Song 177: “Never Learn Not to Love” by the Beach Boys, Part Two — “Is it True What They Say About Dixie?”

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Higley Song 177 Never Learn Not to Love by The Beach Boys Part 2 Is It True What They Say About Dixie Before we begin, a quick note. This episode and the others in this series on Never Learn Not to Love all deal with severely distressing topics, more than is normal for this podcast. As a whole, the whole mini-series will be dealing with murder, drug abuse, mental illness, incarceration, racism and white supremacy, grooming, sexual violence, and many more distressing concepts. In the case of this episode and the next, we will in particular be looking at racialized abuse of incarcerated people, and there will be some discussion of gun violence. In 1969, The Beach Boys released their album, 2020. It was so titled because, depending on how you counted, it was their 20th album in six and a half years. It was actually their 15th studio album in that time, but it also released one live album, three best ofs, and an album called Stacker Tracks containing instrumental backing tracks, a sort of photo karaoke release. It would be their last for capital records for more than 20 years. It was one of the group's best and most stylistically diverse albums. It also says something about them, about the toxic culture in the California music industry at the time, and about the end of the 60s as a whole, that it is an album featuring creative contributions from four people convicted of murder, three of whom would go on to commit their murders after the album was released. One of those is Phil Spector, who co-wrote I Can Hear Music, which the group covered on the album. We've already looked at Spector a great deal in this podcast and effectively ended his story, though he will be turning up in a handful of future stories. A second is session drummer Jim Gordon. We will talk about him and his crimes in a future episode, so let's leave him aside for now. And a third is Lead Belly. We have of course seen Lead Belly turn up in several previous episodes, as the credited writer of Rock Island Line for example in the episode on Lonnie Donoghan, but we've never looked at him in depth. So let's look at Lead Belly. That was how this episode was meant to start. There's a reason this episode has taken a while to finish, longer than I normally take. I wrote that introduction a few weeks back, I changed one word of it later, changing four murderers to four people convicted of murder, for reasons that will become clear. And then had a long section planned and mostly written, which would tell the standard story of Lead Belly. A longer version of the shorter version I gave in, for example the Rock Island Line episode, and which turns up in almost every book on him, or on blues or folk music history. That story goes, basically, Hugh D. Ledbetter, who went by the nickname Lead Belly, was a violent man who spent much of his life incarcerated. He was arrested first for attempted murder, downgraded to possession of a deadly weapon, and spent time in prison for that. He then went on to get arrested and convicted for a murder he committed, apparently the overall woman, but only spent seven years of a 30 year sentence in prison. He played a song to the governor of Texas begging for his freedom, and rather astonishingly he ended up persuading the governor, who enjoyed his music so much he pardoned him. But his time out of prison didn't last very long, and soon he ended up in prison for attempted murder in Louisiana, and remained there until John Lomax came along collecting folk songs. He was amazed at Lead Belly's talent and took him under his wing. In particular, Lomax took a recording of Lead Belly singing another song asking for a pardon, this time to the governor of Louisiana, and once again, for a second time, Lead Belly managed to get himself let out of jail by singing for his release. Lomax then got Lead Belly his career and made him into a star in his 40s, after decades in prison. I'd written a whole long thing about that which was going to be the first half of this episode, and I was going to do a whole clever thing looking at parallels and differences between Lead Belly and Charles Manson, a figure with a lot of surface similarities, for one who went in a very different direction right at the end. But there's one problem with that, literally the day before I was going to record this episode. I was looking online for an MP3 copy of a song I wanted to use a clip of in the episode. I didn't find the song I wanted, but I did find a book titled Bring Judgment Day, Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies by Sheila Coven Bernard, which had only been published a few months ago, after I'd already looked for and bought most of the books I was intending to use in this episode. And which apparently came out rather under the radar due to problems with the publisher. But the title obviously resonated with what I'd set up in the last episode, so I thought I'd do my due diligence. I could buy the book, give it a read and see what new extra elements could be included in the story I was telling. Read it the next day, do an edit pass, stick in a couple of extra examples or anecdotes or whatever, and maybe fix a couple of mistakes. It turned out that I needed to rework the entire episode. Bernard's book is one of that small number of books where I have to stress what an episode owes to a single source, because Bernard is the only biographer of Hugh Lelep better to have gone back to the primary sources and looked at them with some awareness of how Jim Crow affected the justice system in the early 20th century, and of the deep racism of much of what was written about him in his lifetime. It's one of the best books on music I've read in years, and I urge anyone who finds this episode at all interesting to get yourself a copy. Bernard has demolished the whole narrative we normally understand of Lelep better, and one of the things she seems to have shown is that he didn't actually like being called Lelep belly, and so from this point I won't. So let's start again. We have of course seen Hugh Lelep better turn up in several previous episodes, as the credited writer of Rock Island Line for example in the episode on Lonnie Donoghan, but we've never looked at him in depth. So let's look at Hugh Lelep better. Hugh Lelep better. I've heard his forename pronounced a couple of different ways, including in recordings of the