A book written between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the fate of Bobby Beausoleil, Californian guitarist who could have become a rock star if he had not met a certain Charles Manson. And stabbed to death a man. A tragic destiny like the writer likes them, a burning California road trip, and a fascination on the edge of the razor for a period populated by cruel angels. To read to spice up its summer.
Why this interest for Bobby Beausoleil, this "cruel angel" little known in France?
I knew him by Charles Manson. He murdered Gary Hinman. A musician, an adorable guy who dealt from time to time, but who was not a bad delinquent armed ... My publisher had the same reaction as many people: '' But who is this Bobby Beausoleil? His name is incredible, is that his real name? ''. Everything intrigued me at home, his name, his angel's face. I thought I would also put an end to my cycle after my previous books: «Egéries Sixties» on muses with the often tragic destiny, «Aspen Terminus» on Claudine Longet, this French singer, promised a great future if she does not ' had not murdered her lover, and then "Lives and Death of Vince Taylor," a rock musician with a battered life. I'll end with Bobby.
Always the middle of the music, always tragic destinies ...
I explain it in the preamble. My books are very romantic biographies. I like to understand the starting point of a biography. As far as I am concerned, it is linked to my childhood, to my mother who had always promised me a crossing of America. We have never done it and it remains a regret, a small wound. This journey towards California also corresponds to my youth in Guétary, the French California of the 70s with the first American surfers, come with their guitars and the novels of Kerouac. I was listening very much to this Californian music, including the band Love where Bobby Beausoleil almost played. He also made the first parts of groups known as Jefferson Airplanes, Grateful Dead, played alongside Neil Young ... In fact, the last three lines of my book reveal a '' Rosebud '' behind it all. A parallel story that occurred in my family.
Your book is a road trip made with your partner, photographer Laura Stevens ...
Yes, and my 14 year old son. I wanted to illustrate this book which is a road trip in search of a California, not so "beautiful sun" as this, but rather bad moon, obscure and a little sinister. I tell the Joshua Tree Inn, a haunted motel, and the Russian Embassy, which was baptized for welcoming white Russians in the 1920s. In the 1960s, it was squatted by some satanic hippies, including Kenneth Anger, an underground filmmaker who only swears by Lucifer.
We are indeed far from flower power. The second chapter begins with the massacres of 13 November. This is the end of the carelessness of a generation, just like the end of the Californian myth described in your book. There is a link ...
For me, November 13 was the end of the carefree rock. I will never go to rock concerts like before. The Bataclan will never be the same again. Your parallel is right. My book talks about this California between shadows and lights, between dog and wolf, sinister with old hackneyed hippies. The dream will have been short lived. Four wonderful years, from 1964 to 1968.
One discovers, and it is exciting that the Manson band and its victims did not belong to two distinct worlds. At the time, everyone knew each other, it was, you say, "almost incestuous" ...
That is true, and it has never been revealed in the books, the investigations on the Manson Band. I met Mirandi Babitz, who opened the first chic hippie shop and designed Jim Morrisson's leather pants. She spoke to me about this "incestuous promiscuity" which they maintained. It was scary. Her boyfriend at the time was Tex Watson's best friend, the Manson devil's messenger who arrived with the loopholes at Sharon Tate's home, shouting, "I am the devil, and I am sent to fulfill his work. '' Mirandi was very close to Sharon Tate. She could have been at home that night. She had met Manson in her shop. It was a band of three hundred people, '' everyone slept with everyone, '' she told me. Neil Young had slept with Susan Atkins, one of the murderous girls of the Manson band.
You admit a "fascination on the wire of the razor". There would be an obscure part in you?
I have an attraction in spite of myself, a little unhealthy, because in my surroundings, during my youth, gravitated unhealthy and evil beings. They took drugs, and had satanic practices ... I write a very personal novel about this period. You know, we're all fascinated by the shadowy part of people.
Copyright Laura Stevens
Bobby Beausoleil and other cruel angels by Fabrice Gaignault, éditions Séguier, 20 euros.
