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

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Now I'm admittedly somewhat a fan of intriguing mysteries, secret plots, and/or conspiracies. Especially if they are well-evidenced. Sadly, this one was not. The case forwarded here relies on no more than a string of coincidences that all share roughly the same location. I kept waiting for the author to tie all these people together in a coherent plot, but he never did... Thomas McGrath: Am I right in presuming that you take it as a given fact that power networks are essentially infected by occultism? Are these cults essentially Satanic, or what? 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. 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. 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 : Laurel Canyon, covert ops Weird scenes inside the canyon : Laurel Canyon, covert ops

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. Come on, man. The hippie movement was real. I smoked dope, got laid, and didn’t take a shower for six months at a time. It was very real, especially everytime I raised my arm and a noxious cloud emerged. Welcome to being a manipulated low level asset of the CIA...Mr. Moonbeam. 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. 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.

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.” There were something very strange indeed with the 60s america, maybe the world, but often camouflaged by beauttiful images of "the summer of love", "the beatles", "the flower power"... And when Vito split, Manson happened to show up in his place, because, as McGowan writes, “It makes perfect sense, in retrospect, that Charles Manson and his Family came calling just as Vito fled the scene, and that a Mansonite replaced the freak child (doomed Godo Paulekas, said to have died after falling through a skylight while tripping on acid) as the embodiment of Lucifer. For the truth, you see, is that in many significant ways, Charles Manson was little more than a younger version of Vito Paulekas.”

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Following a similar path to Laurel Canyon was another influential artist on the forefront of the hippie movement: Frank Zappa . Frank’s father also worked for the military—serving as a chemical warfare specialist at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Coincidentally, Edgewood also happens to be the official headquarters for many of the government’s MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. Zappa later materialized in Laurel Canyon in the late-1960s without having any compelling reason to do so. 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. The uncanny, lightning-fast speed with which the L.A. scene (starting with manufactured group The Byrds) were promoted by the corporate media. 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. The sheer amount of musicians in the Laurel Canyon scene whose parents worked in military intelligence. Jim Morrison’s father was literally the commander behind the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ that was the casus belli for America’s entry into Vietnam, and in fact most of these ‘L.A.’ musicians were actually from northern Virginia (home of the Pentagon, CIA etc.)

Adding a cherry to the top of the synchronicity sundae is Frank’s wife, Gail, who also hailed from a military family. Funny enough, she happened to cross paths at a young age with fellow future hippie, Jim Morrison—they both attended the same Naval kindergarten class before reuniting decades later in Laurel Canyon. McGowan finds these facts unsettling, describing the series of events as “too many coincidences… to be a chance gathering .”