OK, how’s this for a story? It combines a film and soundtrack 10 years in the making, black magick, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, LSD and mescaline trips, the Sexual Freedom league, Charles Manson, sweet, sweet, murder, a stint in San Quentin, occult legend Aleister Crowley, Church of Satan’s Anton LeVay, Germany’s Externsteine, and… ah you get the friggin’ picture, huh?
This weird, massive epic is the story of Kenneth Anger‘s “Lucifer Rising” and the tumultuous struggle to record its soundtrack with ’60s psyche-rocker Bobby BeauSoleil.
I can’t even attempt to do the tale justice, but basically, bat-shit crazy avante-garde, underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger tried to make his out-there, drugged-out manifesto, “Lucifer Rising” in 1968. Due to drugs and a lot of other stupid shit, he failed miserably. At the time he tried to enrole BeauSoleil to compose the soundtrack with his then psychedelic chamber music group, The Orkustra.
BeauSoleil gets so into the project his band quits. No mind, he starts a new one called The Magick Powerhouse of Oz (awesome, right?). Filmmaker and musician move in together, black magick occurs, chairs are emblazoned with 666, trips are taken (and by this we mean boatloads of drugs are ingested) and the relationship disintegrates one night onstage in a disastrous evening of flash-point drama (Anger beats someone over the head in an LSD-confused haze; a concert is ruined)
Loads of F-bombs are dropped, reels of film are stolen, fingers pointed, accusations made, unreliable narrators telling unreliable tales, fuck you collaboration.
Both go their separate ways leaving the madness that is drug-infested, syphilis-ridden Haight Ashbury San Franciso and BeauSoleil crosses path with the Manson gang. Needless to say he is quickly charged with murder when he stabs some unlucky drug dealer in the gut and murders his ass. A life sentence in San Quentin is handed down, goodbye life (he’s mentioned in the Manson book “Helter Skelter” too)
Anger, meanwhile hires Led Zep shredder Jimmy Page to compose the score, but Page becomes rather “indisposed.” From prison, BeauSoleil gets word that Anger, years later (this is like early 1970s, i think, most confusing timeline ever), is resurrecting “Lucifer Rising.” This is unfinished business, prison be damned. The charming BeauSoleil somehow convinces prison officials that a convicted murder must create the score to what is actually avante-garde cinema, but to these people must be hippie-scum ratshit trying to pass off as freaky art.
Page, who apparently takes forever (3 years) to deliver 25-minutes of useless droning nonsense (would love to hear this now), is fired once Anger gets BeauSoleil’s impassioned plea to work on the project once more.
From prison, the convicted murderer, builds keyboards, builds electric guitars and creates a score for $3,000 that is a claustrophobic and volcanic psychedelic head-trip. This inventive nutjob does final mixes, splicing and sequencing in his tiny little cell (you also have to potty in their, gross). BeauSoleil watches the film once and somehow the score fits perfectly (of course it does, you watch it high as a kite and it works, duh).
What I gather from the rest of this crazy, rambling story is that somehow the band the Freedom Orchestra is involved and these recordings – made in ’77-’79 – are added to Anger’s now-legendary film and then promptly lost forever (the film finally comes out in 1980, which is more than 10 years from inception if you understand basic mathematics, which I apparently do not).
Some years later a journalist asks BeauSoleil (who still resides in prison and continues to be denied parole) where the tapes for the soundtrack are and he denies their existence. Finally, an old Orkustra bandmember finds them in his house some 30 years later and voila, this fucking long-winded story is thankfully over (shit, you should try reading the press release, it’s like studying for a term paper).
Wow, I’m so exhausted, I may never listen to this entire score again. It’s dark, sometimes ambient, feverish psychedelia, not unlike you might see in an early (and bad) Peter Fonda movie like “The Trip.” This mean, Vice Records‘ Adam Shore is going to love it to pieces. The end.
Why didn’t Jimmy Page compose the score to “Lucifer Rising”? He was chasing the dragon according to Anger. Which isn’t far fetched, Pagey had well-documented problems with junk.
“Lucifer Rising” Bummer trip dude…
In what is known as an “editorial stretch” in the biz, (ok, that’s actually what I call it), Kenneth Anger’s avante garde homo-erotic biker film/sort-of companion piece film, “Scorpio Rising,” was the primary influence behind electro-rockers Death In Vegas’ criminally underrated 2001 record Scorpio Rising. “Scorpio Rising’s” soundtrack is excellent too (lots of girl groups), but that will be another post.
