The latest list of suggested topics for MRR mini-theme issues came when I was working in the garden. It brought back memories of similar notes wedged into my typewriter back in the old newspaper days...back in the days of typewriters.

It would be fun if through a time warp some of these marvelous subjects fire-breathing editor Pat McMahon assigned me would show up as MRR theme issues: the history of pizza in Calgary, allergies and how to spot them, the stamp collector's corner at the post office (I never turned that one in), men who collect toy soldiers, had enough?

It would have in turn revved up the tacky Calgary Herald Friday Magazine to feature the latest ideas from Tim: major labels, Japanese culture and crime.

"I know this is on short notice," the letter said in reference to the crime issue, and I realized I had two days to put together an article on criminals, the prison system and the brave new buzz phrase: three strikes you're out!

I had just spent time in the San Luis Obispo area, drinking in rich gossip about former Manson-family member Bobby Beausoleil, still incarcerated. One friend knew Bobby's wife; another had been interviewing the prisoner, hoping to put together and sell an article.

I thought that by focusing on the Manson family, one of the most notorious in American history, I could examine the entire issue of crime and punishment. It was amusing—and relevant—to bring up Manson with some people and listen to their "three strikes" type rage: "It's a good thing those people are locked up! Would you want one of them moving into the neighborhood? They should have gassed them!"

Bobby B. was not involved in the ritual Tate/La Bianca mayhem because he was already in jail, apprehended in the murder of a third-rate mescaline chemist with whom the Manson family had a beef, the same poor guy who had his ear lopped off with Manson's mojo sword, then sewed back on by Family cuties using dental floss. (This is one of the only details I remember from this case, being fascinated with alternate uses of dental floss: try putting it on for guitar strings.)

Being associated with Manson means Bobby's key has been thrown away. He has already served 25 years for this murder, which seems like enough. My writer friend feels he has reformed, however some of his activities fail to impress the parole board:

His soundtrack to the Kenneth Anger film Lucifer Rising just showed his continuing interest in Satanism, and the babes-in-bondage magazine he publishes with his wife is also not the P.B.'s cuppa tea.

This is all the height of hypocrisy in a state whose film industry is on an endless diet of Satanic mucus, blood and doo doo. With kinky sex thrown in for kicks.

I was also amused by my friend's failure to interest any magazines in this guy. By focusing on Bobby's music he'd managed rejects from every publication contacted except for Hustler, who said it sounded interesting... except for the music. Wasn't there something else he could play up, besides music.

Yeah, really. Anything but music. It was around here that my attempts to tie the Manson legend into the over-all scene of crime in America flopped. What I needed were ideas on how to improve the prison system or something else to replace it with. But I didn't have any, other than the vague notion that putting criminals with other criminals doesn't make a lot of sense. However I don't know how you'd avoid other criminals.

Imagine a society happy to throw its hands up in the air over the first two violent assaults an individual commits, then ready to squander its resources feeding, housing and caring for these people for the rest of their lives. You don't have to imagine it. You live in it.

The New Yorker had a nice cartoon on the subject: two old men, sitting in a prison cell. One guy says "My third felony was the smartest move I ever made. On the outside they're still fighting for health care."

I watched the film 'Carlito's Way', curious to see what happens when a Hollywood big shot (Brian De Palma) takes on several insightful novels about the U.S.A. crime scene. In one of the first scenes, the main character tells a judge he has reformed, "not in 25 years like you said it would take, but in five!" But he can't really reform because all his friends are crooks. The biggest crook turns out to be a lawyer. (Wonderfully played by Sean Penn, by the way.) So much for Hollywood films not being realistic.

I started thinking the Manson story had more to do with the major label issue than the crime issue.

After all Charlie came really close to landing a contract with one of the big labels and a top producer of that time. The songs he wrote, no better and no worse than most of the crap the major labels put out, continue to generate cover versions. Any songwriter would be happy to get as many recordings done of their music. The fact that he can't collect royalties saves him from dealing with some of the biggest criminals we have living outside the prison system, i.e. the music publishing industry.

Manson cover songs can be used to chart the social differences between major label and independent releases. For example in 1993 I contributed five versions of How Can You Kill Me I'm Already Dead, a tone poem based on Manson's speech to the jury, to an Italian label named Helter Skelter releasing a Manson theme CD/ EP. As always I credited the publishing rights to the Manson/Burt Bacharach songwriting team. The release featured a variety of other artists and some great artwork by Raymond Pettibon. Like everything I'm involved in it is almost impossible to find and nobody paid any attention to it.

But let Guns and Roses cut a Manson song on their new release and you've got a mini-controversy with editorial writers philosophizing in magazines published by the same conglomerate that owns Guns and Roses. Plus relatives of some of the victims (of Manson, not Guns and Roses) running around making furious little waves.

Now don't get me wrong, I loved Sharon Tate and have wept over her grave. However people like her relatives have given up completely on the concept of rehabilitation, at least in connection with these scum that have brought so much sadness into their lives. And many people who have never been crime victims or even known someone that has have also given up, preferring to daydream about savage punishments. And that's where our society stands, hovering between treating each little criminal like a wounded sparrow that needs counseling or figuring out new reasons to use the cruelest punishments at our disposal, life prison sentences, the death penalty or a major label record contract.

Let everyone buy guns and shoot each other. But please, let's not have any more ringleaders with marketable song catalogues.

"Charlie wasn't really into his music," my Manson expert friend explained. If he had been, he might be on tour this summer, a whole new generation of fans into his groovy sixties music. However as most know about Mans he prefers life in prison to life on the outside, it's like his form of social security. Frankly I'd rather live in a country where its easier to get on welfare if you're a musician, not a murderer. (The welfare would be cut off if you scored a major label contract.)

This major label topic is ho-hum, having been discussed to death in the last decade and the one before. I have only fleeting bits of knowledge relating to the topic picked up in years of playing music.

I remembered how I had gotten into blues in the summer after ninth grade and for the most part this meant I was buying albums on small labels that I had never noticed before: Yazoo, Arhoolie, Delmark and so forth. I recalled learning the history of record companies. When the phonograph was first invented it was sold in furniture stores, and the small stock of records that were available became accessories sold alongside couches and hassocks.

Since the blues was primarily a black music, the first blues '78s were sold in furniture stores in black neighborhoods. It is amusing to me that the furniture clerks in these places would no doubt pick up some knowledge about these items they were selling, some of them perhaps becoming blues experts.

Now we have an industry that no longer sells records, it sells new music formats. Allowing them to endlessly reprint the same recordings that used to be sold in furniture stores. Major labels may just as well be selling coffee tables as CDs.

"One thing you have to realize about Manson is that they learned everything about 'Helter Skelter' from a scratched up old vinyl album," one of the biggest guys in the music business told me. (The former 600-pound doorman of a club in Huntsville, Alabama.)

"Imagine what them boys mightta done if they had a nice clean-sounding CD of the white album back then." Notice the sexual stereotyping typical of the music industry: 'them boys' in reference to a cult that centered around girls! In the same era that Manson and his kin began creepy crawling around the Hollywood hills, technology for recording was going through rapid new innovations at the same time the pop music of the day was changing into something 'old guard' A&R men such as Mitch Miller of Columbia could neither understand nor comprehend, though they liked the greenbacks that flowed in.

So for a few years you had unprecedented freedom in the major label scene. An album such as the Jefferson Airplane's 'Surrealistic Pillow' was created by people using an 8-track machine for the first time in their lives, the big label honchos shrugging "Gee, we don't know how to use these things" and happy to let the weird longhairs fuck around as long as they came up with a tape on a reel and didn't murder any famous movie actresses in the process.

From here we have evolved to a point where the major labels have established "standards" for everything they release, these rigid controls loved by the recording industry, guaranteeing big profits for those who build high-tech studios and mold corporate 'record producer' types at $50,0000 per 'grunge rock' release. It works the same way as the construction industry, rumored to be the main force behind 'three strikes/you're out' because of the lush profits available when dealing with government prison-building contracts.

The number three is of paramount importance as you see. We have not only chosen three as a breaking point for incarcerating career criminals, but career hit-makers know full well anything longer than three minutes will probably not get played on the radio, the exceptions happening of course during the Manson era, the most notorious being 'MacArthur Park' not co-incidentally about Los Angeles and baking cakes, the latter a standard way of breaking someone out of prison. This song, written by Jim Webb and recorded by actor Richard Harris, was known as the 'poo poo' song by disc jockeys, for reasons that will be explained in the future "How to shit on the job" issue.

