He titled it after a popular amusement-park ride and used it as a metaphor for the downfall of civilization: 'I was using the symbol of a helter-skelter as a ride from the top to the bottom – the rise and fall of the Roman Empire – and this was the fall, the demise, the going down.' In reality, McCartney said Helter Skelter was only an attempt 'to make a very loud, raunchy rock 'n' roll record' and pick up the gauntlet laid down by The Who's Pete Townshend, who'd claimed in a recent magazine interview that his band had done just that. 'Every single song on the White Album, he felt that they were singing about us. The song Helter Skelter - he was interpreting that to mean the blacks were gonna go up and the whites were gonna go down.' 'He thought that the Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years,' she said in the 2009 documentary Manson. Though Manson denied he had interpreted the song that way while on trial in 1970, former acolyte Catherine Share confirmed that's how he had explained it to his followers leading up to the August 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. But he interpreted the whole thing - that we were the four horsemen, Helter Skelter was the song - and arrived at having to go out and kill everyone.' 'I still don't know what all that stuff is it's from the Bible, Revelation - I haven't read it so I wouldn't know. 'Charles Manson interpreted that Helter Skelter was something to do with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse,' Paul McCartney, who wrote the 1968 song, noted in the 2000 Beatles book Anthology. More people associate 'Helter Skelter' with Manson than the BeatlesĪn old adage says there's no such thing as bad press but having a mass killer co-opt your song is a less-than-optimal bit of PR.

Here are five works of pop-culture linked to the mass killer:ġ. Charles Manson, who died in prison Sunday at age 83, inspired more than a murderous cult.

What did helter skelter mean