Helter Skelter (Manson Scenario) - Background

Background

Manson had been predicting racial war for some time before he used the term Helter Skelter. His first use of the term was at a gathering of the Family on New Year's Eve 1968. This took place at the Family's base at Myers Ranch, near California's Death Valley.

In its final form, which was reached by mid-February 1969, the scenario had Manson as not only the war's ultimate beneficiary but its musical cause. He and the Family would create an album with songs whose messages concerning the war would be as subtle as those he had heard in songs of The Beatles. More than merely foretell the conflict, this would trigger it; for, in instructing "the young love," America's white youth, to join the Family, it would draw the young, white female hippies out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. Black men, thus deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them, would be without an outlet for their frustrations and would lash out in violent crimes against whites. A resultant murderous rampage against blacks by frightened whites would then be exploited by militant blacks to provoke an internecine war of near-extermination between racist and non-racist whites over blacks' treatment. Then the militant blacks would arise to sneakily finish off the few whites they would know to have survived; indeed, they would kill off all non-blacks.

In this holocaust, the members of the enlarged Family would have little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city that was underneath Death Valley that they would reach through a hole in the ground. As the only actual remaining whites upon the race war's true conclusion, they would emerge from underground to rule the now-satisfied blacks, who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the world; Manson "would scratch fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton and go be a good nigger...."

The term Helter Skelter was from the Beatles song of that name, which involved apparent reference to the British amusement-park ride of that name and was interpreted by Manson as concerned with the war. The song was on the so-called White Album (formal name, The Beatles), first heard by Manson within a month or so of its November 1968 release:

When the Beatles’ White Album came out, Charlie listened to it over and over and over and over again. He was quite certain that the Beatles had tapped in to his spirit, the truth — that everything was gonna come down and the black man was going to rise. It wasn’t that Charlie listened to the White Album and started following what he thought the Beatles were saying. It was the other way around. He thought that the Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years. Every single song on the White Album, he felt that they were singing about us. The song "Helter Skelter" — he was interpreting that to mean the blacks were gonna go up and the whites were gonna go down.

— Former Manson follower Catherine Share, 2009 documentary Manson, Cineflix Productions et al.

Although Manson thought almost every song on the album had a meaning connected with the events he and, in his view, The Beatles were foreseeing, he had to lay out the supposedly coded meanings for his followers. White Album songs specifically known to have been connected with the vision are:

1. I Will
2. Honey Pie
3. Don't Pass Me By
4. Yer Blues
5. Sexy Sadie
6. Rocky Raccoon
7. Happiness Is a Warm Gun
8. Blackbird
9. Helter Skelter
10. Piggies
11. Revolution 1
12. Revolution 9
13. Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey (connected to the prophecy by Family member Charles "Tex" Watson, not necessarily Manson)

Beatles songs that are not on The White Album but are also known to have a connection to Helter Skelter are "Blue Jay Way" and "Yellow Submarine."