One Tin Soldier - Billy Jack 1971

MGM Video ^ | 1/1/1971 | MGM Video

[Pol-92064]

One Tin Soldier is a 1960's era protest song written by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter. Sung by "Coven".

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TOPICS: Arts/Photography
KEYWORDS: music

[Steely Tom]

I think it was a joke.

You addressed your correction to dfwgator, but it was I who made the mistake of identifying Tom Laughlin as Tom McLaughlin.

I know what you're thinking:

You thought it was a joke
and so you laughed
YOU LAUGHED!
when I had said
that losing you
would make me flip my lid
RIGHT?

[Steely Tom]

The Beach Boy that Manson got to was Dennis.

Wow. I didn't know that, or forgot it.

Imagine. Being Brian, and being on top of the world, and having your little brother bring that homicidal whack job into your circle.

I read somewhere that Manson and his girls basically moved in to Brian's beach house and wouldn't leave.

So he left. He just left, and bought another beach house somewhere else.

[HandyDandy]

Dennis was on his way home and stopped to pick up a small group of hitchhikers. They turned out to be Manson and some of his family. They followed Dennis into his house and basically never moved out. Dennis eventually moved out. Manson showed Dennis a bullet and said, “this has your name on it.” That shook up Dennis who went into a downward spiral. He became a down and out derelict alcoholic. Living on the sidewalk outside the liquor store. His look totally gone over to street bum. He blew through all his money. They took away the love of his life, his beautiful sailboat. It had been his escape and party boat. It had its own berth in the marina and Dennis had many parties there. Oftentimes he would throw something valuable over the side. In his destitute years he decided to go diving there to see what he might recover. He was resurfacing and struck his head on a boardwalk beam, which knocked him unconscious and he drowned. He was found on the bottom in a fetal position. Someday I’d like to see the true movie of the Beach Boys, so they’d better hurry up and make it.

[PJ-Comix]

If you read Chaos by Tom O'Neill, he paints a pretty vivid picture of LA in the late 60s and into the 70s. In the entertainment world, it was just a gigantic, drug-fueled frat party.

And according to O'Neill the CIA was feeding LSD to Manson via CIA Dr. Jolly West (who had done a number on the mind of Jack Ruby in jail) to run mind control experiments on his followers. And, OOPS, it ended up causing the Tate-LoBianco murders. So prosecutor Bugliosi's main task was to avoid evidence implicating the CIA and present it as a Helter Skelter shtick.

[PJ-Comix]

A high school classmate of mine kept disappearing for weeks at a time and hanging out in Hollywood. In his brief times back at school he’d try urging us to join him, telling us about this “family” that he’d been staying with, that either was connected to a rock band, or was a rock band, or something. This would have been in 1968, so about a year later we figured out exactly who he had been hanging out with. He was kind of a meek and timid sort, not killer material. And not the only Manson follower that I ended up knowing.

Tex Watson went to your school?

[Steely Tom]

It's all incredible, isn't it. Incredible, but credible.

How much of "the 60s" was the result of knowledge arising from CIA mind control experiments getting out into mainstream society?

I'm afraid I couldn't finish Tom O'Neill's book, which dragged on kind of too long for me. I tried to make sense of all the Bugliosi stuff, but I missed the point you made.

So Bugliosi was working for the CIA?

I always wondered where that line in War's song Why Can't We Be Friends? came from:

I heard you're workin' for the C-I-A...
they wouldn't have ya in the MAF-I-A!

[Orosius]

Don’t know any sorry

[Zathras]

I didn’t know most of this.
Thanks for posting!

[PJ-Comix]

Just before Jack Ruby was going to testify, he was visited in jail by CIA MK-ULTRA doctor Jolly West and immediately after that visit Ruby went completely incoherent. Oh, and the Unabomber? Also the sad result of a CIA mind control experiment gone wrong.

[Pelham]

I think this kid’s name was Jeff. He was a year or two younger, maybe 15 at the time. We were in Orange County so going up to Hollywood was no big deal. This kid had a crappy home situation so joining Manson’s merry band would have had some appeal.

[Pelham]

Probably. I only remember that it was one of the Wilsons. Not enough of a Beach Boys fan to have paid attention to first names.

[PLMerite]

Foot to the head:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEsOmQ8sfvU

[Steely Tom]

I didn’t know most of this.

You really don't have to buy Tom O'Neill's book to learn pretty much all the important stuff that's in it.

Tom O'Neill was interviewed widely, and many of those interviews are on YouTube.

Joe Rogan talked to him for several hours, and the interview is available on YT.

But there are many others. You can watch them to your heart's content.

Tom O'Neill spent something like 20 years investigating the connections between Manson and MK-Ultra. I'm not sure how much he proved definitively, but he exhaustively researched a great deal of circumstantial evidence that's pretty convincing.

But just as interesting was the record he made of what life was like in Los Angeles, from the second half of the 1960s, going forward into the 70s. LSD was legal until October 1966, and was circulating in the entertainment world. I remember reading an article in Popular Science, written by one of that magazine's reporters, about his LSD trip. That was probably in 1964 or '65, when I was in elementary school.

When you add that to what's in the record about Jack Ruby, and the Oswald connections to the CIA, including the mysterious "Raleigh call" he made the night before he was killed, it's a lot of fascinating straws being blown by the same storm.

[Steely Tom]

Vanishing Point has been called "existentialist."

A case could be made that the moment someone begins to discuss existentialism in anything resembling a serious way, the line has been crossed into The Pretentiousness Zone.

[Angelino97]

A case could be made that the moment someone begins to discuss existentialism in anything resembling a serious way, the line has been crossed into The Pretentiousness Zone.

You know you're in the Pretentiousness Zone when people post Sartre quotes in French, and they can't even read French.

[Steely Tom]

But Monseur, zat is non Français!