Paul McCartney Didn’t Perform The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ for Years After Charles Manson ‘Hijacked’ It
Paul McCartney didn’t want to perform The Beatles‘ “Helter Skelter” for years after Charles Manson “hijacked” it. The cult leader “hijacked” many Beatles songs and claimed the Fab Four were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Paul McCartney wrote The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ after Pete Townshend said something interesting
Sometimes, a simple phrase triggers something in a songwriter’s head and results in a hit song.
In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote “Helter Skelter” after hearing The Who’s Pete Townshend say he’d written the “loudest, dirtiest, rockiest” song, “I Can See for Miles.” Paul loved the description, so he went into the recording studio and said to the band, “Let’s just see how loud we can get and how raucous. Let’s try to make the meters peak.”
On “Helter Skelter,” Paul added contradicting elements. The music was loud and raucous, but its lyrics take aspects of two childhood staples. Paul describes going up and down a helter skelter, a conical fairground fixture with a slide around the outside. He also took inspiration from a song in Alice in Wonderland.
Paul used the helter skelter as a symbol of life. “One minute you’re up, next minute you get knocked down,” he wrote. “You’re feeling euphoric, then you’re feeling miserable. Such is the nature of life.”
Some listeners looked past the childlike elements. Lines like “She’s coming down fast” sound sexual. Others related the line to drugs, which was darker. However, the song’s meaning got even darker once Charles Manson latched on.
Paul McCartney didn’t perform The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ for years after Charles Manson ‘hijacked’ it
A year after The Beatles released “Helter Skelter,” Charles Manson “hijacked” it and turned it into something ugly. The cult leader thought The Beatles were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He began reading into much of their lyrics, mostly from songs on The White Album. Manson thought the group’s music had “all sorts of secret meanings.”
Manson read hell into “Helter Skelter.” Then, Manson and his group carried out the Tate-LaBianca murders in August 1969. According to Rolling Stone, the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” were painted in victims’ blood on the LaBiancas’ fridge. During the cult’s trial a year later, Manson revealed their motives for the killings “came from Manson’s twisted misinterpretation of lyrics on the ‘White Album.'”
Manson thought The Beatles’ “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” and “Helter Skelter” foretold a bloody, apocalyptic race war. When the war never began, he decided to start it himself with the murders.
“[‘Helter Skelter’] means confusion, literally,” Manson said during the trial. “It doesn’t mean any war with anyone. It doesn’t mean that some people are going to kill other people. … Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down around you fast….
“Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment because the establishment is rapidly destroying things? The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb and blind to even listen to the music…. It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says ‘Rise.’ It says ‘Kill.’ Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”
In The Beatles Anthology, Paul wrote, “I still don’t know what all that stuff is; it’s from the Bible, ‘Revelations.’ But he interpreted the whole thing … and arrived at having to go out and kill everyone…. It was frightening, because you don’t write songs for those reasons.”
In The Lyrics, Paul revealed he didn’t perform the song for years after Manson and the Sharon Tate murders. “It was all too twisted,” he said.
Paul said he and the band played ‘the hell out’ of the song
In The Lyrics, Paul said the recording process for The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” was “endless, a feat of endurance.” That’s why Ringo Starr shouts that he has blisters on his fingers at the end. “It was that kind of session,” Paul wrote.
He explained that he and The Beatles “had played the hell out of it, so maybe Manson did detect something infernal in it.” Manson wasn’t the only one who picked up on the song’s darker themes. Many heavy metal bands, including Mötley Crüe, have covered the song and it has sometimes been credited as the first heavy metal song.
Paul doesn’t know if that’s the case, but “it’s certainly true that the music preceding rock, the gentle and romantic dance music, was kicked over. We were kicking that out of the way with this song.”
The Beatles were certainly embarking on new territory on “Helter Skelter.” Whatever people think of the song, it’s good that Paul didn’t let Manson affect his views of it for long.
