Bobby Beausoleil Reference Archive

SECONDS #50, 1999 by Michael Moynihan

SECONDS: How did you begin as a guitar player and musician? BEAUSOLEIL: To begin with I taught myself. I’ve never had any lessons or formal training. I’ve always been an improvisational player still am, and always will be. SECONDS: What was memorable about the psychedelic L.A. scene? BEAUSOLEIL: The second time I took LSD I…
2016 Parole Hearing Transcript

SUBSEQUENT PAROLE CONSIDERATION HEARING STATE OF CALIFORNIA BOARD OF PAROLE HEARINGS In the matter of the Life Term Parole Consideration Hearing of: ROBERT BEAUSOLEIL CDC Number: B-28302 CALIFORNIA MEDICAL FACILITY VACAVILLE, CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 13, 2016 9:45 A.M. PANEL PRESENT: PETE LABAHN, Presiding Commissioner RANDOLF GROUNDS, Commissioner STEVEN MAHONEY, Deputy Commissioner OTHERS PRESENT: ROBERT BEAUSOLEIL, Inmate…
Hymns From The Solar Temple

Dennis Dread “But the bridge resounds no less under just you, and you do not have the colour of dead men. Why are you riding here on the road to Hel?” ~Gylfaginning The music of Lucifer Rising reverberates with all the pathos and raw emotive energy of an ageless archetype. Like the film itself, the…
The Saga of a Soundtrack

With the advent of the conformist nightmare that consumed most of America in the 1950s, something eventually had to break. By the middle of the following decade, it most certainly had—and the shattered evidence was plain to see. Under a California sun, the shards and splinters of what had been a monochrome world now glinted…
The Artist’s Journey – a prisoner’s path to redemption

The following is a transcript of comments made by Bobby in an interview with Plethora magazine, Copenhagen. Both my music and my visual art come from the same place within me, so I can often speak of either or both modes of expression in the same breath, at least when it comes to describing the…
The Lucifer Rising Suite: A Journey Out of Darkness

by Bobby BeauSoleil San Francisco in the spring of 1967, it was, and the grand cultural experiment, that great hoax of freedom unfettered, was in full swing. Social forces swirled in dangerous eddies and crosscurrents, wreaking havoc and destruction and creative splendor by turns. Some of the people swept up in them became intoxicated with…
INCARCERATION NATION: The Road to Hell

BACK IN 1970, when I first came to prison, there were about 10,000 prison inmates in California’s state prisons. There are now over 170,000 inmates in the state’s prisons—a seventeen fold increase, most of which developed from the early 1980s to the present. This ballooning of the prison population is grossly out of proportion with…
Bobby BeauSoleil: Life After Death Row, Making Art and Music Behind Bars, by Adam Kovac

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…
The Farcical Capote Interview

In late 1972 or early 1973, Truman Capote came to San Quentin to interview some of the prisoners there. Word was spread about that he had come there to “expose prison problems”. This stated mission appealed to many of the prison inmates there at the time, and naturally – “revolutionary” that I considered myself to…
My New Year’s Revolution

At the end of the previous year, I wrote and sent out a little poem speaking to how 2019 had been a rough row to hoe, and raising hints for the better times ahead in 2020. The dubious quality of lyrical content aside, it’s obvious that I’m hardly a reliable oracle. Now, with the passing…