Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Charles Manson, The Beatles, and the Motive No One Expected [Highlight From Episode 356]

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Charles Manson, The Beatles, and the Motive No One Expected [Highlight From Episode 356] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Here's a clip from a recent episode of Booked on Rock.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: My guess is Nicholas Tachka, author of the musical lives
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: of Charles Manson, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Invention of the Sixties or no sense makes sense. So
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Charlie still had hopes of a career in music at
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: this point. Now you mentioned Terry Melcher, So let's talk
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: about Terry Melcher. Now, Doris Day's son, music producer connected
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: with the Birds, really well known at the time. He
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: meets him through Dennis Wilson, Right, that's right.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: So this is another kind of point within the story
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: where again narratives are really they conflict with each other.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: Terry Melcher was the tenant at the Colo Drive house
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: where the Tate killings happened, where Sharon Tate, wife of
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Roman Polanski and actress, was living for the first night
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: of the murders. There's some evidence and here we haven't
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: yet mentioned his name, but I should bring up. Probably
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: the recent big book about the Manson killings is by
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Tom O'Neill, and it's titled Chaos, and it really delves
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: into all of the conspiracy theories that were swirling around
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: then up until now it's based on a lot of
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: reporting and interviews that he did that this is where
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: these ideas of Terry Melcher being much more involved in
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: a more long standing way with the commune most recently
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: have come from. So the idea that Manson and the
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: group had maybe even been to Cielo Drive, had been
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: somehow associated with Melcher and others prior to the killings.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: A lot of this evidence comes from his book, which
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: kind of pinched this really sort of conspiratorial image of
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: possible government involvement, of possible conspiracy theories behind the scenes.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Which CIA control exactly.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: That this is his thesis is that there was this, well,
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: there was a project mk Ultra that was a CIA
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: funded mind control program that, according to O'Neil, had offshoots
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: in California that brought Manson in the commune, possibly directly
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: into He suggests that at times maybe the Manson family
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: was itself a government experiment gone wrong, that Charles Manson's
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: parole officer was someone who was heading a kind of
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: a government trial to see how speed could influence and
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: even foment violence within the Code to culture. Going off
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: in a little bit of a tangent, but that's because
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: you know, the story about Melcher's is really really complicated,
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: and within sort of my book, one of the things
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: I I try to do is to historicize this conspiracy
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: theorizing because O'Neill wasn't the first one to be suggesting this.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: In fact, countercultural newspapers at the time were beginning to
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: suggest that maybe there was maybe the government had put
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: the Manson family up to this to discredit the counterculture.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: As far back as the late sixties early seventies, huh.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: As early as late nineteen sixty nine. Countercultural newspapers were
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: mentioning this. As early as nineteen seventy. Nineteen seventy one,
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: May Brussels, the sort of conspiracy theorist par excellence was
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: positing that the Manson Commune was somehow related to government
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: programs and.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: The idea that it went too far and after what
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: happens with the murders, that now they want to suppress
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: they don't want anybody to know about it.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's right.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: Went too far. The experimentation that wenttically too far.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: Either the commune were sort of unwilling, unknowing dupes who
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: were being drugged or fed drugs or sort of put
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: into this sort of pressure cooker situation to see what
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: would happen. Or that Manson himself was somehow directly connected
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: to government agents. I mean, these are the conspiracy theories.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. The full episode is available wherever you
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: get your podcast