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knifeshoeoreofight · 6 years

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Sidgeno #33 for the prompt thing!!

#33 (celebrity/fan)

“So, how’re you holding up, Sid?” Flower says, his grin puckish and amused.

“Shut up,” Sid retorts. He re-checks his camera’s settings for the fifth time, hoping his ears aren’t as red as they feel.

“Aww, precious muffin, it’s not everyday you get to meet—”

“Shut up,” Sid says again, desperate to head off this line of teasing before it can escalate any further, or, god forbid, someone else on the crew overhears.

He should never have confessed to Flower about how much he loves Malkin’s Menagerie. It’s not his usual type of show. His taste usually runs to serious war documentaries or biopics about NASA. However, during a shoot last year, he’d been suffering from a lousy bout of jet-lag fueled insomnia. Flicking through motel room tv channels in an effort to numb his brain enough to sleep, he’d stumbled across the show. He’d been charmed from the get-go.

The presenter, Evgeni Malkin, was this huge, gangly, exuberant Russian guy who traveled around the world, talking about different animals and conservation programs. There are a ton of shows like that, Sid’s even done camerawork for a few. But something about Malkin’s Menagerie is different. Maybe it’s the honest enthusiasm— hard to come by in this business. Malkin clearly loves his job, and loves the animals so, so much. The show’s unofficial tagline is pretty much “I can pet?”

It seems like it’s Malkin’s mission to snuggle pretty much every animal around the globe that will let him. He’s so gentle with them, too. The last episode had seen him cooing at an impossibly cute baby sloth as it (slowly) tried to climb onto Malkin’s ever present backwards snapback. Malkin resembled nothing so much as an ebullient, marshmallow-hearted Russian frat boy, and it worked for him.

Really, really worked for him.

Sid shakes his head to clear it. He couldn’t let this…crush… get to him. He works in show business, for fuck’s sake. He’s been on the other side of the lens from A-listers. Well. As close as they get to those in Canada. He doesn’t get silly about who he’s filming. Until now.

When he’d heard Vero and Catherine was going to bring Evgeni Malkin on as a guest interviewee, he’d had enough of a little mini-freakout that he’d ended up blurting everything to Flower, to his eternal regret.

“Oh, like you can judge me,” Sid had snapped over Flower’s gleeful chortling, jerking his head towards where Veronique Larosee was sitting in her co-host’s chair, getting her makeup retouched.

“Ah,” Flower had replied, staring with his habitual mooney-eyed expression at the so-called love of his life. “Unlike you, mon chum, I’m actually doing something about my troubles of the heart.”

“She said she doesn’t date co-workers,” Sid had said waspishly although he’d felt bad about it later.

“I told her it’s ok, I’m an independent contractor,” Flower said, spirit unquenchable. “Love will prevail, I just know it!”

Now, as he starts in on his sixth unnecessary round of checks, Sid feels like his nerves are karma for being a dick about Flower’s kind of super sweet hang-up on Vero.

Malkin is even bigger in real life. Sid swallows as he watches, safely hidden behind his camera equipment, as Malkin benevolently looms over Vero and Catherine Laflamme. His huge hands dwarf theirs as he shakes them, all the while cradling a tiny orange kitten in the crook of his other arm. Sid isn’t going to survive this.

The gist of the segment is going to be Malkin talking about how house cats are tiny apex predators who basically domesticated themselves, and giving some care and behavior tips to the viewers of the show. The kitten he’s holding belongs to a local shelter, which is being promoted as this episode’s charity spotlight. Everything goes fine at first. The kitten is cute and Malkin is charming, and Sid dies a thousand deaths when the kitten perches on Malkin’s shoulder and he unconsciously tilts his head to rub his cheek against its soft, fluffy fur. Really, it’s a toss up as to who is cuter.

Eventually though, as it always does, something has to go sideways. In this case, someone drops a crate or something off camera and the kitten startles, leaping out of Malkin’s arms before he can grab ahold of it. It rockets straight for Sid, and all he can think is that the studio is a warren of rooms and equipment, full of tight spaces for a baby animal to hide and never get found. Sid launches himself off of his stool after it, but also isn’t able to grab it before it dives into a snarl of cables. Sid crouches, making himself smaller and reaching out towards the kitten, talking soothing nonsense to it under his breath. The poor thing is shaking.

After a few moment, though, it makes a tiny, heart-melting mew and toddles out far enough that Sid can scoop it up and cradle it to his chest. He jumps, thankfully keeping his careful grip on the kitten, when a smattering of applause breaks out. He turns, already feeling his face flush with embarrassment, to see the entire cast and crew looking on with various expressions of charmed amusement.

Malkin is halfway to, him, and he’s wearing a pretty weird expression. Sid wonders what he did, as he carefully hands the kitten back to Malkin. Their hands brush, and Malkin keeps staring at him.

“Thank you,” Malkin says. “What your name?”

“I’m Sidney,” Sid says. “Uh, good thing he didn’t get far, eh? Cute little thing.” He scritches the kitten’s ears, and it mews again. Sid has to smile at it.

When he makes eye contact with Malkin again, Malkin is still. Staring. “Back to work!” Sid says awkwardly and tries to smile at him. He ducks back behind the safe barrier of his camera, and filming resumes.

He’s got to be imagining that Malkin’s looking into his camera a lot more than he was before the kitten got loose.

When shooting finally wraps up, Sid catches the lady from the shelter as she’s crating the kitten up. It’s so small and so sweet, and he feels kinda unsettled by the idea of it going back to a sterile steel cage at the shelter. He and the women have a quiet word, and she passes him her business card, smiling. She promises that she’ll hold the kitten for him, and that he can pick it up tomorrow morning.

“I think I just somehow acquired a cat,” Sid says blankly to Flower as they get to work breaking down their respective equipment. “Get that out of my face,” he adds, swatting at Flower’s boom mike.

Flower cackles. “You’re about to acquire something else, Mr. Hero.”

“Huh?” Sid says, before he hears a throat clear behind him. He turns, and it’s Malkin. Sid sets down the box he’d lifted to his shoulder. Malkin’s eyes track the movement, but then he yanks his eyes back up to Sid’s face.

“Thanks again for help,” Malkin says.

