There’s a lot to be said for playing music just for the fun of it....But the music nearest and dearest to my heart is that which invokes the warrior’s mythic journey and hearkens to the spiritual mysteries of the shaman’s visionary quest. Often, music is a kind of prayer for me, or complex instrumental chanting—a search for tones and chords and rhythms that resonate at the deepest levels of human experience. I find that I am most in my element when composing soundtracks for flights of the imagination, and music to search one’s soul by. - Bobby BeauSoleil
Robert Kenneth Beausoleil, AKA Bobby BeauSoleil, was born on November 6, 1947, in the California beach town of Santa Barbara. The oldest of five children in a Catholic family of modest income, BeauSoleil’s boyhood was relatively unremarkable, merely a function of growing up in a tract house his father had purchased on the G.I. Bill. From an early age he chafed at the artificial restraints imposed on him by the pervasive homogenized reality touted on his family’s black and white television as the lifestyle to aspire to in the modern world of the 1950s, and he couldn’t wait for legal age to be out of it and on his own. Shunning the surfer scene of his hometown peers, he turned his attention to hot rods and electric guitars. These interests eventually took him to “the strip†in Hollywood, California, where in 1964, at the age of 16, he became a colorful and familiar feature of the emerging youth subculture.
Plying his developing talents as a guitarist through several garage band experiments better left forgotten, BeauSoleil landed a position as second guitar in Arthur Lee’s new band, The Grass Roots – a band that a short time later would become widely known as Love. His membership in the group was short-lived, however; he was fired because he was too young to play legally in adults-only nightclubs. Crushed but undaunted; BeauSoleil licked his wounds, dusted himself off, and left Los Angeles for parts north.
Just prior to his eighteenth birthday, BeauSoleil joined the artist community in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, he formed a band of his own, an instrumental ensemble called The Orkustra, notable for its unprecedented blend of psychedelic rock, classical, jazz, and middle eastern music styles.
BeauSoleil gigged regularly with The Orkustra for about a year and a half when, in the spring of 1967, he was discovered by underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger while performing with his band at the opening of a particularly bacchanalian counter-culture festival called The Invisible Circus. Anger, taken by BeauSoleil’s striking looks and uninhibited stage performance, asked the young musician if he would be willing to star in his current project, an epic underground film with the foreboding title of Lucifer Rising (but actually a fanciful interpretive continuation of poet John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lostâ€, based on the myth of the fallen angel). BeauSoleil agreed, on the condition that he would composed the score and record the soundtrack for the film with his band. A bargain was struck.
For months, BeauSoleil and Anger worked on the film project, for the most part independently. To perform the soundtrack, BeauSoleil formed a new band he called The Magick Powerhouse of OZ, an eclectic ensemble that combined experimental free jazz with bluesy rock and amplifier feedback. For the band’s first performance, Anger and BeauSoleil joined forces to put on an event at the Straight Theater called, by Anger, The Equinox of the Gods. When the event (while memorable to the audience) did not go as planned, Anger and BeauSoleil each blamed the other for what had gone awry. The collaboration could not be reconciled, and the two parted company with harsh feelings.
Following the mock-funeral for the Haight-Ashbury staged by guerilla theater activists The Mime Troupe in the fall of 1967, BeauSoleil returned to the greater Los Angeles area, where he half-heartedly rejoined the L.A. music scene as a guitarist for hire. A couple of months later he was called upon to play supporting guitar for singer-songwriter Charles Manson, and thereafter joined Dennis Wilson (Beach Boys) and others in efforts to help Manson record an album of his songs.
It was around this time that BeauSoleil, now twenty years old, became increasingly disgusted with the corporate music companies who had kept a stranglehold on the music business, the coopting of youth culture art and dress styles by commercial advertising and the fashion industry, and the insidious encroachment of organized crime in the hippie drug trade. The violent backlash of government and law enforcement in response to the perceived threat of the youth movement, along with the looming probability of his being drafted into military service to help press the war in Vietnam, prompted BeauSoleil to retreat to the peripheries. He began to associate more with outlaw motorcycle clubs, who he romanticized, and others, like Manson, who lived on the outskirts of what was considered normal, acceptable society. Disenchanted with the counter-culture and disenfranchised from the mainstream, BeauSoleil began to adopt some values that led him astray into criminal activities.
During the commission of an absurdly misconceived drugs transaction, things went terribly wrong, and BeauSoleil killed a man. He was arrested soon afterward, tried in a Los Angeles County courtroom, convicted of one count of murder in the first degree, and sent to San Quentin’s Death Row. Two years later, in 1972, his sentence was commuted to life with possibility of parole after seven years. Ever since, his former association with the since notorious Charles Manson has dogged his heels like a starving wounded hyena, and consequently, he remains in prison more than 36 years later.
BeauSoleil’s tragic fate could not still his rebellious creative spirit. While in prison he has, by turns, and despite tremendous obstacles and restrictions, taken up the visual arts, started music programs and formed bands, taught himself electronics, invented and built innovative musical instruments, composed and recorded an impressive body of original music, produced numerous videos in support of youth outreach programs and cognitive programs for prison inmates (in cooperation with community efforts to reduce crime and recidivism), and is the author of a modest assortment of creative writing projects, some of them ongoing.
In 1976, while at the state prison in Tracy, California, BeauSoleil resumed his earlier collaboration with Kenneth Anger, nearly ten years after their parting of ways in San Francisco. The filmmaker had shot new film for his Lucifer Rising project. BeauSoleil believed that the soundtrack was still his to do; Anger agreed. With permission from prison authorities, BeauSoleil formed a band of musically inclined prison inmates and called it The Freedom Orchestra, assemble a make-shift recording studio, and in 1979 he finally completed his soundtrack for the now legendary film. In the decades since it was recorded, this soundtrack, both in context with the film and independent of it, has garnered increasing international acclaim for its emotive and visionary experience. Lucifer Rising, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, is now available worldwide in a double CD Deluxe Edition from Arcanum Entertainment.
BeauSoleil married Barbara Ellen Baston – a talented artist, an advocate for goddesses everywhere, and all-around creative soul in her own right – in late 1981. Over the course of the 23 years since then their relationship has evolved into a sacred partnership that transcends convention. It is through the window Barbara has opened that Bobby BeauSoleil and his work becomes accessible to the world at large, and for the most part is how he is able to have some access to the world. Between them, Bobby and Barbara have four children and a growing number of grandchildren, and an unshakable belief that one day they will abide together in the home Barbara has made for them.
In 1994, BeauSoleil was again allowed some limited opportunities to record some of his music, and this time, with the support of some musical industry sponsors, he was able to make recordings using much more sophisticated equipment than at any time previously. Over the subsequent 8 years he composed and recorded, as a solo performer, a total of about 3 hours of new music. The most stylistically representative of these recording have been compiled for a new double CD entitled Dreamways of the Mystic, to be released on the Arcanum Entertainment label in March, 2005.
After opportunities to record his music again dried up in 2002, BeauSoleil turned his focus to other creative projects. After a ten year hiatus from drawing and painting, he began work on a new series of paintings intended as a visual counterpoint to the music of Dreamways of the Mystic. This series of paintings is ongoing. Between paintings, BeauSoleil divides his time between writing two books: a work of historical semi-fiction about the events of 1967-1969, and his autobiography.
