Lucifer, Arisen

In the mid-1970s, BeauSoleil had gone from a 22-year-old kid who was, as he puts it, "too damn pretty for prison" to a tough-looking 29-year-old covered in tattoos, including the word "Lucifer," which he'd inked across his chest using a broken guitar string. He'd been laid up in the hospital after getting knocked in the head with a baseball bat during a melee at San Quentin. Coincidentally, Kenneth Anger got the same tattoo in nearly the exact same place a few years later. It's improbable either of them knew of the other's.

In 1976, while an inmate at Dueul Correctional Institute in Tracy, BeauSoleil learned that Lucifer Rising, the movie, was still unfinished. He and Anger hadn't spoken since the night of "Equinox of the Gods," though Anger had sent BeauSoleil a postcard when he was on death row. It was in an Egyptian motif and depicted a harpist playing to Horus; it read, "They also serve those who sit and wait."

One day BeauSoleil read in a magazine that Anger had hired Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page to do the Lucifer Rising soundtrack.

"I felt that it was mine," says BeauSoleil. He wrote to Anger asking if he could take over.

Page and Anger were on the outs by that point, and Anger agreed to let BeauSoleil take a crack. BeauSoleil wrote the warden, the now-deceased R.M. Dees, for permission to work on the project in prison. "I'm not going to stand in the way of a guy making a buck," BeauSoleil remembers the warden saying.

BeauSoleil recruited other inmates for his band, which he called the Freedom Orchestra. One, strangely enough, was a Manson Family associate named Steve Grogan. BeauSoleil went about the project as zealously as if his life depended on it, and in a sense, it did. "Here I am in prison, stripped of ostensibly everything, and I had begun to rebuild myself," says BeauSoleil. "[I thought,] 'This reality does not define me. I'm still rockin'!'"

Anger sent an unfinished black-and-white version of Lucifer Rising, and one evening BeauSoleil screened it in (of all places) the prison chapel. The footage Anger had shot of BeauSoleil in the late 1960s was gone, much of it used in an earlier film called Invocation [of My Demon Brother]. The men saw a montage of primordial, mysterious images. A volcano bubbles lava. The Egyptian god Osiris and goddess Isis lift staffs to the heavens. An elephant stomps a cobra. A Magus magician figure enacts a bloody ritual around a circle to resurrect Lucifer. People carry a torch through the mountains. Marianne Faithfull, as Lilith, goddess of destruction, walks along the Nile and among the pyramids at Gîza.

"To them it was just weird images put together," BeauSoleil says of his fellow inmates. To BeauSoleil it was something personal.

"I recognized myself in the central character, being something of a fallen one myself," says BeauSoleil. "The mythology of it perfectly coincided with what was going on in my own life at the time. Lucifer's punishment was that he was exiled and cut off from the beloved, which was my pain."

"I was struggling," BeauSoleil continues. "I needed to demonstrate to myself that I was not dead or destroyed."

BeauSoleil began to compose an ambitious electronic symphony in his head that would carry the listener through painful dark places and loneliness, then end on a hopeful note. With $3,000 Anger sent to a teacher at the prison, BeauSoleil bought microphones, a four-track recorder, an open-reel tape deck, a six-channel mixer, a drum set, and a PA system. He found a battered trumpet under the prison gym bleachers. Then he built the rest of the instruments and electronics himself.

He constructed Grogan's guitar, a bass, and then, because each inmate was allowed to have only one instrument, a double-necked guitar for himself, one neck for the bass strings. After taking an electronics course through a local community college, he built synthesizers, a reverb unit, and amplifiers, some from kits, some from scratch.