man himself, but that seems to be the one that was used most commonly by his friends. Was born in either 1888 or 1889. Reports vary and documentation is scarce. In Louisiana, near the Texas border, two parents who had been born into slavery, but were slowly dragging themselves up into something close to, if not wealth, at least a kind of prosperity. They were very hardworking sharecropping farmers who, by Hugh Lelep's mid teens, had managed to actually buy themselves their own land, just on the other side of the Texas border, rather than having to work on other people's land. By the standards of the lives of most of my listeners, they were living in grinding poverty doing backbreaking labor, but for black people in the rural south at the turn of the 20th century, they were relatively well off, and an example of the American dream as it's meant to work. If you work hard and live right, even someone who was born into slavery can make something of themselves and ensure a better life for their kids. Despite the reputation he had later for being violent and aggressive, Hugh D was uniformly described as a very quiet, well behaved child. A childhood friend and teenage girlfriend, and mother of his first two children, Margaret Coleman, wrote a description of him as a kid in the 1930s, saying, Hugh D was a boy from his childhood days quiet and respectful. His record proved he was a quiet boy, never meddled, quarrelled or argued with anyone. He was swift, quick, very apt with his books. He was plain spoken. Something about Hugh D's life was quite different from other children's. He never played like the others. He talked with the things he wanted to do when he became a man. And he never tried to interfere with anyone unless they would give him a cause, then he would try to defend himself. Through all of his troubles he has always been a boy to regain the same friendship with his enemies. He was also something of a child prodigy when it came to music. His whole family were musical. His mother led the singing in her church choir, and two of his paternal uncles were songsters. The term that was used at the time for men who would sing and accompany themselves on the banjo or mandolin or other portable instruments to entertain at parties. And the family encouraged Hugh D to pursue his musical ambitions. The right anecdotes of him whittling himself a fife from a stick when he was two years old and teaching himself to play tunes on it. He also taught himself harmonica, accordion and mandolin as a small child. His family would later talk about him sitting in a rocking chair playing the accordion when he was still so young that his feet wouldn't touch the floor when he was in the chair. According to Coleman, the very first night he had an instrument. Bernard interprets Coleman as saying it was the first night he had a guitar, but the wording is ambiguous and it might also be the first night he had an accordion. He taught himself to play a song called The Rain No Cornbread Here. I haven't been able to find a recording of a song by that title by anyone, but it might be related to or the same song as. A song known as Cornbread Ruff or Jawbone, which we know led better use to play on his accordion before he got a guitar, and which he recorded in the 40s. It could also be a song called Green Corn, which another biography, possibly interpreting the same anecdote differently, says he learned early on on the guitar after having learned the Cornbread song Whatever It Was on Accordion. Led better got his first guitar some time around 1903 or 1904, a year or two after he left school and around the time his parents made the last payment on their land. His cousin Edmund, who was a few months younger than him, already played an apartment that gave him a handful of lessons but said later, he was a quick learner, he was the only person I knew who could just pick up an instrument and play it like he had lessons. He started playing in string bands with mandolin players, banjo players and violinists, and also started performing at suki jumps, local parties, for fifty cents a night as a solo performer. He was a sophisticated modern performer, as well as playing guitar and singing he would also dance, doing a new form of dancing which many in his audience had never seen before, tap dancing. It's likely that what he was actually doing would now be called soft shoe dancing, which is tap dancing in normal shoes, as this was before tap shoes became commonplace, and this was just about the time that Bill Bojangles Robinson, the first star of tap dance, was just starting out in his career, so this really was incredibly modern. As well as this he would play the organ in his local church, and would also lead the congregation in singing, lining out, shouting out the next line so people knew what to sing, and he loved to play for children as well. In all these he learned hundreds of songs, dance songs, church songs, children's songs, field hollers, and he turned out to have an astonishing memory not only for songs but for different variants of songs, being able to talk later in life about the ways people in one town would sing a folk song, and how it differed from another town. When he was sixteen he moved to Shreveport, the nearest big town, for a while, and started playing at the Bottles on Fannin Street, the local red light district. But he couldn't make much of a living on Fannin Street, many of the better Bottles had the latest technical innovation, player pianos that you could put a coin in to get them to play, and so they didn't need musicians anymore. And he soon returned home where he married his first wife, and tried settling down and working as a cotton picker, though he and his wife would travel to Dallas regularly to try to see if he could make money as a musician there. Eventually they moved to Dallas, and he spent several years travelling around that part of Texas, often with a younger friend, Blyon Lemon Jefferson. I said, yeah, well, we'll make a park all my door. I said, yeah, well, they will make a park all my door. I ain't got too many magic but I got two. Jefferson would play slide guitar using a knife, while Ledbetter would play second guitar, accordion, or mandolin. Ledbetter seems to have spent a lot of time with Jefferson, and a fair bit of time with Bessie Smith. He was remembered by Esther Mae Scott, one of the last surviving classic blues singers of the pre-World War I era, as having been the person who introduced her to Smith in 1914, for example. Incidentally, Scott's one album, recorded after her rediscovery in the 1970s, shows the way that purist ideas of what counts as authentic blues bear little relationship to reality. People we think of as blues singers at the turn of the last century always incorporated pop music into their performances. In 1915, when he was 26, Hudi, who was now based near Dallas, visited his parents in Harrison County for an important celebration. It was the 50th anniversary of Juneteenth, the 19th of June 1865. The day a Union soldier read the Emancipation Proclamation to the Black people of Galveston, Texas, informing them that they'd been freed. Supposedly the final people in the former Confederate states to hear the good news. For those who are not aware of Black American history for whatever reason, this is an important celebration for Black Americans, particularly in Texas, and was finally made a national holiday three years ago by the Biden administration. So you can imagine how important this 50th anniversary was to Ledbetter's parents, who had been born into slavery. It was then that everything changed for Hudi Ledbetter, and he went from being a promising young entertainer, the kind of person who might have had the same success and stardom as young friend Blandham and Jefferson, or his acquaintance Bessie Smith would have a decade later, to getting the reputation that would haunt him the rest of his life. Leaving aside the version of the stories of Ledbetter's convictions that are told later, which we will look at next episode, here are some facts that are relevant to what follows. The area around Ledbetter's parents' home was rapidly growing economically, or you'll have been discovered nearby. And as a result there were massive amounts of new roads being built around Harrison County, Texas, where the Ledbetters lived, to make it easier to get drilling equipment and workers to these rural areas. The Ledbetter's farmland was close enough to the rural areas that they had sold some speculation rights, for a trifling amount, but they would be in line for a big payout if those speculators found anything. Then there's the fact that when slavery was abolished in the US, an exception was made, one that's still enforced today, for people sentenced to prison time. It's okay to force them into labour, for example, to build roads. The Sheriff Robert Hope had a day job as an overseer for the new road building project, which needed a constant stream of young male labourers, preferably black men working for no money. Then there's the fact that the District Court Judge for Harrison County, Henry T. Littleton, was the president of the Caddo Clinton Oil and Gas Company, and had been given a new car, big deal in the 1910s, by the Good Roads Advocates of Marshall for his work on getting new roads built. He then also co-owned a private club, whites only of course, the secretary of which was one William Henderson Lane, an attorney, and also a special judge in the county court. And finally there's the pattern we've talked about in the episode on Crossroads, where the vast majority of lynchings of black men for alleged crimes tended to be of black men who owned something, usually land. The powerful white men wanted, and wouldn't give it up to the white men. What tended to happen was that the black man would be accused of some awful crime, the people in the area would be roused to fury, the man would be murdered horribly. We can, I think, be glad that that did not happen to Hughie Ledbetter of his father. We don't know quite what did happen. We know that Hughie did own a gun, given to him by his father for protection, and we know that it was technically illegal to carry a pistol in much of Texas, though we also know that that law was enforced very selectively. Three days before Juneteenth, Hughie Ledbetter was arrested for attempted murder by Deputy Sheriff Robert Hope. We don't know exactly what happened. There were minimal newspaper reports at the time, but Hope claimed that Ledbetter had shot a man and had confessed to the crime. The victim was able to appear in court a couple of days after the alleged incident, so if he was shot at all it was clearly not a very serious wound, which is not to make light of shooting, but absent any other evidence we only have limited information suggesting that the river was a shooting at all. Perhaps there was. Perhaps Hughie Ledbetter, a man uniformly described by those who knew him as quiet and gentle and unassuming, did, without provocation, without it being in self-defense, just decided to murder his parents' neighbour, take a shot at him, and not finish the job. Perhaps. Or perhaps it was something else. What we do know is that after the arrest, Hughie's parents hired him a lawyer. The legal firm they hired to defend Hughie was Lane and Lane, the junior partner of which was William Henderson Lane, who was the treasurer of the private club that Henry T. Littleton, the judge in Hughie's case, owned. The fee for Lane and Lane's legal services was 30 acres of their land, around half of what they owned. Hughie's father signed the contract with the lawyers, his mother just put an X there as she couldn't read or write. The witness who countersigned Hughie's father's signature was R. L. Cypert, who was the foreman of the grand jury who would decide if Hughie's case would go to trial. A year later, the Ledbetters tried to get their land back. The best guess anyone can find for what happened, given subsequent court filings, is that they had been lied to about what they were signing. They seem to have believed that they were posting their land as security against the legal fees, and that once they paid them they'd get their land back, for what they'd actually signed gave the Lane's the title to their land. The Lane's magnanimously agreed to sell the land back to the Ledbetters, for the low low price of a little under twice what they'd originally paid for it 12 years earlier. What? They didn't have that much money? Well, that was okay. The Lane's would lend it to them. At interest of course. And then when three years later the older Lane died, the younger Lane, the one who was the treasurer of the judge's white's only club, sued the Ledbetters to get the remainder of the loan, about 83% of it plus interest in court costs, back in one lump sum. And if they couldn't pay that off at once, to call in the land that it had been secured on, well, of course, keeping the money the Ledbetters had already paid. Once the Ledbetters lost that judgement, the land was then sold off, to Robert Hope and Charles Carney his father-in-law. Robert Hope, you may remember, had been the deputy sheriff who arrested Houdy, and had then run the chain gangs of enslaved to build the roads. Hope by this point had gone up in the world. He now managed an oil company. Given that level of corruption, it seems to me almost irrelevant if Ledbetter actually did shoot his neighbour, as was alleged. And I certainly don't see any reason to believe that Robert Hope was telling the truth when he said Ledbetter had confessed. Certainly despite this alleged confession, and despite Ledbetter's victim being alive and well enough to testify, Ledbetter was never actually convicted of the crime he was charged with. The trial was scheduled four times, but seems never to have been actually held. Reading between the lines, possibly incorrectly. It looks like maybe the witnesses who were being called were unwilling to testify, or were maybe telling a story that was different from the one the authorities wanted. But that's my inference, and I may be reading too much into things, but the charges were eventually dropped. But by that time, the authorities had still managed to imprison Houdi Ledbetter. He was arrested again on the separate charge of possession of a gun. This arrest took place while he was still awaiting trial for the attempted murder charge, and because that was a lesser charge, it could be tried in a court with only six jurors. Indeed, he was arrested on two separate charges of carrying a pistol, one of which he was found not guilty of even by a handpicked jury of six white men. Thomas Sheila Coen Bernard, whose book Bring Judgment Day again is my major source for this part of this episode, and which I can't praise highly enough, says, What is clear is that Harrison County officials seem determined to convict him for something, but for the other charge he was given a sentence of a month of tarred labour, and not only that, he was ordered to pay off the costs of the arrest and trial, by working at hard labour. The costs amounted to $73.50, and that would be knocked down by 50 cents per day, working on building the new roads that so many people involved in his incarceration were invested in. Sometime after four months into this one month sentence, Ledbetter managed to escape from this involuntary servitude, which must have seemed like it was going to last forever, and he and his wife moved a couple of counties away, and he changed his name to Walter Boyd. Two years later though, he was arrested again, this time for an actual murder. The circumstances around this one are less well documented, and again we don't have the details of the trial, other than a couple of very brief reports in local newspapers and some brief notes of the one day trial. But what seems to have happened is that Ledbetter and three other men, one of them a distant relative, Will Stafford, who was also married to Ledbetter's cousin, were out gambling and got into some sort of argument. According to Ledbetter, one of the other two men grabbed Stafford's own gun and shot her in the head with it. According to the prosecution, Ledbetter shot Stafford with Ledbetter's gun. Obviously there was no forensic evidence to show which of these was right, and either is plausible. Ledbetter was convicted, but his lawyers, working pro bono it seems, and actually trying to defend him, filed motions for another trial. It's certainly not impossible that Ledbetter was guilty of the murder, we don't know who was telling the truth with no physical evidence, but there certainly seems to have been more than a little doubt among people around the case about how guilty Ledbetter was. According to Bernard, at least one member of Stafford's family was convinced, Hugh didn't kill Will, some other men did, while Ledbetter's lawyer's son later told a journalist that his father had been utterly convinced that Ledbetter was innocent and had been set up. Not conclusive evidence of innocence by any means, but nor is there any real evidence of his guilt either. In a weird coincidence, and I do mean that, as unless I'm missing something there's no way this could be more than that, the district attorney prosecuting Ledbetter in this trial was the nephew of Charles Carney, the man who two years later would buy the land that the Ledbetters had had to sell to pay for their son's previous lawyers. Ledbetter's lawyers managed to get a three month period to put together a case for a retrial, during which Ledbetter was just held in a local jail rather than sent to a more secure prison, and during that time he and his cellmates managed to escape. Two of them, which two, and with or without the knowledge of the other three prisoners in the cell we don't know for sure, other than that the ring leader seems to have been a man named James Mosley, knocked the jailer down and stole his gun when he came in with the breakfast tray, and four of the five people in the cell ran out. Unfortunately, when they were caught a couple of hours later, Mosley was shot dead by police shortly after the escape, they were all charged with and convicted of the attempted murder of the jailer, which seems possibly not the best charge for knocking someone down, especially since they stole his gun. If they'd wanted to kill him they would presumably have used that. And this conviction made the judges turn down the request his lawyers had put him through a retrial. After all, he was clearly a convicted attempted murderer, so what were the chances of him not actually being a real murderer? Open and short case! He was sentenced to a total of 30 years in prison with a minimum tariff of 7 years for the two crimes. Let better served his time in one of the worst prison systems in the world, the Texas prison farms, which were notorious for their brutality. He was serving on farms which had been established in slavery and had smoothly switched over to using convicts as the slaves, doing the same work in similar conditions. But in 1921, three years after his conviction, a new governor of Texas was brought in, Pat Neff. Neff was a progressive and a reformer, but neither of those things meant quite what they might seem to mean today. He was a former prosecutor with a record of getting an astonishing number of convictions, but he was strongly opposed to pardoning convicted criminals and ended up pardoning only a fraction of those his predecessors did. The main criticism that was made of him in his time in office was his refusal to take a strong stand against the Ku Klux Klan. He was though a strongly religious man and of the type that wants to cleanse the world of all evils, whether those are evils committed by individuals or societal evils like filth and squalor and disease. He wanted to be as a later political slogan would have it, tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. And so when reports came in that Texas prisons were filthy and unsanitary and essentially places of degrading evil torture, he allowed an organization, the Texas Committee on Prisons and Prison Labour, to investigate. This organization was mostly made up of former suffragettes, who had now turned their mind to further reforms having won the vote for white women, and they investigated the prison system over a period of three years, finding that 89% of the prisoners were diseased, two thirds were mentally ill, and that what was needed was a prison system new from start to finish. The committee were given a lot of access to the prisons, and sometimes they brought the governor himself along on their inspections. This would be a big event, and entertainment would be put on for him, including prisoners performing music for him. Led better than a band of other musicians were told to play country songs for the governor and the rest of the delegation, and Neff was impressed not only by Led better's musicianship but by his dress. He was always so and he was very scrupulous about his appearance and dressed as neatly as he could, and he'd had his prison uniform laundered starched and ironed to make a good impression. And then Led better played a particular song. That was a song that he had written specifically aimed at Neff, inspired by Matthew 614. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you, and asking him for a pardon. Neff and the committee then interviewed Led better about prison conditions and his crime, and Led better impressed them. Though in his brief mention of this in his autobiography, Neff uses some extremely racist terms about the unnamed prisoner, who was not yet famous but we now know to be Led better. Neff visited the prisons several more times, and each time he made a point of seeking out Led better, who would play the same song for him each time, as well as many of the other country songs that Neff loved. And on the last day of Neff's term as governor, he did as Led better had asked and pardoned him. He would have led better walked free six and a half years into his 30 year term with a full pardon. In the meantime his father had died and his wife had left him, but he was legally innocent. He spent the next few years working quietly around Shreveport, playing music and supplementing his income with various jobs working on farms and for royal companies. After five years he had no trouble, but then in early 1930, trouble happened. There are many, many conflicting stories about what landed Led better back in prison. Lots of stories seem to complicate two different incidents, with perhaps some suggestion that one of the incidents caused powerful white men to be annoyed at Led better and thus ensure his conviction. But the actual charge was for stabbing a white man named Dick Ellet. The early reports in newspapers and reports from Led better's acquaintances tell a relatively consistent story. Led better was walking home when he saw a Salvation Army band performing. He stopped to listen to the music and danced along with it. Some of the white people watching objected to a black man dancing to church music and tried to stop him. What happened next is a little unclear. According to the Led better's then girlfriend, who he later married, a drunk white man who had been friendly with Led better since there were children grabbed him to say hello, and other people in the crowd thought they were fighting. It's possible to get something like this from the confused mess that people have treated as Led better's autobiography and which we'll talk about next time, too. Whether because of that, or just because of his dancing, a crowd of white men, some armed with knives, started attacking Led better. Led better pulled out his own pocket knife which he carried as a tool to defend himself. Two people, Led better and Led better sustained minor knife injuries. The white elite was taken to hospital to be treated for his minor wound. The black Led better was taken to jail and charged with attempted murder. Led better nearly didn't make it to trial. A lynch mob was formed and surrounded the jail, but for once were dispersed by the sheriff rather than allowed to murder a black man. During the trial the story subtly changed from what had been reported in the newspapers before the trial. After the trial, the newspapers reported that the testimony had been that Led better had, after people had stopped in dancing, gone home and come back with a knife and stabbed Elit. This seems to me like a fairly clear example of changing the story to show premeditation, so that a black man who was defending himself from an armed mob would be turned into a cold-blooded attempted killer. While awaiting the trial in which he was found guilty, Led better's mother died. He was not allowed to visit her on a deathbed or attend her funeral. He was sentenced to six to ten years at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, and it was there he met the real villain of his story. And speaking of villains... When we left the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson was recording and me recording the song Old Folks at Home, and they just recorded and were about to release a great album, Friends, that didn't even make the top 100 on the album charts. However, at the time they were doing that, they were also working on a track that went in a different direction from the gentle, almost easy listening style that the group had used on Friends. Do it again is a return to the topic of surfing, though not as many claim to the sound of their old surf records, as sonically it's very different from its predecessors. Given the twin topics of the lyrics, surfing, and the group's first attempt at surfing nostalgia, with Mike Love's lyrics talking about reminiscing about surfing days and getting back together and surfing again, it's appropriate that it has its roots in a track that some consider to be the first surf record. Though, as we always say, there's no first anything, and if there was, this wasn't it, and one that had been released on Candix, the same label as the Beach Boys' own first single, Surfing, a few months before they made their debut. That track was Underwater by the Frogmen. That had been brought to Brian's mind the year before when they played a couple of concerts in Hawaii for an Abandoned Assemeda to Live album, with Brian for once performing live for the record. That show had been made up of odd rearrangements of some of their biggest hits in more mellow, organ driven versions, and had included a version of Surfing which they hadn't performed live for years, and possibly thinking of Candix records and the song's similarity to Underwater. Brian played a slight variant on the latter's melody as his organ part. In early 1968, Michael Ovid gone surfing with a friend, and was inspired to make a political return to the subject that had given the group their earliest hits, by which they'd only actually sung about for a very short period of time. The Beach Boys' first surfing record was of course Surfing in November 1961, but by two years later and their fourth album, Little Doos Coop, they totally dropped the topic. Between September 1963 and July 1968 when the new single came out, they'd only recorded one song about surfing, the 1964 album track Don't Back Down, released in July 1964. Indeed this new single would be the only time they would release a song about surfing between 1964 and 1978, but as Bruce Johnston said about it later that year, everyone else was going back to basics so I suppose it was inevitable that we should, though as we've seen the group had actually been slightly ahead of the curve when it came to the trend for going back to one's roots. The basic track for the song was recorded by the Beach Boys themselves, with Alan Carl on guitars, Brian on keyboards and Dennis on drums, with one of Carl or Brian playing the bass. That basic track with a slightly different guide vocal has been released on various gravity's compilations. But it was a few days later and the finishing touch was put on that would turn it into a proper hit record. A horn section was added, and also a second drum track and some additional percussion was put on by session drummer John Gwerin, but the real trick to making it a hit came from the engineer Steve Desper, who had recently started working with the group and would be an essential part of their team both live and in the studio for the next few years. Desper had ordered a couple of tape delay units to thicken the group's live vocal sound by essentially doing live artificial double tracking, and he decided to use these on the drum part, but to put the tape heads very close together so that as he put it, one drum strike was repeated four times about 10 milliseconds apart. The result was a unique drum sound that made the record's intro sound like nothing else That track went top 20 in the US, becoming their last top 20 hit until 1976, and also ended up becoming their second and final UK number one hit. The combination of a nostalgic look to the past with experimental production techniques seemed to provide a way forward for the group. But in the few days between those two studio dates, the group would help produce some demos for a friend of Dennis's. Charles Manson had had an unfortunate, difficult life, and it is hard not to feel some sympathy for him. His mother was a neglectful alcoholic who served Tammy prison during his early childhood and who kept getting arrested for petty crimes. Young Manson quickly fell into the same patterns, but much more so. According to interviews he later gave, which may of course not be accurate, he burned his school down when he was nine. He got sent to multiple reform homes and juvenile correction institutions where he was abused, and from which he kept escaping and committing more crimes. By the time he was 32 he had spent more than half his life in various institutions, graduating to adult prisons as soon as he was old enough, for crimes including car theft, trying to cash forged checks, and pimping. When he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, aged 26, in 1961, he seemingly decided that prison was now just his life, and that he was more comfortable on the inside. But he also began a self-improvement programme of sorts. In particular he started reading self-help books. The books that were in the 60s the equivalent of the kind of books you get in airport and train station bookshops today. The ones that these days get titles like Mindful, Leadership Tips from Marcus Aurelius to Declutter and Detox Your Mind in Just 24 Seconds. He read How to Win Friends and Influence People, the first massive self-help bestseller of this nature, which contains advice like, �The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want. What do you want?� Sigmund Freud said that everything you and I do springs from two motives, the sex urge and the desire to be great. John Dewey, one of America's most profound philosophers, phrased it a bit differently. Dr. Dewey said that the deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important. After that phrase, the desire to be important, it is significant. You are going to hear a lot about it in this book. He also read Games People Play by Eric Byrne, the pop psychology bestseller that teaches a hypothesis that people have different modes of behaviour, which Byrne called the parent, adult and child, and the behaviours of addressed from, for example, my child to your parent, and the problems come when people are operating on different levels. That book in particular influenced one of the songs at Manson, an aspiring songwriter would soon write, �Look at your Game Girl�. And Manson was also hugely influenced by two different sources we�ve talked about in the podcast before. He was a fan of the science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Timeline, a novel initially inspired by Kipling�s Jungle Book, about a boy named Valentine Michael Smith raised on Mars by Martians, who comes to earth and is the leader of a messianic cult that features non-monogamy and blends pagan mystery religions, fundamentalist Christianity and pantheism. Smith is killed at the end and revealed to be an incarnation of the archangel Michael. The book seems to have been at least partly inspired by the Mormon religion, which as a subject Heinlein had a fascination with, though he was not a member of the church. And in turn the book was hugely popular in the counterculture. Stranger in a Strange Land seems to have been one of the major inspirations for David Bowie�s Ziggy Stardust, and was also the inspiration for Triad. The David Crosby song recorded at various times by the birds, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby Stills and Nash. The other major influence on Man�s enduring his time in prison was, coincidentally or not, closely linked with Heinlein. Elrond Hubbard, like Heinlein, was a science fiction writer who had done most of his work for a astounding science fiction magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, the most influential man in science fiction in the mid-20th century, and a man whose bizarre personal ideas about race and parapsychology have shaped huge chunks of the culture to a much greater extent than most realise. Hubbard and Heinlein had known each other and at times had been friends, though there's no truth to the widely circulated rumour that they challenged each other to start a religion with Hubbard winning the bet. Heinlein had, though, introduced Hubbard to Jack Parsons. Parsons was a pioneering rocket scientist. He was a founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech, which later became the basis of NASA's rocketry research. But he was also a devoted occultist, and was the head of the LA branch of the Oro-Templi Orientis, Alistair Crowley's magical organisation, reporting directly to Crowley and providing much of Crowley's income. Hubbard moved in with Parsons, and Parsons taught him Crowley's system, which, behind all its talk of magic, was mostly actually about creating new, different mental states in the practitioner. The two participated in various occult rituals, mostly involving sex and drugs, in an attempt to create a moon child, a magical being that would save the earth, rituals of which Crowley said, Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a moon child. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts. After the moon child ritual failed, Hubbard stole $10,000 of Parsons's money, and ran off with Parsons's teenage wife, marrying her bighamously. During all that time, Hubbard had continued writing science fiction stories for John W. Campbell, and Campbell had been profoundly shocked by the revelation of the atomic bomb. Campbell became convinced that a new form of psychology was needed to change the minds of humanity, to prevent it from destroying itself with this new technology, and Campbell also believed that science fiction fandom and writers, being obviously the most intelligent and scientific people in the world, were the people to develop that. And Hubbard, who knew a mark when he saw one, started a series of experiments with Campbell, involving ideas from Crowley, from Gemelosomantics, and from Hypnosis. Being Campbell developed a new science, they called Dianetics, the name being Campbell's idea, inspired by the new science of cybernetics. The Dianetic experiments mostly consisted of Hubbard putting a pyramid made out of mirrors on a spinning record player, shining a light into it, and making Campbell look at it until he was in an appropriately suggestible state, sometimes with the help of scopolamine and phenobarbital, and then doing hypnotic regression, having the suggestible Campbell remember traumatic events from his past, so he could be cleared of them. Campbell was impressed by this, and wrote to Heinlein saying, I firmly believe this technique can cure cancer. This is, I am certain, the greatest story in the world, far bigger than the atomic bomb, because this is the story of controlling human thought, freeing it for use, and it is human thought that controls atomic energy. It is a story that must be spread though and spread fast. But damn it Bob, right now the key to world sanity is in Ron Hubbard's head, and there isn't even an adequate written record. Campbell and Hubbard co-authored papers on their discovery, which they submitted to the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry, both of which rejected it on the trivial technicality that they had absolutely no evidence for their hypothesis. Instead, the paper was published in the Stounding Science Fiction, under Hubbard's name alone. Campbell was a very collaborative editor, and often effectively co-wrote stories with his authors but gave them full credit, and he clearly decided to do the same thing with his new scientific discovery. A book followed, which Campbell worked on extensively with Hubbard, before the two of them fell out. That book became a mega bestseller, and off the back of it Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology and became its leader. Manson, in prison, converted to Scientology and absorbed Hubbard's book on Dianetics hungrily, in particular its techniques for manipulating suggestible people, which he combined with the techniques he learned from how to make friends and influence people. And there was one final big influence that hit Manson in prison. On seeing the Beatles and the reaction they had, Charles Manson, who had been playing guitar a little for years but never got very good, decided he had a new ambition. He was going to be a star like them. He became a major Beatles fan and started writing his own songs in imitation of them, taking his music seriously for the first time. He got an inkling of how he could do this when he got a new cellmate, Phil Kaufman, in 1966. We've met Kaufman previously. He was Grand Parsons' tour manager and stole Parsons' body to set fire to it as Parsons had wished. Kaufman would in fact be the tour manager for a lot of very successful artists in the late 60s and 70s, people like Frank Zappa, Emmylou Harris and Joe Cocker. But when Manson met him he was an actor who'd had bit parts in a few films and knew a lot of people in the entertainment industry. It was one of Kaufman's connections, PR man Gary Stromburg, at that time working for Universal Studios, who would get Kaufman his first tour manager job with The Rolling Stones when he got out of prison. But even before then, Kaufman was impressed enough by Manson that he gave Manson Stromburg's contact details. Stromburg might be able to help him when he got out. Kaufman advised Manson to wait a few months after release to contact Stromburg, so he had time to re-eclimatise to the outside world. Manson took that advice when he was released on parole next year, though he actually didn't want to be let out at all, saying he was too institutionalised and didn't know how to survive on the outside. He moved to San Francisco to hate Ashbury, and it was there that he took his first acid trip, at a grateful deadgig. The source I'm using says that this was at the Avalon Ballroom and likely on June 11th 1967, but the dead actually stopped playing at the Avalon for about a year, only a few days after Manson was let out of prison and before he got to San Francisco. And they were actually in New York on that particular date, so it was likely at the Winterland or the Fillmore at some point in late spring or early summer. 