An Email about The Velvet Underground

AUG 15, 2016

To Bobby:

Just out of curiosity I wanted to ask you if you ever heard the Velvet Underground play in San Francisco or L.A. in late sixties? I’ve read that they performed a couple of times on the east coast in -68 or -69. What are your thoughts about the Velvets music? Of course, I’m an old velvet-fan myself, so your assessment would be really interesting.

I also would like to tell you how deeply impressed i am by the artistic career that you have pursued while in prison for decades, this is so encouraging. I wish you all the best for your future and in particular with upcoming parole hearing.

Kind regards,

Karl

Response:

As far as I know, The Velvet Underground did not gig in San Francisco or the bay area. Pretty sure I would have heard if they had. However, I did meet Nico in San Francisco. This was in '67, just a chance meeting in the apartment of a friend where she was a guest. A rangy sort of woman, and she seemed a lot warmer than her stage persona.

The Velvet Underground came to L.A. with Andy Warhol's Plastic Inevitable. Appropriately, they gigged for a week or two at a short-lived cheesy nightclub on the strip (Sunset Blvd) called The Trip. I saw several of their performances there. This was in '66, when I was 17. They were unlike any of the L.A. bands, dark and spooky, but definitely worth seeing more than once. They were too weird for many people in the L.A. scene at the time. Weird has always appealed to me, however.

Thank you for your kind remarks about my work.

Bobby

Custom Electric-Acoustic Guitar

AUG 13, 2016

With profound gratitude to its builder, professional luthier and longtime friend Tim Jagmin, I am happy to share these photos of the electric-acoustic guitar Tim recently made for me.

I first became acquainted with Tim back in the mid-1970s when he was making custom electric guitars and pickups for The Silver Bullet Band, fronted by singer Bob Seeger - a great motor town rock band. At the time I was building electric guitars too, and that's what brought us together. Tim made the radical blade pickups for the doubleneck guitar I played during the time I was recording the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising.

This is a large guitar, Tim's first jumbo acoustic. The neck and body is birdseye-figured bubinga with an oiled natural finish. Except for the Schaller tuning machines, Tim made every piece that went into the making of this guitar, including the stainless steel frets. At present the guitar is in safe keeping with my late wife's son, John Freeman, who plays it regularly. John tells me the instrument has a rich, warm tone with a satisfying low end thump. Fate willing there will come a time when I can play it and hear what it sounds like with my own ears.

Many thanks to Nicole Freeman for taking these photos.

Lucifer Rising Suite Email from a Fan

MAY 20, 2016

Hello,

Just wanted to drop a line and say that I just purchased the Lucifer Rising Suite CD set. I'm a big fan of the original release, so I really look forward to hearing all of the rest that heretofore has been unavailable. No offense to Kenneth Anger, but I have always thought the soundtrack was better than the film.

You manage to capture such ambience in your work. As a fellow musician, I am interested in how your writing process works in regards to that, if you are willing to discuss it.

Thanks,

Reggie

Since you already like the film soundtrack, my guess is that you're really going to enjoy listening to the Suite as a whole. There is a common theme in all of the recordings that are in this anthology. Although I began the project with the intention of producing a good soundtrack for the film, the scope of the project enlarged seemingly of its own will to extend well beyond this original premise. Even so, from the beginning I wanted the music to stand on its own, independent of its service to the film.

The ambient quality of the soundscape is an integral part of my music composition process. Of necessity I usually compose, record, and mix using headphones. This is not usually considered the best way to produce music. Studio monitors are recommended but that option has not been available to me. One advantage that developed out of the limitation is that it led to finding or devising techniques for placing the instruments and sound components into distinct locations and distances from the middle, that being the apparent location of the listener. Sometimes I will make a single note move in location or distance over time. Why not? - it's all virtual space anyway. I'm happiest with the result when the musical performance seems to live in a space that exists in defiance of the distance between the ear cups of the headphones or the space within one's skull.

—Bobby

Old Movies!

AUG 18, 2016

Simple Man

Way back in 1978 I performed a concert with The Freedom Orchestra in the gymnasium at the state prison in Tracy, California. By several layers of miracle a video of this performance exists, and can now be shared. The quality of video equipment that was used in basic education in the 1970s was not the greatest, so some allowance must be made for the image quality. But hey, that any such artifact even exists is, as I said, something approaching the miraculous. Our stage was the boxing ring, much of our equipment was built in the prison handicraft shop, the gymnasium acoustics were far from great, and all the guys in the audience were criminals. Prison rock at its finest!

Below is a link to one excerpt from the video, one of the opening songs for the concert - a cover of "Simple Man", written by Ronnie Van Zant and Gary Rossington. I've never been a great singer but the story in the song is one that has resonance for men who have made serious mistakes in life, so I thought it might set a good tone for the beginning of the concert. Awhile later The Freedom Orchestra performed significant portions of my compositions for Lucifer Rising. These portions of the video will be added to the channel in the months to come. Stay tuned!

Bobby BeauSoleil

March 2016

https://youtu.be/5VHLbop_5NA

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