Glenn Vance

Charles Manson and the Beach Boys

Den­nis Wil­son, brother of Brian Wil­son and drum­mer for the Beach Boys, was dri­ving through Mal­ibu in 1968 when he noticed a cou­ple of girls hitch­hik­ing on the side of the road. He picked up the girls, Ella Jo Bai­ley and Patri­cia Kren­winkel¹ and took them where they asked him. He saw them hitch­hik­ing again later on and picked them up again, this time tak­ing them to his home.

Den­nis lived on Sun­set Blvd in a house for­merly occu­pied by Will Rogers, and he left Ella Jo and Patri­cia there while he went to a record­ing ses­sion. Upon return­ing home at 3 am, a man appeared at the back door of Den­nis’ house.

Den­nis, fright­ened, asked the man, “Are you going to hurt me?”

The man replied, “Do I look like I’m going to hurt you, brother?” and he dropped to his knees and kissed Den­nis’ feet. He invited Den­nis into his own house where about a dozen unin­vited house guests, nearly all of them girls, were gathered.

The man was Charles Man­son, and he and Den­nis got along great. He and Man­son would sing and talk about impor­tant things, while the girls cleaned house, cooked, and catered to their needs. Man­son liked to write music, even though Den­nis said he was not musi­cally gifted, and Den­nis intro­duced Man­son around town to var­i­ous peo­ple in the enter­tain­ment industry.

The Beach Boys even­tu­ally went on to record one of Manson’s songs, reti­tled from its orig­i­nal name “Cease To Exist” to become “Never Learn Not To Love” from the 1969 album 20/20.²

1. From Vin­cent Bugliosi’s Hel­ter Skel­ter. [↩]
2. The rest of this piece was parsed together from the always excel­lent Answers.com web­site. [↩]

12. January 2007 by Glenn Vance
Categories: History | 2 comments