Charles Manson: Each song that I’ve been doing
is just one mistake right after another. I just take the mistake and groove on
it and it becomes something else. And I do this [strums guitar] and make
another mistake. And I just keep making the same mistake and it becomes another
beat. You can get all kinds of beats by making groovy little mistakes.
Interviewer: When did you take up the guitar?
Before you went into prison, or after you got out? Or while you were in?
Charles Manson: While I was in.
1967 - Charles
Manson in a recording studio.
System of a Down & Charles Manson
Excerpts from an Interview with Charles Manson, 1987
“I lived in Hollywood. And I had all that: the Rolls Royce
and Ferrari and the pad in Beverley Hills. I had the surf board and the Beach
Boys...and all them guys...the Deana Martins and the Nancy Sinatras...’Will you
do it to me? I hear you do it good, honey.’ And all that kind of ‘Will you come
up to my house later?’
So, I went through all that and I seen that was a bigger
prison than the one I just got out of. And I really didn’t care to go back to
prison. See, prison doesn’t begin and end at the gate. Prison is in the mind. It’s
locked in one world that’s dead and saying or it’s open to a world that’s free
and alive.”
Charlie says the girls liked him because he created music...
“And I play and I sing and they said, ‘Hey, man, you’ve got
soul in that music.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I play a little bit, you know.’ They
said, ‘Man you’re really somebody.’ I said, ‘Oh, I am? I just got out of jail. I
don’t know what ‘somebody’ is. They liked my music. They say, ‘Man, we want to
get you over.’ I said, ‘What, ‘We’ll take you down here to Beverley Hills and
we want to get you in because you’re a star.’ I said, ‘I’m a what?’ They said, ‘You’re
a star.’ So they took me to the Beach Boys and I went and I got on a surf board
and I rode around, and I looked and I said, ‘Geez...this is more trouble than
what I just got out of. Look at yourself. You’ve got to wear that whether you
like it or not. You’ve got to do things. You’ve got to get up and go through
all kinds of changes. Whether you want to or not doesn’t matter. Your whole
life is put in your paycheck. You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to
do something I don’t want to do. If I’m shovelling the barn, if you want me to
go...I say, ‘No, no, no, no, I’m doing something right here. I’m helping this
blind man.”
The Music of Charles Manson
[+ Various songs and
related material here:
All the Way Alive
(check out track no. 10 True Love You Will Find)
Unplugged
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