David McGowan

Place of publication transcribed from publisher's website.

Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops and the Dark Heart of the Hippy Dream

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon

This was an interesting book.  I am not quite sure of what to think about the information presented.  Does it seem to be a strange coincidence that so many people from Laurel Canyon who involved in the music industry have family members in the military and intelligence services?  Yes, but the military/intelligence apparatus at that time was large, considering the years in which all of those musicians were growing up were within 20 years of WWII.  The implied thesis is that all of these people (Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Gram Parsons, Gene Clarke, etc.) were either knowingly or unknowingly part of a plot to derail support for the antiwar movement by shifting the perception of the people involved from being young, intelligent, clean-cut college students to drug addled hippies.  I am not sure the book has the evidence to prove that, but the idea is interesting.  The parts of the book I found much more interesting were those about The Monkees (even though they are criticized as being a band created for television, their origins were not that much different than the other bands in Laurel Canyon at the time) and the amount of time and number of people Charles Manson ran around with in that particular community.  Everyone knows about his involvement with Dennis Wilson, but apparently many more people also recorded demos of his music and hours worth of his conversations.  

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops and the Dark Heart of the Hippy Dream

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