Bobby Beausoleil Reference Archive

We need to get this out of the way right off the bat: Bobby Beausoleil was an associate of Charles Manson and he murdered Gary Hinman, a crime for which he was sentenced to death.

He’s still alive and well, serving his commuted sentence in Oregon State Penitentiary.

I spoke with Bobby twice by phone recently, and this interview is not about Manson or the murder. It’s about his life before and after. Because if you put all judgment about what he did aside, Bobby Beausoleil has led a fascinating, creative life.

Before the murder, he was an up-and-coming member of the Los Angeles music scene, a guitar player who had played with guys like Arthur Lee and later formed an early prog band, The Orkustra. And, yes, he also did some recordings with Charles Manson. He’s released multiple albums that he recorded during his incarceration using fellow musicians that he’d found behind bars. His prison output includes the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s legendary underground film Lucifer Rising (a project that, at various times, had Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page connected to it).

Some of those albums were created with instruments he built himself in prison, including a guitar-like synthesizer controller that he dubbed the Syntar (and which in many ways the guitar industry is only now catching up to).

He’s also a prolific artist, selling his visual art through his website, and he’s also taught himself digital animation, last year releasing the first segment of a cartoon he calls Ask Professor Proponderus, which aims to help kids whose family members are incarcerated come to terms with the situation.

This is a transcript of our two interviews.

Adam Kovac: You’ve put out eight albums during your time in prison. What can you tell me about making them?

Bobby Beausoleil: At least one of those is a compilation. Two of those are actually one; there’s volume one and volume two, that is a compilation. Other than that, I think there are actually six distinctly different albums.

AK: Can you tell me about how you got started working on those? Once you were in, how did you decide I still need to make music?

BB: I don’t think it was ever a decision that had to be made, because it was in me to make music. I was born to it. It was just a matter of putting myself into a position where I could make music again. After I went to prison, I was on death row for two years. Instruments were not allowed so I made no music at all. (It was actually a three-year period if you count when I was going to trial.) Then I was put on the mainline in San Quentin, and immediately obtained a guitar, a little inexpensive Harmony acoustic guitar. I wish I had it now, I think it would be a collector’s item. At the time it was a really cheap guitar and I started making music with the guys in San Quentin. Eventually we put together a little talent show that was a lot of fun. From that point, it was a gradual evolution or gradual navigation, I think is the better word to put it, to put myself into a position to be able to do music in earnest. That didn’t happen until I was transferred to Tracy Prison in Tracy, California, and started working on putting together a music program there. There hadn’t been a music program in Tracy since the ’50s, and then it had been a brass band thing, they had some kind of brass band ensemble at the prison. I think it was the 50s—it’s hard to say. I eventually found the instruments they had been using in the course of putting the new music program together at Tracy. I found a couple of working clarinets, a working sax and a couple of trumpets in the pile and all the rest went to salvage. We used the funds from that to pay for a couple of guitar amps and music accessories. We eventually got a little bit of money from the business office for a PA system and a set of drums and we were off to the races at that point. That’s when I got interested in playing in earnest on a regular basis. I put a band together called the Freedom Orchestra.

AK: How did you find the guys?

BB:  There weren’t that many people in the prison, maybe 1500 guys. It was pretty easy to figure out who was interested in playing music. When I first got to the mainline at Tracy, there wasn’t a formal music program of any kind but there was a group of guys who would get together. One of the correctional officers, a lieutenant, allowed them to go into the chow hall when it was not being used and play guitars. Some guys with acoustic guitars and a guy playing drums on a pan or something. And that was about what existed when I got there. So it was pretty easy to find out who the musicians were, who the guys were who wanted to play. Musicians are by and large a passionate lot, you know? It’s a small percentage of the prison population, but it is one that is earnest. The guys who want to play music usually really, really, really want to play music, you know? (laughs) So it’s not hard to find them. Out of that group, you find a few musicians you really enjoy playing with and out of there forms a band. Pretty much like on the streets. You have a smaller population to select from, but it’s surprising how talented some of the guys that you’ll find in prison.

AK: Can you tell me about the routine? Do they let you guys jam when you want to jam?

BB:  It was initially scheduled out by music genre. I was tenacious. Getting a music program started, you know, I had to do a lot of politicking with the administration as well as with the inmates, my fellow prisoners (I hate that term, inmate, by the way). The guys who wanted to play music were the easiest part, the rest of it was negotiating for funding and negotiating for a place to play, a place where we could get together, not just the chow hall, but some location that would be a band room. And we did find one. I was fortunate to find a former barbershop that was no longer being used. It had windows to the control centre so that the staff could observe us while we were in there. Supervision is of course a major necessity. You have to allow for supervision, otherwise you can’t get together. So we had to have a place where we could be observed, hopefully without being too loud for the people observing us, so it was a little tricky to figure that out. It was a barbershop that had windows, so I double layered the windows to isolate the sound to the room itself and that became our music room. For a while we had egg crates on the walls to try and treat the concrete blocks. It was like all prison rooms, a concrete box. So we had to treat the walls in a way where we could play music in there without killing ourselves with the reverberation from the hard walls. From that point, once we had a room, we started scheduling. We had several different groups. You have to be concerned about ethnic balance or ethnic representation in any music program in prison, otherwise you have situations where you have people who are jealous and there’s strife, there’s problems. So we had a soul band, and a rock band and a country band and a Mexican band.

AK: Were you playing with all of them?

BB:  I played with a couple of them. The rock band was my band, the Freedom Orchestra. So that was the rock band. I didn’t really play country that much so I kinda stayed away from that. I did fill in with the soul band every so often, playing blues and R&B, I like to play in those styles.

AK: It’s interesting that you were playing in the soul band. I read one of the transcripts from one of your parole hearings, and they asked you something like ‘Are you a racist?’ Where did that come from?

BB: (Laughs) You know, that’s a good question. There’s not a racist bone in my body, man, there really isn’t. As long as I’ve played music, I’ve been playing, you know, ethnic music. So, I don’t know where that comes from. Actually, I do sort of know where that comes from, but it doesn’t come from any real place. It comes from this perception, or misperception. I should note that when I was just beginning to gig professionally, and I was 17 years old, I played with Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols in a band called The Grass Roots, that would later become known as the band Love. That was a racially mixed band. Johnny and Arthur were both black guys. The music that I was attracted to…I loved R&B and blues. From the minute I was exposed to it, I’ve been into it. It would be irrational to have that interest in that genre of music and then have a racist attitude towards black people. It’s just absurd. There was a situation that developed in San Quentin in which I was involved. I was defending a friend of mine. There was a fracas, an event that became publicized as an in-house power struggle within a white, racist group. Because of that, that association developed. And then there’s also just being associated with Manson, who has been described as someone who wanted to start a race war, which is a complete crock, or once again a misrepresentation of what was actually happening—largely perpetuated by Manson himself, by the way. But, nevertheless, an association that I think plays into the idea that I might be racist. But there isn’t anything in my record that would indicate racism being my orientation.

AK: When did you start working with Kenneth Anger and when did you resume?