“I really, really didn’t really do much?” Sid replies, a little confused. Malkin shuffles his feet awkwardly.

“Take you to dinner to say thank you?” Malkin persists, rocking back and forth on his heels a little.

“He’s very single, and he’d love to go with you,” Flower suddenly interjects, popping up over Sid’s shoulder, grinning like a lunatic. “He’s a huuuge fan, loves your show—”

“Flower!” Sid cries, but Malkin’s uncertain expression melts into a blinding smile.

“Very glad to hear,” he rumbles. “You free at eight? I’m pick you up?”

“Sure,” Sid says faintly, and somehow manages to exchange phone numbers and say goodbye with only a moderate amount of nervous fumbling. Malkin keeps turning around to smile at him as he walks away, eventually walking backward into a piece of the set. He honest-to-god blushes and books it out of there. Sid stares dazedly after him.

Flowers smiles gently at him then. “Good luck, Sid. Take the chance to be happy.”

“Thanks,” Sid says gratefully, and as he turns toward Flower, he glimpses Vero standing over by the edge of the set behind them, clearly waiting for their conversation to be finished so she can come over and talk to Flower. “You too, eh?” He grins, as it’s Flower’s turn to look thrown off. Sid hoists his box of gear again, and leaves them to it, smiling the entire way out of the building, heart feeling light as air.

#Anonymous #sidgeno #sidney crosby/evgeni malkin #hockey rpf #dana writes a thing

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bbreferencearchive · 7 years

Text

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 went and saw The Byrds. The whole electric band experience took on new dimensions, under the influence. I’d always loved music, but there were parts of it I’d never really heard before. To be on LSD and hear for the first time an electric twelve-string played by Jim McGuinn – One of the bands that opened was The Grassroots. This wasn’t The Grass Roots that most people would be familiar with; this band later became Love.

SECONDS: I’m familiar with Love, but how did they sound at that earlier stage?

BEAUSOLEIL: Arthur Lee was playing harp and covering a lot of Stones tunes, but he was starting to write his own material. I saw tremendous potential. I told him I thought he needed a rhythm guitar player in the band, so I tried out. They were getting ready to play a gig at a place called Brave New World. It was a private Gay bar, although they didn’t know it at the time or at least I didn’t. But it was a gig that Arthur didn’t expect too much attendance at, so he decided I could get on stage with them… When I first saw them, they didn’t have much of a following. I was probably their most enthusiastic fan. So we got this gig at Brave New World, playing for this private Gay audience — men dancing with each other, which was not what we wanted. I just got tired of the situation we were all tired of it; we wanted an audience. So I went out on Sunset Strip and told everybody this is where it’s happening, and gave out directions to the club. By the time I got back to the club, people were already Haight-Ashbury was not known then for what it later became. It was a low-rent district, right next to the park. As far as the scene goes, there was just a handful of artists and musicians. Two bands lived in the area — The Grateful Dead and The Charlatans — and some artists. There was a Jazz club, Haight Levels. You could go in there twenty-four hours a day and listen to Jazz music. Then there was The Psychedelic Shop and The Donut Shop, and that was pretty much it.

SECONDS: So it transformed into a straight Rock club overnight.

BEAUSOLEIL: Yeah, although it still maintained its private- club status for quite awhile. At some point after a few months we were gonna take a break for awhile because Brave New World was moving to a larger place. I got invited to take a trip to San Francisco with a girlfriend and a friend of hers, so I went along for the ride with my dog Snofox.

SECONDS: Things were shifting into the Hippie era.

BEAUSOLEIL: It was definitely picking up steam at this point. We went through Big Sur, and all of the sudden I’m seeing a lot more long-haired people. I had on skin-tight pants and a crepe shirt with ruffles. I had a mop of hair and wore these blousy crepe shirts, so I got the nickname Cupid. The Big Sur people didn’t know what to make of me.

SECONDS: Did you fit in with the emerging Hippie attitudes?

BEAUSOLEIL: No, I didn’t. I got to where I’d pointedly tell people, “I’m not a Hippie — I’m a barbarian.” I hated that term Hippie. I was there when it was coined, when somebody told Life magazine, “We’re Hippies” — and I didn’t like it. The youth movement had never been a fashion thing, and if it became one, you’d missed the point.

SECONDS: So you returned to L.A. —

BEAUSOLEIL: I got back and found out I’d been replaced in the band, and the reason was I was too young to play in many of the clubs, legally. I was also still learning to play. I could play a real good rhythm guitar, but there was somebody who had more experience at that. This guy Bryan MacLean took advantage of the opportunity — I wasn’t there — he made a pitch to the band, and beat me out…I went back to the Bay Area and bummed around and finally found my way into the Haight-Ashbury. Haight-Ashbury was not known then for what it later became. It was a low-rent district, right next to the park. As far as the scene goes, there was just a handful of artists and musicians. Two bands lived in the area — The Grateful Dead and The Charlatans — and some artists. There was a Jazz club, Haight Levels. You could go in there twenty-four hours a day and listen to Jazz music. Then there was The Psychedelic Shop and The Donut Shop, and that was pretty much it.

SECONDS: Were you taking lots of LSD?

BEAUSOLEIL: I never really took “lots of LSD” and I never really went looking for it. Pot, on the other hand, I smoked pretty much every day, but not a great deal. If I smoked a joint a day, I was perfectly happy. That was the extent of my drug involvement. I never got into Heroin. I experimented a little with uppers and downers, to see what they were — and didn’t like ’em. I lost a lot of friends to Crank and Heroin.

SECONDS: There’s a legend that when the Grassroots changed their name to Love, it was a tip of the hat to you.

BEAUSOLEIL: Well, at least that’s what Arthur Lee told me. I’d gotten a gig in another band in San Francisco called The Outfit. It was San Francisco Rock, all original music — a pretty good little band. I didn’t last long with them. Anyway, having joined a band, I needed to make a quick trip back to L.A. to pick up my guitar. Meanwhile, the other band called The Grass Roots had come to L.A. They’d just had a hit record. They pretty much captured the band name by being the first to record using that name. So there was kind of a war going on when I arrived in L.A., with people taking sides over “Who is the real Grass Roots?” Eventually it was decided that the band I’d been part of was going to change their name. Arthur told me he’d decided to rename the band “Love” in honor of me, alluding to the Cupid nickname. I felt honored. It kind of healed the hurt feelings.

