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. It is true that I believe that some of the most famed artists to emerge from Laurel Canyon are vastly overrated, with Jim Morrison and David Crosby quickly coming to mind. 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. He implicates The Doors as part of the conspiracy, assigning their instant fame to the intelligence community’s psychological operation.

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

I am a big believer in the notion that 'the truth is out there', but don't expect it to be delivered to you in a tidy package by any mainstream media outlets. 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. As was the custom with big events in the mid- to late-1960s, particularly in the northern California area, Altamont was drenched in acid. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology in 1983, and he ran a small business in the greater Los Angeles area from 1990 until his death in 2015.Recommended for those with a keen interest in the times - BUT - the book by no means put a period on the issues McGowan addresses at the beginning of the story. Other then that it's a decent account of the 60s counterculture and nefarious characters who inhabited it. Zappa later materialized in Laurel Canyon in the late-1960s without having any compelling reason to do so. The author seems to be suggesting that the wild lifestyles promoted by these artists (many of whom did not actually play on their records) was an attempt by the CIA to exert mind control over young people in an effort to divert them away from more serious anti-war efforts. S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which will, in turn, quickly lead to America’s deep immersion into the bloody Vietnam quagmire.

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon : Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops

Three Dog Night, Frank Zappa, the Doors, Love, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Buffalo Springfield, and many more were all musicians/bands created by the CIA. 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. I could hear the baby boomers keeling over and falling on their favorite bongs as I paged through the most provocative chapters.

Further, the author makes no effort to hide that he personally is a liberal-progressive yet implies (but never proves) that the LC Hippie scene was planned, initiated, and controlled by U. 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.