Chuck Negron & Wonderland


I had posted before about how the album shown in the living room in the crime scene video is by Three Dog Night. If you missed that post, just use the search button. It was obvious that the gang at the house had been jamming to this record and that maybe singer Chuck Negron was going to stop by… maybe Barbara and Susan had not met him yet. I have also never seen Wonderland described as “upscale” by anyone else. Classic.

Here’s what Chuck had to say in an interview for a book titled, The Harder They Fall, which is about celebrities and addiction:

Drugs led to all kinds of problems. Some dealers once shot through the walls of my house in Los Angeles when I was inside. They wanted me to pay my drug debts. I remember terrible fights — one with Janis Joplin where I called her an ugly slut. She was a nice, sweet person and was one of many musicians I knew who died defeated, tortured deaths.

I don’t know why I stayed alive. I used dirty needles. Four people were beaten to death with baseball bats at an upscale heroin shooting gallery in Laurel Canyon. Centering on porn-film legend John Holmes it became known as the Wonderland Murders. The carnage happened in the very place I was spending most of my evenings at the time — except that murderous one. Once I almost drove my whole family into the canyon as we headed down Mulholland Drive in our little red Volkswagen. I had popped some downers before we left home and blacked out. At the last minute, Julia slammed on the brakes. I almost bled to death after demolishing my car on a Sunset Boulevard streetlamp. I cracked my head open, collapsed a lung, and mangled my body. The firefighters had to cut me out from that automobile.

With musicians I knew toppling like ten pins, death was very close up, and I thought about suicide and attempted it as well. Once I hung myself with a belt in the closet of a shabby motel room, only a rusty overhead pipe collapsed and saved me. Another time I walked directly in front of a moving bus on purpose. Compared to facing my probation officer with another dirty drug test, it seemed like a good alternative. I overdosed routinely. Other druggies had to beat me back to life after one overdose, subsequent to which my body was black-and-blue from the neck down.