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

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From Morrisson to Zappa, from Arthur Lee to John Philips... nobody is minimally sane, when not plainly a bad or confused person. Sure, there could be a lot of coincidences (the writer of The Association's '66 cult-and-drug-flavored hit "Along Comes Mary," Tandyn Almer, just so happens to split L.A. and die in the spooky D.C. suburb of McLean, Virginia, where Morrison, John Phillips, Mama Cass Elliot, Peter Tork and others hung out in their early years), with all these covert ops, serial killers running around and funding that seems to come from nowhere. After all, who paid for all of this for so many years?

Books Your Parents Warned You About: Weird Scenes Inside the Books Your Parents Warned You About: Weird Scenes Inside the

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.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.

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

But if an uncanny number of the leading lights of the Laurel Canyon scene grew up in such an environment, then that is clearly a meaningful pattern. And if a few of the new breed of stars happened to have violent death intrude upon their personal lives, then that would be a tragic but largely inconsequential fact. But when it becomes clear that violent death surrounded the entire scene, with whole families at times dying off under suspicious circumstances, then that again is a distinguishing pattern—and one that has been all but ignored by other chroniclers of the scene."

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. 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.

Dave McGowan - Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon Dave McGowan - Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon

I would like to see someone with the chops to a actually take this on, there's possibly something here to look at, not such a broad ranging conspiracy as McGowan has laid out but it's worth a look and it would be nice to see someone with an ounce of intelligence have a butchers.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. 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; David McGowan: To the extent that it has a central thesis, I would say that it is that the music and counterculture scene that sprung to life in the 1960s was not the organic, grassroots resistance movement that it is generally perceived to be, but rather a movement that was essentially manufactured and steered. And a corollary to that would be that for a scene that was supposed to be all about peace, love and understanding, there was a very dark, violent underbelly that this book attempts to expose. 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...

Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops

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. The propensity for Canyon-dwellers to avoid the military draft at the height of the war; the surprising number of music clubs that opened ‘just in time’ to popularize and publicize marginally-talented Laurel Canyon artists; or the mysterious and grisly deaths plaguing many of the musicians’ circles may seem like chance sequences or unrelated coincidences—but to McGowan they are worthy of documenting and examining. The central question of his book becomes a rhetorical one: “ How many coincidences does it take to make a conspiracy? ” 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. McGowan begins his argumentation by pointing to Jim Morrison’s father, Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who played a central role in the Gulf of Tonkin’s false flag event. Morrison, curiously, avoided this association, stating his parents were dead, adding fuel to his mythical narrative of having no musical training and supposedly becoming a musical shaman following ghostly encounters and hallucinogenic trips. While some of that may have been the case (such as the trips and witchcraft initiation, for example, as shown in Oliver Stone’s The Doors), the real story is likely much closer to McGowan’s analysis – Morrison was promoted and made into an icon by the system because of these high level connections. However, being well-connected was not the only explanation – the establishment had a specific motive of derailing any legitimate anti-war activism or artwork, as well as moving the culture into a more degenerate state for social engineering.I am definitely adding it to my "Classic Trash" shelf along with my Brian Jones conspiracy books and Hollywood Babylon. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-06-01 05:25:07 Autocrop_version 0.0.13_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40529106 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier