☂♥: LUCIFER KENNETH ANGER RISING

INTERVIEWS WITH BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL 1998-9

What were the circumstances you came out of?

I was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1947, to a couple who were and still are—at least the one of them who is still living—Catholic. I was the first born son, the first of five children. I have two brothers and two sisters. Not a well-to-do family, but we always got by. My dad worked two jobs sometimes to make that happen with such a large family. For most of the years when I was growing up he worked for Arden Farms Dairy—he was milkman, basically, and he became a manager for the company later on. It was a working class family. On the GI Bill my dad bought a tract home in 1955, and that's where I spent most of my years growing up. We had lived in a couple of other houses before that.

What were your earliest musical recollections?

I've always had a fascination for music. The earliest Christmas present that I remember getting was a drum—one of those little toy drums with paper heads and a pair of drumsticks. I was four or five, but I remember that gift, whereas I don't really remember any of the others. And I remember that I beat it to death, there was nothing left of the skins on either side—which was kind of a shame because then it wouldn't work as a drum anymore! After that as I was growing up I remember building these strange instruments, out of wooden crates, sort of jug band type instruments . . .

Stringed instruments?

No, they were percussive, they had can-lids and things attached. I would build these contraptions and I called them my "jazz bands," and I would play them and just banged the hell out of them. So maybe had I been born one universe over from this one I would have been a drummer. But as it happened I found a guitar in the attic of my grandmother's house when I was about eleven years old.

Do you know who it belonged to?

It was said to have been my mother's, but I think it might have been her brother's, my uncle's, because one day he came over and played a song on it. For some reason I think it was his, although my grandmother told me it belonged to my mother—maybe she just wanted me to believe that, I don't know.

Was there any kind of musical tradition in the family?

My mother could play a couple of songs on the piano, I guess she'd had a few lessons. But other than that there was no real music tradition in my family. My uncle at one point must have played guitar a little bit, since he played me a song that one time. On my father's side, both my grandparents were deaf. Other than singing in the shower, which he did with considerable passion, my father didn't bring any musical ability to my early years, or at least not any musical influence. Most of it was just my listening to the radio.

Do you recall what you heard that got you excited?

Rock and Roll, from "Hound Dog"—that was the first one that caught me. From that point on, it was wherever I could listen to Rock music. Later I branched out into other interests, musically, but early on it was Rock and Roll. I eventually wound up with the family radio. We had one table radio, but eventually my mom got a hi-fi stereo, one of those console things on which she would play Harry Belafonte and Johnny Mathis records. When she got the stereo I was given the family radio, but up until that point I had a crystal radio that I had built and it had a little earphone, and underneath the blankets I would listen to KISS radio all night. Every third or fourth song they played was a rock song, you had to listen through all this other songs . . .

This was before Rock had really come to precedence.

Yes, and Santa Barbara wasn't really a place that was on the cutting edge.

How would you describe where you lived?

At the time I heard one person characterize it as "a town for the newlywed or nearly dead." When I was first growing up there it was a pretty small town, only a couple of stop lights where the highway went through. Very quaint . . . the wealthy people were up in the hills, the less wealthy were on the flats, down at sea-level. There was Haley Street area, which was the black ghetto, and there were the barrio areas and then the upper crust in the Montecito and Hope Ranch areas, and various strata in between. It was a pretty nice town, and the beach was always great. I loved the ocean, and the mountains weren't too far away.

Did you surf?

I never really got into it. I did a lot of body-surfing and swimming. I think probably my life might have gone differently if I had been able to afford a surfboard, but they were kind of spendy back in those days and I never got into it. I wound up in more of a greaser mode—the hair falling down the center of the forehead and the ducktails.

This was when you were fourteen or fifteen?

More like twelve or thirteen.

Did you listen to Rockabilly back then?

I guess some of it was. One of my favorite artists back then was Ray Charles, "What I Say" and that mode . . . I really liked Rhythm & Blues and Rock, and actually I didn't know the difference. If it had a beat, it was Rock.

Did you just begin to figure things out on the guitar by yourself?

To begin with I taught myself. I've never had any lessons or formal training. In fact, the way I found the guitar, it was set up for Hawaiian style playing, intended to be played on the lap with a steel bar. There was a metal nut that actually went over the regular guitar nut, which raises the strings off the fingerboard. I found the guitar and the steel, and my first explorations were with the steel, so I would tune it up to intervals that sounded okay to my ears. I had no idea what I was tuning it to, and basically I was tuning it to a chord that sounded good. And then I would play these impromptu compositions. I've always been an improvisational player, still am, and always will be.

You've always played by ear?

Yes, but I'm not sure I would call it that by now. It's beyond "by ear" . . . it's spontaneous playing, by feel.

Did you start by learning how to play Rock songs?

Eventually, yeah, I realized that was not the normal setup for that guitar with that metal nut on it. So I took that off the guitar, and I found a place to play along with other musicians at Bonnie Langley's Music Store on State street. Bonnie was an older rotund lady, with a big mat of kinky hair, who let kids play the guitars and drums in the afternoons after school. She was deaf in one ear . . .

I was wondering why she would allow such things to go on!

That had something to do with it, because we were playing Rock. Sometimes it would get to be too loud even for her and she'd cut us off for a week or so. Then we'd come back much more timidly and play soft for awhile and gradually over the course of a few days it would come back up to its normal roar and then she'd cut us off again. So that was kind of the exchange that we had there. We helped bring people into the store apparently, it must have been good for business. She sold records, so people who were into buying 45s would come in.

And these were electric instruments . . .

. .

☂♥: LUCIFER KENNETH ANGER RISING