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 MANSON
- the unholy trail of Charlie and the Family
by John Gilmore and Ron Kenner
Amok Books
AMOK books has (re)published a number of John Gilmore books and I'm told
that they are all great. So far I've only read Manson (formerly
known as The Garbage-People ) and his psychosexual novel, Fetish
Blonde (Creation books), but my interest has been sparked.
A lot of people seem to regard Manson really highly: the greatest philosopher
this side of Nietzsche and all that. John Gilmore is not one of them although
he seems to admire the Son of Man in his own way. Gilmore seems to share
Charlie's contempt for the hippie movement (amen to that) and has no trouble
in seeing it go crashing down the gutter in an avalanche of drugs and
decay.
When I was growing up I would hear people moaning-about being born at
the wrong time. "I wish could have gone to Woodstock..." I have also harboured
dreams like that but they usually revolve around Times Square in '75.
Manson was the avant-garde of the seventies. You could spell it with one
world: "violence". The Family showed the way of the knife but it was others
who would take it to its extreme: the Japanese Red Army, RAF, Red Brigades...
Gilmore bases his book on interviews with many characters: Manson, of
course, and Bobby Beausoleil, who is an interesting person in his own
right. The information is straight from the horse's mouth instead of a
lot of second-hand garbage that has been floating around.
Manson is not about the trial. Instead Gilmore and Kenner focus
on the time before the murders and the milieu that the Family came out
of, something I find profoundly more interesting. This is quintessential
reading for those into the subject matter and for fans of the darker sides
of the sixsixsixties.
JONAS KELLAGHER - 21 June 2001
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