{"product_id":"184923100198","title":"Bobby Beausoleil: Orkustra: Experiments in Electric Orchestra (Vinyl LP)","description":"The Orkustra's Story by Bobby Beausoleil San Francisco, 1966. Narrow Victorian façade houses, gaunt and quaint, squeezed together side-by-side like musty books in the library of a lunatic. The roller-coaster streets arranged with about as much apparent forethought as a casual toss in a child's game of pixie sticks, each hilltop offering up it's own unique vista, each vale a haunt of subtle intrigue. Elegant old theaters, dilapidated warehouses, eateries and clubs and coffee houses, places of commerce, places of worship, houses of the holy and the unholy, all gracefully suffering the same kind of slow decay that time and salty sea mists inflict on coastal communities. The noise, the din, an ever-present song: machines and voices, music from windows and doorways, in clubs and concert halls; wavelets lapping at the piers on a wharf, the deep bellow of distant fog horns. Twinkling spires supporting colossal bridges spanning the placid waterways, countless city lights sparkling their reflections on the bay like diamonds, like the stars of galaxies. The fairyland gardens of Golden Gate Park, a living testimonial to the vision and determination of one man, and the wisdom of city fathers who allowed him a free hand to create them out of the wasteland. Cops walking their beat on Haight Street, dressed for another era in dark blue double-breasted coats adorned with rows of shiny brass buttons. Unruly traffic on a confusing disarray of highways and byways; the buzzing hustle of an electric streetcar, the more stately bustle of a clanking trolley. And the people-young and old, rich and poor, sane and senseless, revered and misunderstood, fastidious and unwashed, drunk and sober, stoic and passionate, godless and born again-of every kind and color; a port city's rich and pungent brew of diverse cultures. To one who until just a few months earlier had been in the choking grip of the glitz and stucco squalor of the greater Los Angeles area, being absorbed by the rollicking energy and rich ambiance of San Francisco was like being dipped in mother's milk. It seemed an enchanted place to me. To this day it remains the only city I have ever truly loved. What has this to do with The Orkustra? Quite simply, everything. Only in that brief and unique period in San Francisco's history could a band like The Orkustra have been brought into being, for it was as much an expression of the times and the environment as it was an expression of the collective imaginations of the band's members. My arrival in the San Francisco bay area preceded by a couple of months the otherwise uneventful passage of my eighteenth birthday in the fall of 1965. A young vagabond in colorfully mismatched clothing, less than ten dollars in my pocket, I wandered the area aimlessly at first, all of my hopes for the future resting on my ability to play a few chords and riffs on the Epiphone electric guitar I was packing. Accompanying me was Snofox, a mid-sized white dog of uncertain genealogy, my ever-faithful friend and traveling companion. We stopped for a couple of weeks in Sausalito, and it was nice, but too exclusive and removed from the action. Berkeley was a busy hub of activity, but too collegiate for my tastes, and North Beach reminded me a bit too much of the blinking neon-infested Hollywood Boulevard I had left behind. By a series of happy accidents, we soon found ourselves in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and it was just right. At that time, the Haight was a relatively quiet low-rent community, charmingly seedy and run down, very nearly a ghetto in places. Bordered on two sides by Golden Gate Park, and with it's affordable rentals, the area tended to attract aspiring artists and musicians, and their respective camp followers. This was the Haight-Ashbury district as I found it. In altogether too short a time it would undergo a drastic transformation. The Haight Street Merchants Association was already conspiring to make the Haight a thriving-and hence profitable-center of counter-culture activity, and young people were beginning to drift into the area in ones and two, much as I had. A year-and-a-half later the trickle would become a flood greater than the most imaginative of the Haight Street Merchants could have anticipated, a flood that would quickly swamp the little community. During that brief span of time between, however, it would give rise to a creative outburst that would leave an indelible imprint on the consciousness of the western world. Having found a suitable base of operations, the next order of business was to find a rock band I could join in with. Locating one turned out to be a snap. Within less than a week of arriving in the Haight, I learned of an up-and-coming band called The Outfit who practiced in the local area. I learned also that they had recently fired their first lead guitarist, and were in the market for a replacement. While this was certainly welcome tidings, I was not so certain that my qualifications would measure up. Having previously played as a rhythm guitarist in a couple of L.A. rock groups, I was not entirely without real band experience, but I had yet to cross the threshold from playing rhythm to playing lead. The noodling and riffing I had been doing in private was unproven in the context of a band, and I was reluctant to bill myself as a lead player. Nevertheless, figuring that the most I had to lose was a bit of my dignity, I forged ahead in a leap of faith, determined to do my best to land a position in the band. The Outfit practiced in an old movie theater on Haight Street. The sign above the marquee proclaimed it to be the Haight Theater, but it was already becoming known on the street as the Straight Theater. In the hip-speak of the times, the term getting straight was synonymous with getting high, and so, to anyone in the know, the new name was a declaration that the former movie theater had fallen under the dominion of psychedelia. It had recently been purchased by a loose confederacy comprising the Resner brothers, Bill and Hillel, and a few of their friends, who intended to convert the run-down Art Deco style theater into a sort of counter-culture party palace. The work required to bring about the transformation had not yet begun in earnest the day I approached the front doors of the Straight Theater for the first time. Hearing music inside, and finding the doors unlocked, I went inside and introduced myself to the band. Despite my limited experience as a lead guitarist, the audition went well. The members of The Outfit liked the way I was able to compliment the sound of their repertoire of original songs with my impromptu riffing, and I was unanimously voted into the group. During the almost daily rehearsals that followed, I discovered that I had a knack for spontaneous melodic improvisation. Ironically, this discovery would give rise to a discontent with the formula rock band model that would, in part, lead to my decision to quit The Outfit only a few months later. I enjoyed playing with The Outfit for those few months. They were a fun bunch of guys, and there was some real talent within the group. But there were problems in the marketing strategy. The band's management was stuck in a Hullabaloo mindset, and simply did not get it that The Outfit was never going to be like a stateside version of The Dave Clark Five. A misbegotten strategy of shopping the band to the bubble gum crowd had us playing high school events and gigs at out-of-the-way nightclubs like The Piano Bar, where the clientele guzzled beer and sipped mixed drinks, and smiled vacuously at the motley looking group on the bandstand, occasionally calling out the names of Top-40 songs that The Outfit could have played only as a mockery. Oddly, the other members of the band did not seem able to apprehend the nature of the problem and were apparently willing to go blithely along with the management's plan. I could not have said at the time why I felt such a growing sense  Flash Gordon, Bombay Calling, Punjab's Barber, Gypsy Odyssey, Bouzouki Blues Experiment, Hungarian Stomp, Flash Gordon (A Practice Session), Freeform Improvisation, Dancing in the Park, Gypsy Odyssey (Practice Session)","brand":"CD Baby","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39575628939414,"sku":"184923100198","price":41.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2231\/7305\/products\/1882251_1eef82d7-19d1-4d58-9f6f-b237d456ef94.jpg?v=1704878996","url":"https:\/\/www.besvinyl.com\/products\/184923100198","provider":"besvinyl.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}