, “HEALTER SKELTER”.
The hope of Charles Manson , cult leader of The Family who had planned and ordered the string of murders launched by his followers 55 years ago this week, was that these deaths would be blamed on African Americans, instigating an apocalyptic race war that would allow him to ascend to power. It was a deranged idea he would later testify to have read, somehow, between the lines of The Beatles ’ 1968 White Album , a dark, sparse and – particularly on John Lennon ’s more nihilistic songs – acerbic masterpiece of a double album that almost sucked the colour from the psychedelic age single-handed. On the album’s release, Manson played it over and over again at The Family’s run-down Western film-set headquarters at Spahn Ranch, convinced that The Beatles were sending him coded messages in every song .
The avant-garde collage piece “Revolution 9”, he believed, was a reference to Revelations 9, a biblical passage which speaks of a “bottomless pit”; Manson took this as a sign to hide and grow his Family in a cave in Death Vall.