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
Well, Manson really believes, I mean, let's just put this out there because we haven't said it yet. The first set of murders will happen at 10,050 Cielo Drive, which is where Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski live. But that's where Terry Melcher had lived previously. Exactly. And so Manson knows the house. And he's got this resentment that just boils up about Melcher.
Like Melcher for years barely appeared in public because he was so spooked by, I mean, I think he knew, I think he knew that Manson, if Manson wasn't literally targeting him, that Manson's anger, you know, the, the kind of murderous rage that ended up in these, these two nights of murder, I think was very much out of this disappointment that Melcher didn't give him a contract.
Like he really believed that Melcher was going to be his meal ticket.
And I think that's right. But I want to kind of it's obviously out there while what Manson does with the Beatles music and how he reads it. But it's part of a larger wave of understanding rock and roll music and popular music more generally as having cultural weight. as having important political meaning, right?
Like this obviously, it's not just the Beatles, it's obviously Dylan too, and it's all manner of musicians, right? It's some really important jazz musicians who are reaching, you know, in terms of black power. You know, music begins to be understood in the mid-60s as a social force.
Exactly. Commercial, it's top of the charts. And that's a rich brew. And Manson, I mean, he's not like you and me. Like we have the wherewithal to hear music, understand that it's a kind of distinct artistic form. But it's not like, I mean, most of us who are dedicated music listeners have moments where we think,
wow they're talking right to me right like they're like like right like they they know me they understand you know yeah manson had that in a path you know in a pathological way like it tipped over into him thinking it was secret messages he listened to other music too that he didn't take that like he his second favorite band was the moody blues and it's like he didn't get any secret messages you know from them like they weren't telling him you know that he should
dress his knights in white satin or whatever, you know, like he, it was something about the Beatles that really reached him and a lot of people.
Absolutely. They have agency and that, you know, like there's a one or two of them I want to sort of separate out because they were literally what we would now call underage. And so not legally responsible, you know, for. Yeah. But yes, these are women who have agency and they are making decisions to join Manson in this delusional quest.
I want to answer really carefully the question of how much of a white supremacist Manson was. Charles Manson was clearly a racist. He was clearly someone who believed that black people were subhuman and he articulated that again and again in his life. That, as we spoke about earlier, was very much a product of his prison training.
Like that was clearly part of the kind of segregated antagonistic world. I'm not excusing this in any way. I'm just trying to understand it. was he mostly motivated by this thing that Vincent Bugliosi framed at the trial as this race? I mean, that was a fairly late breaking thing in the life of the family.
Manson did begin talking about it with them, but it's no, it had nowhere near the weight that the music business stuff had for the family. The family was organized for months and months and months around getting Charlie a contract. It's not like they actually made a lot of plans for living in a hole in the desert and waiting out the race war and then taking, you know,
I mean, that was when he was really starting to fall apart. And it was very much a symptom of his, you know, what psychologists would call decompensation. You know, like he was losing his shit. And the direction it took, not surprisingly in American culture, given that we're a culture kind of rooted in systemic racism, is that he kind of grabbed that narrative and ran with it.
It's almost impossible to do a head count on the cult because people are coming and going. There are people who are not all the time with them, like Bobby Beausoleil and folks who are associates of the family. But there's a core of a couple dozen people who are always at the ranch.
There's clearly an inner circle, too. And those are the folks who end up being responsible for the two nights of mayhem, you know, in August of 69. And there's clearly like he has his lieutenants, you know, like Tex Watson is clearly the second in command, you know, man. And Lynette Fromm.
And a few of the other women are clearly like the ones running the ranch, you know, the ones who are in charge of the daily operations. But then there's all these other folks, you know, they you if you read deep enough in the literature, you come upon these names and you're like, who's that again?
You know, like like somebody else just showed up a month or so before the murders and lived there for a while. People come and go. Charlie didn't like to let people go like they would chase people down if they tried to leave. Right. Because he needed that like intactness.
First night, they head out to Benedict Canyon, which again, I don't know how familiar your listeners will be with geography of LA, but Benedict Canyon is one of these beautiful areas, a little bit north of where the cultural action is, the Sunset Strip. It's not a long drive, but it's a whole other world.
Again, if your listeners are not on the West Coast, what LA geography looks like is always a mystery to those of us from the East Coast or elsewhere. So it's this really remote feeling part of LA, right?
Right. It's beautiful. It's remote. So they make it to this house, which is the house of... The actor Sharon Tate and her husband, the film director Roman Polanski, who have a few houseguests and the few members of the Manson family make their way in, are clearly intent on just wreaking havoc. It's not that they're just there to kill people. They are there clearly with some instructions.
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