MANSON, 'CYCLES', AND THE SUMMER OF 69

Like painted kites
Those days and nights they went flyin' by
The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky
Then softer than a piper man
One day it called to you
I lost you, I lost you to the summer wind

'Summer Wind'

You may remember the evocative scene in Quentin Tarantino's 'Once Upon A Time In Hollywood' (2019) where Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is fixing the television aerial up on the roof of movie actor Rick Dalton's (Leonardo DiCaprio) Cielo Drive home. It's evidently hot. The Californian sun is shining bright and there is just the faintest, barely detectable summer breeze. It reminded me in its own way of Bert's symbolic forecast "Winds in the east, mist coming in, / Like somethin' is brewin' and bout to begin" in Disney's 'Mary Poppins' (1964) before the nanny emerges through the clouds over London's skyline to resolve the disharmony in the Banks family household. In the case of the scene from 'OATIH' however, it's not Mary Poppins who appears but cult leader Charles Manson, searching for record producer Terry Melcher at his home, but finding Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate instead.

Of course, Terry Melcher was not only known as being a record producer but also for being the son of Doris Day. The generational contrast between his mother's cultural era of the 1940s and 1950's with his own of the 1960's couldn't have been more stark. His was a new age of revolution, including civil rights, a febrile kaleidoscopic counter culture and political assassinations accelerated by the symbolic starting gun with its copper jacketed bullet which killed JFK on that November day in Dallas, 1963.

A generation dreaming (mostly Californian inspired) soon found out that all their collective hopes and aspirations would have to paid at a price, be it war, murder or drugs. Flower power was one thing but it was the mushroom clouds of Oppenheimer's Trinity at Los Alamos that had already set the backdrop for the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation. In David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks : The Return' (2017) he suggests in his own inimitably symbolic way that Trinity was the birth of a supernatural evil in America and the world. The form of this evil later transmogrifies from the terrifying 'Frog Bug' to the scorched engine oil incarnation that is Killer Bob (Frank Silva) who could well be considered television's very own Charles Manson equivalent.

Long before 'Twin Peaks', however, America was about to reach the crossroads of its own surreal dream/nightmare saga : the 1960s where the events of Sharon Tate's bloody murder in Cielo Drive took place just a few days before Woodstock. Though not obviously twinned, both the near simultaneously-occurring tragedy and celebration of death and life in America that month of August sounded the death knell for the hippy dream of that decade.

For unbeknownst to most people dancing in those fields of Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, they were attending their own generational wake at Woodstock while California was on red alert, reeling from its own pre Laura Palmer-like incident in Benedict Canyon in the hills of Los Angeles.

Prior to the grisly massacre of Tate and others, Tarantino's Cliff Booth (though a fictional creation) senses something in the air up on the rooftop, an imperceptible change in the atmosphere.

But he wasn't the only one.

Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
Looked at clouds that way

'Both Sides Now'

Frank Sinatra wouldn't have known until after the fact that he was allegedly number one on the Manson family's kill list (including his planned castration and the fantasy of 'suspending him upside down from a meat hook, skinning him alive while playing his music in the background, tanning his flesh and turning it into purses') but the singer might have already had his reasons to be paranoid throughout that tumultuous decade of unprecedented change in America.

Sixteen days after JFK had been assassinated in November, 1963, Sinatra had become a national news story for all the wrong reasons as a group of amateur criminals attempted to kidnap his son, Frank Jr, where the young man was performing at Harrah's Club Lodge, Lake Tahoe on the border between Nevada and California. Thankfully, Sinatra's son remained unscathed as he was released by the nervous criminals and later found in Bel Air having walked several miles from where his captors had held him hostage.

Having previously thrown his full support behind JFK's 1960 election campaign, including encouraging mobster boss Sam Giancana to rustle up support from the unions for Democrat votes only to find himself left out in the cold when he came to power, Sinatra most likely felt used by the President who he'd considered a friend. Now the man he had helped become president was dead and all bets were off for what other chaos would be in store for him and his family.

