#the song lyrics is meant to be a letter from jail describing the prison life and repeating ''the only thing that I miss is you''

[batri-jopa]

LGBT w kulturze polskiej

Wały Jagiellońskie i "Tylko mi ciebie brak" z 1981 r.😉

[dancingaliensfics]

♡My Prison Pen Pal♡

Helmut Zemo x reader

Word count: 1,802

Warnings: swearing, mentions of prison and crimes and slight angst to do with his family

A/N: its finally here! I havent writen a fic in a long time so hopefully you guys like this! I tried to avoid using idioms and things like that but message me if you need anything explained or reworded as I know most people aren't native English speakers

@sorcerersofnyc

♡♡♡

His first letter came during the series finale of your favourite show. A rather inconvenient moment, you thought, so it stayed on the welcome mat until you passed through the hall on your way to bed. Picking it up, you figured you'd skim the first few lines then finish it and write a reply before work. Instead, you found yourself writing and rewriting a reply through the night. Somehow this man had managed to enthrall you with only a letter. Maybe it was the way he wrote as if he was some elegant poet whose sonnets would one day be hailed as classics. How he managed to be open and expressive, exuding a welcoming aura, and yet still seeming mysterious. Or perhaps it was simply fated by the stars that Helmut Zemo would capture your heart.

You waited anxiously for his second letter to arrive. After sending the first, you hadn't cared whether you got a response, the whole thing seemed like a bad idea to you. But your mother was insistent that you needed to meet new people and this way you wouldn't need to worry about awkward face to face conversations. Sending the first letter felt like any other chore you do in the day, done with much effort and resignment but forgotten within minutes. But the second? It felt like the most important thing you'd done in a long time. You'd even bought a first class stamp (not that it makes a difference).

You wanted to know more about this intriguing man. No, supervillain. Charged with international terrorism. Jesus christ what the fuck was wrong with you? Were you really falling in love with a supervillain after one letter? But he didn't seem evil to you. He wrote eloquently, somehow his simple and brief description of his day (he'd started reading a new psychology book, you'd have to send him some recommendations) sounded fascinating in his words.

Over time, you started to notice small things about Helmut. The way he crossed his t's, how he signed his name, but mainly that there was a romanticism to his writing. From the way he described his home, his wife, his son to his recipes for Sokovian dishes with small notes and doodles (your favourite was his shepherd's pie recipe where he helpfully noted his mother's assertion that you should always add more than you think you need). It was becoming clear to you that he wasn't the stoic and vengeful baron you expected but rather a soft, lonely and endearingly weird man who you couldn't imagine plotting to destroy the Avengers. Whilst it was his mystery that first captivated you, it was his sweet and sometimes awkward personality that convinced you to keep writing.

It took a while for Helmut to tell you about his family. You had heard on the news back when he first arrested about his motive, so you were interested to hear his perspective on his crimes. But that wasn't what you got. Instead, he told you about when he and his father used to play football when he was young and how they would play a match every time he visited, with Helmut playing against his father and son, who always wanted to play with grandfather. He told you of the songs his wife used to sing, how her voice was always loud and shaky and after years of singing somewhere over the rainbow she would still forget the lyrics and invent her own. He told you how his son was the best pianist he had ever heard. How he could play the greatest rendition of amazing grace and that he had just learnt the theme from swan lake. That he had been excited to practice it on his grandfathers grand piano the day Ultron attacked.

There was something so human about this man. His love for his family, his loss and grief, his plan to avenge his family, it was all so tragic and yet here he was sending you drawings of the flowers from his garden growing up. You wanted to hug him and yet sometimes you felt he wouldn't need it, wouldn't want it. You were wrong.

Helmut Zemo missed his family. He told you so in one of his most recent letters. He missed holding his son, brushing his wife's hair, going for long drives, waking up at 2am to comfort his son, early morning trips to the shops, cleaning up after dinner, helping with homework. Everything he listed seemed so trivial, so meaningless in the grand scheme of life and yet the memories meant so much to him.

You realised then you had never pitied him before. Not that he wasn't deserving of it, just that he didn't seem to need it. But overtime you realised that what Helmut had really needed wasn't revenge or to make a world free from superhumans, it was someone to talk to. Someone to trust. Someone who would understand his pain and not judge it. Perhaps, you thought to yourself, you could be that person.

