Upon his arrival to Los Angeles in 1975, David Bowie stayed for a while at the Los Feliz house of Glenn Hughes, a close friend and by then Deep Purple’s bass player. This neighborhood is famous for having inspired the architecture of Buena Vista Street, the entrance to one of Disneyland’s theme parks, as well for being the area where the Manson Family killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the night after Sharon Tate’s murder. In fact, Hughes’ home lay on Waverly Drive, just down the road from the LaBianca house.

Informed of the fact, Bowie developed a paranoid obsession with the killings which, in his mind at least, became a malign influence that hung over the whole area like a specter. Surely the mountains of cocaine and the lack of sleep did not help the situation. Since California has a long tradition of Satan worshippers a la Anton LaVey, Bowie’s interest in the occult became a drug addled inferno packed with hexes and inhabited by witches, bodies falling from the sky and demons that haunted hillside swimming pools. In one of his lowest points he came to believe that a group of black girls wanted him to impregnate them to make a devil child, something clearly drawn from Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.

As in Tate’s case, the LaBianca murders were a random affair, there were no “occult” reasons for the crime: Manson chose the place because a while ago he had gone to a party in a neighboring house. The slaying of the supermarket executive and his wife, a continuation of Tate’s and his friends the night before, was part of the so-called “Helter Skelter” scenario that Manson had instilled on his followers for months; in essence, the Beatles’ song supposedly described, albeit subliminally, the beginning of a racial war between whites and blacks that would overtake the United States and impose a new world order headed by Manson. Actually, McCartney’s song was about a typically British amusement ride consisting of a spiral slide winding around a wooden tower (when I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide, where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride, till I get to the bottom and I see you again); Manson’s apocalyptic scenario was about a day at the fair.

A strange symmetry is at work here: while rock stars like Bowie became obsessed with the Manson Family murders, murderers like Manson became obsessed with rock stars like the Beatles. Regarding this obsession, Catherine Share, a member of the Family, commented:

It wasn’t that Charlie listened to the White Album and started following what he thought the Beatles were saying. It was the other way around. He thought that the Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years. Every single song on the White Album, he felt that they were singing about us.¹

Apart for his role as guru and commune leader, Charles Manson himself was a talented musician who was struggling to get a record contract. He had met Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who saw promise in his music and introduced him to Terry Melcher, a record producer that had been instrumental in shaping the sixties “California Sound.” He auditioned for Melcher who said he’d call him with an answer but never went through with this promise. Enraged, Mason went to the producer’s house on 10050 Cielo Drive but was informed that Melcher didn’t live there anymore. Unbeknownst to Manson, a few months prior the owner had rented the property to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. According to Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor in the Manson Family trial, the address on Beverly Crest embodied the establishment’s rejection of his art. If he was not going to make it as a folk rock star the only thing left for him were his apocalyptic prophesies.

Given their proximity in time, many of the details of the LaBianca murders have become confused with the events that took place at Cielo Drive. Many believe that the “death to pigs” motto was scribbled on the walls of Tate’s and Polanski’s house, when in fact they were written on the LaBianca’s living room along with the “Helter Skelter” legend on the refrigerator. The word “PIG”, written in Tate’s blood on the front door, was the only message left at Cielo Drive. This fixation with pigs comes from the Beatles’ song Piggies, a social critique that George Harrison based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and which Manson interpreted as an invitation to murder white influential people to trigger his racial apocalypse.

It has never been possible to determine with certainty if Manson knew who the new tenants of 10050 Cielo Drive were, but the fact that they were influential and well-known people fit well into with his plans. In November 1969, while serving a sentence for another murder, Susan Atkins—the Family member that wrote PIG on the front door—bragged to a fellow inmate that Manson had a list of celebrities he planned to kill. Atkins’ comment linked Manson’s name to the murders and cracked the case, which three months later still baffled the police. Among the names in Manson’s hit list were Steve McQueen, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra. Lynette Fromme, another Family member that was not involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders, attempted to kill president Gerald Ford in September 1975.

According to Ringo Starr, the Tate-LaBianca murders put an end to the sixties:

It was upsetting. I mean, I knew Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate and – God! – it was a rough time. It stopped everyone in their tracks because suddenly all this violence came out in the midst of all this love and peace and psychedelia. It was pretty miserable, actually, and everyone got really insecure – not just us, not just the rockers, but everyone in LA felt: ‘Oh, God, it can happen to anybody.’ Thank God they caught the bugger.²

By late 1969 everybody in Beverly Hills had locked their doors. It was the heyday of hippie paranoia and state-of-the art alarm systems. Ultimately, Charles Manson’s “Helter Skelter” scenario is a descent through a spiral/labyrinth where men and women become hybrid monsters, sovereigns and sacred men (0.5, 0.12, 1.4). A labyrinth whose opening lay in the Tate-Polanski’s house.

10050 Cielo Drive’s last tenant was Trent Reznor, frontman of industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, who lived in the house for eighteen months between 1992 and 1993 and converted its spacious living room into a recording studio he nicknamed Le Pig. Portions of the Broken EP and the band’s second LP The Downward Spiral—indisputably one of the best rock albums of the 1990s—were recorded at the site where members of the Manson Family massacred Sharon Tate and her friends. Unlike Bertolucci or Polanski, Reznor did not create a locus terribilis, a site of exception, with the excuse of artistic freedom, he converted an existing terrible place into a site of cultural production; a new variation of our subject which allows us to appreciate how our concept of locus terribilis begins to extend its influence to other spheres, very appropriately like a spiral.

Simply put, The Downward Spiral is a modern masterpiece that can only be compared in his time to such iconic and timeless pieces of rock music such as Radiohead’s OK Computer, U2’s Achtung Baby, PJ Harvey’s 4-Track Demos and Rage Against the Machine’s debut album. However, its insight into the psychological decomposition, into the morbidity of the human soul of our time is still unrivalled. To this day, a quarter of a century after its original release, the album still sounds elegant and abrasive and remains unusually relevant about our most intimate feelings of isolation, our innermost terrible places. Some of the most haunting songs from the album, such as Mr. Self Destruct and Ruiner, feature a very peculiar lyrical structure, the lyrics are delivered by two distinct “voices,” one that enunciates angrily and the other that sings in violent whispers, which seem to point to the conscious and unconscious of an individual living under overwhelming psychological pressure.

Regarding how he came to rent the Cielo Drive property, Reznor has always insisted that he did not know that it was the house of the Tate murders house until the day he signed the lease agreement, which included a disclosure clause about what had happened on the premises.³ “The first night was terrifying,” Reznor confessed.

‘By then, I knew all about the place; I’d read all the books about the Manson murders. So I walked the place at night and everything was dark, and I was like, ‘Holy Jesus that’s where it happened.’ Scary. I jumped a mile at every sound—even if it was an owl. I woke up in the middle of the night and there was a coyote looking in the window at me. I thought, ‘I’m not gonna make it.’⁴

After the initial shock, said Reznor “the house didn’t feel terrifying so much as sad—peacefully sad. But that could just be my own insanity.”⁵

Whether it was a publicity stunt or artistic eccentricity (or a mix of both), from the very beginning Reznor denied a direct influence of the murders on the album’s themes and, in fact, its content is much more interesting if it is taken out of this context and put in a tradition of albums such as Low and Outside by David Bowie and The Wall by Pink Floyd. However, many of the album’s soundscapes make it impossible not to hear references to what happened on Cielo Drive. In Piggy, one of the radio singles which Reznor began composing before moving to California, it is inevitable not to hear the sound of summer cicadas interspersed between the cymbals and superimposed with backward digitized screams; the resulting environment is as placid as it is eerie and it creates a very particular psychological tension that falls apart as the drum solo fades out leaving the skeleton of the song. The Downward Spiral is a psychological helter skelter that descends to the complete disintegration of the individual. The king as a psychological representation of the diurnal ego (1.10) is at the center of one of the last verses of Hurt, the last song of the album:

I wear this crown of shit

Upon my liar’s chair

Full of broken thoughts

I cannot repair

The album culminates with the image of the king/ego as the sinister and terrified being evoked by Bacon and Bertolucci (3.3.1), which highlights the conjunction between sovereign and homo sacer. Seen thus, The Downward Spiralis a spiral katabasis (0.5, 1.2) into an entirely modern hell, one that lies within (0.15). The mouth of this Avernus, its threshold, is 10050 Cielo Drive (0.6, 0.8). Whether consciously or unconsciously, Reznor took the entrance to the netherworld left open by the Manson Family as the starting point for his downward journey.

Around the same time Reznor signed to his Nothing Label a little known band from Florida called Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. They went by names that combined the name of a model or actress with the last name of a serial killer, bringing together two of the greatest obsessions of the US consumer culture. The point was: in the US you can become a celebrity either by being a star or by killing a lot of people. Marilyn Mason had already recorded a demo album called The Manson Family Album and jumped at the idea of recording and mixing the band’s first album at Le Pig; one would say the very idea was auspicious. Reznor and Marilyn Manson can be seen playing together at the Tate house in the video for Gave Up from NIN’s Broken EP.

Reznor’s stay at Cielo Drive came to an end after he chanced upon Patti Tate, one of Sharon’s younger sisters:

It was a random thing, just a brief encounter. And she said: “Are you exploiting my sister’s death by living in her house?” For the first time the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said, “No, it’s just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I’m in this place where a weird part of history occurred.” I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don’t want to support. When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, “What if it was my sister?” I thought, “Fuck Charlie Manson.” I don’t want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit.⁶

It seems the encounter with a member of the Tate family shook Reznor deeply and just before he embarked on the tour for The Downward Spiral, he began to dismantle the studio. Nevertheless, upon learning that the owner of the property wanted to demolish the house to build a new one, he took the front door as a souvenir and installed it in the entrance of Nothing studios in New Orleans. He took the doorway, the very threshold of one of the most famous terrible places of the twentieth century with him.

The record label went defunct in 2004 but the door continues in its adoptive place. It now serves as the entrance to a funeral home.

Few rock stars need as little presentation as Marilyn Manson. Emerging from Fort Lauderdale’s underground scene, Brian Hugh Warner’s musical and aesthetic project became one of the most famous and important acts of shock rock of the nineties. His third record, Antichrist Superstar (recorded at Nothing Studios in New Orleans), is a devastating critique on hypocrisy and conservatism of American society and combines a number of influences that range from David Bowie, Nietzche’s übermensch, Kabbalah, LaVeyan satanism and Aleister Crowley’s magick. If few rock stars have generated so much gossip and controversy as Manson, even less have been so critical of the musical establishment and its effects on contemporary society. Singles such as The Beautiful People, This is the New *hit and The Dope Show speak eloquently of his ability as social commentator.

In the latter’s video, taken from 1998’s Mechanical Animals, Manson criticizes the pop-star manufacturing system through a carefully crafted aesthetic that picks up on the ideas of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era. A breasted, alien-like creature, Manson is captured on a hill and taken to a facility where he is subjected to various tests to turn him into a rock star. The result is rather intriguing: instead of a Bowiesque fascist rock star/dictator in the vein of The Thin White Duke or Pink (3.1, 3.2), Manson reverses this aesthetic and creates a glam dictator an autocrat in a red sequined attire and platform boots escorted by a police force wearing magenta uniforms. Manson poses with his fans in the midst of a set of buildings of brutalist inspiration that recall the contrast of Havana’s soviet architecture. Aside from Ziggy Stardust, the immediate references for the video are Bowie’s acting work in Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Also, there are several references to Alejandro Jodorowski’s film The Holy Mountain (1973), in particular the sequence with the mannequins which represent the serialization and reproducibility of the Messiah, in Jodorowski’s case, or of the pop star, in Manson’s.⁷

Fotograma del video de The Dope Show

With Marilyn Manson we arrive at a new variation of the dictator/rock star; an iteration conscious not only of its condition of commodity but also of its biases and disadvantages. Having realized that whoever disappears as a life-form from the polis, reappears as consumer good in the market (0.19, 2.11, 3.2) Manson was able to devise a coherent representation of the manufacturing of any star/dictator, a process with scientific and industrial overtones encompassed in the image of him strapped to a replica of German artist Rebecca Horn’s Overflowing Blood Machine (1970), an external suit of plastic veins that surrounds the user transforming it into an extension of the mechanism. Manson’s glam dictator is as much a plastic rock-‘n’-roller as Ziggy Stardust (3.1), but one that must suffer its condition as a commodity as an intrinsic part of its act. Needless to say, this variation of the dictator/rock star is perhaps the most honest to date: totalitarianism under sequins.

Then, on the morning of April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, senior students at the Columbine high-school in Littleton, Colorado, killed thirteen people and seriously injured other twenty-one in the school grounds. It wasn’t the first high-school shooting in US soil but it was the deadliest so far. Attracted by the shock value of the news and desperate to find a culprit, both the mainstream and sensationalist media jumped the gun and pointed to artists like Marilyn Manson, NIN and movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers as some of the sources of inspiration for the massacre. Marilyn Manson took the worse part. Rumors stated that Harris and Klebold had put Mason style make-up on for their killing spree and were wearing band’s T-shirts. Neither of these statements were true. A victim of his own transgressive aesthetics, Marilyn Manson became a very real representation of the American Antichrist, the media depiction of all immorality and evil. Ironically, neither Harris nor Klebold liked his music, although they did have a keen interest in the Manson Family murders.

A couple of months before the shootings Dylan Klebold submitted an essay in his creative writing class entitled “The Mind and Motives of Charles Manson” in which he argued that the plot of Natural Born Killers was not meant to reproduce the Bonnie and Clyde theme of a criminal couple, and that instead it drew its inspiration largely from the life of Charles Manson. His reasoning is rather imprecise and the link between the movie and Manson turns out to be an excuse to write about the Tate-LaBianca murders. Although since its release the film has been accused of inspiring multiple murders and massacres, Natural Born Killers is nothing but a scathing critique to America’s media driven obsession with its killers. However, in the mind of both Harris and Klebold, Oliver Stone’s movie (shortened as NBK in many of Klebold’s diary entries) became a code name for the massacre.

Dylan Klebold—a shy, melancholic and lovesick type that ended up following Eric Harris, a genuine psychopath—was a fan of The Downward Spiral, which he continually referenced in his diaries:

I just want something i can never have.... true true I hate everything. why can’t I die... not fair. I want pure bliss... to be cuddling w. [edited], who i think i love deeper than ever... I was hollow, thought I was right. Another form of the Downward Spiral... deeper & deeper it goes. to cuddle w. her, to be one w. her, to love; just laying there. I need a gun. This is a wierd entry... I should feel happy, but shit brought me down. I feel terrible. The Lost Highway apparently repeats itself.

The opening line of this entry is a clear reference to Something I Can Never Have from NIN’s first album Pretty Hate Machine The song also appeared in the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, which was produced by Reznor. The lost highway in the last phrase refers to David Lynch’s movie of the same name, whose soundtrack was also produced by Reznor. One can see spirals scrawled here and there in Klebold’s diaries.

It is very unlikely that Klebold and Harris didn’t know that The Downward Spiral had been recorded at the site of the Tate murders, but regardless of this fact—or their obsession with the Manson Family or Natural Born Killers—my point is that the atrocities stemming from the 10050 Cielo Drive’s locus terribilis, have continued spiralling down to our days, reaching further and further into US society. In fact, in his book on the massacre, journalist Dave Cullen goes as far as arguing that Columbine “was not really a school shooting at all. It was an attack on society itself, intended to instill fear across the nation and secure the boys eternal notoriety.”⁹ The media and the entertainment industry have been instrumental at keeping this terrible place alive.

Of course, it is not my intention to suggest that Trent Reznor, Oliver Stone or Marilyn Manson are to blame for Columbine. That no artist could or should be blamed for how people interpret their work is a matter of common sense.¹⁰ An artist’s job is to represent the world as he or she perceives it and these musicians and filmmakers have been quite insightful at that; resorting to a cliché, they have captured the spirit of their time. No artist or musician should be singled out and held responsible for exposing the flaws of his or her society. Far from implying guilt, or even causality, the group of artists that I have dealt with in this section is a constellation that seems to be inextricably linked to a terrible place that the media insists on keeping wide-open, to the point of having turned it into one of the key pieces of the american contemporary imaginary.

A couple of months after the Columbine massacre, Marilyn Manson wrote a very eloquent article in Rolling Stone stating his point of view on getting blamed by the media and various other conservative organizations:

We applaud the creation of a bomb whose sole purpose is to destroy all of mankind, and we grow up watching our president’s brains splattered all over Texas. Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised. Does anyone think the Civil War was the least bit civil? If television had existed, you could be sure they would have been there to cover it, or maybe even participate in it, like their violent car chase of Princess Di. Disgusting vultures looking for corpses, exploiting, fucking, filming and serving it up for our hungry appetites in a gluttonous display of endless human stupidity.

