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

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It was with some personal interest I read this tapestry of biographical sketches, historical vignettes, digressions, and leading questions asked with dramatically-raised eyebrows. My mother and father were almost -- though not quite -- part of the "scene." They were living only one canyon over from Laurel when I was born in 1968. They long remembered the massive influx of unwashed and drug-addled young searchers and the resulting Sunset Boulevard riots in '66. At the time, my father was an impresario trying to get a young ingenue (my mother) into the LA music free-for-all. They spent time in the clubs McGowan profiles -- places like Whiskey a Go-Go and Pandora's. Hell, they might have crossed paths with some unsavory characters like Vito Paulekas and Elmer Valentine -- or even Charles Manson himself. It was a wild time, though the real wildness lasted for only two years or so. Also, he seems to labouring under the misapprehension that hippies were all Gandhi-style pacifists, and that when a musician owned or enjoyed guns there’s some sinister double standard at work, meaning they’re not who they say they are. And Tork? What was he allegedly doing before landing a gig as a doltish, bass-playing Monkee on the hit NBC TV series in 1966?

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon - Headpress Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon - Headpress

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.Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon was a disjointed, rambling mess... I came across the book by chance, and decided to see where the author would take the writing. 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... 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. I looked into this and sure enough, Tork (then known as Peter Thorkelson) was in South America for a month or so, allegedly visiting family. But was he really? Or was he on some sort of “secret mission” as his pal Stills has implied in the past? Oddly, I have found no official biographical book on Tork and he is decidedly the most mysterious Monkee of the quartet. 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.”

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

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. Following a similar path to Laurel Canyon was another influential artist on the forefront of the hippie movement: Frank Zappa . Frank’s father also worked for the military—serving as a chemical warfare specialist at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Coincidentally, Edgewood also happens to be the official headquarters for many of the government’s MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. Zappa later materialized in Laurel Canyon in the late-1960s without having any compelling reason to do so. By highlighting these connections, McGowan implies that Zappa could be a product of these psychological experiments—a Manchurian candidate programmed as a child and activated in his 20s.One of my heroes, Frank Zappa, has his life deconstructed and analysed. Also featured are many well-known names from Harry Houdini, Beach Boys, Mamas and Papas, right up to the punk and new wave scene of the late 70s and early 80s. Charles Manson also appears, lauded as a talented musician as well as a charismatic cult leader. Now I'm no public relations mastermind, but it seems to me that if I wanted to create pro-war sentiment as a top-down propagandist, I would probably endeavor to enhance or amplify this sentiment, and not oppose it... 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.)

WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE CANYON - Internet Archive WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE CANYON - Internet Archive

McGowan’s assertion: This can't all be explained away with the dreamy word "serendipity." It was all too weird. Someone -- or a group of someones -- was pulling the strings, and with some end in mind. 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.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. While that may not seem so unusual in the midst of the Cold War, many of the names above were linked or directly involved in the military, through family members or personally.

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