SECONDS: You didn’t last long in The Outfit

BEAUSOLEIL: I hadn’t any real clear idea where I was going with it, but I was beginning to formulate ideas for a band ofmy own. I didn’t want to use the same Rock Band instrumentation. I was listening to Middle Eastern music, to Jazz, to Classical, I liked Vivaldi and Mozart — what I wanted to do was play Rock Music with all these other elements. I didn’t want to lose the driving rawness of Rock, but I wanted to bring in this “universal” music concept that I was evolving — a multi-cultural, multi- disciplined sort of thing. So I began to pick up other instruments: a dulcimer, a student-model sitar, a bouzouki, an acoustic guitar —

SECONDS: How did psychedelic drug culture effect the music?

BEAUSOLEIL: Oh god — it had a profound influence on the music from the very beginning. From the very beginning when I got involved with it — “Tambourine Man” was about LSD, you know; it was the first song, the first exposure I had to the so- called “youth culture,” to that emergence of the Sixties youth movement and being turned on to Pot and LSD. It seemed like from the beginning that the consciousness-expanding substances were always a part of it, and it wasn’t so much the drugs but rather “we are finding out who we are.”

SECONDS: Were you aware that this “quest” was unfolding at the time?

BEAUSOLEIL: Absolutely, that was what it was for me. When it became fashion, and bracketed under this term “Hippie,” I resented it because it didn’t represent me. It was always that quest. It was frightening, it was moving, it was inspiring, it was crazy, it was extremely humorous at times and it was tragic at times. It was all those things that that kind of on-the-edge quest is.

SECONDS: How did you form your own band?

BEAUSOLEIL: I was playing sitar, which is strictly a melodic instrument, and I was experimenting with the bouzouki. I wanted to continue to do Rock, but to bring all these new influences and timbres into the music. The only way I could do that was to form a band of my own. What I did was to put out ads for musicians to form the first “electric symphony orchestra.” The first to join was David LaFlamme, who went on to form It’s A Beautiful Day. He was a violin player with Classical training. Together we rented an old warehouse on Page Street in the Haight district and got it ready as a rehearsal place. Shortly after David joined me others began showing up. A cellist, another violinist — my intention was to electrify them all. The electric orchestra was, needless to say, an ambitious idea — and had I been older or wiser I probably never would’ve attempted it. I think I was turning eighteen at that point.

SECONDS: The instrumentation must have been different —

BEAUSOLEIL: Completely in a whole new paradigm. We soon whittled the lineup down to five: oboe, violin, upright bass, percussion, and me on guitar and bouzouki. We were known as The Orkustra and became pretty well-known; we played all the major venues numerous times.

SECONDS: When was all this?

BEAUSOLEIL: 1966. We lasted as a band for about a year and half, until I got into the Kenneth Anger thing, working with him on Lucifer Rising.

SECONDS: Was ’67 the Summer Of Love?

BEAUSOLEIL: Nobody was calling it that when it was happening. It was a summer of disaster, truth be known. What happened there was so unlike what you’d imagine from that term “Summer Of Love” — in a lot of ways, it was the summer of tragedy. It was insane. A lot of it was wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but it destroyed the Haight and brought a lot of good things that were going on to an abrupt halt — it would’ve been nice to see where it all would’ve gone, had it been allowed to continue at its own pace rather than being accelerated from outside. But such things happen, and maybe it’s all for the best.

SECONDS: How did you meet Kenneth Anger?

BEAUSOLEIL: The Orkustra was approached by the Sexual Freedom League, and they wanted us to play this gig that turned out to be the most remarkable event I experienced in San Francisco, the “Human Be-In” notwithstanding. It was never publicized and there were no posters put out for it. The Glide Memorial Church was rented for a three-day weekend. They essentially turned it into a free-for-all. They lined up all these people to come in and do different things to get the activity going but they wanted it to be a people’s event. Essentially they wanted people to groove on each other, and not just to be passively entertained. The talent and artists they brought in were there for the purpose of encouraging people to interact... We set up behind this false wall. Later that evening when it was time, we quietly went back behind the false wall, while someone was reading poetry. About six or seven female dancers joined us. They were in exotic costumes, like bare-topped bellydancers with pantaloons and bangles and jangles on. Then at the appointed moment we struck a chord and launched into one of our exotic danceable pieces, and these girls burst through the paper wall and took over. There was a crowd there participating in the poetry reading, and now all the sudden it became something completely different. There were shocked looks on some people’s faces. The idea was to get everybody dancing. The girls were pulling people out of their chairs. It was a blast. At one point this gorgeous blonde who was one of the bellydancers came near me and I just grabbed her hand and brought her over to where I was playing. I stood her on a chair and she danced while I played to her. It’s one of those times when you just had to be there — but she was dancing and I tried to dance with her, musically. I was playing to her body movements and she was doing likewise in response to me. It was spontaneous, and it was wonderful — you could not have planned something that went as beautifully. After awhile the number of people made the air in the room so dense you could cut through the steam with a knife. Everyone was sweating, people were taking their clothes off. Nobody was fucking at that point, although that did happen over the three days at various times — and it was all the more beautiful because it was unplanned. It was a total surprise to everybody. While I was playing to her I took my shirt off.

Everyone was perspiring and everybody’s bodies were wet. The girl is dancing and I started licking sweat from her body, impulsively. Pretty soon there were three or four people licking this girl. She was overwhelmed, and eventually her friend saved her and it was time for the girls to leave so they snuck out the back. The pulse was there and we continued playing, but the girls had done their job. This is what Kenneth Anger saw — he was in the audience. He might’ve been loaded on Acid; there’s a good chance he was. But what he saw blew his mind. He’d had some other guy lined up to play Lucifer in his film, and he immediately fired him. That was our first meeting. He came up to me in the parking lot after we played, pointed at air and said: “You are Lucifer!” Those were his precise words, his opening line.

SECONDS: And you didn’t argue.

