Mark Lindsay, the singer of Paul Revere and the Raiders, whose music is used in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, once met Charles Manson.
He tells Billboardit took place when he and producer pal Terry Melcher were sharing a rented house just outside L.A.. One day Dennis Wilson was there, along with some lawyers they knew. Mark figured, "There was a big meeting going on and I didn’t want to disturb that. So I walk into the kitchen to get a drink and squatting against the refrigerator was this little guy in a blue shirt, jeans, long hair and a beard. And he was like a doorstop against the fridge."
That was Manson. Lindsay says he wouldn't get out of the way. He asked Melcher, "Who's the weird guy in the kitchen?’ And someone says, ‘That’s just Charlie Manson, he’s okay.’ It may have been Charlie, but he wasn’t okay."
Melcher moved out shortly after, and so did Lindsay. The next tenants were director Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate, who was later murdered by Charlie's "family."
In a chilling postscript, police later told Mark that his and Melcher’s names were on a Manson death list. At the time, Mark says, he slept with a pistol under his pillow because of some "weird fan messages... I always wondered what had happened if Terry and I had still been living there and I had that .44. Things might have been different."