Full transparency – I have a handful of records by some, shall we say, questionable human beings. And if I’m being totally honest, some of them aren’t questionable so much as awful. Sometimes the music is good and I suffer from a bit of cognitive dissonance in finding the artist abhorrent but the art itself good or great. And, well, sometimes the art isn’t really that good and the notoriousness of the artist is what drew me to the record in the first place.
I assumed Lie: The Love And Terror Cult would be the latter, but while there are some legitimately bad songs on it (“Garbage Man”) as a whole it’s not half bad, albeit more of a demo than a proper studio album. Recorded in 1968, prior to the notorious murders that would make Manson and his “Family” household names, it’s very much a hippie folk kind of album. In fact the writing was good enough that the Beach Boys covered “Cease to Exist”, changing the title to “Never Learn Not To Love” and including it on their 1969 LP 20/20. And this wasn’t just a matter of covering something that had come across their radar – Manson recorded upwards of a hundred hours of music at the Beach Boys’ studio, with engineer Stephen Desper having said that “… [Manson] had musical talent”. Manson, however, was not given a songwriter credit, and when his involvement later came to light it became a bit of an issue for the Beach Boys.
Phil Kaufman met Manson when both men were incarcerated at Terminal Island in 1966-67, before Manson became a cult leader, and was impressed by he fellow prisoner’s musical abilities. He self-funded a pressing of 2,000 copies of Lie: The Love And Terror Cult in 1970, which came packaged with a poster featuring the printed signatures of other prisoners. These first pressings are pricey – Discogs history puts them generally in the $400-500 range, though copies with the poster can and will go for more. Various other pressings have been put out over the years, both official and unofficial. My copy is one of the 1987 pressings, and while it’s lofi, the overall quality is perhaps a bit above average for a rough demo (these recordings were not part of the Beach Boys studio sessions).
If you want a thorough history of the album I suggest checking out the post on Vinyl Stories HERE – it’s very in depth and well-written. Believe it or not, you can actually stream Lie: The Love And Terror Cult on Bandcamp HERE, and you can even stream it on Spotify. Should you? Well, that’s up to you…