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
But the Manson family, like they're weirdos and losers. And yes, you know what I mean? They're in death. That like, it's, it's not a nice place to be. Right. And they're busted out there and they're, they're like fishing about like, like they're not hard to find there. Nobody else is living at it. They're not sophisticated criminals is basically not sophisticated criminals. Yeah, that's it.
That's it. And they're easy to bust and they're easy to prosecute because they're, you know, messed up on drugs among other things, but they're not career criminals. They're not, you know, um, and, and they're easily found and, and they're easily brought to trial and they're easily convicted.
That's great. And one of the reasons I, you know, I called my book creepy crawling and we haven't talked about this yet is that the crime that they committed most often was what they called creepy crawling.
You know, the family would go into a house of somebody that they could get at near Chatsworth and they'd literally go into, while the family was sleeping, they'd go in the house and rearrange the furniture. And this is just like psychological warfare. Like the family would wake up and know someone had been in the house, but not be able to figure out why or what they wanted, right?
And that to me became like the guiding metaphor for what the Manson family has done to us. Like we can't get them, like they're in our heads. Like they're rearranging our furniture. Like we can't like- Wow, she looks like just a normal teenage girl. She did what? Oh, interesting. And that's the metaphor for me that we can't get done with.
We're still trying to figure out how this happened and what happened to families that our daughters were so vulnerable to this. That's what they were so good at, just getting in our houses, getting in our minds.
Yeah, absolutely. And that was really what got me started in during the research was this realization that like every, it felt like every couple months there would be, I'd hear a song or I'd see a new documentary or there'd be a new bit of visual culture. There was this great series of photographs of Barker Ranch that some European photographer did, a real art project.
And I was like, how come we can't leave this guy alone already? Even after Even after he died. And I started thinking there was this great Rolling Stone cover in the 70s about Jim Morrison, another shamanic LA figure. And it was years after Morrison had passed. And the headline, if I'm remembering right, in Rolling Stone said, he's hot, he's sexy, he's dead.
And I thought about that with Manson because I was like, no matter how long he was in prison and then after he died, we're still trying to figure out what he did. Like the murders we know, the true crime piece we're done with. But the cultural part, I mean, he... ended up feeding so many different strains of popular culture.
Like LA, you can't have LA punk in the late 70s and early 80s without Manson. He's all over the musical and visual culture of that moment. Hip hop culture, beginning in the late 80s into the 90s, his name gets, he just becomes like the emblem of kind of
uncontrollable horror I mentioned before and I'll say again the horror movies of the 1970s all these home invasion movies like that becomes a subgenre in horror that I think is very much inspired by the Manson the two nights of Manson murder of like you can be home you think you're safe and then all of a sudden You got hours of, you know, of horror ending in death in front of you.
So like again and again, it was like no surprise to me when it was the opposite of a surprise when Quentin Tarantino, who is just kind of, if nothing else, just like he keeps wanting to make movies about movies, right? Yeah. And he took this most film worthy crime and turned it.
I mean, I hated the movie, but he turned it into this, you know, even more sensationalistic, you know, I don't want to spoil it for anybody who hadn't seen it, but like he blew it up even more than it already was. Sure. And so that was one of the things, my research, like I couldn't do justice. Like I, at some point I was like, I need to have like a,
online searchable index you know like i need somebody with those skills to index every moment that he's mentioned in popular music in film culture in other visual culture sculpture paintings just endless productions
And the paranoia it causes. It's really hard not to see this as the moment that Hollywood switches from expansive, open-ended drug culture, weed and hashish and LSD to the cocaine intensity of the 70s, like, leave me alone, I'm alone, do it, you know?
Absolutely. If I can say one more thing on that, I've always really resisted. It gets quoted again and again. Joan Didion wrote this essay where she says, you know, we knew the 60s ended that night. And I'm like, well, it was August of 69. It was going to end. The 60s were going to end anyway. Three months. Yeah. Right. Like and then Manson gets arrested in December. So it's this very neat.
i think you've been hinting at this and i just want to underline it it's like a punctuation that like those experiments the fun the the the kind of various communities integrating with each other like this is the punctuation that says yeah that that stuff's over right right now now we're going to reorganize in a much more hierarchical kind of way exactly it's no coincidence that you know a few years later you have
There you go.
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