Creepy Crawling by Jeffrey Melnick

Author:Jeffrey Melnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628728941
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2018-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

A Legion of Charlies

It was in the Los Angeles Free Press that the countercultural press wrestled with the “truth” about Charles Manson and his Family with the most sustained attention. Even before Ed Sanders began his long series of articles about the case, the Freep was giving serious attention to the Tate-LaBianca murders and the arrests of Manson and his followers. The Free Press, as cultural historian Rachel Rubin has recently explained, debuted in 1964 as a newsletter at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. By the end of the decade it was an influential switchboard for the counterculture—connecting up numerous political and cultural constituencies.1 During December of 1970, the Free Press began regularly to resist the anti-hippie narratives developing in the wake of the early December “break” in the case. In the next few months, with no clear editorial stance (other than mistrust of official and semi-official narratives about the case) the Freep gave over a huge amount of space to Manson: news articles, letters, advertisements for his music, poetry and prose by the accused himself, editorials, sketches, and a full printing of Manson’s statement to the court during his trial, all found a home in the pages of the Freep. The main burden the Free Press attempted to carry, at least in the first couple of months after Manson and other Family members were captured, was to stake out a legible anti-anti-hippie position.

Lawrence Lipton, born in 1898, led the charge. In his regular column “Radio Free America” he angrily opposed the anti-counterculture dogpile that had greeted Manson’s apprehension. Lipton responded to local newscaster Piers Anderton’s claim that the murders were somehow a “natural” outgrowth of hippie life by asking “What have you discovered in the music of Bob Dylan, Donovan, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane or the Rolling Stones that leads inevitably to stabbing people to death?”2 (Leaving off the Stones would have made for a more powerful case, given the recent tragedy at Altamont, of course.) Two of the most interesting early entries in the Freep’s Manson coverage actually came with letters sent in by Marvin Garson, a former student activist at Berkeley, and then a Bay Area radical and publisher of the important underground paper the San Francisco Express-Times (which folded early in 1969). Garson, while not promoting full-blown conspiracy theories, did contend that the district attorney must have been overjoyed to stumble upon Susan Atkins—the “freakout hippie girl”—who could not stop telling tales in jail. In a subsequent issue Garson wrote again to enjoin the editors of the Free Press to “assume Manson is innocent, just as a mental exercise. It might lead you to some interesting pieces.”3 (This letter appeared very close on the page to an advertisement asking for information about a runaway thirteen-year-old girl; such notices appeared frequently in the pages of the Free Press and may well have contributed to the sense that Manson had been exploiting a very real and intractable social problem.) Lipton, from his beat perch at Venice Beach, was more

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