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

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Besides the music industry and its strange ties to gov't agencies like the CIA, Dave also explores the strange history of Hollywood from the silent era and Houdini to the Manson family. The connections are endless, baffling. Do yourself a favor and read this book. And by all means verify what is written therein independently. Only then will you understand the power of the dark side... During his legendary music career, Morrison mastered little more than a tambourine and a microphone, claiming that a majority of his song’s lyrics were composed during the course of a summer spent tripping on LSD. This anecdote provides the perfect cover story to explain how he became such a prolific songwriter in the span of only a few months. Contributing to the mystery was an ominous online comment that was posted months prior to Dave’s cancer diagnosis: “ ... this David McGowan fella really ought to quit smoking. With all the elitist feathers he’s ruffling, he’s likely to come down with a spontaneous case of hitherto undiagnosed stage 4 inoperable Pancreatic cancer. ”

Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops

There is also much made of certain dates which have occult significance like the fact that Tom Mix died on October 12, Alistair Crowley's Birthday. Mix had once owned the "Log Cabin" (future home of Frank Zappa) and Spahn Ranch (where the Manson Family lived). The Log Cabin burned down on Halloween, 1981. This was 22 years to the day after Houdini's estate located nearby burned down. Houdini himself also died on Halloween in 1926. Spooky! Parts of it also read like a giant game of "Six Degrees of Separation." For instance, how to connect comedian Phil Hartman and Charles Manson? Well...Hartman designed the CSNY Logo and was the brother of John Hartman, a label exec with David Geffen. John Hartman got his start in the music business with Colonel Tom Parker. Tom Parker worked with Tom Mix in the 1940s. In addition to the aforementioned Spahn Ranch connection, Phil Hartman also attended high school with Squeaky Fromme. From Morrisson to Zappa, from Arthur Lee to John Philips... nobody is minimally sane, when not plainly a bad or confused person.Every chapter of this book brings some light to people, music groups, weird happenings, surronding "Laurel Canyon", the inception place where the hippie culture sprung... and, man, it is not a pretty picture.

WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE CANYON - Darkness Is Falling WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE CANYON - Darkness Is Falling

McGowan suggests that these Sixties-era megastars weren’t touched by “The Establishment” because they proved to be useful tools in their efforts to water-down or co-opt any efforts of a truly grassroots movement that could have emerged and brought real change and an earlier end to the meat grinder in Southeast Asia. Perceived anti-war anthem "For What It's Worth" takes on a whole different meaning - figuratively and literally. After noting Harry Houdini’s connection to Laurel Canyon and his role as a spy for Scotland Yard, McGowan reveals one of the best insights missed in most research – Laurel Canyon was home to one of the largest film production studios of its day – run by the Air Force. If that is hard to swallow, the pill becomes much bigger. What would become known as Lookout Mountain Laboratory was originally envisioned as an air defense center. To learn more - and I mean more - go to www.davesweb.cnchost.com. And like me, you'll tumble into a rabbit hole from which you will likely never return.Am I? Imagine my raised eyebrow. I’ve read enough about this to begin to believe that, as crazy as any of this sounds,...it starts to make sense. The first step is to understand the agenda of the CIA. Thomas McGrath: You propose that hippie culture was established to neutralise the anti-war movement. But I also interpreted your book as suggesting that, as far as you’re concerned, there’s also some resonance between what you term “psychedelic occultism” (the hippie counterculture) and the “elite” philosophy/theology? You think this was a second reason for its dissemination? 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? The story of the scene that played out in Laurel Canyon from the mid-1960’s through the end of the 1970’s is an endlessly fascinating one” and that while most folks know about San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene, Angelenos, of which McGowan is one, “remain ignorant of the even larger music and counterculture scene that played out in the Hollywood Hills.” One downside of the book is the cursory treatment given to a key element of the alleged scheme—namely, how did these bands and their music influence the masses? Were subliminal messages used? Brainwashing? Reverse speech?

Weird scenes inside the canyon : Laurel Canyon, covert ops Weird scenes inside the canyon : Laurel Canyon, covert ops

McGowan notes how so few of the Laurel Canyon artists really demanded an end to the war, killing so many of their peers. Jim Morrison? ‘Fraid not. Mr. Mojo Risin’s dad, U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison was the man in charge of the naval ship, the U.S.S. Bon Homme Richard, which was involved in the very Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to escalation of the Vietnam War. In fact, McGowan includes a photo of a clean-cut Jim Morrison on the bridge of the infamous ship with his dad in early 1964. Just a few years later he would be asking the world to ‘break on through to the other side” and to “light his fire.” All the while, he largely ignored the politics of the day and had seemingly no musical training or interest. How convenient.Thomas McGrath: Am I right in presuming that you take it as a given fact that power networks are essentially infected by occultism? Are these cults essentially Satanic, or what? Laurel Canyon performers acted as de facto mouthpieces for the protest-generation, with songs espousing anti-war attitudes and lyrics that helped usher in a fresh set of values. Their social messages were often muffled beneath loud clothes, free love and boisterous drug use—tools that arguably distracted America’s youth in the 60s more than they focused them on enacting societal changes. 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... If, for example, just a few prominent Laurel Canyon musicians happened to come from military/intelligence families, then we could probably safely write that off as an interesting but largely inconsequential aberration. Author David McGowan was born and raised in Torrance, California, just twenty miles south of Laurel Canyon. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology and has, since 1990, run a small business in the greater Los Angeles area.

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon Quotes - Goodreads Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon Quotes - Goodreads

I started reading this guys blog posts several years before the book was published. The book itself is full of interesting facts and anecdotes about the area surrounding Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. The book is a fun read if you are a lover of history, conspiracy, and musical biography. At times the author jumps around a little. The book might have benefited from a little more editing, but over all for what it's worth I really did enjoy the conspiracy aspect of it all. For all things to converge in one place and one time, kinda interesting, kinda creepy. 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. Unlike the Haight-Ashbury scene that followed it, the Laurel Canyon music/hippy scene of the 1960s and 1970s is a story that remains largely unknown; or possible human sacrifices to the Dark Lord. McGowan, in his chapters “Vito and His Freakers: The Sinister Roots of Hippie Culture” and “The Death of Godo Paulekas: Anger’s Infant Lucifer,” we are introduced to debauched guru and self-described “Freak” Vito Paulekas, along with his wife Szou and his disturbing companion Carl Franzoni. These guys helped get The Byrds (a largely untested, musically-limited band which was as much or more of a manufactured act than the derided Monkees, at least in the early years) off the ground by doing spasmodic, freakish dance moves on the dance floors of clubs that sprouted overnight on the Sunset Strip. That freewheelin' behavior cloaked something far more ominous. And when Vito split, Manson happened to show up in his place, because, as McGowan writes, “It makes perfect sense, in retrospect, that Charles Manson and his Family came calling just as Vito fled the scene, and that a Mansonite replaced the freak child (doomed Godo Paulekas, said to have died after falling through a skylight while tripping on acid) as the embodiment of Lucifer. For the truth, you see, is that in many significant ways, Charles Manson was little more than a younger version of Vito Paulekas.”Now I'm admittedly somewhat a fan of intriguing mysteries, secret plots, and/or conspiracies. Especially if they are well-evidenced. Sadly, this one was not. The case forwarded here relies on no more than a string of coincidences that all share roughly the same location. I kept waiting for the author to tie all these people together in a coherent plot, but he never did... The sheer amount of musicians in the Laurel Canyon scene whose parents worked in military intelligence. Jim Morrison’s father was literally the commander behind the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ that was the casus belli for America’s entry into Vietnam, and in fact most of these ‘L.A.’ musicians were actually from northern Virginia (home of the Pentagon, CIA etc.)