The only thing of importance in the "counter-culture" to these businesses is of course the counter the merchandise is sold over and the other one you use to tally up the day's sales. And of course every vital, free-thinking, convention-shattering cultural movement that only the real hipsters know about eventually turns into a car commercial. And so what?

It made me think what I was really writing about was Japan, or at least a Japanese cartoon character whose name I believe is "Drymong."

On my first trip to Japan in the early '80s, this little Drymong guy, kind of a dog with a pot belly and his mouth open all the time, was everywhere you look—billboards, cartoons, T-shirts worn by people of all ages, milk cartons, candy machines, everything a Drymong theme.

On my second trip to Japan at outset of the '90s, this little terd was nowhere to be seen and my Japanese hosts made a bewildered face when his name was brought up. I was told to just forget any plans I had of rounding up replacement Drymong toys, t-shirts, ashtrays and so forth.

This is the reality facing lots of crap pushed by the big labels. I won't predict what of the current glut will still be remembered in 1999, because you can't. I certainly couldn't have predicted that the Partridge Family would be viewed as hip, charming and musically energetic the way it is by the younger generation today. It is interesting to note that if any member of this particular family had committed a ritual murder they would have an easier time getting their songs recorded.

In America we have acts such as DR.E.Mong in your goddamn face everytime you turn around, among many other fad hit groups of the top 40. Their leader, Mike Swipe, actually contacted me once. He wanted me to play guitar and contribute original songs to a 'solo' project of some kind he was working on. But in his first letter he warned me there was no possibility to make a penny on this production because "it is being done for an independent label."

Of course I told him to go hang it in his ass! Here we have a system of rewards the major labels have worked out with influence from the prison system, where somewhere along the line it was decided that celebrity felons such as Manson should not make money on their creative endeavors. The majority of convicts contracted to such institutions work with no remuneration, and they believe nobody else should make any money either. Is this a problem? Nah. Just ask Kurt Cobain.

If you want to know a force that can wreak havoc with art, try personal and cultural disagreements amongst collaborators. This brings us back to Japan.

Let's take a look at two Japanese musicians, Tommy and Steve. (Note: Not their real names.) Tommy showed up on the early '80s New York avant-garde scene, jamming with everyone, developing an intense philosophy about creating something totally crazy and meaningless, climaxing in one 19-minute track 'How to Kill the Mind'... excuse me, are we allowed to mention pieces of music that last 19 minutes in MRR?... Tommy and his cohorts were definitely setting the stage for the lunacy of current groups such as The Boredoms, UFO or Die, etc.

Steve was criticized by many who jammed with him for playing too loud, too much, too incoherently, too aggressively. Sometimes he spent entire sets taking the drum set apart and putting it back together again. A German guitarist wept after one set, lectured Steve that "Music is not sports." (Neither is crime. See: Three Strikes topic.)

Tommy and Steve are both my types of musicians, but our relationships degenerated because of something that has nothing to do with music. I found out both these jokers are followers of Charles Manson. I wonder if a cult like this exists in Japan. I would think it would be hard for the Japanese to understand the racial motivations for Manson's career, since the Japanese have only one race to worry about in their society.

At one gig with Steve I let an American living in Japan sit in, but had to boot him off the bandstand when he started making snide comments about Jews. When Steve asked me why I'd done this, I was unable to convince him the guest musician had been rude. "What's a Jew?" Steve asked, perplexed.

Perhaps the second race in Japan is women. After all, wasn't it a Japanese woman, Yoko Ono, who made up the expression 'Woman is the Nigger of the World'? (Does she still have a major label contract?)

For example, one thing that pissed off Tommy was the relationship between our wives. He had brought his wife over to New York City and was already distressed that she was becoming more independent and aggressive, "more like American woman."

I'd already heard a lot about American women in Europe, German and French men telling me they thought American women were too independent. "They'll do whatever they want. They are too crazy."

Hopefully this is true. The more our wives walked and talked the more Tommy felt a revolt was being planned.

