Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation

Part I

• U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under attack while patrolling Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf. – Jim Morrison’s father
  • earliest on the Laurel Canyon/Sunset Strip scene is Jim Morrison
• Frank Zappa
  • ‘Log Cabin’ – which sat right in the heart of Laurel Canyon, at the crossroads of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue – Zappa will play host to virtually every musician who passes through the canyon in the mid- to late-1960s.
  • Zappa (born, curiously enough, on the Winter Solstice of 1940) never really made a secret of the fact that he had nothing but contempt for the ‘hippie’ culture that he helped create and that he surrounded himself with.
  • Francis Zappa (father) was, in case you were wondering, a chemical warfare specialist assigned to – where else? – the Edgewood Arsenal. Edgewood is, of course, the longtime home of America’s chemical warfare program, as well as a facility frequently cited as being deeply enmeshed in MK-ULTRA operations.
  • Zappa’s manager, by the way, is a shadowy character by the name of Herb Cohen, who had come out to L.A. from the Bronx with his brother Mutt just before the music and club scene began heating up. Cohen, a former U.S. Marine, had spent a few years traveling the world before his arrival on the Laurel Canyon scene. Those travels, curiously, had taken him to the Congo in 1961, at the very time that leftist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was being tortured and killed by our very own CIA.
  • Gail Zappa (wife), known formerly as Adelaide Sloatman. Gail hails from a long line of career Naval officers, including her father, who spent his life working on classified nuclear weapons research for the U.S. Navy.
  • Gail had attended a Naval kindergarten with “Mr. Mojo Risin’” himself, Jim Morrison
  • Jim Morrison had later attended the same Alexandria, Virginia high school as two other future Laurel Canyon luminaries – John Phillips and Cass Elliott.
• John Edmund Andrew Phillips
  •  was, shockingly enough, yet another child of the military/intelligence complex. The son of U.S. Marine Corp Captain Claude Andrew Phillips and a mother who claimed to have psychic and telekinetic powers, John attended a series of elite military prep schools in the Washington, D.C. area, culminating in an appointment to the prestigious U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.
  • Phillips arrived at the very height of the Cuban Revolution (in Cuba).
  • a few years after Castro took power, Phillips found himself cooling his heels in Jacksonville, Florida – alongside, coincidentally I’m sure, the Mayport Naval Station.
• Mr. Stephen Stills
  • Stills will have the distinction of being a founding member of  Buffalo Springfield, and,  Crosby, Stills & Nash
  • Stills will pen perhaps the first, and certainly one of the most enduring anthems of the 60s generation, “For What It’s Worth,” the opening lines of which appear at the top of this post (Stills’ follow-up single will be entitled “Bluebird,” which, coincidentally or not, happens to be the original codename assigned to the MK-ULTRA program).
  • Stills was (*yawn*) the product of yet another career military family. Raised partly in Texas, young Stephen spent large swaths of his childhood in El Salvador, Costa Rica, the Panama Canal Zone, and various other parts of Central America – alongside his father, who was, we can be fairly certain, helping to spread ‘democracy’ to the unwashed masses in that endearingly American way
  • Stills was educated primarily at schools on military bases and at elite military academies.
  • Stephen will later tell anyone who will sit and listen that he had served time for Uncle Sam in the jungles of Vietnam. what will be ignored is the undeniable fact that the U.S. had thousands of ‘advisers’ – which is to say, CIA/Special Forces operatives – operating in the country for a good many years before the arrival of the first official ground troops
• David Crosby
  • Crosby is, not surprisingly, the son of an Annapolis graduate and WWII military intelligence officer, Major Floyd Delafield Crosby.
    • http://www.cinematographers.nl/GreatDoPh/crosby.htm
      • William Beebe led to a job as ph [stills & movies] on the Beebe Haitian Expedition [1927].
      • filmed the Matto Grosso Expedition, the Pratt Honduras Expedition, the LaVarre Brazilian-Guiana Expedition and an Indian Expedition
      • WWII he worked as a ph in the Air Transport Command making reference films for pilots
    • http://www.filmreference.com/Writers-and-Production-Artists-Ch-De/Crosby-Floyd.html
      • For Corman, Crosby shot War of the Satellites, Machine Gun Kelly, I, Mobster, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial, Tales of Terror, and many other films. Most of these films were for American International Pictures, or AIP, Corman’s “home company.” Eventually Crosby worked on other AIP projects not directed by Corman, including Bikini Beach, Pajama Party, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and Fireball 500. After his work as a cophotographer of the undistinguished programmer The Arousers, Crosby retired from the industry.
  • David Van Cortlandt Crosby, as it turns out, is a scion of the closely intertwined Van Cortlandt, Van Schuyler and Van Rensselaer families.
  • the Crosby family tree includes a truly dizzying array of US senators and congressmen, state senators and assemblymen, governors, mayors, judges, Supreme Court justices, Revolutionary and Civil War generals, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and members of the Continental Congress.
  • has a real fondness for guns, especially handguns, which he has maintained a sizable collection of for his entire life.
• Jackson Browne,
  • who is – are you getting as bored with this as I am? – the product of a career military family. Browne’s father was assigned to post-war ‘reconstruction’ work in Germany, which very likely means that he was in the employ of the OSS, precursor to the CIA.
• Gerry Beckley, Dan Peek and Dewey Bunnell.
  • Individually, these three names are probably unknown to virtually all readers; but collectively, as the band America, the three will score huge hits in the early ‘70s with such songs as “Ventura Highway,” “A Horse With No Name,” and the Wizard of Oz-themed “The Tin Man.” I guess I probably don’t need to add here that all three of these lads were products of the military/intelligence community. Beckley’s dad was the commander of the now-defunct West Ruislip USAF base near London, England, a facility deeply immersed in intelligence operations. Bunnell’s and Peek’s fathers were both career Air Force officers serving under Beckley’s dad at West Ruislip, which is where the three boys first met.
• Mike Nesmith of the Monkees and Cory Wells of Three Dog Night (two more hugely successful Laurel Canyon bands), who both arrived in LA not long after serving time with the U.S. Air Force. Nesmith also inherited a family fortune estimated at $25 million.
• Gram Parsons, who would briefly replace David Crosby in The Byrds before fronting The Flying Burrito Brothers, was the son of Major Cecil Ingram “Coon Dog” Connor II, a decorated military officer and bomber pilot who reportedly flew over 50 combat missions. Parsons was also an heir, on his mother’s side, to the formidable Snively family fortune. which reportedly owned as much as 1/3 of all the citrus groves in the state of Florida.
• What one finds, far more often than not, are the sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and the sons and daughters of extreme wealth and privilege – and oftentimes, you’ll find both rolled into one convenient package.
• Warren Zevon, the son of William “Stumpy” Zevon, a lieutenant for infamous LA crimelord Mickey Cohen.
• the Laurel Canyon crowd that transformed Los Angeles into the epicenter of the music industry.

