Aging Charles Manson: Reflections

Today's Los Angeles Times has published a new photograph of Charles Manson. It turns out that officials at Corcoran State Prison have released Manson's picture, which is an updated inmate photo used at the facility.

The full Story is here, including this passage:

This August marks the 40th anniversary of the Manson killings, which stunned the nation and effectively marked the end of the counter-culture, "flower power" era of the 1960s.

Manson and other members of his so-called family were convicted of killing actress Sharon Tate and six other people during a bloody rampage in the Los Angeles area during two August nights in 1969. Prosecutors said that Manson and his followers were trying to incite a race war that he believed was prophesied in the Beatles' song "Helter Skelter."

As a kid, my only knowledge of the murders came from skimming my parents' copy of Vincent Bugliosi's, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. But when I became a skatepunk around 1980 or so, I was always going to gigs up in Hollywood. Black Flag, the seminal L.A. punk rock outfit was the rage, and Raymond Pettibone, the brother of Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, published a series of anti-establishment concert flyers that often featured images of the Manson family. I have a copy of the one above, which used to trip me out, with its captions, "Charlie, you better be good. It wasn't easy getting in here you know," and "creepy crawl the Whisky," for the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulvard.

The flyer for Black Flag's Baces Hall gig on October 24 (1980?) is here. This concert is famous for the "riot" that broke out there (see Punk 365). I use "scare" quotes because no one was actuallly rioting inside the concert. I don't know what happened outside, but the LAPD came into the hall with full battle gear and mowed down the punks with truncheons. My buddies and I booked it out the side door, and the cops had sealed off the street with barricades. I was driving and as I started to get away a couple of skinheads screamed for help and we opened the door to let them in. The car was rolling as this happened, so it all seemed pretty surreal at the time.

Anyways, I was about 19 or 20 at the time. We were up in Hollywood a couple of times a week for concerts. The Starwood on Santa Monica Boulevard had punk night every Tuesday and Wednesday night. Rodney Bingenheimer was the DJ. Click here for the concert flyer announcing shows for Black Flag with Middle Class, Social Distortion, and the Adolescents.

Click here for a compilation of Pettibone's Black Flag concert flyers.

In any case, readers now know more about me, and the things I did when I was a punk-rocking skateboarder! I came of age in the 1970s, and the era of stadium concert-rock was giving way to the new punk grooves from New York, London, and Los Angeles (about tens years after Ann Althouse's flower days, although check out Robert Stacy McCain for some ramblin' on the more common doings of "my generation"). When I see kids wearing all the punk paraphernalia nowadays it just reminds me of all the good times I had back in the day. I have a large bank-slalom competition photo of me on the wall in my office, and kids sometimes come to office hours and say, "Cool, who's that?" Then they trip out when I say, "Oh, that's me, about thirty years ago."

One of these days I'll upload and blog the skateboarding photos that I have on file. But that's for another day.