Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon Quotes

“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.”
― David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

“That was just one curious shift that occurred in the local music scene. The folk-rock movement, as it turns out, didn’t really last very long in its original incarnation. To the contrary, it quickly splintered into three distinct new genres: country-rock, psychedelic rock, and the ‘introspective singer-songwriter’ school of folk-rock most closely associated with former mental patient James Taylor. None of those musical genres, notably, posed much of a threat to the ‘establishment.’ The navel-gazers eschewed social concerns in favor of focusing on tales of personal anguish, the acid rockers largely preached the mantra of ‘turn on, tune in, drop out,’ and the country-rockers largely stuck to traditional—which is to say, quite conservative—country music themes. Following”
― David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

“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.”
― David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

“fact that his father secured representation for him from a member of the Queen’s Counsel.”
― David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

“As Unterberger duly notes in his expansive, two-volume review of the folk-rock movement, “much folk-rock was recorded and issued by huge corporations, and broadcast over radio and television stations owned for the most part by the same or similar pillars of the establishment.”
― David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

“As was the custom with big events in the mid- to late-1960s, particularly in the northern California area, Altamont was drenched in acid. And as was also the custom at that time, that acid was provided free-of-charge by Mr. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, also known as The Bear. At the so-called “Human Be-In” staged in January of 1967, for example, Owsley had kindly distributed 10,000 tabs of potent LSD. For the Monterey Pop Festival just five months later, he had cooked up and distributed 14,000 tabs. For Altamont, he did likewise. Also present that day, and featured in the Maysles brothers’ film gyrating atop a raised platform near the stage, was the King of the Freaks himself, Vito Paulekas.”
― David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

“As the story is usually told, the 1960s countercultural movement posed a rather serious threat to the status quo. But if that were truly the case, then why was it the “pillars of the establishment,” to use Unterberger’s words, that initially launched the movement? Why was it ‘the man’ that signed and recorded these artists? And that heavily promoted them on the radio, on television, and in print? And that set them up with their very own radio station and their very own monthly magazine? It”
― David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

“Vito Paulekas.”
― David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

“Photographer Man Ray, for example, is a compelling suspect given that the posing of Ms. Short’s body appeared to mimic the Minotaur, one of his better-known photographs.”
― David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream