Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "david-mcgowan"

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

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


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 found much of it unconvincing, however there are two points in the author’s favour:

1. 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.)

2. The uncanny, lightning-fast speed with which the L.A. scene (starting with manufactured group The Byrds) were promoted by the corporate media.

Outside these points, however, everything is very murky and nebulous, and as the book lacks footnotes it’s hard to check McGowan’s sources.

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.

In reality, the ‘pacifism’ of the hippies is itself a media fiction…many genuine hippies believed in violence in self-defence. My novel ‘Greybeard’ concerns an elderly hippy who goes on a killing rampage in Germany when his grandson is murdered by Merkel’s hordes, which isn’t exactly a far-fetched scenario.





Much of McGowan’s writing reads like some kind of dark gossip column, whereby he delights in showing what degenerates most of these people were.

Admittedly, most of the music is forgettable. With the exception of ‘Californa Dreaming’, Love’s Forever Changes, and ironically, Charles Manson, it’s dreary stuff. Only the most slovenly, beer-gutted boomer crying demented tears of nostalgia over the memory of his first joint could possibly find pleasure in the likes of Frank Zappa, or Crosby, Stills and Nash.

If the scene really was engineered by the CIA, they could have picked better songwriters, lol.

NB - McGowan's essay ‘Wagging the Moondoggie’, (https://centerforaninformedamerica.co...) is better reasoned and structured than this rather rambling book.



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