Fuck.

You couldn't think of how to cope with this. No one you knew had ever mentioned falling in love with a criminal through letters. And as hard as you tried you hadn't been able to find a single romcom with this plot line. You couldn't tell him. You imagined with his seemingly fragile state of mind receiving from basically a stranger professing their love would at best cause him to ghost you. Especially after he confided in you, shared his thoughts and memories.

So instead you continued as normal. You sent him pressed flowers and pictures of your favourite places. Eventually, he asked what looked like, and you spent an hour trying to decide whether you should send a picture of yourself or to just vaguely describe your features. After deciding to send a picture of yourself on holiday a few months before the blip, you found yourself wondering what he'd do with it. Would he throw it away as soon as he got the letter or would he keep it, tuck it away in some book to look at whilst thinking of you?

You also found yourself wondering what he looked like in the real world. You had found pictures of him online, but they didn't feel real. He was never rarely happy. The pictures pre Ultron were clearly taken by paparazzi, so you weren't surprised he rarely looked anything other than annoyed. There were a few though, ones with his wife and son, where he clearly hadn't noticed, and some from when he was much younger and seemed to enjoy the attention. Then were those taken after his arrest.

And so you continued to wonder he looked like. How he looked in the morning, with flowers in his hair or in summer with the sun lighting his face. You wondered what his hair looked like wet, if he ever scrunched his nose in disgust. You wondered what his smile was like.

Over time, you told him more about yourself. The stress of returning home after the blip to no job, no house and your friends 5 years older. Your ex was married with kids and your sister had moved abroad. It was as if you blinked and your whole life had changed. You mentioned how it was your mum who had suggested getting a pen pal, so you could talk to someone new, who was living a different life to you, although she had meant someone in a different country not jail. Since coming back you'd been isolated and stressed with starting a new job, recovering lost information and personal belongings and moving house, so you had thought it might be good to speak to someone who didn't know you, who couldn't judge you. You told Helmut how it had been good, how writing to him had helped you, how he had helped you more than he could ever know.

No, that sounded creepy. How you appreciated his letters.

Too formal. How you hadn't expected to become his friend, but you were glad to be able to say you were.

Helmut was comforting. You knew in your head that your meeting on Friday was nothing to worry about but seeing him say it felt so reassuring. Each one of his letters made you feel relaxed, feel safe. You wanted to make him feel the same. So, as a way to repay his kindness you had told him that no matter what happened, he could always trust you. And it was true. You couldn't imagine a world where you wouldn't do anything for Helmut and although you knew he would never need it, you still wanted him to know you would always care about him, even if no one else did.

Writing to him had become as easy as talking to someone you'd known all your life. You had fallen into an easy routine, you knew when to expect his letters and you knew when you'd send a reply. The routine felt so natural that you even knew what the envelope would look like, always the same off-white with a square edged flap. The address was always the same too. Except on his last letter. Which was strange.

At first, you thought Helmut had been moved to a different prison but after frantically typing the address into Google Maps you realised it was not a prison. Fuck you had no idea what it was, but it wasn't a prison. It also wasn't in Germany.

You sat still, staring at the unopened letter for a few minutes.

You looked up at the door. You thought you heard someone knock. The post had already come and you weren't expecting people. Hell, there wasn't anyone other than your parents who would visit anyway and they would have called first. Now you were sat still, staring at the front door.

"I know you're in there, the lights are on."

It was as if you were a marionette, being moved by some strange force that was slowly pulling you out of your seat and towards the door. You didn't even register that you moved until you felt the door handle on your fingertips. The cold metal caused you to stop, as if broken out of a trance. There was a sudden realisation that if you opened the door your life would never be the same. It was sickening, a mixture of dread and excitement; it reminded you of the moment before a roller coaster drops. You repeated that thought in your head. "Your life would never be the same". Your life hadn't been the same in almost a year. What would be the harm in one more big change. So you did it. You opened the door.

His smile was beautiful.

[rolandfontana]

The Man Who Murdered the Sixties

It’s been a half-century since Charles Manson and his loopy minions conspired to commit a series of murders that still fascinate and flabbergast the world.

Manson, who died in prison in 2017, would savor the attention he continues to attract, including in this summer’s Quentin Tarantino film (“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”) and several new books,  including my own.

In March 1967, at age 32, Manson was a fresh federal parolee who stumbled into San Francisco as American ingenues in peasant dresses and bellbottoms—runaways, hitchhikers, and lost souls—were streaming in for the Summer of Love. His timing was impeccable. The patchouli-scented sexual revolution created a perfect petri dish for his predation.

Using prison-honed talents as a con man and middling skills as a guitarist and singer-songwriter, Manson soon began building a cult of as many as 35 young hippies, three-quarters of them women.

He would spin campfire lectures for his stoner clan featuring Psych 101 dogma about projection and reflection. He basted their brains in a mix of Jesus Freakiness, Dale Carnegie hucksterisms, Norman Vincent Peale’s sunny-sided platitudes (“You are perfect!”), and the buggy self-help triangulations and “dynamics” of his prison-library Scientology.

Charles Manson. courtesy Oxygen

They believed he was a godly mystic.

The writer David Dalton nailed Manson in eight words: “if Christ came back as a con man.” Joe Mozingo of The Los Angeles Times said, “He was a scab mite who bit at the perfect time and place.”

Using the playbook of pimps and cult patriarchs, he isolated troubled young women from their past lives and controlled their bodies and minds. He was the Wizard of Oz for libertines, and he as much as told them so.

Susan Atkins, who became one of Manson’s most prolific killers, said Manson often mocked his own followers’ blind faith.’

“He said, ‘I have tricked you into doing what I want you to…It’s like I’ve got a bunch of slaves around me,” she told a grand jury in December 1969, after her arrest.

The Enigma of Charles Manson

Manson was an enigma on many levels.

The “Manson Women” Photo courtesy Oxygen

He was a racist and sexist imbued with the old-timey sensibilities of an Appalachian upbringing. He preached female subservience and racial segregation, and his young followers lapped it up in the midst of a flowering civil rights movement and on the cusp of modern women’s liberation.

Many were willing to kill for nothing more than Manson’s validation.

“You can convince anybody of anything if you just push it at them all of the time,” Manson once said, “…especially if they have no other information to draw their opinions from.”

Just 29 months after Manson began assembling his naifs into a communal Family, these “heartless, bloodthirsty robots…sent out from the fires of hell,” as a prosecutor would describe them, carried out a series of proving-ground murders in Los Angeles over four weeks in the summer of ‘69 that still has a place of prominence in America’s storied pantheon of crime spectacles.

The primary motive was money to allow the Family to finance a retreat to California’s Death Valley to ride out the race war that Manson predicted was coming.

The first victim, the Family’s good friend Gary Hinman, was Killed on July 27. Two weeks later, on Aug. 9 and 10, Manson followers killed the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and five others in acts of casual savagery that remain a peerless mashup of celebrity, sex, cult groupthink, and bloodlust.

Police outside 10050 Cielo Drive in Hollywood where the blood-splattered bodies of Sharon Tate and her four friends were found. Photo by George via Flickr

“It had to be done,” one of the killers, Leslie Van Houten, explained after her arrest. “For the whole world’s karma to be completed, we had to do this.”

Writer Dalton, who covered Manson for Rolling Stone, called him “the perfect storm” for 1969.

“It was the conflation of mystical thinking, radical politics, drugs, and all these runaway kids fused together,” Dalton told me.

“The world seemed to be in death spiral of violence, and we thought the whole hippie riot was about to begin to save use all. We were going to take over and everything would be cool. In fact, the opposite was happening, embodied by Charlie Manson.”

The implausible Manson story cannot be separated from the context of its era, as some Americans were asking essential questions about what their country ought to be.

The half-decade of 1965 to 1970 saw ghetto riots, the emergence of a vibrant new psychedelic culture, shocking political murders, riveting space exploration, escalation of the war in Vietnam, and burgeoning protests of the same.

Two months alone in the summer of 1969 brought an extraordinary series of events. On June 28, a police morals-squad raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, touched off three days of rioting—and ignited the gay rights movement. On July 18, Ted Kennedy, surviving male heir to the American political tragi-dynasty, fled the scene of a fatal car wreck on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass. On July 20, the world watched on TV as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their stiff, bouncing strolls through moondust.

Among the viewers was a small group of friends and kin gathered at the home of Sharon Tate. Twenty days later, on Aug. 9—50 years ago today—four members of the same group would be savagely murdered by Manson’s second kill team. A week after that, more than 400,000 peopled endured organizational bedlam to attend the Woodstock Festival, 100 miles north of New York City. That same weekend, Hurricane Camille pounded ashore on the Gulf Coast, east of New Orleans at Pass Christian, Miss., killing 256 people.

The Sixties created Manson, and his crimes were an exclamation point to a turbulent decade.

A ‘Child of the ‘30s’

But as he liked to say, “I am a child of the ’30s, not the ’60s.”

He was born to a prostitute mother and drive-by father in 1934 and raised by relatives in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia coal country. He became a chronic juvenile delinquent who flailed his way through a Dickensian childhood. A tiny boy who grew into an elfin but sinewy man, he was locked up in reform school, jail or prison for all but a few years of his life from age 13 to the grave.

He spoke or wrote a million words about his life and crimes—in court, in letters, in media interviews. He bleated many excuses for his wasted life, almost always beginning with a lack of parenting and proper education.

Manson often played crazy, but that was a studied tactic. As Vincent Bugliosi, his prosecutor and biographer, told Time magazine before he died in 2015.

“His moral values were completely twisted and warped, but let’s not confuse that with insanity. He was crazy in the way that Hitler was crazy…So he’s not crazy. He’s an evil, sophisticated con man.”

Manson preached a homespun version of liberation theology—the freedom to be you. But a switch was flipped in the fall of 1968, when the Beatles released their White Album.

Manson convinced his followers that the world’s most famous band was sending him direct messages in the lyrics, including those of “Helter Skelter.” He imagined that Paul McCartney’s song presaged a race war that would induce the Family to retreat to a desert hideout, then emerge heroically and install Manson as a world leader and master breeder.

Manson recast his horny young stoners into a classic apocalyptic cult, prepping for end times. Growing impatient for the race war, Manson decided to “show blackie how to do it” by committing a series of murders and leaving clues meant to implicate the Black Panthers, that era’s subject of America’s ever-changing moral panic.

The starry-eyed plan was a failure on every level.

Before Manson “got on his “Helter Skelter” trip,” according to Paul Watkins, another follower, “it was all about fucking.”

Five former members of the Family, all senior citizens now, are still imprisoned, 50 years along: Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, Charles Watson, Bobby Beausoleil and Bruce Davis.

Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was imprisoned for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford. Photo via YouTube

Many others have died, including Watkins and Susan Atkins.

Most renounced Manson long ago, although Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, an early acolyte who served 34 years in prison for a 1975 assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford, self-published an autobiography last year that was largely dedicated to minimizing Manson’s culpability.

Atkins, who once seemed to enjoy her public profile as an illustrious sexpot murderess, had a personal reckoning before her death from brain cancer in 2009.

“In hindsight,” Atkins wrote in her memoir, “I’ve come to believe the most prominent character trait Charles Manson displays is that of a manipulator. Not a guru, not a metaphysic, not a philosopher, not an environmentalist, not a sociologist or social activist, and not even a murderer.

David Krajicek

“His long-term behavior is one predominantly of a practiced manipulator.”

She called him “a liar, a con artist, a physical abuser of women and children, a psychological and emotional abuser of human beings, a thief, a dope pusher, a kidnaper, a child stealer, a pimp, a rapist, and a child molester. I can attest to all of these things with my own eyes.

“And he was all of these things before he was a murderer.”

This essay is adapted from David J. Krajicek’s new book, Charles Manson: The Man Behind the Murders that Shook Hollywood (Arcturus).