BEAUSOLEIL: I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, to tell you the truth! I didn’t know where he was coming from. He immediately qualified it and told me, “I’m Kenneth Anger, a filmmaker, I’m making this movie,” et cetera. So we talked a bit about it. I vaguely knew his name, but I was more familiar with the film Scorpio Rising, which had shown around. I’d never actually seen it, but it was one of those underground things people would talk about.

SECONDS: Why did The Orkustra split up?

BEAUSOLEIL: Kenneth Anger approached us after the gig. He wanted me to star in the film, and I was primarily interested in doing it so that I’d have the opportunity to do the music. But that ended the band, because when we talked about it with Kenneth the band was there too, but they were more or less excluded. It created a rift and there was a distance between us, so the Orkustra disbanded.

SECONDS: How did you assemble a new band to do the film soundtrack?

BEAUSOLEIL: Basically I just went shopping around the circles I was familiar with. Some of the players were Free Jazz musicians. Some of them were more accomplished than others and, to tell you the truth, we never had real chemistry as a band. It was more a situation where I was hiring them to play on the promise of payment later.

SECONDS: And what happened?

BEAUSOLEIL: The new band, which I’d named The Magick Powerhouse Of Oz, was getting anxious to do something. So I started setting up a concert for the Autumnal Equinox. I talked to Kenneth about it and suddenly he wanted to get involved. He was going to do an invocation with a pre-recorded tape of some Aleister Crowley ritual, to usher in the Equinox. My band was going to play in costume. I pretty much wore the same thing I always did, except I had a new beaverskin top-hat and a full-length blue velvet cape. We’d rented scrim [translucent curtains] from a technical supply house, and wanted to do something interesting with light-shows and films projected on the scrim with the band playing on a darkened stage behind it. As the stage lights were turned up, the scrim gradually became more transparent until you could see us within this light show. It was very effective. That was the plan, and then Kenneth had pre-recorded a spoken word audio tape. He’d had someone record him and slow it down, because he had this effeminate lisping voice which he wanted to make sound more masculine. The night of the performance, Kenneth took Acid — not the wisest thing to do! We played our first set, and then he was going to do the ritual and we’d come in at the end of that and start playing again. The first set went real well and everybody was awed by what we’d been doing. Then it was Kenneth’s turn to do his thing. The tape starts playing, and he’s out on the dancefloor along with these various props like mannequins with costumes and painted heads on them representing various deities; he starts doing his invocation to the tape — and then suddenly the tape breaks. Here he is, high on Acid; the tape breaks; he’s in front of the audience — and from that point things just went haywire. He freaked out, and it seemed like things around him started freaking out along with him. There were spotlights, and one of them exploded for reasons unknown. Kenneth — spontaneously trying to figure out what to do — started calling, “Bobby, where are you? Bobby, where are you?” and started tearing holes in the scrim in his attempts to find me. He had a cane — which he’d bought in a junk store — that had two serpents twining around it, like Caduceus, with a fist for the handle. He was using that for a sort of wand, and somehow he broke it. He threw the pieces out into the audience, screaming “I love you!” One friend of mine got hit above the eye and had to have stitches. Kenneth freaking out was pretty much the close of the concert. We played on for a short set and that was the end of that. The audience was pleased — for them it was all part of the show — but for him and I, it was a disaster.

SECONDS: What did Kenneth do?

BEAUSOLEIL: I think he was overwhelmed with embarrassment as he was coming down from the LSD. In his own mind he’d made a fool of himself in front of a lot of people. After the Equinox disaster, he levelled the blame, so to speak, on me.

SECONDS: It’s not as if you caused his performance to go awry —

BEAUSOLEIL: He knows that; it was more I might’ve done something metaphysically — it was never stated what it was. Later he took out a full-page advertisement in the Berkeley Barb, declaring that he was dead. He was sort of committing metaphorical suicide, and I was a part of his life so I was naturally a casualty in that situation and sort of a focus of it — the demon in his life that had thrown everything askew. I didn’t do any of this, and it was not really stated what I did, although I was accused of stealing the film. Of course the film never existed, so there was nothing to steal!

SECONDS: He claimed you took the print of Lucifer Rising when you headed back to L.A.

BEAUSOLEIL: He claims something different just about every time he tells the story. At one point he claimed it was “buried in Death Valley,” because of the Manson stuff. I don’t know what was on his mind!

SECONDS: Where did you meet Manson?

BEAUSOLEIL: The first time I met the Manson people was at the “spiral staircase” house down in Malibu, just at the base of Topanga Canyon. I went there visiting a friend I’d known previously from the Hollywood scene, and there was what seemed to be a party going on next door — people smoking Pot and playing music. So I just wandered over there and it was Charlie Manson singing and playing guitar, and there were some other guys and some girls. I sat down, I listened for awhile, and I picked up this instrument called a melodica. I played along for a little while and checked out what was going on, then I left.

SECONDS: When did you run into Manson again after that?

BEAUSOLEIL: At one point I advertised myself as a guitar player for hire and got a call from a band called The Milky Way who wanted me to play guitar for a gig. It turned out to be a little band that Manson was in. Charlie Manson was the lead singer. They had a gig at the Topanga Canyon Corral, which was the only nightclub in Topanga. I played with them and it was really pretty easy — I just improvised along with them.

SECONDS: What was the music like?

BEAUSOLEIL: It wasn’t all that great. Charlie wrote most of the lyrics. It was garage-band stuff. The best thing, though, was Charlie and his singing, and his kind of Dylan-esque sounding lyrics. Playing with him from my point of view as an instrumentalist came very natural. I found it really easy to do interesting things instrumentally around what he was doing, to enhance the delivery of his songs. As far as I know, those gigs were the end of the band — I wasn’t going to be getting paid. I did get a little bit of money from the Corral, but there was no point in me playing with the band. I hadn’t been asked to become a member in the first place, and I wouldn’t have been interested if they did ask. I was just a hired guitar. I didn’t get in-depth with them at that point, but I did meet him again a month or two later and visited with him down across from the spiral staircase house, where they had the bus parked across the street.

SECONDS: What led to the unfortunate turn of events which was about to unfold?

BEAUSOLEIL: There’s not any one thing. It was an outgrowth, in part, of the disillusionment I felt. I was lost. I’d tried escaping in various ways — I tried escaping on the road; that became more and more difficult. The backlash of law enforcement really came down hard; places we used to be able to go were no longer friendly. The signs would read: “No Hippies—No Bare Feet.” The cops made it really clear you were not welcome and harassed you; they followed you up and down the highway while you were traveling. It got to be more and more like that I didn’t feel like I belonged anymore. There were a lot of cutthroat things happening in the music industry. I wasn’t doing anything professionally with my music, and wasn’t really inspired to try. What happened then was that I got into motorcycles and the motorcycle lifestyle, which purported to be “free.” I was looking for that freedom. I wanted to keep and sustain my freedom from all of it, including what I saw as the traps that the youth movement had fallen into.

SECONDS: Bikers embodied what you were looking for —

BEAUSOLEIL: That’s what they seemed to represent to me, but I didn’t know much about them. There was a lot not to like with some of them, as it turned out. But I began to somewhat adopt that lifestyle. I began building a motorcycle, and at the same time I was living in Hollywood. That’s where I was at in my life when this incident occurred which brought me to prison I’d go out to the Ranch on the weekends and there were Straight Satans and Satan’s Slaves and every so often some Hell’s Angels would come hang out. I was a little intimidated by them. I didn’t really know them that well, they didn’t know me, and I was probably viewed as some upstart — who knows what they thought of me! I think they were attracted by the girls. And it was a good place to hang out and drink beer. One of them, a guy named Danny DeCarlo, became a witness against me in my trial. Somehow he’d hooked up with one of the girls at the Ranch — Susan Atkins. He lived there and kept his motorcycle there and fooled around with guns a lot, which I didn’t like — I’ve always hated guns. But that’s how I got involved with those people. At one point there was supposed to be a party given by the Straight Satans. They to impress these guys. I wanted to be accepted by them because I was oriented more towards being a barbarian than a Hippie, and that lifestyle appealed to me. But anyway, this motorcycle club wanted to party and they had some money which they wanted to use to score some psychedelics. I told them I knew a guy in Topanga Canyon and that I could score for them. They wanted LSD or Mescaline or something along those lines — I don’t think they really had a whole lot of experience in that. So I turned over a thousand dollars for a thousand hits of Mescaline from Gary Hinman, and took it to the bike club. I figured it was a successful deal. I never thought Gary’d bother selling something that wasn’t good or wasn’t what it was purported to be. I thought maybe I would’ve been invited to the party, but I wasn’t! The transaction occurred at the Spahn Ranch, and the next day they came back and wanted their money back, saying that the Mescaline had turned out to be bunk. I had to take them at their word — I hadn’t tried it myself, I wasn’t there when they took it; I didn’t know if what they were telling me was true — but they were pissed off and I was in a bad way with them. There was this one absolutely huge guy — I think he was from the San Bernadino chapter of the chapter of the Hell’s Angels — who confronted me. I immediately told him I thought that was bullshit, and that the guy I bought it from wouldn’t have sold me any bunk. The next thing I know I’ve got an arm around my neck and a knife held up to my throat. They let me know in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t negotiable. I have to tell you that I’m extremely embarrassed to this day — thirty years later — about being stupid enough to have put myself in that position. Now, there is a possibility that the product was in fact bunk, because what I’ve since been told is that Mescaline will turn to strychnine if allowed to sit for awhile. So there is a possibility that the stuff had simply been sitting around for too long. Apparently that change is a normal process, but I didn’t know that at the time, and the bikers probably didn’t know that — they saw it as my having given this guy a thousand dollars of their money and then I brought them poison. So I had to go to Gary’s to try to get the money back. One of the Straight Satans, Danny DeCarlo, put a gun in my hand and told me, “If he doesn’t cooperate, here’s what you do: you hit him with the gun, and —” Now, I was in no way prepared for this! Apart from a little target shooting with a .22 as a kid, I’d never had a pun in my hand. I was way out of my element; I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. Bruce Davis — who was eventually convicted as an accessory to the crime, although he actually didn’t do anything — drove me to Gary’s and dropped me off. Two of the girls that hung at the Ranch wanted to come. They didn’t know what was going on. They weren’t “sent” to go with me, as was alleged later on. They were both friends of Gary’s to begin with. Everybody in the area, Manson included, knew Gary. Some of the girls had even stayed with Gary. One of the girls that went with me, Mary Brunner, lived with Gary for a time. The girls wanted to know where I was going, and I said, “Over to Gary’s house.” They asked, “Can we come too?” That’s all it was —their initial involvement was quite innocent.

SECONDS: And there was no antagonism toward Hinman outside of the fact you were in this weird situation over the drugs?

BEAUSOLEIL: Not really, but I had to take the word of the bike club. When I got to Gary’s place he invited me in. We sat down at the kitchen table and I told him, “Look, Gary, you sold me bunk and I’ve got to get the money back. There’s no two ways about it, it’s really a bad scene.” I was anxious about the situation and I let him know we couldn’t dance with this, so to speak. His response was that the money was already gone, and it wasn’t available any longer. I was really beginning to freak out. I suppose if I’d given myself time to cool down I could’ve come up ways to have dealt with the problem without resorting to violence. I probably could’ve gotten out of town — that would’ve been one option, and there have been many, many times when I’ve wished that was the option I’d taken.

SECONDS: Although having a price on your head from bike clubs who travel around wouldn’t have solved the problem —

BEAUSOLEIL: I didn’t want to live always having to look over my shoulder. Also it was a matter of self-respect — I’m not the kind of guy who runs from things. It was something I felt I had to deal with. Anyway, Gary said he didn’t have the money. He showed me his checkbook and there was no balance in it, and only about forty bucks in his wallet. I reached desperation and actually did what Danny DeCarlo had suggested — which was to hit Gary with the gun, to make sure he knew I was serious. I hit him a few times on the head with the gun, which shocked him. He said, “Bobby, this isn’t like you!” And it wasn’t — I was completely into something that wasn’t my orientation, and I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t know how to behave in a situation like that, and I was at wit’s end. I was desperate. Desperation is a killer. Choices made in a state of desperation are really made in a state of chaos — you can’t think rationally and you can’t make good decisions if you’re desperate.

