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

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It was fun to realise how intertwined everyone's life and habits were during those formative years and it was poignant hearing the stories - through the lens of almost 50 years - of those who succumbed to that lifestyle. It was still cheap and a not overgrown place to live, had good weather, and an aura of glamour because of Hollywood.

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops

He argues that the ‘hippie crowd’ was deliberately manufactured to serve as controlled opposition and a conduit for large-scale mind control operation. So here was a guy who had never sang, who had ‘never even conceived’ of the notion that he could open his mouth and make sounds come out, who couldn’t play an instrument and had no interest in learning such a skill, and who had never much listened to music or been anywhere near a band, even to just watch one perform, and yet he somehow emerged, virtually overnight, as a fully formed rock star who would quickly become an icon of his generation. DAVID McGOWAN was born and raised in Torrance, California, just twenty miles south of Laurel Canyon.

And members of the Beach Boys (primarily surfer/drummer Dennis Wilson) were among Charlie’s besties. 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. In the mid-1960s, the desolate area of southern California held little that would appeal to a rock’n’roll musician; nevertheless, it quickly became the unlikely mecca for a new wave of rebellious artists. 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. I think the moral of this story is to do our best not to be manipulated by the right or the left into being their stooges by being a distraction from the people who are really trying to make social change.

Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops

Even Cass Elliot was apparently killed for ‘knowing where the bodies were buried’ and it’s left at that.In any event, by all accounts the secret bunker had been up and running for more than twenty years before Laurel Canyon’s rebellious teen years, and it remained operational for the most turbulent of those years. The Doors, the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, James Taylor, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and more lived and jammed together here. David McGowan: Yes, I do believe that what you refer to as power networks, otherwise known as secret societies, are occult in nature. A true conspiracy-archivist to the end, McGowan chose to highlight this morbid synchronicity in one of his last messages to loyal supporters. Most also came from military related backgrounds and were given credit for launching a major counterculture movement that many of them had no real sense of or involvement with.

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

This is a spooky and dark (though down right fun) collection of unexplained murders, strange coincidence, and bizarre facts. Thomas McGrath: Am I right in presuming that you take it as a given fact that power networks are essentially infected by occultism? 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?He has a gift for identifying patterns between people, places and events that are largely overlooked, obfuscated, or written off by the mainstream narrative. The mantra of ‘Sex, Drugs, and Rock’n’Roll’ became a way to placate a Sixties Generation on the precipice of social upheaval. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians and intelligence personnel — the same sort of people who gave birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. Much of McGowan’s writing reads like some kind of dark gossip column, whereby he delights in showing what degenerates most of these people were. For the record, the Tonkin Gulf Incident appears to differ somewhat from other alleged provocations that have driven this country to war.