MANSON & MORRISON: Strange Days of 1969

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:03]Two men.

[00:00:05]One died in 2017.

[00:00:07]One died in 1971, probably.

[00:00:10]One sold out arenas. One only dreamed of playing them.

[00:00:15]One is on your t-shirt.

[00:00:18]Hell, maybe the other is on your t-shirt.

[00:00:21]Jim Morrison. Charles Manson.

[00:00:24]We keep them in separate rooms in our cultural memory, but maybe they exist in the same room.

[00:00:36]Los Angeles in the 1960s was receiving pilgrims.

[00:00:41]They came from everywhere, from small towns and broken homes and middle-class lives that felt like slow suffocation.

[00:00:49]They came because the city had made a specific promise.

[00:00:53]That you could arrive as one person and become entirely another.

[00:00:58]That identity was a choice.

[00:01:00]That freedom was real and available and waiting for you in the canyons and on the beaches and on the Sunset Strip where the future was being assembled in real time by people who were largely making it up as they went.

[00:01:16]Morrison came first.

[00:01:17]He arrived in 1964 from Florida, the son of a naval officer, already voraciously well-read of the rebel poet Rimbaud and others who believed the artist's job was not to describe reality, but to detonate it.

[00:01:32]He was writing constantly, carrying notebooks everywhere.

[00:01:36]The lines that would make him famous already existed before the band, before the concerts, before the myth.

[00:01:44]He was beautiful and simultaneously dangerous-looking.

[00:01:48]He signed up for classes at UCLA film school and dropped out a year later.

[00:01:53]The Doors formed just after that.

[00:01:57]Manson in 1967 from Cincinnati, Ohio, but really from everywhere. America sends its discarded people. Reform schools, county jails, federal penitentiaries.

[00:02:10]He had spent more of his life inside institutions than outside them. And those institutions had taught him things no university could.

[00:02:20]How power actually works.

[00:02:22]What humiliation does to a person. And what people who have been told they are worthless will do for someone who tells them they are chosen.

[00:02:31]He was small, genuinely small, under 5'4" in a city that worshipped physical presence.

[00:02:38]But he carried a guitar and an unshakable belief in his own significance that people in that city in that moment found impossible to resist.

[00:02:49]Manson and Morrison.

[00:02:51]Both were outsiders. Both had something to prove.

[00:02:55]And both understood with an animal instinct that most people never fully develop exactly how to make other people need to share their energy.

[00:03:07]The people who followed them, Morrison and Manson, well, really, they were the same people.

[00:03:23]Comparison between two figures of the same cultural era can be made lazily.

[00:03:28]So, let me be precise about this. These are not superficial similarities.

[00:03:33]Both Morrison and Manson were, above everything else, men who understood the weaponized power of language.

[00:03:42]Not language as communication.

[00:03:45]Language as transformation.

[00:03:47]You communicate to inform someone.

[00:03:50]You transform to remake them.

[00:03:53]Both men believed with total conviction that the right words delivered with the right authority could dissolve a person's existing sense of reality and rebuild it according to the speaker's design.

[00:04:07]Morrison called this shamanism. He spoke about the poet as someone who crosses between worlds, between the rational and the irrational, the civilized and the feral.

[00:04:19]He wanted to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

[00:04:23]His performances were not concerts but rituals designed to break something open in the audience and leave them changed.

[00:04:32]The darkness wasn't accidental. The imagery of death, transgression, and apocalypse that ran through everything he wrote was a deliberate construct, a mythology of the self designed to make other people feel that proximity to him was proximity to something beyond ordinary human experience.

[00:04:54]Manson's method was different in delivery and identical in architecture.

[00:04:59]He spoke in a free-associating torrent of imagery, scripture, philosophy, and flattery.

[00:05:06]Because buried inside the apparent chaos was a consistent message.

[00:05:11]You have been lied to your entire life.

[00:05:14]The world that shaped you is the prison.

[00:05:17]I can see you more clearly than anyone has ever seen you, and I am offering you the way out.

[00:05:32]Feel the mechanism of that sentence. It simultaneously diagnoses the listener's condition, positions the speaker as uniquely liberated, and creates an immediate intimate bond.

[00:05:45]A masterpiece of manipulation into 15 words.

[00:05:50]Morrison did the same thing on a larger stage.

[00:06:05]Both men's words carried a promise that following them meant finally being free, being seen, being chosen. And both men's words carried a danger that their followers either didn't recognize or recognized and followed anyway because the promise was more powerful than the warning.

[00:06:25]This is what language does in the hands of people who understand it as an instrument of power.

[00:06:33]It doesn't just describe a reality, it creates one.

[00:06:37]And the reality both men created, Morrison in arenas, Manson in the desert, was one in which the speaker was the center of all things and everyone around him existed in permanent orbit, surrendering more than they kept.

[00:06:52]Both men were consumed by the idea that the world's collapse was not to be feared but celebrated.

[00:06:58]Morrison found this in William Blake and Nietzsche, the doors of perception, the marriage of heaven and hell, the death of God, the intoxicating vertigo of the man who steps outside conventional morality and discovers the sky doesn't fall.

[00:07:16]He performed apocalypse on stage every night.

[00:07:20]Manson found his in the Book of Revelation and the White Album, a little bit of Scientology, a dash of Dale Carnegie's persuasions.

[00:07:29]Together this wild mashup bred and fed a dangerous theory that Manson called Helter Skelter.

[00:07:36]The sources were different, the conclusion was identical. The world deserves to burn. The chosen few will inherit what comes after.

[00:07:45]I am the one who sees most clearly.

[00:07:49]Follow me.

[00:07:56]Both men fancy themselves poets, avenging angels who vomited out wordscapes that could alter reality.

[00:08:04]In both cases, their followers took their poetry far more seriously than the establishment ever did.

[00:08:11]Morrison never wanted to be a rock star.

[00:08:13]He wanted to be recognized as a literary figure, a serious writer in the tradition of the French symbolists and the Beats who used language to crack open consciousness.

[00:08:24]The rock stardom was a vehicle he resented even as he exploited it.

[00:08:30]Manson recorded he had songs, hundreds of them.

[00:08:34]Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys let the family move into his Sunset Boulevard home for months and recorded with Manson.

[00:08:42]Neil Young met Manson, heard him play, and was reportedly impressed enough to recommend him to Reprise Records.

[00:08:50]Young has spoken about this in interviews with a kind of bemused discomfort.

[00:08:56]He described Manson as having something genuinely unusual as a performer.

[00:09:02]This is not mythology. Young has confirmed it himself.

[00:09:06]But perhaps the most significant musical connection Manson made was with Terry Melcher, Doris Day's son, producer of the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders, and one of the most powerful young men in the Los Angeles music world.

[00:09:20]Melcher dated model actress Candice Bergen and together they lived at a charming house on Cielo Drive that overlooked the entire Los Angeles basin.

[00:09:31]Melcher liked the gals around Manson, some perhaps a little too much, and he enjoyed the parties at Wilson's place.

[00:09:39]But he was always too busy to listen to Manson perform.

[00:09:43]Charles Manson, Jim Morrison, both ultimately embody what we think of when we talk about the late 1960s.

[00:09:51]And both men died symbolically in 1969.

[00:09:56]Morrison's end came in Miami in March, arrested for indecent exposure after a concert that crossed whatever line even his most devoted audience would follow him across.

[00:10:07]He never recovered the cultural authority he'd had.

[00:10:10]He spent months in legal limbo, eventually retreating to Paris, rejecting the rock star persona in hopes of a true literary career.

[00:10:19]He died four months later without any further writing completed.

[00:10:24]Manson's end also came in 1969, in August. Not his own death, but the deaths he instigated. Nine people in all. And with those murders, something larger died. The belief that the dissolution of all authority leads somewhere worth going.

[00:10:41]The canyons emptied out.

[00:10:43]The experiment was declared over.

[00:10:45]Both endings were self-inflicted.

[00:10:48]Both were the logical conclusion of world views built with no mechanism for stopping once the end had been reached.

[00:11:05]Morrison died at 27.

[00:11:07]And within months had been transformed into something he never quite was.

[00:11:12]The pure romantic martyr.

[00:11:14]The beautiful poet shaman consumed by his own flame.

[00:11:19]The complicated, often ugly, often genuinely cruel reality of who he actually was got quietly filed away.

[00:11:27]Manson became a different kind of myth.

[00:11:29]The all-powerful evil. The hypnotic mastermind.

[00:11:33]Man who could look into your eyes and dissolve your will.

[00:11:37]The terrifying genius of pure darkness.

[00:11:40]Both myths are wrong.

[00:11:42]Morrison was not a pure flame. He was a deeply manipulative, often abusive man who wielded his charisma like a weapon and left considerable damage in his wake.

[00:11:54]Manson was not a hypnotic superman.

[00:11:57]He was a damaged, desperate cunning man who found a population of vulnerable people at a specific moment when the usual social structures had dissolved and he exploited that with a ruthless efficiency.

[00:12:11]But the myths serve us. The lizard king and the scorpion.

[00:12:16]They let us keep these men at a comfortable distance as archetypes, as symbols, as cautionary tales, and away from each other. The reality is more disturbing because it's more human and because they are probably closer to them than it appears.

[00:12:35]With all these commonalities between the two men sharing the same time and place you may have wondered did Jim Morrison and Charles Manson ever meet?

[00:12:50]There is a building in Venice Beach.

[00:12:54]At some point in the late 1960s this rooftop was a place where their two worlds existed in closer proximity than either of them knew.

[00:13:07]Jim Morrison knew this roof.

[00:13:10]He was drawn to it as he was drawn to all edges.

[00:13:14]Geographical ones, psychological ones moral ones.

[00:13:20]He also knew two young women who lived in this building and for a time in the '60s he lived up on that roof.

[00:13:30]Below that same roof was the clubhouse of the Straight Satans, an outlaw motorcycle club whose treasurer, Danny De Carlo, had recently taken up residence at a ranch in Chatsworth with a group of people gathered around a small, charismatic man with a guitar and a theory about the end of the world.

[00:13:55]If the haze of Los Angeles ever cleared enough, if those two men, Charles Milles Manson, James Douglas Morrison, had turned and looked at each other across that rooftop in that city during the summer that was about to end everything, what might they have seen?

[00:14:24]I think they would have recognized each other immediately.

[00:14:28]I think each man would have seen a devil.

[00:14:32]And I think each man would have seen his own reflection in the other.