SECONDS: In retrospect it must be hard to make sense of some of the decisions you made in that situation.

BEAUSOLEIL: That’s very true. It’s hard to describe what was going on, or why it was happening, in any sensible way. It doesn’t make sense to me today, and it didn’t make sense to me then. I’m trying to put this into a context which makes it at least understandable, because it must be understood in some way, but it didn’t really “make sense” — it still doesn’t make sense. It was extremely out of character for me, and I think that’s why it happened, because I had no experience in that kind of lifestyle. I was twenty-one and never had a gun in my hand before, never involved myself in any sort of drug-dealing or been in any of that kind of scene. Anyway, at this point Gary and I are at odds. I’ve pulled a gun on him and hit him a few times. I didn’t know what he was going to do, and he didn’t know what I was going to do. Our whole relationship had changed — not that we had a really close relationship at any point, but this was never the relationship that we had. It was now put into an entirely different context. I decided I needed to be able to leave the room and go look around the house for something that might be worth a thousand bucks. Want to know how naive I was? I put the gun in Susan Atkins’s hands and I told her, “Hold the gun on him — and if he moves, shoot him.” I didn’t believe she’d actually shoot him but I figured that was enough, he wouldn’t do anything. I go out in the living room and I’m looking around, trying to find something that can be converted into a thousand dollars of value in the eyes of the bike club. All of the sudden I hear screaming coming from the kitchen: “Bobby! Bobby! He’s got the gun!” The situation had gone immediately from bad to worse — he’d taken the gun from her. Gary must have seen it in her face, as I had, that she wouldn’t actually shoot him. I didn’t even give myself time to think — I ran into the kitchen and just dove at him. I got there quick enough to keep him from pointing the gun at me, and then we both had hold of the gun and we wrestled over it. I knew I could not let this guy put the gun on me. Now, maybe he wouldn’t have done anything but I wasn’t about to take any chances. Suddenly the gun goes off. We both separated at that point, each thinking that one of us had been shot. Actually — fortunately — no one was hurt. The bullet went through the kitchen sink. In that moment when the gun fired we were both in shock, but I regained my senses before he did and was able to get the gun back. Gary didn’t have any money. If I could hit him with a gun several times and he still maintained he didn’t have any money, I had to believe him. He wasn’t oriented any more toward violent criminal activity than I was. Anyway, I was unable to find anything of value in the house, the baby grand piano being a bit useless —

SECONDS: — for a biker club.

BEAUSOLEIL: Yes, and also it would have been impossible to get it down the flight of stairs and transported anywhere. He had a couple of beat-up vehicles, however. A Fiat with a Toyota engine and a VW bus with a smashed-in front. They were both junkers, but I figured that between the two of them they might be worth a thousand bucks, so I said, “How about those two cars?” and he signed over the pink slips for the two wrecks. I’m figuring the business is concluded; we’ve balanced the score as well as we can and I’ve got something at least which I can take back — and hopefully it will be good enough. What I didn’t know was that while Gary and I had been wrestling over the gun, one of the girls had called the Ranch. Apparently, as best as I can put it together, the girl had called the Ranch and told whoever was on the other end that Gary had gotten the gun. What I imagine happened is Manson got word that two of his girls were being threatened by Gary, and that Gary had the gun. While I’m concluding business with Gary and getting ready to leave, suddenly someone comes to the door. At this point the gun was put away and Gary was not being held against his will. He’d got a couple of lumps on his head from being hit with the gun, but other than that he was unscathed. There was a bullet hole in his kitchen sink, but we were both okay with walking away from it and letting it go at that. He was not real happy about losing his vehicles, but he was writing them off. Now suddenly there was someone at the door, and Gary answered it. It turned out to be Manson with Bruce Davis standing behind him. I’d assume that Manson believed Gary was still in control of the situation because he answered the door. Manson didn’t give him a chance to say anything more than “Hi, Charlie” before he struck Gary across the face with a sword that one of the Straight Satans had given to him. He walked in and kind of blustered around for a few minutes. I assume he realized his mistake shortly thereafter.

SECONDS: Where were you?

BEAUSOLEIL: I was standing right there.

I was in the living room, a few feet from the front door. I was in shock. Gary was in shock. It was so uncalled for — I didn’t know where it was coming from, and thought, “What is this about?” Now I’ve got a situation where Gary had a severe slash across his face and a nick where the sword had cut his ear. I heard Manson say something to me like, “That’s how you be a man!” Then he and Bruce left. Gary was bleeding pretty badly from his face, and I didn’t know what to do. The girls were still there but Manson was gone in five minutes. Either he or Bruce drove one of Gary’s vehicles away. I don’t remember how or why this came about. I had a severely wounded guy on my hands who I’m afraid is going to go to the cops. He wanted to get medical treatment — understandably. I didn’t want him to go to the hospital because that would bring the cops in. I was in a panic, and the only thing I could think of to do was to try to fix him up myself. I’d had some experience sewing up my dog, Hocus, who was a fighter and often had come back home with gaping holes in his skin. I figured that it had provided me with enough experience I could give Gary a couple of stitches — at least stitch his ear so the nick wouldn’t heal separated — and bandage him up on the cheek. I wanted to try to just cool him out. I was desperate. Now obviously, none of this makes sense. You may ask, “What was I thinking?” but the thing was, I wasn’t rational. It was a desperate effort to try to make things right with Gary so that he wouldn’t go to the cops. He would seem to cool out for awhile and then he’d decide, “No, this is isn’t gonna work — I need to get to the hospital.” He’d chant mantras. That’s what he was into at that time. He’d try to calm himself down, and then he’d revert to the panic. And then I panicked — and I killed him, rather than let him go to the cops. I drove back to the Spahn Ranch with the two girls in the VW bus. Now how all this evolved into the theory that Manson ordered me to kill Gary —

SECONDS: Which Bugliosi claims —

BEAUSOLEIL: That’s what was alleged at my trial. That was the sort of framework the prosecution was trying to establish as the explanation for the so-called “Manson Family Tate-LaBianca murders” — that Manson was directing everything and issuing orders. Naturally I was “under his orders.”

SECONDS: Along with everyone else.

