I guess if you had to choose....you'd take Andy Warhol over Charles Manson. Obviously you'd look better...and, honestly, isn't that enough?
Also, with Andy the body count was lower and, as with his art...it's not clear who's hands were actually getting dirty...no conviction.
In 1965, Andy Warhol met Edie Sedgwick at a party. Captivated at first sight, Warhol claims to have felt something like love for her. We know it weren't lust. My guess is that it was covetousness...an overwhelming desire to possess Edie's identity. Sedgwick's blood was a Founding shade of blue. Regal by nature with an effortless charm, she was everything the awkward, pocked, Andy Warhola was not.
Andy took her on as an avatar.
That's a dangerous position to be in with a narcissistic psychopath...so it ended badly. Of course, that's not all Andy's fault. She was a grown woman with her own capacity for destruction. She wasn't kidnapped and she benefitted from the associations..at least for a little while.
Still, of all the people in the world for her to have lighted on...he was the one almost guaranteed to knock at least ten years off her life.
Enough of the murder and mayhem...for the moment at least.
Right in the middle of all the nonsense we've been covering...the Velvet Underground, Venus in Furs, Heroin, White Light/White Heat, Sister Ray...that Velvet Underground, offered up one of the most precious songs ever recorded.
This final version puts Jack in the corset and Jane in the vest but it's still just a boy and a girl who want to get home to each other at night. The great anti-ideology...the anecdote to the murderous mass mind. The only place the individual can truly emerge...in genuine relation. Listen closely Protest Kids...as Jack emerges into his individuality with exuberance!
It's impossible to hear Sweet Jane without Chuck Berry's You Never Can Tell echoing in the background. They had a hi-fi phono...and they let it blast!
This girl has just tried to assassinate the president of the United States...Gerald Ford. Of course, you might know her from her time with the Manson Family.
Squeaky was not directly involved in the infamous murders carried out by The Family. She never did any time for those but she doesn't seem to have regretted the association.
She was a piece of work in her own right. After the Manson murders and before her attempt on Ford, she was dragged in for the murder of a couple in Stockton, CA. Turned out everybody there was involved except the victims and Squeaky. A couple of years later she tried to kill Gerald.*
The story doesn't end there. In 1987, Squeaky got wind that Charles Manson had cancer in the balls. So she escaped from prison to be with him. This baffles me...more than the gruesome murders which, despite their grotesque nature, seem to have been about dope...bad dope deals. What I don't get is the devotion of these girls.
(Nancy Pittman, Sandra Good, Kitty Lutesinger, Catherine Gillies of the Manson Family)
Them girls are outside the courthouse in a show of support for Manson and the others on trial for the brutal slaying of seven people. Squeaky's somewhere around there. She and others camped out on the grounds during the trial. Soon they'd all be bald with X's carved in their foreheads.
WTF? They are Baby Boomers...and that might be all the explanation we need but, still...
Just up the road Jim Jones' People's Temple is rockin', Ted Bundy is about to commit his first murder, John Wayne Gacey has just been granted parole for sexually assaulting a minor. There they sit...ice wouldn't melt in their mouths...in devotion to Charles Manson.
Despite the attempt on Ford and her escape, to help Charlie with his balls, Squeaky was eventually paroled y'all...God only knows what she's up to.
*Thirteen days later another woman tried to kill Ford...the most innocuous figure in the history of U.S. politics. For her part, Squeaky seems to have been chapped about the Red Woods...yes she was a confidante of Charles Manson, yes she was involved with dope dealing Aryan Nationers but, she loved the planet.
