1 Charles Manson Song Includes Cryptic Nod to The Beatles’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour’
Charles Manson’s unsavory association with The Beatles is well-known. However, few classic rock fans know Manson wrote a song referencing The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. It’s not clear what Manson was trying to say.
Charles Manson wrote a folk song about himself that references The Beatles
Vox reports Manson believed The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” predicted a race war. If that wasn’t going to happen on its own, Manson decided he should start the war. His cult, widely known as the Manson Family, killed 12 innocent people.
In addition to being the most notorious cult leader of the 1960s, Manson was also a folk singer. A collection of his demos was released in 1970 under the title Lie: The Love and Terror Cult. One of the tracks is a ditty called “Arkansas.” The track is about Manson running away from home so he didn’t have to go to school and then raising himself without the help of parents or teachers. He recalls becoming a squatter, much like his father. It also includes this cryptic line: “My nose is droopy red an’ my whiskers grey / ‘Cause the magical mystery tour has taken me away.”
What does ‘Arkansas’ have to do with The Beatles’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour?’
Manson was obsessed with The Beatles, but it’s unclear why he threw in a shout-out to Magical Mystery Tour. We don’t know if he was talking about the album Magical Mystery Tour, the song of the same name, or the film of the same name. In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul said mystery tours were bus trips to undisclosed locations he used to enjoy. Paul thought that mystery tours were romantic and surreal and decided to make the movie Magical Mystery Tour bizarre to keep up with psychedelia.
Who knows what Manson thought mystery tours were? “Arkansas” certainly doesn’t sound like a song from Magical Mystery Tour. That album is lush and psychedelic, while “Arkansas” is pretty raw. Maybe Manson just used the phrase to seem cool to hippies. He certainly took to the hippie subculture in the worst possible way.
John Lennon distanced himself from Charles Manson but didn’t defend the other Beatles
During a 1980 interview in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, John dismissed the Fab Four’s Manson connection. “All that Manson stuff was built ’round George’s song about pigs [‘Piggies’] and this one [‘Helter Selter’], Paul’s song about an English fairground,” he recalled. “It has nothing to do with anything, and least of all to do with me. I gave George a couple of lines about forks and knives and eating bacon.”
John seemed particularly interested in exonerating himself. “It has nothing to do with me,” he said. “It’s like that guy, Son of Sam [serial killer David Berkowitz] who was having these talks with a dog. Manson was just an extreme version of the people who came up with the ‘Paul is dead’ thing or who figured out that the initials to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ were ‘LSD.'”
Manson will always be a dark part of The Beatles’ story, even if they don’t bear any responsibility for his crimes.
