“Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars / But I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars...”
As song-closing lyrics go, the final couplet on Neil Young's Revolution Blues are certainly striking... even more so if you know that the song was inspired by Young's encounters with infamous American cult leader Charles Manson.
Manson died on November 19, 2017, 46 years into a life sentence handed down to him for seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder, in relation to the brutal killings carried out by members of his cult, the Manson Family, in the summer of 1969. But as Neil Young revealed in a 1985 interview with Musician magazine's Bill Flanagan, he only knew Manson as an aspiring musician who had already made friendships and connections on the Californian music scene.
