Charles Manson Songs That Were Performed By Famous Bands

In the late 1960s, charismatic lunatic Charles Manson informed his bevy of followers that a race war was on its way down the cultural pipeline, and that it needed a push start. To achieve this, he nudged his posse into committing seven murders, including Sharon Tate, and attempting several others, including the botched assassination of President Gerald Ford. Before that, he'd spent time in boys' homes and prisons for a litany of crimes, having been tied to various sexual assaults, armed robberies, forgeries, and parole violations. Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson once claimed that he saw Manson shoot a man and dump his body in a well, according to Biography.

Speaking of the Beach Boys, Manson was also an aspiring songwriter, with one heck of a catalog of ditties. Were they good? Well, artistic value is subjective, but no, not generally. Still, that hasn't stopped several celebrities over the years from drinking from the banana-pants whackadoo creative well, either as a way of saying "look how rock and roll we are" or, in one case, to try and recoup damages stemming from cult orgies.

Maybe the best known Charles Manson song is the Beach Boys' Never Learn Not to Love. Originally written under the much more Manson-y title Cease to Exist, it came about thanks to Manson's brief but tempestuous friendship with aforementioned Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, according to Biography. It's a long story, but basically, Manson became this Beach Boy's surprise roommate after Wilson picked up a couple of his followers, and the group spent a year trashing the musician's place via sex parties and drug-fueled shenanigans. $100,000 in damages later, Wilson claimed sole credit for the song as a means of repayment, the band made some changes to the song's structure and title, and an otherwise unremarkable piece of musical history was committed to vinyl.

According to the Baltimore Sun, in 1993, Guns N' Roses released a new album titled "The Spaghetti Incident?" with a bonus track called Look At Your Game, Girl. It was a cover of an old Manson recording, and fan backlash ended in Axl Rose claiming that all proceeds from the song would be donated to charity, as reported by the Washington Post. Similarly backfiring, Henry Rollins of Black Flag produced an album of Manson's music in the eighties, according to the Los Angeles Times, which was hastily cancelled.

On a side note, Rolling Stone reports that actor Crispin Glover also did a Charles Manson cover, which is really only surprising to people who've never heard anything about Crispin Glover.