BB:  I met him in the spring of 1967 and he was working on Lucifer Rising. He was passionate about this concept that he had for a film that would be kind of the sequel and antithesis to his previous film, his most popular film at the time: Scorpio Rising. He was very ambitious. This was going to be, for an underground film, epic. He wanted me to play Lucifer in the film, and I told him I would do it on the condition that I do the soundtrack. This was ’67 and we worked together on the project for about six months. I left the band that I played in at that time, which was The Orkustra and formed a new band called The Magick Powerhouse of Oz and began work on composition for the soundtrack, kind of a freeform mode of composing as was my compositional approach with The Orkustra. There were some problems that developed between Kenneth and I. It’s hard to describe, to be honest I don’t really understand what happened, some kind of psychological breakdown that was going on with him. I can’t really say what was the cause of it, but we had a famous falling out at that point. That was the end of that phase of the Lucifer Rising project. Years later, of course I’m in prison, he had begun the project again. He’d renewed his approach to the project, got some funding and Jimmy Page was going to provide him with a soundtrack. I don’t think Kenneth liked what he came up with. It was kind of amorphous, which I liked, actually. It was kind of ambient. I liked it, it was a different direction than the direction I had taken, which had a lot of strong, melodic components rather than being strictly ambient or background music. I wanted something that was thematic, that had strong melodic components to it. I think that approach was more keeping with what Kenneth wanted for the project. Again, in 1975, we were discussing it. I actually began work on the music for the soundtrack in 1976.

AK: You were doing that on your own, in prison. It’s ambitious music, how do you get that kind of sound quality when you’re doing it in the most DIY way possible?

BB: Being a quick study.

AK: Just reading as much as possible on sound and engineering?

BB: A lot of it just came out of experimenting, but also studying, reading. It was all seat of your pants, for sure. But I’m very passionate about this. I wanted good sound quality and a variety in the sounds. I had a very limited budget going into it. Kenneth provided $3,000 and that included recording equipment. I got one good microphone out of the deal, and two recorders, one being needed to master from the four-track. I had a four track recorder and a two track. Almost all the budget went to recording equipment, leaving almost nothing for instruments. So I built instruments and, you know, just hustled. A little bit came from Ken, but a lot of it was just hustling and getting bargain basement deals on parts and so on to build guitars and keyboards and amplifiers, and effects device. Many of the instruments used on the soundtrack were actually handmade.

AK: Do you feel that Lucifer Rising is your musical legacy?

BB: I would say that a lot of people would say that it is, at this point. I think that it was an extremely ambitious, I guess is the right word, but it’s not really what I mean to say. It was an ambitious project, it’s a miracle that it happened under the circumstances that it did. It was very personal, it became a very personal statement and in that respect I think it is probably my most significant published work. It was autobiographical, my own story being told in my own life. I took a fall (laughing), a serious fall, as Lucifer did in his. I translated the Lucifer story into my own and told the story from the standpoint, musically, of my own sense of loss and defeat and my own hopes and desire for restoration. To reintegrate and restore myself to integrity is I think the better way to phrase that. And reconciliation with my loved ones and the world at large.

AK: Do you feel like you’ve accomplished that, gotten to that place of restoration?

BB: I do. It hasn’t translated to a parole, which is not necessarily a requirement, I don’t think. I mean, it would be nice! (Laughs.) I don’t think I belong in prison. I’m not a threat or a danger to anybody, so in that respect it doesn’t make sense that I remain in prison. But nor is it the nature of my success. So, yeah, I would say yes, I have restored myself to integrity. Yes I did fulfill the story I was telling in the music for Lucifer Rising.

AK: When you look at your newer work, let’s say the Dancing Hearts of Fire LP, where are you in your head when you work on this music? You talk about Lucifer Rising being about working through your own issues of redemption, but what’s your inspiration now?