The Man Who Murdered the Sixties syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

[gossipnetwork-blog]

Charles Manson: Twisted Beatles Obsession Inspired Murders

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/charles-manson-twisted-beatles-obsession-inspired-murders/

Charles Manson: Twisted Beatles Obsession Inspired Murders

Charles Manson had an easy explanation for why he ordered the deaths of the family of Leno LaBianca and residents at Sharon Tate’s house at the hands of his “Family”: “It’s the Beatles, the music they’re putting out,” he told the district attorney who sent him to death row. “These kids listen to this music and pick up the message. It’s subliminal.”

Nearly half a century has passed since the Manson Family carried out the brutal, stunning Tate-LaBianca murders in August of 1969, and their supposed link to the Beatles remains confounding. The words “Healter [sic] Skelter” had been painted in victims’ blood on the LaBiancas’ fridge, but the reference’s significance did not come to light until the trial. When Charles Manson and his followers faced a judge for the crimes a year later, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi explained that the motive for the killings came from Manson’s twisted misinterpretation of lyrics on the White Album, which was released in November 1968, months before the murders. In Manson’s mind, benign songs like “Blackbird,” “Piggies” and, most prominently, “Helter Skelter,” foretold a bloody, apocalyptic race war. But when the battle never began, he decided to kick-start it with the murders.

“Charles Manson interpreted that ‘Helter Skelter’ was something to do with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse,” McCartney said in the 2000 book The Beatles Anthology. “I still don’t know what all that stuff is; it’s from the Bible, ‘Revelations’ – I haven’t read it so I wouldn’t know. But he interpreted the whole thing … and arrived at having to go out and kill everyone…. It was frightening, because you don’t write songs for those reasons.”

“It has nothing to do with me,” John Lennon said in a 1980 Playboy interview. “Manson was just an extreme version of the people who came up with the ‘Paul is dead’ thing or who figured out that the initials to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ were LSD and concluded I was writing about acid.”

“It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson,” George Harrison said in Anthology.

“I mean, I knew [Tate’s husband] Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate and, God, it was a rough time,” Ringo Starr said.

Although he would deny being into the Beatles years later (“I am a Bing Crosby fan,” he declared in 1985 – despite inmates at a prison Manson stayed at in the early Sixties claiming he was obsessed with the Beatles), Manson discussed the group enough with his followers that his warped reading of the Fab Four’s most adventurous album resounded throughout the trial. Bugliosi interviewed several Manson Family members, including those who were not facing criminal charges, and found consistency in their descriptions of his mythology surrounding the White Album and the garbled connections he made between it and the Book of Revelations, which depict end-times.

“This music is bringing on the revolution, the unorganized overthrow of the establishment,” Manson told Rolling Stone in 1970. “The Beatles know [what’s happening] in the sense that the subconscious knows.”

Charles Manson as he was being brought into the Los Angeles city jail under suspicion of having masterminded the Tate-LaBianca murders. Bettmann/Getty

“From the beginning, Charlie believed the Beatles’ music carried an important message – to us,” Manson Family member Paul Watkins wrote in his book, My Life With Charles Manson. “He said their album, The Magical Mystery Tour, expressed the essence of his own philosophy. Basically, Charlie’s trip was to program us all to submit: to give up our egos, which, in a spiritual sense, is a lofty aspiration. As rebels within a materialistic, decadent culture, we could dig it.”

Manson discovered the White Album in December 1968, while visiting Los Angeles on a sojourn from the freezing California desert. When he returned to Death Valley on New Year’s Eve, he began pressing his entourage for their reactions to the record. “Are you hep to what the Beatles are saying?” Family member Brooks Poston recalled Manson asking him, as reported in Bugliosi’s book, Helter Skelter. “Helter Skelter is coming down. The Beatles are telling it like it is.” Watkins said this was around the time, too, that Manson began using the words “helter skelter” to describe an oncoming racial conflict, “and what it meant was the Negros were going to come down and rip the cities all apart. … Before Helter Skelter came along, all Charlie cared about was orgies.”

“It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson,” said George Harrison. 

