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

Reviews

Scriptwriter

I've always been interested in the 60's and 70's music 🎶 and culture. Instead, McGowan relies on phrases like "isn't this a coincidence?

Laurie Jean Kase

Despite what I've written above, however, I tremendously enjoyed Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon and would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the music of late 1960s - early 1970s American rock and folk-rock. McGowan, despite his appearing to take seriously stories of practises in satanism and black magic and other things you really should outgrow by your teenage years, delights in telling us the undeniably disturbing, sometimes amusing and occasionally disgusting indulgences of what happens to people with too much money, too many drugs and too little self control.

Mary Ann Marrero

What this all amounts to is probably not very much and certainly the author makes no attempt to establish a narrative or present any evidence that substantiates any grander conspiracy. The case McGowan makes is ill-defined and totally unconvincing - and yet this book still makes for highly enjoyable reading, as it essentially devotes a chapter per band/solo artist, digging the dirt and raking the mud over many of the sacred cows of those "mystical" few precious years. Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, Gram Parsons, Love, The Beach Boys, The Byrds and many more, all come in to McGowan's sights and nobody gets away clean.

The best McGowan manages, in terms of his thesis, is to draw out that many of the self-proclaimed antiestablishment peace and love generation, came from families with strong ties to the military-intelligence community, that they all chose to live very close to each other and that nearby was a covert intelligence facility (probably used to produce US propaganda) and that within the Laurel Canyon community, there was a surprisingly high level of murder, suicide and violence. This book 📖 is hard to put down once you've started reading 📚 I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about things never mentioned on Mainstream media outlets.

" which isn't really a substitute for hard facts. David McGowan's book, which adapts its title from a lyric from The Doors' song, The End ("weird scenes inside the goldmine"), makes a vague assertion that the synchronistic gathering of the elite of late 1960s counter culture in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, was less a gathering of the like-minded and more some kind of sinister counter-intelligence operation.