(Credits: Far Out / Bobby Beausoleil)
Music » From The Vault
Tom Phelan
Tue 5 November 2024 13:00, UK
See AlsoBobby Beausoleil | RustbladeIt All Went Down: Bobby Beausoleil, the Gary Hinman Murder and Lucifer RisingThe Last Manson MysteryManson Murder Conversion: Bobby Beausoleil — BardachReportsThe death of the 1960s revolutionary dream of utopian peace was tragically symbolised in one of America’s most terrifying crime sprees. Amid a climate of intense social unrest, Vietnam’s napalm terror gnawing at the collective conscience, and The Rolling Stones’ disastrous Altamont gig around the corner, the spate of murders by ‘The Manson Family’, as orchestrated by their unhinged ‘leader’ Charles Manson, left a dark shadow in the national psyche, as if all the cloud storms of social strife engulfing the country had finally erupted among the LA hillside determined to bring hippiedom to a nasty, violent end.
Among the drugged-up down-and-outs and hedonistic outcasts pulled into the Family’s paranoid cult of prophesied race wars was a budding musician and former Los Prietos Boys Camp inmate, Bobby Beausoleil. Drifting between LA and San Francisco and encountering the turbulent West Coast counterculture brought him into the fold with some of the upcoming artists of the era, including notably Love’s pre-Arthur Lee incarnation, The Grass Roots. Crucially, it was amid this zenith of underground art that he met experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger.
Anger, long fascinated with the mystical intersection between youth culture and arcane esoterica, was preparing his next short titled Lucifer Rising, an experimental piece influenced by occultist Aleister Crowley’s interpretation of Lucifer existing as a light-bearing God, Anger biographer Bill Landis explaining “metaphor for the ultimate bad little boy who could corrupt you without coercion”. In this context, Lucifer is not the devil but a rebellious mythic hero representing the spirit of the artist.See AlsoThe True Story Behind Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
Meeting at the infamous Invisible Circus festival in 1967, Anger spotted the charismatic Beausoleil, now fronting the ramshackle jam band The Magick Powerhouse of OZ, and offered him a part in his planned movie. In a 2017 interview with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine, Beausoleil recalled: “The deal I made with Anger was that I would agree to starring in his film if he allowed me to compose and record the soundtrack. Some of the members of The Orkustra found Anger sort of off-putting and declined to work with me on the project. So I formed The Magick Powerhouse to make sounds for the soundtrack. It was a short-lived band. We played only one public gig. You can hear the recording on The Lucifer Rising Suite soundtrack anthology album.”
It was quite an offer for a strung-out hippie kid barely touching 20. Anger, a committed Hollywood socialite and dabbler in the black arts, was able to court some of rock’s most famous stars for the Lucifer Rising project, casting Jimmy Page and Marianne Faithfull as ‘Lilith’ and ‘Man Holding the Stele of Revealing’. He was even in talks with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to initially score the picture, Jagger suggesting his newly acquired Moog synthesizer to omit suitably strange soundscapes.
On July 25th, 1969, Beausoleil, along with several Manson Family members, including future Sharon Tate murderer Susan Atkins, descended upon the home of music teacher Gary Hinman, a recent Family associate, to convince him to join the cult proper and hand over all his assets to Manson. After three days held hostage, and Manson personally slashing his face with a samurai sword, Beausoleil finally stabbed Hinman to death on Manson’s orders, the other Family members scrawling the words “political piggy” on the walls and leaving a crude imitation of the Black Power fist in an attempt to stoke the race war-obsessed upon by their paranoid leader. Beausoleil was arrested on August 6th, having been found driving Hinman’s car with the murder weapons in the tyre well.
After an initial death sentence and subsequent commutation to life imprisonment in ’72, any further opportunity to score Anger’s then-still-unfinished Lucifer Rising seemed dashed. When discovering that Page, who initially was attached to the project, had dropped out due to an argument with Anger and Page’s wife, Beausoleil felt the short’s beckoning energy once again from inside prison, forming The Freedom Orchestra collective of fellow inmate artists to deliver on a creative promise made years back.
“For reasons difficult to explain, I felt a compulsion to complete the project I had begun years earlier,” he said. “When Anger decided that he didn’t want to use Jimmy Page’s music for the film, I volunteered to do it, and Anger accepted my offer. Anger’s concept for the film had little bearing on how I conceived the music. For me Lucifer Rising is about the arduous journey involved in arising out of one’s own self-made undoing. There is an obvious autobiographical component. As in many classical symphonies, the story is told emotively through instrumental music.”
Finally, the soundtrack was complete and the short was exhibited in 1980 to much critical intrigue, it’s soundtrack distributed on the underground Lethal Records. A heady, rock ‘n roll nightmare imbued with Apocalypse Now‘s atmospheric dread and prog-infused drama that serves a fascinating score of a time when insanity, celebrity, and violent upheaval collided like a devastating bookend to the tumultuous ’60s.
Related Topics
Charles MansonKenneth Anger