When it comes down to who’s to blame for the high school murders in Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who’s guilty. We’re the people who sit back and tolerate children owning guns, and we’re the ones who tune in and watch the up-to-the-minute details of what they do with them. I think it’s terrible when anyone dies, especially if it is someone you know and love. But what is more offensive is that when these tragedies happen, most people don’t really care any more than they would about the season finale of Friends or The Real World.¹¹

Modern media, as Marilyn Manson suggests, has brought us to a terrible place of indifference, insensitivity and apathy that mirrors the cruelty of our sovereigns. It is through this gigantic media apparatus that our current locus terribilis has become a fixed and indispensable element of modern society.

One of the main characteristics of this new terrible place is its capacity for homogenization:

It is no wonder that kids are growing up more cynical; they have a lot of information in front of them. They can see that they are living in a world that’s made of bullshit. In the past, there was always the idea that you could turn and run and start something better. But now America has become one big mall, and because of the Internet and all of the technology we have, there’s nowhere to run. People are the same everywhere. Sometimes music, movies and books are the only things that let us feel like someone else feels like we do. I’ve always tried to let people know it’s OK, or better, if you don’t fit into the program. Use your imagination – if some geek from Ohio can become something, why can’t anyone else with the willpower and creativity?¹²

A world that has become an enormous shopping mall full of identical people, is a world that does not occupy a definitive place in space (0.8, 0.9, 0.11, 1.18). This is globalization’s dream, creating a threshold where existence is reduced to consumption and entertainment, which in turn lead to an inevitable infantilization. (1.16, 3.3.1). The world turned into an amusement park.

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1. Manson, Cineflix documentary, 2009. ↩︎
2. The Beatles Anthology, 311. ↩︎
3. There’s another version of how Reznor ended up living in Cielo Drive: “I remember having dinner with [music booker] Ian Copeland and he asked where I was going to be in L.A., and I mentioned a house on Cielo Drive. He said, “That’s where the Manson murders took place.” I had read Helter Skelter, the true-crime account of the Manson family murders, co-written by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi as a kid and was freaked out by it; Ian said he had a copy. So we finished dinner, and I got his copy of the book and turned to the pictures in the middle. I’m thinking, Man it would be fucking crazy if it’s the same house. Then I saw a picture that showed a wooden ladder going up to the loft — I’d just gone up there earlier that day — and I thought, Holy shit, it’s the same place. No part of me thought, That’d be cool!” (Vulture, In Conversation: Trent Reznor)
4. Gavin Baddeley, Dissecting Marilyn Manson. ↩︎
5. Entertainment Weekly, ‘Making records Where Mason Killed’. ↩︎
6. Mikail Gilmore, “Trent Reznor: Death to Hootie,” Rolling Stone, March 6, 1997. ↩︎
7. Marilyn Manson’s references to a dictator/rock star go back to his previous album, Antichrist Superstar, whose central character is a supernatural being who, wanting to end the world, assumes the identity of a populist leader who convinces a large part of the population to follow him. ↩︎
8. Dylan Klebold's diary, entry Thoughtz, 10-14-97. Available at: https://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/klebold_journal_1.2.pdf ↩︎
9. Oliver Moore, “Columbine: myths and truth” The Globe and Mail, May 8, 2009, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/columbine-myths-and-truth/article785290/ ↩︎
10. Here it is worth asking: were The Beatles sent to the stake for their supposed “influence” on the Tate-LaBianca Murders? “The White Album had a lot of very subversive messages on it,” said Marilyn Mason in an interview with NME, “ones they intended and ones that may’ve been misinterpreted by Charles Manson. To my knowledge, it’s the first rock’n’roll record that’s been blamed and linked to violence. When you’ve got ‘Helter Skelter’ written in blood on someone’s wall, it’s a little more damning than anything I’ve been blamed for.” (Ted Kessler, “Marilyn Manson goes ape”, NME, September 9, 2000)Here it is worth asking: were The Beatles sent to the stake for their supposed “influence” on the Tate-LaBianca Murders? “The White Album had a lot of very subversive messages on it,” said Marilyn Mason in an interview with NME, “ones they intended and ones that may’ve been misinterpreted by Charles Manson. To my knowledge, it’s the first rock’n’roll record that’s been blamed and linked to violence. When you’ve got ‘Helter Skelter’ written in blood on someone’s wall, it’s a little more damning than anything I’ve been blamed for.” (Ted Kessler, “Marilyn Manson goes ape”, NME, September 9, 2000)
11. Marilyn Manson, “Columbine: Whose Fault Is It,” Rolling Stone, June 24, 1999. ↩︎
12. Ibid., 69 ↩︎