Charles Manson
Lie: The Love And Terror Cult

After reading just one review about the music of Charles Manson, a person rightfully imprisoned for crimes he committed, yet at the same time "hyper-demonized" as an excellent excuse to stab the then-prevailing flower power during the Summer Of Love Made In USA (and which, in the time of Vietnam, certainly wasn't pleasing to the 'sheep' who instead wanted to fight hard in 'Nam!!!), thus causing it to collapse and die on its own, leaving it to struggle until punk arrived to give it the coup de grâce musically as well.

Beyond the socio-political situation that contributed to making Manson worse in the eyes of the world than he actually was (I'm not excusing him, but measure his crimes against those committed by a Jeffrey Dahmer or a John Wayne Gacy, and shudder at the unspeakable horror that these two buddies have done...) and what Manson, I repeat, has actually done, having made this preamble, I want to talk about this controversial record...

Several things need to be remembered about LIE.

First of all, it was a DEMO of ideas and sketches thrown down by Manson with the acoustic guitar and little else, in a home studio with a single take, only one microphone pointed, and tapes that in the desert (where they were brought since Manson lived there) got quite damaged. The quality, therefore, is that of a DEMO. Do not expect anything more.

Secondly, many do not remember that Manson's youth was not in the '60s, but in the '50s, and indeed he considers himself a huge admirer of "no bullshit music", that country of Bing Crosby and those steppe atmospheres... the fact that he managed to break through with several songs at the end of the '60s as a first attempt, having learned to play the guitar in prison, is already a miracle that almost no one of us under the same conditions would be able to do (let's also remember that not all prisons are like the Italian ones, especially not in the '50s...) - and that lyrically, the album hides great moments and catchy refrains, as painful as it is to say, but I'm not saying it for "anti-conformism", it is music that one listens to and makes you prick up your ears..!

The opener, "Look At Your Game, Girl", later picked up by the overrated Guns 'N Roses for no other reason than trying to shock someone (since Axl Rose, let's admit it, is certainly not Perry Farrell...), is actually a beautiful song that sounds classic from the first listen, tinged with unexpected and... sincere melancholy that surprises if one knows the character only for what he did and does not go beyond the face presented by the media... Lo and behold, we have a human being.

"Ego" develops instead into Manson's amphetamine crooning, similar-Indian with acoustic guitar, primitive percussions, and a sitar in a truly agile song almost as much as "Tomorrow Never Knows" (of course, Ringo's drums and the Beatles' studio tricks were unattainable!) for its moves... "Mechanical Man" is instead a spoken word done together with some girls of the Family and becomes another mini-raga with absolutely ironic nursery rhymes in their non-sense about the observation of modern man, whom Manson, newly released from prison, could no longer understand or perceive as "good".

The 14 songs are brief, and this plays in their favor, contributing to the idea that this was indeed just a demo, yet the arrows in his quiver are more than one starting from the first three songs, all three very good, culminating in other compositions suspended between country ("Home Is Where You're Happy", "Arkansas"), rural psychedelia like the Fugs (it's perhaps not an original case that precisely the singer of the Fugs was the first to write a book about him...?) like the splendid "Sick City", one of the highest points of the album for me - considering that in the '60s, among Dylan, Lennon, Drake, Reed, Morrison, and many others it was difficult to write something significant lyrically... yet, this thirty-year-old manages, describing a scenario beyond the world of those years, but demonstrating an incredible acumen...

Restless people, from the sick city
But they're home, now to make the sky look pretty
What can I do, I'm just a person
Just a line that we always seem to hear
You just sit
Things get worse and
Watch TV and drink your beer

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