LUCIFER RISING

Part 5

Morrison had more than a little in common with Manson: he had a thing about Authority. The Establishment. “The Man.” He hated him. For Jim, the Man – aside from the military/industrial martinets, and the capitalists who leached off him --was his father, the youngest admiral in the history of the Navy, who had abused him as a boy. Jim’s signature song, The End, was about killing him. For Charlie, the Man – aside from the step-fathers who had raped him, his jailors, and now Melcher and the rest of the Judases – was his own father whom he had never met: Colonel Scott. 

But there was one big difference between Morrison and Manson. Morrison was rich star. Manson was a penniless hustler. Might this have been the other way around, had Charlie been the chiseled Adonis with the college vocabulary, and Jim the unkempt, wild eyed dwarf?  

In any case, being the same fickle, outlaw business, Jim Morrison and Charlie Manson traveled in the same circles. 

Both were friends of Dennis Wilson. Both were acquaintances of Arthur Lee, too. The genius junkie outlaw, a close buddy of Jimi Hendrix as well, lived with his group, Love, in Bela Legosi’s, Dracula’s, haunt -- The Castle. The Castle was a trysting place for L.A.’s alpha rock crazies. Jim dropped by regularly. So, reportedly, did Charlie. 

Manson was heavily into Satanism. Morrison, like other noire rockers (Jagger, Richards, Jimmy Page, to name a few) was a dabbler. The Doors’ singer visited L.A.’s Church of Satan, founded by Kenneth Anger’s close friend, Anton Szandor LaVey. Manson Family member, Susan Atkins, Sharon Tate’s murderer, was a member. 

Manson pimped out all his girls. Morrison, a regular patron of hippie hookers, allegedly had a thing for another Charlie’s Angel, Collie Leigh Smith. Some say he wrote LA Woman in her honor: Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light? Or just another lost angel...city of night?

An early resident of The Castle was Bobby “Cupid” Beausoliel, a member of the Grass Roots which was renamed Love (ironic since the volatile Lee had a fondness, like Morrison and Manson, for assaulting people.) In 1966, Cupid left Love to join Manson’s fledgling rock band, The Milky Way. The group played only one gig. The venue: The Corral in Topanga Canyon where Canned Heat, Spirit, Little Feat, Neil Young and other locals jammed. Morrison was a regular here too and was said to have written Roadhouse Blues in its honor. 

Two years later, the Milky Way band members reunited for a different kind of gig: ripping off and murdering a musician friend. The Tate/LaBianca helter skelter occurred shortly afterwards. The great guitar for gun swap hit the City of Angels. Joining Wilson, Melcher, and Phillips -- from Topanga all the way out to Zuma -- everybody was hunkered down and packing heat. For once even the L.A. swingers were sleeping with a single monogamous partner: a .38. loaded with hollowpoints.

“They’re killing everybody with property!” declared David Crosby, a peacenik but new Second Amendment advocate.

The idea of exterminating property owners might have appealed to Manson’s idol, the imagine-no-possessions Lennon -- if the ex-Beatle hadn’t been a capitalist and estate dweller himself.

As for Morrison, he had always crashed at cheap motels, in back alleys, or desert ravines. After the Tate/LaBianca carnage, the LAPD investigators called him in for questioning. This was certainly not the first time, or the last, the star had been hassled by “the pigs,” as both he and Manson fondly knew them.