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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So yeah, the Mansons basically take over spawn ranch, which had been from the thirties on an actual movie ranch.
Yes.
They just went out there to ride horses. At that point, the ranch was basically like a tourist site where you could get... They were still filming some TV commercials. And also, I think Bobby Beausoleil, who ends up associated with the family, actually filmed a porn Western out there. It was on its last commercial legs, but you could go out there and ride horses.
And then they kind of ingratiate themselves with... Very elderly George Spahn, who likes the young women too, one in particular, Lynette. Sure. You know, Lynette Fromm becomes like quite literally his handler, and they just move in there, and they take it over.
And they just set up shop there. They live there and they set up, you know, and this is, there's a really cool novel called the girls by Emma Klein. That's about the Manson family. And one of the things that she really gets about spawn ranch, I think absolutely right. Is that the women, what they got more than anything was that there was like a real camaraderie for them among themselves.
It was very gender segregated in a lot of ways. So they're in the kitchen, they're preparing meals. They're, going out during the day to dumpsters to try to come up with produce that's been thrown out.
And so like there's this whole kind of girl slash women culture of Spahn Ranch that's obviously being run by Charlie for Charlie, but like has a lot of space in it for the women to kind of have their own lives.
Again, I want to put it in the language of sexual exploitation. You know, so many of these women are vulnerable in a number of different ways and he individually grooms.
just to use that word that we use, you know, in that context, virtually each woman who comes to him, they, they find women when they're out partying, they find women who may, who have just made their way to the ranch one way or another. And Charlie, like laser beam, you know, for a while, we'll make that person, his object of attention. He'll figure out,
what their biggest vulnerability is, what their relationship with their father is. And then he'll kind of like provide this seemingly loving, gentle, paternal care for them, which then obviously almost always turns it to sexual attention. And the LSD part is definitely in there. I think that gets like a little overstated in our own kind of anti-
hallucinogen moment you know of the 80s and beyond the kind of just say no stuff that we're still living with but he like he knows how to use drugs as part of this for sure there's these kind of group you know trip experiences where he's the master of you know literally the master of ceremonies and And he arranges people. He tells people who they should have sex with and they listen, you know.
So he's arranging these kind of like orgiastic trip scenarios. But it's really, it's that one-on-one thing that I think he masters. Like he's got a great rap. Right. And he knows how to apply it differentially so it'll be effective.
He would really lock in. I think this is the Scientology training. He had this idea of how you become your fullest person, and it was really about presence, about being there. A lot of these young women, some of them were literally directly abused by their fathers, but some of them were just victims of or people who had experienced what we call neglect.
They just had very typically absent 1950s dads. Dad went out to work during the day, didn't really have much to do with the family. And to get this kind of attention from an older man, I think was really hypnotic for a lot of women. And so we talked about it in terms of his eyes, but I really think our focus should be on the kind of whole package is that he knew how to lock in.
I think that's right. And I'm really glad you framed it as such, Don, because it's like we're all still like in the thrall of the prosecutor. You know, Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter and the race war narrative, which I'm I'm sure we'll take a minute to talk about, but you know, Manson, his animus, his engine of his resentment is that he can't make it in the music business.
Like he, he has like a solid year at LA where like he believes his own, like he's high on his own supply. Like he believes his own story. He thinks he's going to be a star. He does not get that while he's playing Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher for certain things, they're playing him as well. So, you know, he has a formal audition and he blows it, you know, like he by his own account.
He's like he freezes up. He can't sing into a microphone. He's not a professional musician. Like he's just not. He's he's cool around a campfire, you know, and we've all seen that. Right. Like we've all seen that guy who, you know, who who takes over the campfire and sing some songs. And that's cool. But he's not. He's not at all a trained musician.
He doesn't know how to, how to play in a, you know, in a studio. And Terry Melcher at that point, like basically throws him to an associate of his who's like got anthropological interest. He's a guy who had gone out, you know, you know, recording native American, you know, tribes and, and so on. And it's like, you might like this guy.
He's, he's kind of like, you know, it's kind of tribal, you know, and Manson cannot believe it. He cannot believe he's not getting a contract. And you know, to his, to his, I don't want to say it's to his credit, but like folks who heard him play thought that he could have been brought along. Like Neil Young very famously said, if Manson had the right band, he could have been like mid-60s Dylan.
Like he could have been that kind of like wild electric sound. But he didn't. Like he was too full of himself. He thought everyone wanted to hang on every word of every song he wrote. But he couldn't. And Terry Melcher basically cuts him. I mean, it's Terry Melcher's the heart of this story. In what way?
Showing 41–60 of 118 · page 3 of 6
← Previous
Next →