There’s no telling how the Manson killings might have turned out differently if Rick James had attended the get-together at Cielo Drive. He called his mother, who told him: “God spared your life for a reason.” “Why? Why would I get a headache at that moment? Why was I spared when a good guy like Jay wasn’t?” It was only the headache that stopped me,” he recounts in Glow. He was devastated by the loss of his friend, and shocked that he had almost attended the same get-together. He recounts in the book how he woke up the next morning or the morning after, went to buy some coffee and milk, and saw the Los Angeles Times headline “Sharon Tate, Four Others Murdered.” James eventually mustered the strength to “put some party clothes on,” but then his headache returned, he went to lie down - and he missed one of the most horrific murder sprees of all time. In this case, though, the headache wouldn’t go away.” Usually a couple of aspirins are all I need. “I did too, but my temples were throbbing.
“She really wanted to make the scene,” James recalls in the memoir. Later, Seville reminded him about the party. But James says he was so hung over that he went back to sleep. One afternoon, James says in Glow, Sebring came to his home and invited him to a “big party” that Sharon Tate was hosting at her and Polanski’s home on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon. He was a cat you could talk to - a big-time music lover and a super-hip patron of the arts.” “In my early California adventures, Jay was probably my most loyal and supportive friend,” James says in the memoir. Sebring often visited James and his ladyfriend, Seville, and never failed “to leave us with a little weed or cash to cover that month’s rent. “Jay saw that me and Perfect were the ideal party people and a week later invited us back,” James recalls in Glow.Īlso Read: The Sad Story of Rick James and Neil Young’s Band, The Mynah Birds The party’s host was Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairstylist and friend (and former boyfriend) of Sharon Tate. But again, that’s another story.)īitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James r ecounts how he survived the Manson murders. (This was a mistake, James explained later - Perfect later hooked up with Sebring, and eventually with James. One night, James recalled, Stills didn’t want to take his girlfriend, a woman Young nicknames “Perfect,” to a fancy party, because Stills was “fed up with that Hollywood crowd.” So he asked James to take her instead. He soon made many other friends in Young’s circle, including Stephen Stills, Young’s bandmate in Crosby Stills, Nash and Young. Young was one of the first people Rick James met up with in Los Angeles, reuniting with his old bandmate at Young’s “log cabin” up in the Hollywood Hills, as James explains in Glow. (Yes, that Neil Young - you can read that story here.) He and Neil Young had scored and lost a Motown Records contract with their Toronto-based blues-folk band The Mynah Birds.
Rick James arrived in Los Angeles in the late ’60s after a brush with fame while living in Toronto. The book was completed after the singer’s 2004 death by author David Ritz, who appears throughout Bitchin’, directed by Sacha Jenkins. And the 2014 Rick James memoir, Glow, goes into far greater detail. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood offered one alternate reality of what happened on that terrible night. They murdered her, Sebring, Tate’s unborn baby, and Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent. 8, 1969, Charles Manson’s followers broke into the home Tate shared with her husband, director Roman Polanski. The doc, now out on Showtime, understandably doesn’t go too deeply into the Manson murders, which have spawned countless other films. One of the wildest Rick James stories in the new documentary Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James is how the then-struggling musician avoided the Manson murders that killed the pregnant Sharon Tate and the guests at her Cielo Drive home - including James’ friend, Jay Sebring.
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