Jeff Melnick
speaker
118 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Jeff Melnick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's like a small handful at this point.
Yeah, that's amazing. And that's where the story gets, I mean, obviously we wouldn't be talking about him if they didn't end up in LA and everything that ensues. And I mean, that's part of, you know, I called him before a cultural entrepreneur, like he begins to really fancy himself a musician and he begins to imagine himself as a musician with
real potential and so la is where it's happening i mean this is la's moment it's i mean when i started researching this stuff i was like earlier in my career did a a book about when new york jews first musicians first you know gershwin and that whole crew in the 1920s first moved out to hollywood because that's where the action was going to be for musicians you know making making music for movies and from that moment on like la slowly becomes the heart of the american music business and it's off the hook in 67 68
The kind of Sunset Strip action, the clubs that just kind of in the street hanging out, you know, informal rituals of hanging out. And then the record companies who are looking for, you know, constantly looking for new young talent. So it's this amazing moment.
It is. I mean, it's sometime in 68, like, and people argue about exactly when. It seems like a couple of the women of the family get picked up hitchhiking by Dennis Wilson. Like, it's this totally, you know, just... lucky accident.
But it's like the way the story gets told, it's like they get picked up hitchhiking and then next they're basically living in his house, the whole family, you know, like they're crashing at Dennis Wilson's Pacific Palisades house. And Dennis Wilson's got this whole crew of guys who begin noticing this.
It's incredibly, I mean, I just want to make sure that we don't laugh it up too much because like it's incredibly exploitive scenario. Like in the research I did, I really focused on this category that we've come to call groupies.
Which is, you know, it's a really complicated category, right? Yes. Right? It can mean just fan, but like baked into it in this moment in the late 60s is it's young women. It's vulnerable young women. It's young women who are being kind of sexually exploited by much older men who are being promised things that, you know, maybe they're going to get, maybe they're not going to get.
But there are power differentials. Right. And the Manson women become something like that role for Dennis Wilson and for Terry Melcher, who's this incredibly important music producer, produces first Paul Revere, the Raiders, the birds. Like he's right at the heart of it. He's Doris Day's son. He's literally the son of like the image of white bread in American culture.
And that's something that like they all I mean, one of the fascinating things when I start doing the research for the book is like, how little any of those people wanted to talk about, you know, I reached out to a few of them just, you know, want to do some of the people connected to the Beach Boys, and they were nobody wanted to touch it.
Um, to the level that like, even when I wanted to quote Neil Young's song, that's, you know, loosely based on the, the Manson case, his people were just like, no, you can't like, usually this is like in the weeds a little bit, but like, usually when you ask to quote lyrics, the company that owns it says, sure. Send us 5,000 bucks like that. It's a money making thing.
Neil Young's people all these years later were like, he does not want to be associated with this.
Exactly. Oh, my God. And they were all they were hanging out together. They were dancing together, you know, in the Sunset Strip clubs. And it's not just music people. It's film people, too. Right. Because this is the moment of the new Hollywood. So Dennis Hopper is tied up with these, you know, with these people. Right.
Like these names who are like crucial people in American culture are dancing with these marginal freaks. Yeah. Yeah.
They do. And Dennis Wilson, I mean, he's in his own way a vulnerable character. He's not the creative engine of the group. He's an important musician, but- If there was a real Beach Boy, it was Dennis Wilson. Yeah, exactly. He's the only one who surfs of the Beach Boys. And he not only takes up with the Manson women, he- gets kind of convinced by Charlie's rap.
And he like, he very famously gives an interview to a British music magazine in, in 68 saying like, Oh my, you know, we, you know, me and the, me and my brothers have a record company at one of our first acts is going to be this guy, you know, Charlie Manson, he's a wizard.
He's like a guru, you know, and like, he's talking this up in public, you know, like this very kind of dark, weird scenario he's presenting as like, this guy's great. He's a great musician. We're going to record him. And he gives Manson personally this sense of legitimacy that he belongs in this scene and that he's a part of it.
And he never gets really that what these guys want from him are women in drugs. He's like a pimp in a few different ways. Exactly.
And it's so shady. I mean, this isn't just LA. This is like, the sites that matter are like Venice Beach, real honky tonk, really marginal folks, what we would now call street people, and just kind of folks who are not mainstream culture. And all of a sudden, they find themselves in Dennis Wilson's mansion, like up on the hill, And it's a wild moment of cultural mixing.
And spawn ranch, just to like, to try to draw a picture for listeners. Like I'm always, whenever I was out on research trips in LA, I was always like, I, I caught to spawn ranch or where it was in Chatsworth. And for East coast people, this is shocking. Cause it's like, this is still LA. Like, cause it's, it just feels like this kind of hard scrabble, desert-y, you know?
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