In “Revolution 1” the Beatles had finally decided to commit themselves to the revolution. In “Revolution 9” they were telling the black man that
Manson found many other messages in this song (including the words “Block that Nixon”), but as far as his philosophy of Helter Skelter was concerned, these were the most important.
Charles Manson was already talking about an imminent black-white war when Gregg Jakobson first met him, in the spring of 1968. There was an underground expression current at the time, “the shit is coming down,” variously interpreted as meaning the day of judgment was at hand or all hell was breaking loose, and Charlie often used it in reference to the coming racial conflict. But he wasn’t rabid about it, Gregg said; it was just one of many subjects they discussed.
“When I first met Charlie [in June 1968], he really didn’t have any of this Helter Skelter stuff going,” Paul Watkins told me. “He talked a little bit about the ‘shit coming down,’ but just barely…He said when the shit comes down the black man will be on one side and the white will be on the other, and that’s all he said about it.”
Then, that December, Capitol issued the Beatles’ White Album, one of the songs of which was “Helter Skelter.” The final stanza went: “Look out helter skelter helter skelter helter skelter/Look out [background scream] helter skelter/She’s coming down fast/Yes she is/Yes she is.”
Manson apparently first heard the White Album in Los Angeles, while on a trip there from Barker Ranch, where most of the Family remained. When Manson returned to Death Valley on December 31, 1968, he told the group, according to Poston, “Are you hep to what the Beatles are saying? Helter Skelter is coming down. The Beatles are telling it like it is.”
It was the same expression, except that in place of the word for defecation Manson now substituted “Helter Skelter.”
Another link had been made, this time to the bloody words on the refrigerator door at the LaBianca residence.
Though this was the first time Manson used the phrase, it was not to be the last.
Watkins: “And he started rapping about this Beatle album and Helter Skelter and all these meanings that I didn’t get out of it…and he builds this picture up and he called it Helter Skelter, and what it meant was the Negroes were going to come down and rip the cities all apart.”
After this, Watkins said, “We started listening to the Beatles’ album constantly…”
Death Valley is very cold in the winter, so Manson found a two-story house at 20910 Gresham Street in Canoga Park, in the San Fernando Valley, not too far from Spahn Ranch. In January 1969, Watkins said, “we all moved into the Gresham Street house to get ready for Helter Skelter. So we could watch it coming down and see all of the things going on in the city. He [Charlie] called the Gresham Street house ‘The Yellow Submarine’ from the Beatles’ movie. It was like a submarine in that when you were in it you weren’t allowed to go out. You could only peek out of the windows. We started designing dune buggies and motorcycles and we were going to buy twenty- five Harley sportsters…and we mapped escape routes to the desert…supply caches…we had all these different things going.
“I watched him building this big picture up,” Paul noted. “He would do it very slowly, very carefully. I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
“Before Helter Skelter came along,” Watkins said with a sigh of wistful nostalgia, “all Charlie cared about was orgies.”
Before Jakobson and I had ever discussed the Beatles, I asked him: “Did Charlie ever talk to you about a black-white revolution?”
A. “Yeah, that was Helter Skelter, and he believed it was going to happen in the near future, almost immediately.”
Q. “What did he say about this black-white revolution? How would it come about and what would it accomplish?”
A. “It would begin with the black man going into white people’s homes and ripping off the white people, physically destroying them, until there was open revolution in the streets, until they finally won and took over. Then black man would assume white man’s karma. He would then be the establishment.”
Watkins: “He used to explain how it would be so simple to start out. A couple of black people—some of the spades from Watts—would come up into the Bel Air and Beverly Hills district…up in the rich piggy district…and just really wipe some people out, just cutting bodies up and smearing blood and writing things on the wall in blood…all kinds of super-atrocious crimes that would really make the white man mad…”
Poston said very much the same thing before I ever talked to Watkins, but with the addition of one very important detail: “He [Manson] said a group of real blacks would come out of the ghettos and do an atrocious crime in the richer sections of Los Angeles and other cities. They would do an atrocious murder with stabbing, killing, cutting bodies to pieces, smearing blood on the walls, writing ‘pigs’ on the walls…in the victims’ own blood.”
This was tremendously powerful evidence—linking Manson not only with the Tate murders, where PIG had been printed in Sharon Tate’s blood on the front door of the residence, but also with the LaBianca murders, where DEATH TO PIGS had been printed in Leno LaBianca’s blood on the living-room wall—and I questioned Poston in depth as to Manson’s exact words, where the conversation had occurred, when, and who else was present. I then questioned everyone Poston mentioned who was willing to cooperate.
Ordinarily, I try to avoid repetitious testimony in a trial, knowing it can antagonize the jury. However, Manson’s Helter Skelter motive was so bizarre that I knew if it was expounded by only one witness no juror would ever believe it.
The conversation had occurred in February 1969, at the Gresham Street house, Poston said.
We now had evidence that six months before the Tate-LaBianca murders Charles Manson was telling the Family exactly how the murders would occur, complete even to writing “pigs” in the victims’ own blood.
We now had also linked Manson with every one of the bloody words found at both the Tate and LaBianca residences.
But this would only be the beginning, Manson told Watkins. These murders would cause mass paranoia among the whites: “Out of their fear they would go into the ghetto and just start shooting black people like crazy.” But all they would kill would be “the ones that were with whitey in the first place.”
The “true black race”—whom Manson identified at various times as the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers—“wouldn’t even be affected by it.” They would be in hiding, waiting, he said.
After the slaughter, the Black Muslims would “come out and appeal to the whites, saying, ‘Look what you have done to my people.’ And this would split whitey down the middle,” Watkins said, “between the hippie-liberals and all the uptight conservatives…” And it would be like the War between the States, brother against brother, white killing white. Then, after the whites had mostly killed off each other, “the Black Muslims would come out of hiding and wipe them
All except Charlie and the Family, who would have taken refuge in the bottomless pit in Death Valley.
The karma would then have turned. “Blackie would be on top.” And he would begin to “clean up the mess, just like he always has done…He will clean up the mess that the white man made, and build the world back up a little bit, build the cities back up. But then he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t handle it.”
According to Manson, Watkins said, the black man had a problem. He could only do what the white man had taught him to do. He wouldn’t be able to run the world without whitey showing him how.
Watkins: “Blackie then would come to Charlie and say, you know, ‘I did my thing. I killed them all and, you know, I am tired of killing now. It is all over.’
“And then Charlie would scratch blackie’s fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick cotton and go be a good nigger, and we would live happily ever after…” The Family, now grown to 144,000, as predicted in the Bible—a pure, white master race—would emerge from the bottomless pit. And “It would be our world then. There would be no one else, except for us and the black servants.”
And, according to the gospel of Charlie—as he related it to his disciple Paul Watkins—he, Charles Willis Manson, the fifth angel, JC, would then rule that world.