The White Album was soon resonating throughout the Manson Family. Manson had renamed Susan Atkins “Sadie Mae Glutz” prior to the LP’s release, but the Beatles’ inclusion of the cheeky song “Sexy Sadie” (originally written to the word “Maharishi,” referring to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had allegedly made sexual advances on Mia Farrow) made it seem like he had divined it. He interpreted some lyrics to the love ballad “I Will” – “Your song will fill the air/ Sing it loud so I can hear you” – as telling him to make his own album to spread the message that he was a resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the bizarre “Honey Pie” (McCartney’s riff on vaudevillian music from the Twenties) with its reference to a “Hollywood song” reinforced that he was a singing messiah. He also claimed to hear messages that the Beatles were seeking him out in “Don’t Pass Me By,” “Yer Blues” and Magical Mystery Tour’s “Blue Jay Way.”

The Manson Family claimed to have sent telegrams, written letters and made phone calls to England to invite the Beatles to join them before the race war, but they didn’t reach the band. So they worked on Manson’s album, which he hoped would be produced by Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, who’d worked with the Beach Boys and lived at 10050 Cielo Drive. The recording never came to be, as Melcher severed his ties with Manson and moved out of the Cielo Drive house; Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate moved in shortly thereafter.

All the while, the songs on the White Album meant more and more to Manson. Bugliosi wrote in Helter Skelter that “Rocky Raccoon” – a goofy, melodramatic number that began in India with McCartney, Lennon and Donovan making up a cowboy named Rocky Sassoon – was, to Manson, a veiled story of an African-American uprising. (The slur “coon” struck Manson.) “‘Rocky’s revival’ – ‘re-vival,’ it means coming back to life,” Manson told Rolling Stone in 1970. “The black man is going to come back into power again.” And, to Manson, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” perhaps Lennon’s most double-entendre-filled song, meant “the Beatles were telling blackie to get guns and fight whitey,” in Bugliosi’s words.

Then there were the five songs Manson liked most: “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” “Revolution 1,” “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution 9.” Manson’s followers would later claim that he had drawn parallels between the last song’s title and the ninth chapter of the Book of Revelation, which tells of a hellish bottomless pit opening up in the world, and a plague of anthropomorphic locusts with long hair coming to torture the unfaithful until an angel blows a trumpet to God. Family member Gregg Jakobson said in Helter Skelter that Manson drew comparisons between the Bible and “the Beatles’ songs, the power that came out of their mouths.”

“Blackbird,” McCartney’s touching, acoustic song supporting black women during the civil rights movement in the U.S., specifically addressed, in Manson’s mind, African-Americans viciously fighting the establishment. Watkins told Bugliosi that Manson “figured the Beatles were programming the black people to get it up, get it on, start doing it,” with lyrics like “Blackbird singing in the dead of night/ Take these broken wings and learn to fly … You were only waiting for this moment to arise.” “‘Rise’ was one of Charlie’s big words,” Jakobson told the prosecutor, which helped establish Manson’s motive because “rise” had been written in blood on the LaBiancas’ wall.

Manson became obsessed with the Beatles after hearing their White Album. ZUMAPRESS

“Helter Skelter” was a song that began from a rivalry with Pete Townshend, after the Who guitarist called “I Can See for Miles” one of the wildest recordings ever made in a Melody Maker interview. “Just that one little paragraph was enough to inspire me, to make a move,” McCartney later said. “So I sat down and wrote ‘Helter Skelter’ to be the most raucous vocal, the loudest drums, et cetera.” He also once described it as “a ridiculous song … ’cause I like noise.” During the trial, Manson said that he’d interpreted the words to mean general chaos; it was obviously an important theme to him as “Helter Skelter” had been written on a door found at Spahn Ranch, one of the Manson Family hideouts. But Family member Poston told Bugliosi that Manson thought it referred to the Family emerging from the bottomless pit referenced in Revelation.

“[‘Helter Skelter’] means confusion, literally,” Manson said in court. “It doesn’t mean any war with anyone. It doesn’t mean that some people are going to kill other people. … Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down around you fast….

“Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment because the establishment is rapidly destroying things?” he continued. “The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb and blind to even listen to the music…. It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says ‘Rise.’ It says ‘Kill.’ Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”

To Manson, the lyrics of “Revolution 1” meant that the once-ambivalent Beatles now condoned violent revolution. 