At a visit to Tommy's parents, we saw the life-style he was used to. His mother prepared a 15-course meal, then left the entire kitchen and dining room a mess, food everywhere, while she raced off to work the night shift as a nurse. She was expected to clean up when she returned at 3 a.m., or the following sunrise when she had to get up. Tommy and his dad sat on their rolly-polly butts the whole night watching Sumo wrestling, unwilling to lift a finger. And Tommy was impressed with his father's manner, "He is so peaceful... like Buddha." Well we could all be Buddha if we turn all the shit work over to women.

When my wife went back home and Tommy and I took off for a final 10 days of intense touring, things really took a bad turn. Tommy had assumed all along that as soon as my wife split I would be eager to go visit "pink saloni" with him. He even taught me to tell the audience "Thanks very much but now I must go to the pink salon" as a way of getting cheap laughs.

Going to a bar is bad enough, but the idea of going to one where a strange woman comes up and gives you a hand job is not exactly my idea of a great foreign vacation. I'm not saying it's a cultural difference because these places are full of foreigners loving it, but in every Japanese town the evening streets are crowded with men out for just such a casual paid-sex experience while their wives sit at home.

One night Tommy and I had the following conversation, which I report out of a life-long love of the ludicrous:

"Oh, Eugene-san! You make a terrible mistake! You have not lived unless you fuck Japanese girl."

"Well then I haven't lived because I haven't fucked a Japanese girl."

"We can make this better for you. We go to pink saloni!"

"No, it's you I'm worried about. You haven't lived either until you've fucked a Mexican girl. Have you fucked a Mexican girl?"

Of course he hadn't, at least not at that point. So I managed to twist it into a stand-off, but the message became clear and felt through the music: our rapport was vanishing because I didn't want to go fucking with him after the gigs.

Same thing happened a decade later with Steve as he began confiding his disappointment in me to others. "I don't understand Eugene-san. He no want to go girl hunting after show."

Of course I was still available as a listener when these guys needed to make announcements about momentous things that were happening to them. On the streets of Paris, Tommy told me the big news: "Eugene-san! I finally fuck French girl!" "

"Oh, did you have a good time?" "Well... interesting, I must ask you... we fuck, we fuck, we fuck... but," eyes widening. "SHE COULD NOT COME ! SHE COULD NOT COME!" He paused.

"Yeah. Well that happens sometimes..." I said "Not with Japanese girl. This never happens with Japanese girl." Perhaps a "three-strikes" system is an ancient yet unspoken part of the Japanese orgasm culture.

Bay Area guitarist Hank Gonzalez rang me recently at 7 a.m. to read yet another clipping about musicians with strings of girls in the Orient. In this case the subject was avant-garde composer John Hate, recently working in the area of 'light nonporous metal skate emo rock/jazz.'

Unable to contain his hysterics. Hank read: "Hate finds most of his inspiration in the beautiful women of the Orient, particularly Japan, where he spends at least half the year.

"His concert programs include hidden references written in Japanese proclaiming the special joys of whipping, mutilating and even skinning these women if they allow it.

"Like a James Bond/007 of avant-garde music, Hate journeys to these exotic far off locales, meets beautiful women, makes them his conquests and then uses their beauty as an inspiration for his compositions." Some of which are under three minutes.

Meanwhile Bobby Beausoleil languishes in prison—"Which is where he belongs, the slime—" "No, you don't understand. Bobby had nothing to do with the Tate murder...he is in jail for killing a mescaline chemist who ripped them off...25 years—"

"SO? GOOD! IF HE WANTED TO KILL SOMEONE SO GODDAMN BAD, WHY DIDN'T HE KILL MANSON?"

In the future we can expect appearances before the California prison parole board by not only John Hate but the aforementioned Japanese musicians, Steve and Tommy. Like Manson, they all admire Bobby. Why? "Manson admired Bobby because he was really into his music. Well not only that, but he had his own string of girls, like Manson did. He didn't have to rely on Charlie's girls, he had his own. And then on top of that he was really into his music, so Charlie admired that because he couldn't get it together, he was just mostly into the girls."

Tim, let me know when you want that History of Punk Pizza in the Bay Area article.