The Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson’s connection to Charles Manson is in focus amid renewed conversations about the notorious cult leader’s life after the release of a new Netflix documentary – ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes’. It was directed by Joe Berlinger.
The new documentary explored the brutal 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others, orchestrated by Manson. The victims of the August 8, 1969 rampage included Tate, the pregnant wife of movie director Roman Polanski ; coffee heiress Abigail Folger; celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring; writer Wojciech Frykowski; and teenager Steven Parent. Supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed and killed the following night. During the period of their friendship, Manson gave the Beach Boys a song titled “Cease to Exist. He wanted money instead. I gave him about a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stuff.”
“Through Dennis and some of those gatherings, I met a lot of people with solid connections, including Terry Melcher, Gregg Jakobson and several others who liked my music enough to want to record and market me and my material,” said Manson in the 1994 book, “Manson in His Own Words. Wilson rewrote some of the lyrics and changed the title to “Never Learn Not to Love,” added it to their 1969 LP 20/20 , but did not give a writing credit to Manson, Rolling Stone reported. Wilson later said about not crediting Manson with the song, “He didn’t want that.
