The Wild Acolyte

ACT I

Into the Wild

No one remembered exactly when Enzo Bachman was born—only that it happened under a solar eclipse, to a surfboard carver and a flower-arranging folklorist. His musical genius revealed itself early. By age eight, he was transcribing birdsong into four-part harmony. At fifteen he enrolled at Juilliard, only to drop out two years later, declaring the “structure of the academy is incompatible with the fluidity of God.”

In the 1960s, Bachman rose to underground fame as the psychedelic movement’s secret orchestrator. While bands like Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds dominated radio, Bachman was scoring tripped-out symphonic suites in the background. Some say he was behind the “lost” orchestrations for Sgt. Pepper’s, others claim he ghost-wrote half of Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle. His magnum opus, Anthem for a Cracked World, debuted at the Newport Folk Festival in 1970 and was immediately banned from PBS for featuring a 17-minute movement played entirely on tuned wine bottles.

He married poet-musician Laurel Foxglove in 1984. They had two children, Larkin and Carlin, raised in a yurt outside Big Sur. But while Laurel was building a commune school and advocating for mushroom legalization, Bachman was composing at odd hours and falling in love with his viola player, Solène Laroque, a French-Canadian mystic with a background in noise performance art and thirty years his junior.

The affair unraveled what little remained of Enzo Bachman’s already precarious domestic harmony. Laurel, long-suffering and half-saintly in her patience, finally left in the winter of 1997 after discovering Bachman and Solène locked in a fevered collaboration on a tone poem brazenly titled “She Plays Me Like Fire.”

By the following solstice, Enzo and Solène were married in Taos, New Mexico, in a sun-drenched, non-denominational ceremony presided over by none other than Ram Dass himself. The air smelled of sage and violin resin. No vows were exchanged, only a duet improvised under cottonwood trees.

Together, they had three children: Willow, called Will; Micah, fierce and tender in equal measure; and Julian, who arrived in the heart of a blizzard while Enzo was in Manhattan, conducting a revival of his long-lost musical Saffron Hymns for a New Republic.

Solène never got to meet her son. She bled into the silence while snow fell in great sheets outside the cabin window, and the world lost one of its few living proofs that music could still save us.

Grief turned Enzo inward. Disillusioned by fame, betrayed by former collaborators, and haunted by the mainstreaming of the counterculture, Bachman and his new family vanished into the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. There, in an overgrown chalet, Junipara Lodge, accessible only by a footbridge in spring, Bachman declared himself in “exile from capitalism.”

Enzo built a half-wild commune from scavenged timber and solar scraps, a place stitched together with music and stubbornness. Instruments hung from rafters like wind chimes; goats and chickens roamed among the ruins of a garden that fed more than just the body. He grew marijuana and harvested psilocybin mushrooms under moonlight, storing them in jars marked with runes and rests.

As the seasons turned, another woman arrived: a sharp-eyed herbalist named Tansy Mire, drawn by the strangeness or the silence or something broken and beautiful in Enzo himself. She stayed, folding herself into the rhythm of the place, and in time, they held a commitment ceremony beneath the apple trees with garlands, fiddle music, and a bowl of wine passed hand to hand. She bore him two more daughters—Poppy and Susannah.

No one could ever recall how many children Enzo had. The number shifted depending on the season, the visitor, the wine. But all who encountered them remembered the same things: the noise, the genius, the blazing language of their bickering, the way they could break your heart with a four-part round.

They came to be known—by neighbors, wanderers, and folklorists—as Bachman’s Cabaret.

They swore like sailors in at least four languages. They dressed like they’d just escaped a theater fire. They could gut a fish, cultivate a SCOBY, play Mahler, and deliver scathing critiques of Berlioz’s orchestration choices—all before lunch.

Their father gave them rigorous musical training and little else. They had no formal education to speak of, but in their wanderings they amassed a surprising trove of mental furniture—half-learned philosophies, borrowed languages, fractured mythologies, and the sort of cultural detritus that clings to bright, unsupervised minds.

Enzo, now well into his seventies, is rarely seen beyond the edge of his woods. He’s said to be working on a “final opera,” which may or may not require a choir of loons and the reconstruction of a medieval hurdy-gurdy.

Critics have long debated whether Enzo Bachman is a madman masquerading as a prophet, or a prophet dismissed as a madman. Either way, his name lingers like incense in the margins of music history. Younger composers—restless, idealistic, half-formed—seek him out like pilgrims, chasing rumors and half-maps through the Vermont wilderness. Some find their way to his so-called castle in the sky hoping to learn something essential, something unteachable. Most leave bewildered. A few stay. None return the same.

There are whispers, of course, of past accolades: a Grammy nomination, a Guggenheim, a symphony once performed in Vienna. But none of it matters here. In this self-made exile, among the brilliance and the madness of his children, Enzo Bachman is exactly where he belongs.