Robert Kenneth BeauSoleil, AKA Bobby BeauSoleil, was born on November 6, 1947, in the California beach town of Santa Barbara. From an early age he couldn’t wait to be old enough to get out 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, 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. 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. 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. BeauSoleil agreed, on the condition that he would compose the score and record the soundtrack for the film with his band. A bargain was struck. 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. 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. He began to associate more with outlaw motorcycle clubs, whom he romanticized, and others, like Manson, who lived on the outskirts of what was considered normal, acceptable society. 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, and sent to prison with a life sentence for one count of murder in the first degree. Ever since, his former association with the since notorious Charles Manson, he remains in prison more than 35 years later. 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, assembled a make-shift recording studio, and in 1979 he finally completed his soundtrack for the now legendary film.
Lucifer Rising, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, is now available worldwide in a double CD Deluxe Edition from Arcanum Entertainment. Over the subsequent 8 years he composed and recorded, as a solo performer, a total of about 3 hours of new music, then turned his focus to producing a series of drawings and paintings as a visual counterpoint. 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. The entire series of paintings will be on exposition at Clair Obscur Gallery in Hollywood, California, in a show opening March 5, 2005, coinciding with the release of the CD.
