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. 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. And then there are a whole lot of violent and mysterious deaths to spice up the action. This book manages to trace various degrees of separation to bizarre murders, suicides, arsons, mind control experiments and despair that extended well into the 70s and after.

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

The standard modus operandi of a work of “conspiracy theory” is fairly straightforward. The author/researcher takes some commonly accepted historical narrative, and lavishes scepticism upon it, while simultaneously maintaining an alternative understanding of what “really” happened, one that ostensibly better fits the considered facts. Tork, writes McGowan, “’migrated to Connecticut then Venezuela,’ which was, I suppose, a typical migratory route for folkies in those days.”JOIN ME NOW, if you have the time, as we take a stroll down memory lane to a time nearly five decades ago — a time when America last had uniformed ground troops fighting a sustained and bloody battle to impose some decidedly Orwellian ‘democracy’ on a sovereign nation. And so it is that, even while the father is actively conspiring to fabricate an incident that will be used to massively accelerate an illegal war, the son is positioning himself to become an icon of the ‘hippie’/anti-war crowd. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. It is, you know, a small world and all. And it is not as if Jim Morrison’s story is in any way unique. 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... Paulekas shows up in the underground film Mondo Hollywood and likely had allowed Satanist and suspected snuff-film creator Kenneth Anger to feature the three-year old Godo as his “Lucifer” in a film he was working on. It is then that Mansonite and former Grass Roots (a different “Grass Roots,” later renamed Love) guitarist Bobby "Cupid" Beausoleil becomes the Luciferian replacement.

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon - Audible UK

Besides the music industry and its strange ties to gov't agencies like the CIA, Dave also explores the strange history of Hollywood from the silent era and Houdini to the Manson family. The connections are endless, baffling. Do yourself a favor and read this book. And by all means verify what is written therein independently. Only then will you understand the power of the dark side... ISBN-13: 9781909394124, 978-1909394124. But the scene had a dark side. Many didn't make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery. Far more integrated into the scene than most would like to admit was Charles Manson and his infamous Family. 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. 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. David McGowan shared all the information he had gathered. Some of it was loosely threaded together, but he lets you draw your own conclusions. I’m still not sure I really grasp exactly all the nefarious things that were going on inside the Canyon, but I do believe that the CIA was involved in creating a counterculture movement that they could control. 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. Riots...are a distraction. Hippies...are a distraction. Trump...is a distraction. They all make the CIA smile.The book is a revisionist/conspiracy work, that implies that the music scene in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles in the late 1960’s was "engineered" by the CIA to dissuade rebellious youth from the anti-war cause. Chapters on The Byrds’ troubled Gene Clark and (later) Gram Parsons, along with iron-fisted tyrants like Frank Zappa, Stephen Stills, Arthur Lee and Captain Beefheart; and sex maniacs (and likely incestuous pedophiles) including various Beach Boys and “Papa” John Phillips, all seem to point to something much more hidden and sinister going on in Laurel Canyon. After all, these perceived peaceful hippies had a rather violent, authoritarian streak about them - quite counter to the image one usually conjures when imagining the happy vibes emanating from the Mamas and the Papas as they perform "California Dreamin'" on a TV variety show. As well; the writing did not pass muster, either. I found the author's style to be all over the place. McGowan frantically rattles off countless different famous people, locations, and events, with little-to-no regard for continuity... The author also drops in many superfluous asides to his writing frequently; saying things like "Are we supposed to believe...?", "Ya, sure...", and other snark remarks. I have to say that after reading this book, I was a bit melancholy. I suppose that knowing many of your heroes were fakes and plants will do that to one. The murders were not an anomaly, there were the normal consequence of weird vibes, drugs, ways, sexual acts, satanic acts and very very very disturbed people. And with this, I am not putting Manson and his "sect" as some kind of super-evil-power that came from nowhere to end the "love, peace and understanding" society of aquarius, no...