BB: Dancing Hearts of Fire is a unique piece. It came out of a time when I was intensely grieving for my wife who had just passed away. She was a dancer, she had a dance troupe for performing Middle Eastern inspired tribal dance and I was composing some music for a collaboration between her and I for her dance troupe. I had just recently sent her some rhythms, some percussion that I had composed for her dance troupe, and then she passed away suddenly, and I was left with these rhythms, so I wanted to do something with them because I needed some way of expressing through my work what was going on with me emotionally. It wasn’t just all sorrow. There was some of that, but there is more than that in feeling bereft of someone who was nearer and dearer to me beyond anything I can possibly express in words. I needed some place to kind of put that energy. Dancing Hearts of Fire became that project and I used those rhythms that I had composed for her as the basis for, what I think is 35 minutes total on that album. So that’s what that album is. In that sense, I don’t know that it’s necessarily an extension of Lucifer Rising. It was kind of an outlier. A new album that I’ve just about finished is called Voodoo Shivaya. This is a double album. I’m working on the very last track now, and it will be released later this year, or at least that’s the plan. Voodoo Shivaya is, I would say, an extension of the Lucifer Rising theme. I’ve done a lot of other music, a lot of it is mystically oriented, it has a lot to do with my spiritual advancement, I guess you might say, over the years. You’ll hear aspects of paganism in some of the music or indications of higher forms of religious philosophy or native shamanism and so on. A progression in my spiritual development can be found in some of my instrumental music, but some of my instrumental music is more about my experiments in electronics. Searching for new timbres and sounds through that medium, electronic instruments, I mean.

AK: How do you get access to those electronic instruments? Are you able to get them from the outside?

BB: I’ve got some pretty good ones at the moment, to be honest with you. I’ve got some really nice instruments at present, store bought, But earlier, a lot of the instruments that I had, I built myself. A lot of it came out of my experimentation in electronics…

AK: When you say you were building your own instruments, you don’t just mean acoustic, but full-on electric instruments?

BB:  Yes. I was very much into synthesizer circuits, effects pedal circuits and experimenting. I had a device called an E-Bow that I used on the soundtrack that I really loved and I was trying to figure out how to mount it on a guitar, in fact I did mount it on a guitar. There’s a picture somewhere of me holding a two-string guitar that had an E-Bow mounted on the body. I built this instrument because I just really liked the sound of a vibrating guitar string when using an E-Bow. I did a lot of experiments with devices, some that I bought, tore apart, rebuilt, added to, modified in various way. Cheap synthesizers that I took apart, experimented with and modified. I was a hobbyist, an experimenter. It sort of paralleled my interest in developing an electronic guitar called the Syntar. The Syntar is a device that was designed from the ground up as an electronic controller but modelled after the way a guitar makes sound. Or any kind of stringed instrument. The idea was to mimic the playability of a stringed instrument and apply it to a synthesizer, guitar-player technique or string-player technique translated to the ability to control any sound, which is theoretically what a synthesizer can make. That was my passion, I was very much into that and spent years and years and years experimenting. By necessity I had to get into electronics in order to have instruments to use on the soundtrack, which is where this began.

AK: What’s nuts to me is that you were working on this, and digitizing guitars, combining them with synthesizers is something that only recently became a big thing the guitar world. You were 20 years ahead on this.

BB:Yeah, I was in the vanguard, you might say, on a lot of that. I was looking for a more direct way to control synthesizers than some finicky, error-prone system that converted the pitch of guitar strings to the controls of the synthesizer. That’s why they didn’t really take off. Guitarists didn’t like them because they were finicky and you didn’t feel really connected to the sound because there was this delay and a lot of other problems related to pitch to voltage instruments. The pitch to voltage converted instruments available today are much, much better. They’re usable. But I prefer a more direct controller. Take the essentials of a keyboard, reshape it into the shape of a guitar and then use that, instead of trying to take a guitar and adapt it to playing a synthesizer, which is always going to be an imperfect process. So that was just a different approach that I took, and now you’ve got products that can track an actual guitar much better than the earlier systems that were designed along those lines. But there is a guy who was also experimenting along those lines. His design is a little different than mine, but using the same principle, what you might call the solid-state electronic approach to using a guitar to control a synthesizer. His name is Harvey Starr, he’s been doing it almost as long as I have. Maybe we started around the same time in our experiments, but he has a guitar called the Z-tar. You can find him online, his company is Starr Labs. He’s actually turned it into a commercial product, which I never did. Being in prison, I could never do that.

AK: Do you resent that you never got to take this technology to market, or not getting the credit of being a pioneer?

