RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Wednesday, October 22

100 VINYLZ: #85 - Lie LP by Charles Manson


(1974, ESP-Disk Records)
I have always been intrigued by ol' Chuckie Milles Manson, ever since I was a pre-teen. He's on some other-level psychology shit, always just being a mirror back at whoever is interviewing him, which is also why I'd never want to actually interview him, because he'd just reflect how awesome he is instead of the creepy shit that's inside. He comes across as a great mix of new age hippie bullshit from the '60s and jailhouse science. I would imagine if he didn't have the swastika tattooed on his forehead, he and the 5 Percenters would be tight.
I can't remember when I got this, but I it was probably when I used to mail order bunches of shit from Toxic Shock, which later became something else with a stupid name. It's just the folksy shit he was recording when he was hanging out with that one Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and it's not really that great (kind of like the Beach Boys; man, I was tricked into giving Pet Sounds the grand remastering another shot recently, and that stuff is retarded, like some surfer kid cracked his head open on a conkshell, but his older brother self-medicated the kid after his homemade extreme sports lobotomy with psilocybin tea, and the kid made an album, and everybody said it was genius to make him feel good like Special Olympians getting gold medals). I guess "Cease to Exist" is the most famous song off of Lie, because it has been covered by bands in the past couple decades, but I've always loved "Garbage Dump" the most, because that's the most anarchist hippie song on here. To this day, there are dumpster divers like mad, some of them close friends of mine. I have two or three garbage bags full of bagels in the freezer on my porch from both one of my wife's friends as well as an older couple at what used to a commune down the road. And I know a crazy mountain dude who feeds his yard chickens entirely with thrown out lettuces from two local Food Lions he picks up every Friday around lunch, because that's when they shuffle the lettuces.
I downloaded a ton of Manson's prison recordings recently, off of archive.org, and that's what I've always wanted more anyways. Were I a money-wasting man right now and not just a regular fucking doomed fat American loser like the rest of you, I'd be searching inside the ebays for a vinyl copy of Live in San Quentin, because that's the fucking shit right there. His kookery and cosmic kung fu is far more deeply embedded in that shit than this old second-rate folksy crap. When I was in high school, this older kid Greg who was a huge influence on corrupting me, but in a smart delinquent way, would make me mixtapes of all the crazy underground punk bullshit he bought like mad with his drug dealing monies. Greg was crazy, like he was always proud he never once had his name in any yearbook, and that's why I'd never say his whole name here. He also would get pissed if you copied his mixtapes for anybody because he didn't really like people outside of like five dudes. He fucked up one kid for dubbing some Cramps shit from some other dude he hooked up. Anyways, Greg would slip me tapes fairly often (I still have a few of them), and one had a Manson prison song, which I never knew the name of until getting the shit off the interorgs the other month. "And As I Told You On This Chord Once Before" is the song, and I used to listen to that shit every day in high school, except when I was afraid he might be brainwashing me, because he might be. There's a strange cadence to it all, and weird ways the words roll poetically but then switch up into something different. If I find that album, that shit might be top ten next time around. Still, just on general Charles Manson awesomeness (Air, Trees, Water, Animals yall), Lie sits right here on my stupid pretentious record dork list of doom.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I always liked "Look At Your Game, Girl" a whole bunch.

Raven Mack said...

yeah that would've been my second track to mention, but then I was afraid I'd go into a guns-n-roses tangent.

kami said...

a brief bums'n'posers moment for you - when the spag album came out i used to go to my local bar and put look at yr game on the jukebox. one barmaid loved it until i told her who wrote the song... then she switched the damn thing off and was very very slow to serve me drinks for the rest of the night

Unknown said...

i can't think of a better excuse than trying to avoid a g-n-r diatribe. fully understood.

by the way, the word verification on this comment was "plereste"--which sounded so perverse, I almost didn't hit publish.

Raven Mack said...

I used to be a plereste. It means you drill holes in encyclopedias to simulate sex with. Lavendar baby oil helps.