He Made Kids’ Music and Albums About Lucifer. Now His Work Is a Rock Opera.

NEW YORK — In 1968, a mild-mannered musician named Bruce Haack appeared on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and explained how his homemade electronic instruments worked. A group of children arrived and in a surreal scene, started dancing with Haack’s associate Esther Nelson to the burbles and gurgles erupting from the prehistoric synthesizers.

Two years later, Haack took a break from tweeny-bopper albums like “Dance, Sing and Listen” to release something decidedly adult but even more left-field: “The Electric Lucifer,” a trippy amalgam of psychedelia, musique concrète and synth-pop that remains one of the most bizarre records of a decade overflowing with them.

Now, the record and its 1978 sequel, “Electric Lucifer Book 2,” are coming to the Kitchen as a rock opera of sorts called “Electric Lucifer,” conceived by the experimental director Jim Findlay and adapted by the musician Philip White. (The show runs until Jan. 13.)

“If you’re interested in experimental electronic music and the history of it, you’re going to stumble upon Bruce Haack at some point, it’s inevitable,” said Jon Schouten of the Toronto label Telephone Explosion, which has released vinyl versions of both “Electric Lucifer” albums and 1978’s twisted “Haackula.”

Like many pioneers without a business sense, though, Haack did not reap financial rewards: He died of heart failure in 1988 at just 57, having spent the previous 15 years or so living in the basement apartment of his longtime friend and supporter Ted Pandel, a retired professor in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

“In his last years he was on welfare,” Pandel, 82, said by telephone. “We would go to food stores and I’d be hiding from people from the university.”

Raised in Alberta, Canada, Haack moved to New York in 1954 to attend Juilliard, where he befriended Pandel. After dropping out, Haack pursued his interest in jury-rigged instruments like the touch-sensitive Dermatron and Peopleodeon — the latter was even featured on the Steve Allen TV show “I’ve Got a Secret” in 1966.

“He could be seen as a kind of godfather of circuit-bending,” said Peter Price, a Philadelphia electronic musician and writer who digitized more than 200 reel-to-reel tapes of unreleased Haack material before they were shipped to the Provincial Archives of Alberta last fall. “He would take whatever kind of consumer objects he could get his hands on cheaply and tinker. There’s whole areas of his output that nobody has any idea about, sort of analog-circuit algorithmic music where he would just build circuits and they would endlessly go.”

Ahead of dance-music trends, Haack explored loops, samples and vocal distortion. He called his proto-Vocoder Farad and used it prominently on “Haackula” and the unreleased 1982 track “Party Machine,” which sounds like a Kraftwerk outtake. Tellingly, a 2004 documentary was titled “Bruce Haack: The King of Techno.”

Haack always struggled to find an audience and for a long time eked out a living accompanying children’s dance classes with Nelson, with whom he also made records on the Dimension 5 label. He would sometimes land commercial jingles and the odd go-nowhere assignment — in 1961, for instance, he contributed background music to a flop Broadway play about robots called “How to Make a Man.”

As for “The Electric Lucifer,” Haack’s sole major-label outing, it sank like a stone. Columbia Records was hoping to cash in on the success of the 1968 album “Switched-On Bach,” a synthesizer take on the classical composer, but it was not sure how to market the new record. Not even the period’s craze for the occult — the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” had also come out in 1968 — helped, and Haack remained in obscurity. A couple of years after the release of his magnum opus, he moved from New York to West Chester, where Pandel had offered him shelter.

Nearly 50 years after its release, though, “The Electric Lucifer” retains its magnetic power, from the intricate cover art by Isadore Seltzer (another boundary-hopping artist who could toggle between Columbia Masterworks and “Sesame Street Magazine”) to the loose concept of Lucifer as a fallen angel sent back to Earth.

“Bruce wasn’t religious per se,” said Chris Kachulis, 82, a friend who sang on the album. “He was more of a pagan, but he loved the writing of the Bible, the theater of church with the incense and the beautiful windows and the mood it created.”

That mood is part of what drew Findlay, 49, and White, who have turned “The Electric Lucifer” into a music-theater hybrid revolving around Lucifer and Jesus on the lam together.

“The thing that made the biggest impression on me was, Bruce talked about a force so powerful, it can redeem even the worst of us, even Lucifer,” Findlay said. “But we don’t make a nostalgia piece that’s just a recreation of (the album). Instead of recreating how Bruce made the music, we’re trying to collaborate with his ghost. If you listen to what we’re doing, you really can see the DNA of Bruce Haack in popular music and you can see it in the music of the show.”