Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon : Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

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Also in March of 1965, the first uniformed U.S. soldier officially sets foot on Vietnamese soil (although Special Forces units masquerading as ‘advisers’ and ‘trainers’ have been there for at least four years, and likely much longer). By April 1965, fully 25,000 uniformed American kids, most still teenagers barely out of high school, are slogging through the rice paddies of Vietnam. By the end of the year, U.S. troop strength will have surged to 200,000. There were something very strange indeed with the 60s america, maybe the world, but often camouflaged by beauttiful images of "the summer of love", "the beatles", "the flower power"...

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon : Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops

Headpress is very sad to report the news that David McGowan, author of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, has passed away following a courageous six month battle against lung cancer. Carl Franzoni perhaps summed it up best when he declared rather bluntly that, “the Byrds’ records were manufactured.” The first album in particular was an entirely engineered affair created by taking a collection of songs by outside songwriters and having them performed by a group of nameless studio musicians (for the record, the actual musicians were Glen Campbell on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Jerry Cole on rhythm guitar), after which the band’s trademark vocal harmonies, entirely a studio creation, were added to the mix. As would be expected, the Byrds’ live performances, according to Barney Hoskyns’ Waiting for the Sun, “weren’t terribly good.” But that didn’t matter much; the band got a lot of assistance from the media, with Time being among the first to champion the new band. And they also got a tremendous assist from Vito and the Freaks and from the Young Turks, as previously discussed.” Even the death-obsessed and positively evil Process Church of the Final Judgment played a role in Laurel Canyon and surrounding areas. Just ask one-time cape-wearing David Crosby or any number of lesser-known “musicians” who came even later. For all the ocean breezes, bikini babes and daisies and so forth, the ever-present Southern California sunshine couldn’t possibly pierce the darkness hanging over Laurel Canyon.

David McGowan

I had previously read and enjoyed Tom O'Neill's epic book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and wondered if the writing here would dovetail with the writing there.

Classic rock conspiracy theory: ‘Weird Scenes Inside the

Admittedly, most of the music is forgettable. With the exception of ‘Californa Dreaming’, Love’s Forever Changes, and ironically, Charles Manson, it’s dreary stuff. Only the most slovenly, beer-gutted boomer crying demented tears of nostalgia over the memory of his first joint could possibly find pleasure in the likes of Frank Zappa, or Crosby, Stills and Nash. So what does all this prove? Well, nothing really. But if true, all these coincidences are strange. Then again, we are talking about California (where there are frequent wild fires and houses burn down all the time). There are other perfectly plausible explanations as to why all these people would end up in the entertainment capital of the United States and why those living in the fast lane tend to turn up dead a lot. The most controversial parts of this book touch little on the central question it asks: Was the culture of the time we know as the "Sixties" really just one massive government psy-op intended to derail opposition to the Vietnam War and popular calls for real social change? Calling themselves Freaks, they lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could," writes McGowan, describing Vito and the Freakers. There really isn’t a unifying thesis here other than outrageous coincidence, shady goings-on, and vague tie-ins with the military and intelligence communities. I kept waiting for the point, or the crisis moment, and it isn’t there. I’m rating this book four stars anyway for being wildly entertaining, full of crazy stories and information I never knew (surprise me and I’m your fan forever), and giving me a hundred rabbit holes to follow.For example, he accuses Kim Fowley (producer of the Ruaways) of "lowering the bar" even further that Frank Zappa had previously done with his GTOs project. He can't help but let his distaste for these artists color his reporting of the story. It's really amateurish and unprofessional. LSD was a product of a CIA program studying how to control people. Timothy Leary was a painfully obvious CIA asset. These drugs were being manufactured for distribution on the street to turn the anti-war movement into navel-gazing morons. The CIA wanted the face of the anti-war movement to be dirty, drugged out hippies, not professors and clean cut kids whom the American public might actually take seriously. Charles Manson was part of this program. Well...probably...truth is a difficult commodity to come by whenever someone is looking into a CIA program. Finding proof is never good for your health. A popular revisionist work implying that the Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, music scene of the late 1960’s was engineered by the CIA to divert rebellious youth from the anti-war cause. Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1200105 Openlibrary_edition This is emblematic of McGowan’s research style. He has a gift for identifying patterns between people, places and events that are largely overlooked, obfuscated, or written off by the mainstream narrative.

Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon - Google Books

One thing that comes off of David’s work whenever we read it is its glaring humanity. David sincerely hated to see all the violence and injustice in the world, and his indignation powered his books.

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So why kill the very musicians and peripheral people who were perpetrating your agenda? I don’t know. David McGowan was not especially clear on this, except to say that they knew too much. Some lived long, normal lives, while many others were cut down in their twenties. I do understand that the CIA would see all of these people as expendable, but at same time, these were sons and daughters of the very people who protected and served us in the military.

David McGowan (Author of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon) David McGowan (Author of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon)

And while Peter Tork, for instance, worked the coffeehouse folk scene in Greenwich Village and was friends with folkie Stephen “The Sarge” Stills, a guy who boasted he had spent time in Vietnam, likely before troops were sent there in the mid-1960’s. Finally, and most damningly, the base case laid out here completely fails to show a proposed mechanism of action that would support the author's assertions. The writing here is quite literally a frenetic lumping together of many misfortunes and famous people; circa southern California in the 60s. How is it all connected, and how did it work?? WHO KNOWS...

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The author does warn readers that many of the anecdotes included in this book will tear down the fabric of the hippie dream, revealing the more sordid and disturbing private lives of some beloved musicians and influencers of the 60s and 70s. Come on, man. The hippie movement was real. I smoked dope, got laid, and didn’t take a shower for six months at a time. It was very real, especially everytime I raised my arm and a noxious cloud emerged. Welcome to being a manipulated low level asset of the CIA...Mr. Moonbeam. What siren’s call echoed through the walls of Laurel Canyon to attract such a large group of counterculture vanguards? As Canyon-dweller Neil Young recounted, they “ were coming like lemmings .” Why? Instead of advocating for armed revolution as a way to change policies or laws they didn’t agree with, Laurel Canyonites preached from the hippie-gospel of peace, love and passive resistance.