"When Dalton arrived, [Brian] Wilson was refusing to co-operate with the swarm of journalists surrounding him. 'He was sitting at the edge of the ocean, playing with the stones'...."

"To the dismay of the other photographers Dalton, an easygoing and charming Englishman, was able to break through to him and 'everything I asked him to do, he would do.'... Wilson.... invited Dalton to live with him and his girlfriend, Barbara. For years afterwards, every time they saw each other, Wilson would say: 'David, you always turn up just at the right time.' It was during this 'spooky' period, when Wilson was nearly always high and so paranoid that he slept with guns under his bed, that Dalton was first introduced to Charles Manson. Wilson was enamoured by the longhaired cult leader: he kept a bullet that Manson had given him on his mantlepiece and drove 120mph into the desert to tell Dalton that 'Charlie is cosmic'.... Dalton was also taken with him and, with his girlfriend Andy (whom he called his 'acid bride'), even went to stay on Manson’s Spahn ranch in Topanga Canyon for a time. There they rode horses in the moonlight and milled around with Manson and his 'family' of spellbound followers....."

From the London Times obituary for the rock journalist David Dalton, who has died at the age of 80.

Heres the award winning article he wrote in 1970: "Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive/A chilling, deeply investigative look into the terrifying Manson family – including a jailhouse interview with Charlie himself." 

Sample text:

“I am just a mirror,” Manson says over and over. “Anything you see in me is you.” He says it so often it becomes an evasive action. I’m rubber and you’re glue. But there’s a truth there nonetheless.

The society may be disgusted and horrified by Charles Manson, but it is the society’s perverted system of penal “rehabilitation,” its lusts for vengeance and cruelty, that created him.

The Spahn Movie Ranch may seem a miserable place for kids to live, with its filthy, broken-down shacks and stagnant streams filled daily with shoveled horse shit. [L]ife there may seem degenerate, a dozen or more people eating garbage, sleeping, balling and raising babies in a 20-foot trailer.

But for more than two years most of those kids have preferred that way of life – life with Charlie – than living in the homes of their parents....

Charles Manson raises some very serious questions about our culture, whether he is entirely part of it or not.

For actually we are not yet a culture at all, but a sort of pre-culture, a gathering of disenchanted seekers, an ovum unfertilized. There is no new morality, as Time and Life would have us believe, but a growing awareness that the old morality has not been practiced for some time.

The right to smoke dope, to pursue different goals, to be free of social and economic oppression, the right to live in peace and equity with our brothers – this is Founding Fathers stuff.

In the meantime we must suffer the void, waiting for the subversives in power to die, waiting for the old, dead, amoral culture to be buried. For many, particularly the younger among us, the wait, the weight, is extremely frustrating, even unbearable. Life becomes absurd beyond enjoyment. Real doubts grow daily whether any of the tools we have to change power work anymore. There are no answers and the questions lose their flavor.

Into this void, this seemingly endless river of shit, on top of it, if you will, rode Charlie Manson in the fall of 1967, full of charm and truth and gentle goodness....

Behind Manson’s attitude toward death is the ancient mystical belief that we are all part of one body – an integral tenet of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity as expressed by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians: “For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”