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BN: Manson had musical aspirations. He hoped to get a record released with the help of Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, to whom he had attached himself, like a barnacle at the bottom of a sailboat. Manson had an overblown sense of his meager talents and believed that he would be bigger than the Beatles. John Lennon once said that as far as young people were concerned, the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, to whom Manson, having assembled his devout Family, was sometimes compared. In his delusions of grandeur, Manson would be bigger than both the Beatles and Jesus. One of his songs, "Cease to Exist," was actually recorded by the Beach Boys in '68, although the title was changed—it became "Never Learn Not to Love"—and the phrase was altered to the more palatable "Cease to Resist." When Manson found out that his lyrics had been re-written and the song was credited solely to Wilson, he threatened to kill him. That was pretty much the end of Manson's time in the music industry, and possibly the beginning of his deadly equation: if you can't be famous, kill famous. When you say that the murders were entrenched in the Hollywood myth, I'm reminded that Manson, had he not been caught, might have orchestrated even more gruesome mayhem—drenched in celebrity blood. If you can believe the jailbird singing of Susan Atkins, there was a movie star "death list" that included Frank Sinatra, who was to have been skinned alive while his own songs played in the background. Take your pick: "Witchcraft," "That Old Black Magic," "Strangers in the Night." And if you can even begin to fathom the horrifying second act, "The Family would then make purses out of his skin and sell them in hippie shops." 1
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1. "Charles Manson and the Manson Family," Marilyn Bardsley, on Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods, http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorio…