Despite the claim of Arte Lupo that ‘here for the first time are the complete recordings that were made on 11th September 1967 in a rehearsal studio’, it’s worth pointing out that the first three of the albums mentioned above all contain material drawn from the same session, but none of them in fact contains the complete recordings, and none of them presents these recordings in their original order. It’s possible to assert this because the booklet of Charles Manson Unplugged 9.11.67 Volume 1 reproduces the original studio tracking sheets for the session, with the client and producer names blacked out. I haven’t seen or heard a copy of The Psychedelic Soul of Charles Manson, so I can’t tell you whether that contains the complete recordings, but The Summer Of Hate definitely doesn’t.  

These recordings predate Manson’s famous LIE album, which was recorded on 8 August 1968, and of course they also predate the Tate-LaBianca murders, which happened on the nights of 9 and 10 August 1969. The Summer Of Hate contains early versions of a couple of songs which do turn up on LIE, namely ‘Sick City’ and ‘Look At Your Game Girl’ (which was covered by Guns N’ Roses as an uncredited ‘secret’ track at the end of their 1993 covers album The Spaghetti Incident?), but most of these songs are not on LIE.   

Manson sings all the songs solo, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, although there are other people present in the studio, presumably female members of what would become known as the Manson Family. Manson sounds surprisingly nervous to be in a recording studio, possibly for the first time. He laughs a lot, and exchanges badinage with the (unnamed) sound engineer, who tries to reassure him and encourages him to play. The sound quality is pretty good (this was a professional demo session, after all), and Manson’s music is innocuous hippy folk quite typical of the time, sounding a bit like Donovan or Arlo Guthrie. The darkness and weirdness of LIE-era songs such as ‘Mechanical Man’, ‘I’ll Never Say Never To Always’ and ‘Cease To Exist’ evidently hadn’t taken over Manson’s worldview at this time. In addition to Manson’s original compositions, there’s a cover version of Willie Nelson’s ‘Night Life’.  

Of course, as we all now know, Manson’s attempts to build a career in the music business came to nothing, and he found fame in an altogether more bloody manner. But for those (like me) who feel an unending fascination for Charles Manson’s twisted and tragic saga, The Summer Of Hate is yet another landmark in the sequence of events which led The Family to the gate of 10050 Cielo Drive.