BEAUSOLEIL: What they used to “support” this was a phone call that had been made from Gary Hinman’s residence to the Spahn Ranch. There were two calls. The first one I told you about: one of the girls had called. The second one was when I was panicked over what to do about Gary, and I called the Ranch and got Charlie on the phone and said, “Look, man, you’ve left me with this problem. You came and cut this guy; there was no need for that. It’s your problem.” And he essentially told me, “Well, you know what to do as well as I do.” He just kind of put it back in my court and hung up.

SECONDS: And later that was alleged to be an “order” from him, telling you to kill Gary.

BEAUSOLEIL: Yes, as in: “You know what to do”— that’s how it was characterized, in an insinuating tone of voice.

SECONDS: Which is meaningless, really.

BEAUSOLEIL: Similar words in a completely different context.

SECONDS: Who testified that he said this?

BEAUSOLEIL: I don’t remember. It was probably Danny DeCarlo. He was one of the star witnesses against me. The other was Mary Brunner.

SECONDS: What was DeCarlo’s motivation in testifying?

BEAUSOLEIL: He stood to go to prison for a federal gun charge, and grand theft auto. I think it was for a stolen motorcycle. He testified that I told him, in a conversation after-the- fact, what had happened. He related, “Well, this is what Bobby told me —” at the trial, and of course we never had any such conversation. But Susan Atkins, was his live-in girlfriend. I assume she had told him, and he later changed it to “Bobby told me —" Mary Brunner testified she was there and she saw me stab Gary the second l ime I stabbed him twice in the chest. I’d slabbed him once, and then she heard something and came running into the room and saw me stab him again. She was threatened with the loss of her child if she didn’t testify. It was insane. Everything about my second trial was incredible.

SECONDS: When the killing happened, were you struggling with him?

BEAUSOLEIL: No, it wasn’t a struggle. It happened too quickly for that. I didn’t give myself a chance to think. When it became clear that he was going to go to the cops, I believed there was nothing else I could do. It was, in retrospect, suicidal. It was as suicidal as putting the needle in my arm or the gun to my head.

SECONDS: When did you realize the gravity of what had occurred?

BEAUSOLEIL: That’s hard to say — it was about ten days after the event that I was arrested, and it’s a blur to me in-between. This was way out of character for me. I was overcome with regret and fear, and unable to think clearly — unable to figure out what I should do at that point. I felt like I didn’t have any friends — which actually turned out to be true, at least among the people I was associating with at the time. It was an extremely difficult time reconciling what I’d done with who I’d always been to myself. Eventually I took one of the cars we’d taken from Gary’s — the Fiat with the Toyota engine. The bike club hadn’t wanted that one; they took the VW bus.

SECONDS: And they were off your case?

BEAUSOLEIL: Yes. After the rumors got around that the guy was dead, they didn’t want anything to do with it. That was as resolved as it was going to be at that point, and they were off my case. I didn’t know what else to do; I just wanted to distance myself as much as I could from those people and that whole scene down there. But really, I think I was running from myself. I got into that old beat-up car and I headed north on Highway 101. As I was going downhill on one of the grades near San Luis Obispo, the engine choked out. So I was stalled along the side of the highway — and that’s where the police found me, beside a smoking car. At that point they had discovered Gary’s body, and there was a bulletin out for the cars.

SECONDS: Any aspect of the case you’d like to comment on?

BEAUSOLEIL: Well, there’s not really much more to say — I was in over my head.

I went to trial with a public defender, and most of my friends were nowhere to be found. Jamie Leopold and Henry Rasoff from The Orkustra were the only ones who showed up and tried to do anything, or just to be there. I’ll always be grateful for that — I had two trials. The first ended in a hung jury, and I didn’t testify. I probably would’ve been acquitted if it weren’t for the fact that after the prosecution and the defense had rested, they brought in a “surprise witness” — Danny DeCarlo. He’d made a deal to get a few felony charges dropped in return for his testimony against me. He essentially said I’d told him I’d killed Gary Hinman, which was a complete fabrication. The first trial ended in a hung jury. Then the Manson cases broke. The Tate-LaBianca cases became a sensation after my first trial, and that completely changed the complexion of the second trial. All of a sudden I was accused of being a “Manson follower,” having been under orders from Manson. A board with pictures of everybody from Manson’s commune was brought to my trial, along with a dummy of Gary Hinman which was rubricated by the prosecution to appear as he had in death. They had a very weak case — it was all circumstantial except for Mary Brunner’s testimony, and she was a codefendant. She was offered immunity in return for her testimony — and also there was Danny DeCarlo. There wasn’t much evidence and there were impeachable witnesses, so what the prosecution did was to exacerbate everything by drawing as many intimations as they could devise regarding my connection with Manson. They capitalized on that as much as possible. In fairly short order, I was convicted and sentenced to death.

SECONDS: And your case became part of the Manson-related trials.

BEAUSOLEIL: As far as the innuendo, yes. That’s mostly what it was, because there were no hard facts ever shown in regards to my actual involvement with these people. It was true that I did associate with them, but I never considered myself a member of any commune.

SECONDS: The Establishment had nothing to trot out to show how terrible the youth culture was — and now they did.

BEAUSOLEIL: Well, exactly. They were looking for that thing that could be used to hurt the movement — to kill it, essentially. The Manson cases were ideally suited for that. If any one event can be said to represent the end of the counterculture movement, it was that event. It was used as a tombstone, in a social context. It marks where the youth movement of the Sixties was buried. It’s a tragic thing.

SECONDS: What happened after you were sentenced?

BEAUSOLEIL: I was given the death penalty. I was on death row for a little over two years, until the law was changed. I was then released to the main line at San Quentin, and spent awhile there. I eventually wound up in Tracy Prison. There was an occasional interview or article on Kenneth that’d be sent to me, and at some point I heard he was again getting ready to do Lucifer Rising. It was still his pet project and he’d slated Jimmy Page to do the soundtrack. So I decided I’d talk to him about it, because I’d always felt — ever since our parting in 1967 — that this was unfinished business. I still believed in the concept of the film — heralding the dawn of a new age, ritualizing that process, the mythological aspects and all of that. It resonated with me. I think it’s important to describe the setting at Tracy Prison in which the soundtrack came about. There was an unbelievable number of killings, and lockdowns occurred every time. Stretchers of the bloody dead and wounded being carried down Tracy’s main corridor was a regular sight. The guards fired guns and shot tear gas into the cell blocks frequently. It was a struggle to create the soundtrack in the midst of that.