Part 2

http://www.illuminati-news.com/articles2/00202.html

• These icons were, to an overwhelming degree, the sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and the scions of families that have wielded vast wealth and power in this country for a very long time. Are we to believe that the only kids from that era who had musical talent were the sons and daughters of Navy Admirals, chemical warfare engineers and Air Force intelligence officers? Or are they just the only ones who were signed to lucrative contracts and relentlessly promoted by their labels and the media?
  • Why did Jim Morrison never denounce, or even mention, his father’s key role in escalating one of America’s bloodiest illegal wars?
  • why did Frank Zappa never pen a song exploring the horrors of chemical warfare
  • CoIntelPro. Entire books, for example, have been written examining how presumably virtuous musical artists were subjected to FBI harassment and/or whacked by the CIA.
  • “what if the musicians themselves (and various other leaders and founders of the ‘movement’) were every bit as much a part of the intelligence community as the people who were supposedly harassing them?”
  • cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray?
  • the harassment these folks were subjected to was largely a stage-managed show designed to give the leaders of the counterculture some much-needed ‘street cred’? What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team?
  • “Some on the left even theorized that the hippies were the end result of a plot by the CIA to neutralize the anti-war movement with LSD, turning potential protestors into self-absorbed naval-gazers.” An exasperated Abbie Hoffman once described the scene as he remembered it thusly: “There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers … all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these ‘flower children’ who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?!”
• Jerry Brown
  • longtime resident of a little place called Laurel Canyon
  • Brown lived on Wonderland Avenue, not too many doors down from 8763 Wonderland Avenue, the site of the infamous “Four on the Floor” murders

• The Manufactured Invention of the Beatles, Stones, Grateful Dead and the Birth of Rock n’ Roll by the Tavistock Institute; A Jesuit Corporation.

• MORE