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

This is emblematic of McGowan’s research style. He has a gift for identifying patterns between people, places and events that are largely overlooked, obfuscated, or written off by the mainstream narrative. 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. He is survived by his three daughters (Alissa, Megan, and Shane) and also his parents and two brothers.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. 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. If you’ve ever seen the original Mad Max movie you might recall the scene where a mechanic is tuning the vehicle that the titular Max will soon be driving. “Last of the V8s,” he purrs with the engine. Headpress is not unlike that engine in a world gone mad. It’s independent. It’s ravaged by landscape, But it motors on, one of a kind, like the last of the V8s. Unfortunately, alarm bells also rang here for me early on, when the author says that he holds strong leftist political sentiments, but assures the reader that he will leave politics out of the book. Sadly, he did not. He launches into a quote about the war in Vietnam being a "crime against humanity" in almost the next paragraph. Oh boy...

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops

Carl Franzoni perhaps summed it up best when he declared rather bluntly that, “the Byrds’ records were manufactured.” The first album in particular was an entirely engineered affair created by taking a collection of songs by outside songwriters and having them performed by a group of nameless studio musicians (for the record, the actual musicians were Glen Campbell on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Jerry Cole on rhythm guitar), after which the band’s trademark vocal harmonies, entirely a studio creation, were added to the mix. As would be expected, the Byrds’ live performances, according to Barney Hoskyns’ Waiting for the Sun, “weren’t terribly good.” But that didn’t matter much; the band got a lot of assistance from the media, with Time being among the first to champion the new band. And they also got a tremendous assist from Vito and the Freaks and from the Young Turks, as previously discussed.” One downside of the book is the cursory treatment given to a key element of the alleged scheme—namely, how did these bands and their music influence the masses? Were subliminal messages used? Brainwashing? Reverse speech? LSD was a product of a CIA program studying how to control people. Timothy Leary was a painfully obvious CIA asset. These drugs were being manufactured for distribution on the street to turn the anti-war movement into navel-gazing morons. The CIA wanted the face of the anti-war movement to be dirty, drugged out hippies, not professors and clean cut kids whom the American public might actually take seriously. Charles Manson was part of this program. Well...probably...truth is a difficult commodity to come by whenever someone is looking into a CIA program. Finding proof is never good for your health.

Disable Your Ad Blocker

There really isn’t a unifying thesis here other than outrageous coincidence, shady goings-on, and vague tie-ins with the military and intelligence communities. I kept waiting for the point, or the crisis moment, and it isn’t there. I’m rating this book four stars anyway for being wildly entertaining, full of crazy stories and information I never knew (surprise me and I’m your fan forever), and giving me a hundred rabbit holes to follow. There is no doubt in my mind that this book will not be warmly received by all readers. In our celebrity-driven culture, calling into question the character and motivations of so many widely admired and respected figures from the entertainment community is never a good way to win popularity contests. And when those revered figures are overwhelmingly viewed as icons of various leftist causes, it is definitely not the way to win fans among those who consider themselves to be liberals, progressive or leftists. But while my sympathies lie solidly in the leftward flanks of the political spectrum, there are no sacred cows in either this book or in any of my past work.” He's collated a wonderful trove of pretty well known coincidences (and widened his net to take in some extremely tenuous ones) but alas (one of his favourite words annoyingly), it's just that, there's no corroborating evidence to support, the theory he's built around them, he's not interviewed anyone of any note, there are lots of "seems", "I feels" and "It goes without sayings", he's basically just collated a lot of stuff (some of it discredited now) of off Wikipedia and constructed a far fetched theory based on it. He has some good points and if he was at least a half a competent writer he could have made this into something interesting even without the evidence but, alas, he's incapable of that, which is a shame because there could very well be a few valid points buried in here a amongst the sarcasm and snarkiness, is he a CIA mole set up to discredit the theory? I can't think that anyone would publish this, unless that were the case so perhaps his sheer amateurism proves his point, who can tell? Certainly not David McGowan. I had previously read and enjoyed Tom O'Neill's epic book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and wondered if the writing here would dovetail with the writing there.