It could be said that both Doris Day and Frank Sinatra were experiencing the same growing pains of being celebrity parents dealing with the reality of having kids made famous through their success. The 60s were volatile, exciting yet uncertain times and they were both recognising that their own cultural vision of America post WW2 was being unravelled before their very eyes and ears into something stranger and altogether unfamiliar. Although America would continue to export its domestic existential crises with the Cold War, Vietnam and later Iraq and Afghanistan, the 1960s was setting the stage for an internal heart of darkness within the country that continues to play out to this very day. The dream of the past was at war with the dream of the future and in the present it was going to get messy, bloody and complex.

Meanwhile, the good vibrations of the 60s pop charts were beginning to express this 'strangeness' through darker-tinged psychedelia and anti-establishment sentiment with such albums as Love's 'Forever Changes' and Jefferson Airplane's 'Surrealistic Pillow', both from 1967. It was as if the promise of a hippy 'flower power' wonderland was becoming something more akin to a gothic, bacchanalian carnival with ring leaders like Timothy Leary and Charles Manson amongst others epitomising this shift in the collective consciousness of the culture.

Finding solid ground in such changeable times must have been like trying to build a house on quick sand for someone like Sinatra but he was wily enough to stick mostly to his easy listening, swingin' lane whilst occasionally bending the counter culture to his will when it suited him with no regard for who dug it and who didn't. It was in its way a subtle form of reactionary subversion to the rapid social cultural changes taking place though to many it might have seemed like nothing more than mere hippy kitsch.

Over and over, I keep going over the world we knew
Once when you walked beside me
That inconceivable, that unbelievable world we knew
When we two were in love

And every bright neon sign turned into stars
And the sun and the moon seemed to be ours
Each road that we took turned into gold
But the dream was too much for you to hold

The World We Knew (Over And Over)

Toward the end of the late 60s, Sinatra was in his grander way becoming a little like washed up television star Rick Doulton himself, caught between his age (personally and historically) and the new age. Many entertainers and performers who tried not to get drowned in the sea of change that the 1960s brought with it, attempted to surf the counter cultural wave by merging their old style with the new sounds, hoping no-one would call them out for cross generational assimilation/appropriation. Of course, Sinatra couldn't help but let slip his true feelings about the awkwardness of this commercial farce which involved repackaging the new with the old and would often mock the current fads and trends, whether it be with some sly or snide comment on a TV special or on a jokey ad lib on one of the modern tracks he was covering in the studio.

But somewhere between the singer coming to terms with his own middle age at such a time and still trying to remain forever young, many of his albums on his own label Reprise became fascinatingly eclectic as he staked out his musical territories. Compare the melancholic introspection of 'The September Of My Years' (1965) with the eclectic 'The World We Knew' (1967) and we find Sinatra appearing to be swimming against the tide of middle age in an attempt to extend what remains of his youth but also lost in the existential dread of becoming old and snatching at new pop hits as an insurance policy against becoming uncool in the eyes of the 'younger folk'. We'll never know if the iconic singer really cared about needing the 'kids' approval, so secure in many ways was his platform by this time in American history but if his controversial marriage to Mia Farrow (a good friend to both Sharon Tate and partner Roman Polanski) was any indication he clearly wasn't quite ready to embrace the inevitability of 'Father Time' just yet.

God didn't make little green apples
It don't rain in Indianapolis in the summertime
No such thing as Doctor Seuss
Disneyland or Mother Goose is no nursery rhyme

Little Green Apples (Bobby Russell)

Tensions in the marriage between Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow grew significantly when the actress insisted on playing the lead role of Rosemary Woodhouse in Roman Polanski's 1968 horror movie, 'Rosemary's Baby' which was in its own way an early bell weather for the seismic changes soon to befall the final chapter of the 1960s. Aside from the obvious connection to Polanski and the Tate tragedy that would occur a year later in 69, the movie created an unsettling atmosphere that seemed to capture a generation's post-JFK paranoia combined with the potent themes of motherhood and bodily autonomy that were very much part of the counter-cultural zeitgeist. Thinking ahead to when Tate was murdered the following summer carrying her eight month baby inside her, it is impossible not to see 'Rosemary's Baby' as being eerily prescient of that unspeakable massacre.