BB: Well, I think there were times when I did resent it or felt frustrated because of it. I don’t think I could really resent it, because there’s nothing to resent given the fact that it’s nobody’s fault but my own that I’m in prison. The only thing standing in the way of my being able to market my designs is my being in prison. I can’t really blame anybody else or give a sour grapes routine on that basis, so I just have to move on and accept that Harvey was in a position to do it. He didn’t steal from me, we just had similar ideas. It’s a bit of parallel thinking, you might say. So I’m grateful to him for bringing an instrument of that sort to the world. I don’t look upon it with regret at all. It is what it is, I learned what I learned, and I’m richer for it. The technology is still available to other people. Yeah I didn’t get credit, but you know, getting credit’s overrated. (Laughs)

AK: But it’s still nice.

BB: Yeah, but you know, it’s okay. That phase of my life has passed. I no longer experiment in that way. I’m not building circuits. I may again someday. But right now, I’m just enjoying using really well-designed electronic instruments that were manufactured, that have come out of all those years of experimentation. I wasn’t the only one experimenting. There were a whole lot of us who were experimenting and trying different ideas, different ways of controlling synthesizers, or coming up with new circuits, or making new types of sounds. Now, all of those ideas have been incorporated into commercially available digital and analog instruments that are stunning, really just amazing, and I’m enjoying the fruits of all that. I have an electric guitar that’s made by Schecter and it was customized for me. It has a sustainiac system on it, which means that I have that instrument I wanted many years ago, an E-Bow mounted on the body of the guitar. That’s basically what this is. I’ve got an amazing instrument. What about working on computers?I don’t have access to that for my personal music, I’m not allowed to do that.

AK: So what do you record on? Tape recorders?

BB:  I actually have a personal recorder, a small handheld 8-track recorder. It records 24 bits, so I’m getting really good… You know, I have in the palm of my hand now what is greater than the equivalent to what I had when I did the soundtrack back in the ’70s. I’ve got all that in the palm of my hand plus digital effects built in, plus a lot of other things. That’s what I use for recording, and I’ve got a really good synthesizer, a mini-Nova that is just awesome. It’s analog-style digital, emulated analog. Just an incredible instrument. And I’ve got a percussion controller device, a sampler and beats thing, which is awesome. I’ve got good instruments and I’m able to do what I need to do. I’m so proficient at programming that I can get any sound I want. I did so much experimentation in the past that I know intrinsically how to develop a sound out of one’s imagination with the digital tools inside of a good synthesizer.

AK: Do you miss playing live? Do you have the opportunity to get in front of a crowd?

BB:  Once in a while I play live. I’ve been refining this thing called Ghost Highway, that came out of a live recording. Once in a while I get to get up on stage and play in front of an audience. It’s a small audience, but it’s still fun to do, I love to do it, I love playing live. There’s really no replacement for it. I don’t program my music. I do perform my music, so it’s not as though I’m programming it, I’m actually playing it and I sometimes collaborate with other musicians here.

AK: You replaced Jimmy Page on Lucifer Rising and you used to play with the guys from Love who used to jam with Jimi Hendrix….

BB:  I didn’t get to play with Jimi, I was playing with Johnny Echols. He wasn’t Jimi, but he was cool. Good guitar player.

AK: Yeah, but do you feel you got screwed out of your proper place in musical history? Your contemporaries became legends.

BB: You know, more power to them. I can’t look upon my life with regret in that way and say, “Oh, if only I hadn’t been so stupid that I put myself in a position of killing a guy and gone to prison, look at what I could have been.” That would be ludicrous to do that, it would be a waste of energy. I can’t spend the rest of my life doing sour grapes. You talk about Jimmy Page. I did an interview years ago. He and I were featured in the same article, I think it was in Classic Rock magazine, and he was talking about the soundtrack. He was all sour grapes, man. I was really surprised. I had this fantasy that he and I would put our versions of the soundtrack on the same album some day. I was thinking, how cool would that be? To put his music and my music on the same album so people could hear what he was doing, what I was doing, not competitively, but to show how similar yet different our visions for the soundtrack. But that was my fantasy—turns out here’s the superstar, the rock god, and he’s envious of me, and I’m in prison.

