I dunno exactly how the YouTube algorithms decide what to pick to be featured on "my" home page, but when this 1976 interview with Manson Family member Susan Atkins popped up, I couldn't resist watching. I've been obsessed with the Manson Family since reading Helter Skelter in the late '80s. Anyway, after I watched the Atkins clip and the Geraldo interview, I ended my night by listening to Manson's first album, Lie - The Love And Terror Cult. I doubt a lot of y'all Slog Out have heard this LP, it's kinda scarce, BUT it's really good! In fact, I love the album so much, a few years back I wrote a Line Out post praising Manson's Lie - tLaTC album.

Manson's Lie - The Love And Terror Cult album...well, I love it. I do. In fact, Lie - tLaTC (recorded) by anyone else would now be a thousand dollar private press sike album hailed as outsider genius. I'd never cared, much less rated Lie since I'd never heard it...but when I did, I was floored. I bought it cheap, thinking I could flip it, I thought the contents would be Manson's rhetoric/jibberish or worse...a Sufi Choir type cult record, but...uh, it was far from any of that. Lie - tLaTC is some thirty odd minutes of slightly drugged up folkie songs about alienation, heartbreak, and brotherly love, with some nice West Coast sike flourishes...flourishes which do a fine job at making Manson sound somewhat like the Fugs AND...Comus (at times)!!

Yes, Manson was a cult leader/mass murder, but I'll always stand by my LOVE for Lie - tLaTC; tho it's raw, rough, and real lo-fi, the songs are striking. He may have failed to make a career as a musician, but in the '60s he certainly had the songwriting skill of a career musician.