The song’s meaning, however, was crystal clear to its writer. “I was using the symbol of a helter skelter [a playground slide] as a ride from the top to the bottom — the rise and fall of the Roman Empire,” McCartney once said. “This was the demise, the going down. You could have thought of it as a rather cute title but it’s since taken on all sorts of ominous overtones because Manson picked it up as an anthem.”

Then there was “Piggies,” a playful Harrison takedown of the bourgeoisie, dining out with forks and knives, that he’d started in 1966 and finished during the White Album sessions with Lennon’s lyrical addition of “What they need’s a damn good whacking.” But it meant something different to Manson. “By that, he meant the black man was going to give the piggies, the establishment, a damned good whacking,” Jakobson told Bugliosi. Susan Atkins would later write word “pig” in Tate’s blood on a door of the Cielo Drive house. The Family also wrote “Death to pigs” in blood on wall of the LaBiancas, whom they killed using forks and knives.

“All that Manson stuff was built around George’s song about pigs and Paul’s song about an English fairground,” Lennon once said. “It has nothing to do with anything, and least of all to do with me.” But the truth is, Manson also parsed Lennon’s two “Revolution” songs on the White Album.

“Revolution 1” is a groove-heavy rocker with some admittedly mixed messages about political revolutions, notably the student uprising in Paris, the Tet Offensive and the global spread of communism from Mao Zedong in China – a fact lost on Manson. Right before the first chorus, Lennon sings, “When you talk about destruction/ Don’t you know that you can count me out … in.” “I put in both [‘out’ and ‘in’] because I was not sure,” Lennon said. “I didn’t want to get killed.” To Manson, that meant that the once-ambivalent Beatles now condoned violent revolution. And Lennon’s lyric, “We’d all love to see the plan,” was, in Manson’s mind, a message that he needed to show them he was capable of being the catalyst. (He seemed to miss the couplet, “But if you want money for people with minds that hate/ All I can tell is brother you have to wait.”)

The Beatles in May 1968. Everett Collection

The most prescient “Revolution” to Manson, however, was “Revolution 9,” Lennon’s eight-plus-minute audial experiment, an avant-garde odyssey built with around 20 sound-effects loops, including samples of Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony and part of the orchestral overdub from “A Day in the Life.” The Beatle worked on the song with his then-girlfriend, Yoko Ono, and Harrison picked the “nine” in the title because of the numerological meaning it had in his life. “‘Revolution 9’ was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens, just like a drawing of a revolution,” Lennon said in Anthology. “It was just abstract, musique concrète, loops, people screaming.” The New York Times called the track one of the double-LP’s “unqualified bummers” and an “aleatory drag.”

For Manson, it was the album’s peak. He thought, according to Jakobson, that “It was the Beatles’ way of telling people what was going to happen; it was their way of making a prophecy; it directly paralleled the Bible’s Revelation 9.” Manson reportedly could hear pigs oinking and a man’s voice saying “rise” deep in the track’s machine-gun fire. In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi wrote that even he was struck by the song: “After having listened to it myself, I could easily believe that if ever there were such a conflict, this was probably very much what it would sound like.” But to him, it was evidence.

The album became a constant soundtrack for the Manson Family, as they parsed the supposed hidden meanings the songs and how they all fit together into the blood-soaked tableau that was Manson’s dubious beatific vision. Watkins claimed that Manson had heard a connection between “Piggies,” “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution 9,” in a chord that was repeated between the songs – notably around the machine gunning in “Revolution 9.” It somehow spoke to Manson.

“Music gives everyone messages,” Manson once said. “How do I have to appear like I’m some kind of maniac because I can hear something the music says? When the music says, ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow,’ I’m still there over the rainbow.”

The White Album became a constant soundtrack for the Manson Family.

When Rolling Stone met with Manson in 1970, the reporters asked him to illustrate just how the messages all fit together. He asked them to pick songs from the White Album, and they chose “Piggies,” “Helter Skelter” and “Blackbird” – and Manson added “Rocky Raccoon” for good measure. On a piece of paper, he wrote each song title as if it were a column header, and he drew a zigzag under “Helter Skelter” and two markings under “Blackbird,” ostensibly to notate bird sounds. “This bottom part is the subconscious,” he said. “At the end of each song there is a little tag piece on it, a couple of notes. Or like in ‘Piggies’ there’s ‘oink, oink, oink.’ Just these couple of sounds. And all these sounds are repeated in ‘Revolution 9.’ Like in ‘Revolution 9,’ all these pieces are fitted together and they predict the violent overthrow of the white man. Like you’ll hear ‘oink, oink,’ and then right after that, machine-gun fire: AK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK!“

Asked if he really thought the Beatles meant revolution, he said, “I think it’s a subconscious thing. I don’t know whether they did or not. But it’s there. It’s an association in the subconscious.”