AK: It’s weird how things work out that way.

BB:  (Laughs) Yeah, it is. I’ll never be as famous as him for my version of the soundtrack. But I don’t regret that. I can’t look on my life with regret. It is what is, man. Hopefully my music will continue to resonate with people who discover it and what else can I hope for? Just to be able to connect with people through my work. I get a lot of nice feedback from people who have discovered my work. I don’t have any major distribution network to get it out there, so it’s up to people who are passionate about music to find me. As you did, you found me, so other people have. Just to be known on that level is enough. It is what it is.

AK: One last thing I wanted to ask you about. The cartoon, Ask Professor Proponderus. What was your involvement?

BB: I made it.

AK: You made the whole thing? The design….

BB: I created the environment, developed the characters and did the voices and did all the animation and the music.

AK: How did you do all that? I can’t even build my own website.

BB:  (Laughs) Well, just over the years, I’ve been into doing videography for a long time. I started dabbling in a video program in 1976 when I was in Tracy. I was actually working on the soundtrack at the time and the feds bought some equipment for the state for an experimental program to put video for education purposes into all the prison cells as an aid for rehabilitation. So I got into video way back then and stayed with it. I love the visual medium, I love film and filmmaking and video has evolved into a type of filmmaking. So, I’ve gotten good at it over the years. I was doing a number of training videos for a company that’s associated with the department of corrections. You know, safety training and inmate training of various types, sometimes training that is used for staff. In between work on those types of projects I was able to spend some time on this series of animations called the Ask Professor Proponderus which is for the children of incarcerated parents. The idea is to use this sort of engaging way of communicating through cartoon characters to address complex difficult issues, and to communicate ideas and concepts in a friendly way that will help children who have a loved one in prison understand what is going on with their parent or their brother or sister, by answering their questions through the character enactments. What’s the reception to the cartoon been like?Very positive. It’s out there, it’s part of a series. It hasn’t been promoted to the extent that it should be or that it’s planned to be. It’s kind of on hold a little bit until we have more segments, there’s to be more episodes. I’m working on the second one at present and there should be a few more after that. The idea is that it will be a series that’s fairly comprehensive and it will be promoted more rigorously than it has been so far. It is out there on YouTube and available to be seen by anybody. It’s on the Department of Corrections website, so it is out there, it just isn’t promoted as extensively as it will be eventually.

AK: You have so much going on, with the music and artwork and animation. How rigorously scheduled is your life? How do you find time to do all this stuff?

BB: I’ve been working for the last six years for the business arm of the Department of Corrections, and working intently. It’s a pretty rigorous job, full day of work and it’s OK. I work by myself, I’m a one-man production company, working in a corner. Right now, I’m on leave from that company. I’m on vacation at present. My workstation will be moved to a new area. I’ll be doing the same kind of work, but in a different location. Presently, I’ve got a surgical operation coming up in a week and I’ve got an art show in Tasmania that’s coming up May 1st, so I’ve just kind of been taking advantage of the time off to get some other things done.

AK: How do you organize something like the show in Tasmania?

BB:  I didn’t organize it. It’s a group exhibition in Tasmania, the cultural arts center there. The curator wrote to me and expressed an interest in showing my work. I guess I’ve got some fans down there. I’ve been putting some new work together. It’s not a lot of new work, it’s a group show, so I’m part of this show where there will be a couple of other artists. It’s an honor to be a participant in something like that.

AK: Is it frustrating to not be able to attend these things in person?

BB:  Of course (laughs). Yeah. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t wish I was in a more normal type of place and able to interact in a more normal way.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.