Rick Spence
speaker
498 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Rick Spence’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
When I was 17, I thought that I had the world much more figured out than I do now.
Mm-hmm.
Completely deluded. But, you know, it seemed to make much more sense than I could categorize things. Basic take upon human beings, most people, most of the time, are polite, cooperative, and kind until they're not. And the exact tipping point and moment in which they go from one to the other is unpredictable. God, that's brilliantly put.
Mansonville. Well, you begin with Charles Manson, who's the key element of this. And Charles Manson, for most of his life, up until the time that he's around 33, is an unexceptional petty criminal. In and out of prison, reform school from an early age, not really associated with violent crimes. He did stuff like steal cars, write bad checks, became an unsuccessful pimp and drug dealer.
So around 1967, he gets out of his latest stint in federal lockup in Terminal Island near Los Angeles, California. By that time, he's learned how to play the guitar, has ambitions to become a musician, and also has proclaimed himself a Scientologist. Not that he ever seems to have practiced, but that's what he would claim that he was.
kind of, you know, self-educated himself in prison to a certain degree. And so when he gets out of prison in 67, he was a model prisoner. He behaved himself, you know, and seemed, you can sort of imagine his life is going in a completely different direction. And here again, I'm going to say something kind of good about Charles Manson, which is that he actually was a decent singer.
If you really sort of listen to some of the stuff he did, he, you know, he's not a great singer, but he could have, you know, other people got recording contracts with less talent than he had and he could play guitar. The Beach Boys actually do record one of his songs without him.
Well, you're supposed to say it's terrible. Okay. Okay. It looks average to me. Yeah, it's landscape. I mean, if you didn't know it was Hitler... Yeah. Would it, would it, would it, would you, I don't know what people say about it. I'm sorry for the distraction. It's just, you know, it's just, it's an average painter. That's what it was. Something like crazy genocidal maniac paintings.
You don't have really have those. So Manson, he could have done that. He probably could have, you know, he made certain inroads into the music industry. And if he hadn't been such a weirdo, he might've gotten further with it. But his life could have taken a different turn. So this is one of the questions I have.
Where did a guy who's an unexceptional career petty criminal suddenly emerge into some sort of criminal mastermind, a Svengali, who can bend all of these people to his will and get them to go out and commit murder? That's a real shift that you have. So the first thing it kind of could tell you that something odd is going on is he gets out of prison. in L.A. County, and he's on parole.
Parolees are supposed to have a job, not supposed to leave the jurisdiction of their parole. He heads straight for the Bay Area, violates parole right off the bat. Two weeks later, he drifts into the parole office in the Bay Area, whereupon he should have been arrested and sent back to Terminal Island. But instead, they just assign him a parole.
I don't know, maybe things were easier then in some way. So he gets assigned a parole officer, Michael Smith. Michael Smith is initially handling a number of parolees. But after a while, once he takes on Manson, he only has one parolee he's supervising, Charlie Manson, which is odd.
And you also find out that Michael Smith, in addition to being a parole officer, is a graduate student at the University of California. studying group dynamics, especially the influence of drugs on gangs and groups. And he's also connected to the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, which is a place where the influence of, because Haight-Ashbury had lots of drugs and lots of groups.
So, you know, Charlie Manson never gets a regular job, hangs around with young girls. ex-cons, engages in criminal activity, is repeatedly arrested, but nothing ever sticks for the next couple of years.
So who gets that type of thing? Who gets a get-out-of-jail-free card? Informants. So here is what, again, this is speculation, but
Manson, at some point after he got out of prison, is getting this treatment because he is recruited as a confidential informant. For who?
For who? That's the interesting question.
So, probably not for any local police departments. My best suspicion is probably the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, precursor to the DEA. you know, federal parolee, federal parole officer, come graduate student in drugs and group dynamics. And eventually with permission, he goes back down to LA. And what is he part of when he's there? Well, he's on the fringes of the music industry.
Not so much, you know, he's, That was the Wilsons and elsewhere, which also brings him to the fringes of the film industry. So one of the things, if you're sort of looking in terms of Hollywood music industry elites in the flow of... Oh, and he's also dealing in drugs and girls. So an early version of Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah. Manson attracted lots of underage runaways and...
reign them, use them, also associating with biker gangs who produced drugs, etc. So that's part of what he's, he's an informant in the movement of drugs, basically within the film and music industries. And he's given pretty much a kind of free reign at that point. What then happens in August of 1969 is that there are these murders, you know, first Sharon Tate and her friends in Cielo Drive,
Showing 341–360 of 498 · page 18 of 25
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