Feineigle.com - Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon - Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops and The Dark heart of the Hippie Dream

Home · Book Reports · 2017 · Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon - Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops and the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

Published: August 26, 2017
Tags:  Culture · History · Psyop



The book in...
One sentence:
An introduction to the intermingling of the Laural Canyon music scene of the 1960s and 70s with the US military and intelligence community.

Five sentences:
The book offers a chapter for each of the major bands of the scene and offers numerous interesting connections for each to the military and intelligence, often parents and sometimes artists, families that come from old lineages, big money, and sometimes even royalty. The families and the members of the scene are plagued with strange deaths, often ruled suicides, and a lot of houses end up burned to the ground. At the center of success you have the permanent fixture, Vito and his freaks, which the author purports was the cause of the scene's success and not the music that was supposedly quite bad, at least when listened to live. At the physical center of the canyon you have a state-of-the-art studio/military base known as Lookout Mountain Laboratory - an odd hub in such a hippie paradise unless you take into account the military families these hippies hail from. There is also a lot of gun loving, authoritarian, often violent, dual personalities in many of the otherwise hippies of the scene.

designates my notes. / designates important.


Thoughts

While there is no direct connections made between particular actors and particular intelligence operations in the book, it gives a much needed background for approaching the idea that the intelligence community has most likely been using music (and film) for generations to influence culture.

This work leads directly into the work of Jan Irvin of Gnostic Media. Jan makes much more concrete, primary citation backed, connections between the psychedelic and new age movements, Gordon Wasson, Aldous Huxley, and intelligence operations like MKULTRA.

Jan interviewed the author of this book in a two part series on the Gnostic Media podcast episodes 186 and 198. These are available on youtube at the previous links and are archived as mp3s here (186) and here (198).

Less directly connected, but very worthy of inspection, is the work of Hans Utter. He has done research into the nuts and bolts of how music can be used to alter conciousness.

It would have been nice to have footnotes provided, but at least there is a bibliography that can be dug into for further understanding and confirming. Again, I would move from this to Irvin’s work if you want a deeper look.

The research like that found in this book and Gnostic Media have led me to almost completely abandon listening to almost any modern (post 1850/Wagner) music and movies. After seeing how cultural programming (see: Cultural Patterns and Technical Change) works, you become much more aware its vacuousness as entertainment. A corollary begin the avoidance of its deleterious effects.


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