It was so outlandish that, as Bugliosi put together his case against Manson and the killers, he realized he needed to take an unusual approach with the jury. “Ordinarily, I try to avoid repetitious testimony in a trial, knowing it can antagonize the jury,” he wrote in Helter Skelter. “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.” By the time the jury deliberated, they had two requests: to visit the murder scenes and to be able to listen to the White Album.

On January 25th, 1971, the jury found Manson and three other defendants guilty. That April, a judge had sentenced him and the others to death, though their sentences were commuted to life in prison when California overturned the death penalty in 1972. 

Seven deputies escort Charles Manson from the courtroom after he and three followers were found guilty of seven murders in the Tate-LaBianca slayings. Bettmann/Getty

In subsequent years, “Helter Skelter” – a scrappy deep cut about a slide that might have been otherwise ignored in the Beatles catalogue – has improbably become one of the Fab Four’s most frequently covered songs. “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles,” Bono said before U2’s Rattle and Hum cover. “We’re stealing it back.” Other artists who have done versions include Aerosmith, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mötley Crüe, Oasis, White Zombie, Soundgarden, Bon Jovi and the Killers, among others, and even the singer of the song that inspired it – Roger Daltrey – did a version. A hip-hop duo named itself Heltah Skeltah, another group called itself Manson Family and the D.O.C. named an album Helter Skelter, and Manson has served as a boogeyman in the lyrics of Ice Cube, Eminem, Lil Wayne, Big Pun and Death Grips, among others. “Helter Skelter” has also served as the title of a video game, a manga book and the titles of several television shows.

Perhaps most surprising, though, is that McCartney began performing the song in 2004 for the first time ever. It has since become a consistent set-list staple, one that he performed at his two Desert Trip concerts last year. One of McCartney’s live recordings of the song was even won a Grammy. (Incidentally, it wasn’t the first time the song was nominated for a Grammy: the Bobs’ a cappella recording of the tune got a nod in 1984.)

“Bob Dylan thought that the line in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was, ‘I get high, I get high, I get high,'” McCartney said in Anthology, reflecting on “Helter Skelter.” “So there had ben some funny little misinterpretations, but they were all harmless and just a bit of a laugh. … But after all those little interpretations there was finally this horrific interpretation of it all. It all went wrong at that point, but it was nothing to do with us. What can you do?”

“Helter Skelter” would probably have become a deep cut had it not been for the Manson Family association. 

“It stopped everyone in their tracks, because suddenly all this violence came out in the midst of all this love and peace and psychedelia,” Starr said. “It was pretty miserable, actually, and everyone in L.A. felt, ‘Oh, God, it can happen to anybody.’ Thank God they caught the bugger.”

“Another thing I found offensive was that Manson suddenly portrayed the long hair, beard and moustache kind of image, as well as that of a murderer,” Harrison said. “Up until then, the long hair and the beard were more to do with not having your hair cut and having a shave – a case of just being a scruff or something.”

“I don’t know what I thought when it happened,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. “A lot of the things he says are true: he is a child of the state, made by us, and he took their children it when nobody else would. Of course, he’s cracked all right.”

And what of “Piggies” and “Helter Skelter”? “He’s barmy, like any other Beatle-kind of fan who reads mysticism into it,” Lennon said. “We used to have a laugh about this, that or the other, in a light-hearted way, and some intellectual would read us, some symbolic youth generation wants to see something in it. We also took seriously some parts of the role, but I don’t know what ‘Helter Skelter’ has to do with knifing somebody. I’ve never listened to the words, properly, it was just a noise.”

Watch below: He’s nearly 80 and his Family is smaller, but darkness still surrounds America’s most notorious criminal. 

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