SECONDS: How did you arrange it to happen?

BEAUSOLEIL: I wrote Kenneth to tell him I believed I could arrange it with the prison to do the soundtrack. He communicated back that he’d like me to do it, and he fired Jimmy Page. I had a sponsor, an elderly schoolteacher at Tracy, who was essential to making this happen. Her name is Minerva Bertholf. She was provided with money from Anger for the recording equipment.

He put up the initial funds, a little over three thousand dollars. I got as much out of the money as I could, but it wasn’t enough. Three grand is nothing when you have no recording equipment to begin with! In order to stretch the money far enough, I got into electronics and into building equipment myself. Necessity is the mother of invention, and this was the only way I could provide myself and the other musicians involved with the instruments that would allow us to create a soundtrack with some timbral variations, and not just guitars played through guitar amps. I had this grandiose concept in my head of how I wanted the score to sound. I didn’t want it to sound like it was made on a bunch of toys — yet that’s what it was, really! Still we did some amazing things.

SECONDS: Did the soundtrack fit the film?

BEAUSOLEIL: Given the way it was put together, it was serendipitous that they coincided so well. And there were a number of places that anyone watching would think must’ve been orchestrated or intentional, but they weren’t. That was part of the magical spell Kenneth felt was being worked. This creation of the entire film was mi invocation or spell for him. The happenstance of it is an element that he chose to include — which I appreciate, as an improvisational artist myself.

SECONDS: What equipment did you build?

BEAUSOLEIL: Compressors, limiters, gates, analog delays of various kinds, flangers, chorus devices, spring reverbs, amplifiers, pre-amplifiers, mixers — and synthesizer modules and keyboards as well. After the soundtrack the main project I devoted all my electronic building energy to was an instrument design I called the “Dream Machine.” Conceptually this was an all-electronic guitar.

SECONDS: Why not just use a keyboard to get a similar effect?

BEAUSOLEIL: Well, for one thing, I’m not a keyboard player. And for another, I didn’t like the feel of playing lead lines with a keyboard. It wasn’t transparent enough —

SECONDS: How did the Dream Machine evolve into the Syntar?

BEAUSOLEIL: I built another prototype which didn’t use any strings at all. Considering the direction of synthesizers at that time, and the emergence of samples and complex waveform generators that were being designed by my fellow experimenters, I knew eventually we would have many manageable forms of tone generators for synthesizing timbres. What was lacking was methods for controlling these sounds in a truly expressive manner — and developing such a controller became my passion. By the early Eighties the Syntar was a working reality. It was the first and last prototype. I continued designing on paper, but I was unable to continue getting any further due to a tightening of security in California prisons. Besides, I couldn’t get the materials I’d need to take it to another level. I needed microprocessors and somebody who could program and write code so I could develop a MIDI version, because that was the next step. I needed to take my concept and translate it into a MIDI language that would allow it to control any synthesizer — man, that opened up the whole world! But I was stuck, because I was in prison and couldn’t develop it further. But years later I saw a product announcement in Electronic Musician for a device called the Z-tar. It even had a name similar to the Syntar, and it looked very much like my original digital version of the Syntar. About the time I’d finished the digital version of the Syntar, digital synthesizers were being introduced. The Yamaha DX-7 had been out for a year or so, and Casio had followed with a sort of inexpensive take-off using similar synthesis techniques. I decided I had to start experimenting with digital synthesizers if I was going to keep up with the technology. I’d heard good things about the Casio CZ-101. It seemed like a real people’s instrument because it was so inexpensive and it could do so much. I loved the concept of it, so I got in touch with Casio. I told them, “Look, I’ve got a lot of experience in analog synthesis; I’ve built and programmed synthesizers for years and I think I could do a great job designing sounds for digital synthesizers like the CZ series.” At that time there weren’t too many synthesizer programmers around, and most people when they got these instruments didn’t program them. It was too complicated for most people; they just wanted to play music. Manufacturers were looking for programmers or “sound-designers” — and Casio was willing to invest an instrument in me. It turned out to be the CZ-1, a version of the CZ-101 with full-sized velocity-sensitive keyboard. I developed volumes of sounds for that series. Then Casio came out with a VZ series sythesizers and a guitar-controller, the PG-380, which was a MIDI guitar which had the synthesizer built into it. You had to program sounds for it on the synthesizer, which you could then transfer to the guitar using a memory card. Casio invested this new gear in me. What this did was give me an opportunity to obtain a MIDI guitar and develop sounds for it. What it gave to them was — here’s a guy that not only knows how to program synthesizers, but he is also a guitar player — rather than, say, a keyboard player — who can develop sounds for a guitar synth. A lot of programs developed for keyboards don’t work well for MIDI guitar. And this arrangement worked out very well. From there I began programming synths from other companies as well — Kawai, Ensoniq and Kurzweil.

SECONDS: Can you tell if you hear a sound that it’s one you created?

BEAUSOLEIL: In some cases. I’ve heard songs on the radio that were, as far as I know, my sounds.

SECONDS: How does being married in prison affect your situation?

BEAUSOLEIL: I’ve had a few other relationships with women while I’ve been in prison that sometimes seemed to be borne of desperation — on both sides. Meeting Barbara was a revelation. It definitely changes your viewpoint. It makes it harder in many ways, because you begin living your life for and thinking about this other person. On the other hand, it definitely helps to restore one’s sense of normalcy. Because this is a completely unreal environment, by virtue of the fact that there’s only one of the two genders in here — this is not humanity. This is some sort of distortion of humanity, and behavior becomes aberrant because of that. People don’t live in an environment like this for any length of time and come out better for it, by and large, unless they are really conscious of the dynamics of their situation.

SECONDS: If you had to write your epitaph, what would it say?

BEAUSOLEIL: I’ve never even considered that! How about this: “Too busy with life to write an epitaph.” • • •

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