1967 is the least documented year for dead shows as far as taping goes, so we don't have a copy of whichever show Manson saw, but we can imagine that the music he heard was not dissimilar to this Winterland show from March, just before his release. Manson was homeless, but then he met a young librarian, Mary Brunner, who was walking her poodle, after the dog ran up to him and he pretended to be terrified. Within a couple of minutes he'd charmed Brunner into letting him stay in her apartment, and the two soon became lovers. Shortly after moving in with Brunner, Manson intervened with the 16 year old girl, Darlene, who was being attacked by an older man. Manson pretended to be a relative of the girls and rescued her from the man and took her back to his and Brunner's flat. Soon Darlene was also his lover, both her and Brunner devoted to him, and Brunner supporting him on her salary. Darlene soon left the arrangement, but Manson started collecting more teenage girls, usually runaways between the ages of 15 and 19, of whom there was a plentiful supply in San Francisco in 1967, initially presenting himself as a protector, and soon coaxing them into communal living arrangements in which he would play his guitar and spout his philosophy, while having sex with any of them he chose and supplying them with copious amounts of LSD. By the time he headed down to LA to audition for Stromberg in November, eight months after getting out of prison, Manson had six women with him, and had obtained a yellow school bus to drive Darlene in imitation of Ken Kesey's Mary pranksters. Stromberg agreed to see Manson as he was a friend of Kaufman, and was impressed with his music, as many people seem to have been, and called him Russ Regan. Regan was the record executive who, six years earlier, had suggested to Candix Records that they renamed the Pendletones to The Beach Boys, and he was now heading UNI Records, a label that had been set up by Universal and which in 1967 was putting out records by Hugh Massacala, Mr Ubriel Larm Clock, and an album called Discover Yourself Through Astrology, an album with music by one Richard Russell, over which Roger Christian, the lyricist for Little Deuce Coop, Surf City, Don't Worry Baby, and many more hot rod hits, earnestly lectured you about the lessons of the stars. Regan in turn was impressed enough by Manson to agree that UNI Records would fund a demo session forum at Gold Star Studios to be produced by Stromberg. Rather surprisingly in retrospect, listening to these demos, one can see why Stromberg and Regan thought it was worth giving Manson a chance. Manson's songs at this point are far more musically sophisticated than most of the hippie singer-songwriters of the time, with a little Latin influence. The melodies are often derivative, you can hear fragments of more famous songs float to the surface at points, but if anything the main problem with them from a commercial point of view is that they're closer to the adult pop of a Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin or Andy Williams than to the rock market Manson was aiming at. More than anything else, these songs remind me of Brian McLean of Love, and at points they're spookily similar to his The next day Regan and Stromberg agreed that without Manson's charismatic physical presence, the music didn't stand up well enough to be commercial, and decided against signing Manson. Stromberg tried to let him down gently, and told Manson he'd let him know if something came up, which Manson took as an invitation to hang around the universal lot, pestering Stromberg and schmoozing with celebrities. At one point he apparently picked up a little extra money babysitting for Al Lewis, famous for having played grandpa in the Munsters, which finished the previous year. But eventually after Manson tried to get himself involved as a consultant on a film about Jesus, which never ended up getting made, and then grew angry when he discovered they were planning to cast a black Christ, Stromberg explained to Manson that he wasn't going to get signed, and maybe he should just go. All this time Manson had been collecting more girls from what he was now calling his family, and they moved into a place in Topanga Canyon with a new friend, Bobby Bosele, who we've talked about before. He was a member of the Grass Roots, the band that became Love for a while, nicknamed Bummer Bob, and we talked in the episodes on sympathy for the devil, about his collaborations with Kenneth Anger. Bosele and Manson actually formed a six piece band, The Milky Way, but the band only got to play one gig. They drove off the club's normal clientele. But then came Charles Manson's big break in the music business. Ella Jo Bailey and Patricia Crenwinkel, two of the girls in the family, were hitchhiking when they were picked up by a good looking man named Dennis, who took them back to his mansion in Pacific Palisades for a threesome. Afterwards, Dennis went out and left the girls to get themselves ready and head home. They did, and they got back to Charlie, who realised who Dennis was. Dennis Wilson meanwhile had gone to a recording session. One book on Manson says it was the session for Busy Doing Nothing from the Friends album. But given the Beach Boys tour schedule at the time had Dennis in Florida the day before and the day after that, and the fact that the only Beach Boy on the track is Brian, that seems unlikely. More likely is that it was the session for Be Still, the song we heard last time, which was recorded on the 3rd of April, the last time Dennis would be in a studio that we know of until the last week of June. When Dennis got home he found a bus parked outside his house and Beatles records playing from his stereo. As he walked up to the door a short bearded man came out. Wilson was worried at first and said, are you going to hurt me? Charlie replied, do I look like I'm going to hurt you brother? And then dropped to the floor and started kissing Dennis's shoes. Dennis Manson had found his big opportunity in the music business. 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