Toward the end of his marriage to Farrow in the August of 1968, Sinatra had already begun recording his first pop/rock album 'Cycles' (Reprise) at his studio in Hollywood as the actress wrapped on the shoot for 'Rosemary's Baby' and been handed divorce papers by the singer. It seems depressing somehow that Sinatra would still be trying to fit in with the zeitgeist just when his attempt to extend his youth vicariously through his marriage to the young actress had come to its inevitable end. The album starts with 'Rain In My Heart', a repressed Don Draper-ish lament about a man who cannot outwardly express his emotion but is falling apart internally and is followed by 'Both Sides Now', that sublime generational anthem to clouds which Sinatra sings with accompanying jangling harpsichord like a man with an identity crisis, lost in time. If the Austin Powers-like arrangement seems ill suited to such a song then Sinatra somehow redeems it by singing the lyrics with suitable sincerity and wistful hope. Bobby Russell's "Little Green Apples" is the sort of maudlin mid 60s love song that sounds like it might have been written by Rod McKuen on uppers which makes sense when you consider that Sinatra would make an entire album of McKuen's songs and poetry a year later entitled 'A Man Alone' (Reprise). Sinatra demonstrates a beautiful tenderness here and though the domesticated portrait of marriage seems a long way from his perpetual playboy antics you can hear a sort of aspirational quality to the emotion he invests in it. 'Pretty Colours', on the other hand, sounds like the sort of background song you might hear during a James Bond sex scene before his enemies arrive to gun him down. I have no idea what the lyrics means but did think that a late Leonard Cohen circa 'Ten New Songs' era with backing singers could have done a great cover version of this.

The title song of the album 'Cycles' sounds not just like the original version of 'The Littlest Hobo' theme song 'Maybe Tomorrow' slowed down but very much like Sinatra reconciling with his coming of middle age and making peace with the point of no return when your life is divided between those decades before you become aware of your own mortality and after it. George Harrison, Pattie Boyd and Tiny Tim all sat in on the session as Sinatra recorded 'Cycles' and from a generational point of view it must have seemed poignant to their eyes that this established entertainer and cultural icon was singing in such humble fashion about the nature of getting old. Clearly they didn't feel threatened by Sinatra existing in this twilight zone between the hippy 60s and pulpy, doomed romantic kitsch. He was in his space and they were in theirs.

The irony was that as the 60s drew to a close these 'kids' would quickly have to grow up fast as their great dream of youth and idealism that seemed to be calling the shots in society and its culture would end in bloodshed with numerous political assassinations, Vietnam and the Tate murder. The hangover from the outfall of all of these developments would last the entire decade of the 1970s where it would be the hippies turn to figure out quite where it all went wrong as Sinatra returned to business as usual on stage.

In this strange time of the late 1960s, however, where Sinatra recorded the confusion of the age in his own way with albums like 'Cycles' and the young stars were daring to dream beyond just their decade of sweeping change into the next, Manson and his gang followed the JFK assassination with their celebrity murders to set the stage for the 70s which would become for almost everyone in America imbued with the same melancholic atmosphere of Sinatra's 'Cycles' 1968 album.

Everyone it seemed was trying desperately to get back to the garden of their youth but finding it getting further away with each passing year.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Woodstock (Joni Mitchell)

When I listen to 'Cycles' in these 21st Century days it conjures an atmosphere of dry autumn leaves falling into empty swimming pools, cold winter winds chilling the air and broken bicycles in the back yard. Waking up from the dream of the 60s into a sober reality of the 70s was like a form of national rehab for many and only those who knew life before the 60s could adjust to the changes after it without such heavy hearts. Sinatra's insecurity about where he belonged at that brief moment of time from 1968 to 1969 was temporary but for America, it has remained ever since.