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Did The Beatles Ever Respond to Charles Manson Using Helter Skelter? "So Sleazy"
Peacock's Making Manson takes a deep dive into Charles Manson's, life including his tie to The Beatles.
Songs are open to interpretation, but that can go fatally awry.
Charles Manson, the infamous cult leader behind a grisly massacre in 1969, allegedly believed “Helter Skelter,” a song by The Beatles, a pop group he idolized, was secretly summoning him to create violent chaos. (In reality, the tune was about a fairground amusement.) But Manson’s misguided take on the single off the White Album inspired him and his followers known as the Manson Family to a brutal murder spree in California, Newsweek reported.
Making Manson, a gripping three-part docuseries streaming November 19 on Peacock, provides new revelations about the infamous criminal through recorded jailhouse conversations and interviews with former Family members.
Before the premiere, learn more about The Beatles' link to Manson’s true-crime saga, a connection Paul McCartney himself has called “horrific.”
Manson Family murders and The Beatles
In August 1969, members of the Manson Family went to actress Sharon Tate’s Hollywood Hills home, where they fatally stabbed the pregnant actress and hung her.
Hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, producer Wojciech Frykowski, and teenaged visitor Steven Parent were also brutally stabbed or shot.
Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were killed the following night. “Healter Skelter,” a misspelled reference to the Beatles song, was scrawled in blood on the refrigerator, as previously reported by Oxygen.
By this time, Manson had been using the phrase "Helter Skelter" to refer to what he described as an oncoming race war, per the Newsweek report.
Even at his trial, Manson, who died in prison in 2017, invoked The Beatles' tie to the gruesome spree, according to history.com.
“It’s the Beatles, the music they’re putting out. These kids listen to this music and pick up the message. It’s subliminal … 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," he said.
What did The Beatles say about Charles Manson using “Helter Skelter”?
A helter skelter is an amusement park ride with a slide built in a spiral around a high tower. “When I get to the bottom, I go back to the top of the slide,” are the words of the first verse.
“I was using the symbol of a helter skelter as a ride from the top to the bottom — the rise and fall of the Roman Empire,” McCartney said in his 1997 biography, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now.
Manson “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," McCartney said in the 2000 book The Beatles Anthology, per Newsweek.
In the same book, McCartney described Manson’s interpretation of “Helter Skelter” as “horrific,” Rolling Stone reported.
George Harrison echoed that sentiment in The Beatles Anthology. “It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson," he said.
John Lennon has dismissed dark implications of a song “about an English fairground. It has nothing to do with anything," according to the Rolling Stone report, while Ringo Starr commented on the Manson murders’ cultural impact.
“It stopped everyone in their tracks because suddenly all this violence came out in the midst of all this love and peace and psychedelia,” said Starr. “It was pretty miserable, actually.”
Making Manson premieres Nov. 19 on Peacock.
