The Moon, Manson & Music: The Summer of ‘69

Last week was the fiftieth anniversary of the first landing on the moon. This week the Manson Family murders, the Tate/LaBianca killings, reach the half century mark. Each has been noted, celebrated or exploited in its own way, but fifty years on it is important not to overlook the continuity between them, to look back and understand how they co-exist in the same continuum we call the Sixties.

“When the moon is in the seventh house”

“When the moon is in the seventh house,” they sang in Hair, notifying us that it was the dawning of the Age Of Aquarius. Away from Broadway, what did that mean? Neil Armstrong had been on the moon and his hair stayed short. Charles Manson had been in the Big House, and grew his out until he looked like the kind of guru the Beatles put their beads on and visited. Anyone could grow hair.

We like to debate when the Sixties actually began. Was it when John Kennedy became president, inaugurating a ‘New Frontier’. Or were those first years of the 1960s simply an extension of the Fifties, all Rat Pack style and Cold War bravado, until we nearly went to nuclear devastation over Cuba. Did the Sixties really begin at the end of 1963, when JFK’s assassination raised serious doubts about our government and its violence, and when the Beatles began to be noticed (the first report about them ran on the CBS Morning News the morning Kennedy was killed; its repeat that night was cancelled).