Works by Manson Family pal Bobby BeauSoleil's Orkustra compiled on double album
http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-02-03/music/works-by-manson-family-pal-bobby-beausoleil-s-orkustra-compiled-on-double-album/
By Andy Beta
February 01, 2010
The sunny, halcyon days of the 1960s have been shoved down our
collective throats with every Woodstock anniversary and baby boomer
film reveling in the music of the times. In the handwritten notes by
California musician Bobby BeauSoleil that accompany Adventures in
Experimental Electronic Orchestra from the San Francisco Psychedelic
Underground, a hefty gatefold double LP released this month from
BeauSoleil's first group, the Orkustra, we read part of his tale.
While his story starts out as innocently and starry-eyed as any of
the hippie generation, it winds up entangled with the Manson Family
by decade's end. BeauSoleil's trajectory veers into the sordid,
shadowy realm that parallels that same conflicted era.
Born Robert Kenneth BeauSoleil in Santa Barbara, BeauSoleil packed
his bags in 1965 for San Francisco and found himself at the
intersection of Haight and Ashbury. He was just down the street from
where the Grateful Dead were holed up, loosening the knots on folk
and blues and letting in more expansive jazzy improvisations.
BeauSoleil performed a similar act with his own muse, moving beyond
rock into weirder fields of play, drawing on Indian classical music,
the works of John Coltrane, and avant-garde electronic fare. Trawling
the basement of a music shop, BeauSoleil unearthed instruments like
the Greek bouzouki and set about amplifying it onstage. A few
like-minded travelers joined him, and while his original vision was
for an "electric chamber orchestra," the group soon pared down to
five members and the unmodified name of the Orkustra. They began to
share stages with the Grateful Dead, the Charlatans, and Big Brother
and the Holding Company.
This two-album set culls its music from rehearsal tapes and concerts
performed during the Orkustra's brief existence. While the distance
of four decades casts a murkiness over the proceedings, the interplay
among its participants still entrances. The novelty of its lineup,
consisting of BeauSoleil's electric bouzouki, David LaFlamme's
sinuous violin, Henry Rasof on oboe, future Dan Hicks and his Hot
Licks member Jaime Leopold on standup bass, and drummer Terry Wilson,
never overshadows the music. Meanwhile, mesmeric side-long tracks
"Freeform Improvisation (While Watching an Experimental Underground
Film)" and "Gypsy Odyssey," which capture the group at a slow burn
performing live at St. John's Church on Christmas Eve 1966, sprawl
and unfurl at their leisure. Yet the Orkustra remains a snaky
creature, deftly moving to the shadowy corners of sound. Even brief
excursions conjured in its practice space such as the tense
"Punjabi's Barber" and cinematic "Flash Gordon" thrill with their
succinctness, a rarity in improvised music. In the modern age, these
recordings find context, sounding right at home amid recent reissues
of the free-form improvisational music of Arthur Russell (see his
First Thought, Best Thought set) and former Sun Ra player Philip
Cohran on his Malcolm X Memorial (A Tribute in Music) album.
Yet the center could not hold. The Orkustra drifted apart, unable to
get into a studio to record an album, and BeauSoleil soon returned to
Los Angeles, where he fell in with a different lot of musicians who
were orbiting failed songwriter Charles Manson. As told in the book
Helter Skelter, BeauSoleil exacted revenge for a bad drug deal by
stabbing music teacher Gary Hinman to death in the summer of 1969,
writing "Political Piggy" on the wall with Hinman's blood. BeauSoleil
is now serving life in prison after his death sentence was commuted
in 1970; the Orkustra hints at what could have been a happier ending
to this story.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
