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

Do you remember Pandora's box on the strip? That, the Whiskey, and the Ivar Theatre, were what drew the musicians to LC, and started the hippie movement. All the music at the time was coming out of London, but LA had a small movement going. Arhtur Lee of Love, Frank Zappa, David Crosby, Steven Stills, Neil Young, the Byrds, three dog night, to name a few, all were grabbing for the brass ring, and giving London, a run for their money. I was there also. We had a light show, Inner Peace, which was eventually sold to Castle Lighting, which became a giant in lighting concerts.

Strange days, a bit before my time, but I love reading that series and the personal recollections as well.

What a shame, that there was an undercurrent of evil running through the sentiment of "all you need is love". If only it could have been pure and the drugs just openers of other dimensions and enhancers of spirituality instead of leading people down the yellow brick road to he city of lethal illusions.

I hope we get another part to read soon!!!!!!!!

Ironic that Sharon Tate's last movie Valley of the Dolls was all about the world of drugs and deception.

Lonnie Frisbee said the whole canyon came alive. and that he heard God

Part XV
June 6, 2009

[link to www.davesweb.cnchost.com]

snip;

The Byrds were the very first folk-rock band to take flight, and the one that achieved the greatest fame, but to many discerning ears, Laurel Canyon’s other folk-rock powerhouse, the Buffalo Springfield, was the more talented band.



In the literature chronicling the 1960s music scene, few stories are repeated more frequently than the legend surrounding the formation of what would later be regarded as perhaps the first ‘supergroup.’ All such accounts unquestioningly retell the story as though it were the gospel truth, seemingly oblivious to the improbability of virtually every aspect of the legend. And curiously, virtually every version of the story contains some form of the word “serendipity,” as though everyone has been copying off the same kid’s homework.



As the story goes, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay, formerly of the Au Go-Go Singers, had recently transplanted themselves to Los Angeles after the breakup of the manufactured folkie group. Stills had been the first to relocate, in August of 1965. Furay flew out to join him in February 1966, after spending a little time working at defense giant Pratt & Whitney, and the two set their sights on putting together a folk-rock band.



Meanwhile, up in Toronto, Neil Young and Bruce Palmer were playing in a band known as the Mynah Birds – a band fronted by an AWOL Navy man known as Ricky James Matthews, who would later morph into funkmeister/torturer/rapist Rick James, but whose real name was James Ambrose Johnson, Jr..

snip;

But let’s just play along and assume that Neil Young and Stephen Stills, each of whom, for some reason, had been dreaming about forming a band with the other, had a random, chance encounter on Sunset Boulevard. In that brief moment in time, a band was formed – or at least 4/5 of a band.



Retiring to the home of Barry Friedman, who would later legally change his name to Frazier Mohawk, the quartet of musicians quickly decided that their newly-formed band would only perform original material. With no less than three singer/songwriter/guitarists on board (Furay, Young and Stills), along with a bass player (Bruce Palmer), all that was needed was a drummer. Three days later, on April 9, 1966, they acquired one, in the form of Dewey Martin, formerly with the Dillards.



The Dillards, as it turns out, had just decided to go back to their acoustic bluegrass roots, so they no longer needed a drummer. They also apparently had no further need for a whole bunch of new electric instruments and stacks of amplifiers, so Dewey, according to legend, brought all of that with him. Because the Dillards, you know, were just going to throw it all away anyway. So now, with the stars all properly aligned, the band was not only complete but they each had shiny new electric instruments to play – and it all had magically come together in just 72 hours.



There was still much work to be done, of course. For one thing, they all had to learn to play those shiny new electric instruments. And they all had to learn to play together as a band. And they had to build up a repertoire of original songs. And they had to rehearse and polish those songs. But not to worry; they had, as we’ll see, at least a couple of hours to work on each of those things.

snip!

As was duly noted in the last installment of this series, the law enforcement community had ample opportunity to silence the muses of the 1960s counterculture. That the state consistently chose not to utilize that power says much about the legitimacy of that counterculture. For if these iconic figures posed a demonstrable threat to the status quo, then why would they not have been silenced? Why, for example, were three members of the Buffalo Springfield – Neil Young, Richie Furay and Jim Messina, along with Eric Clapton, Furay’s wife, the band’s road manager, and nine others – arrested in a drug bust at a Topanga Canyon home, only to then walk away as if nothing had happened? Why was this case, and so many others like it, not aggressively prosecuted?



The state had other means to silence young critics, of course, one of the best being the military draft. As Richie Unterberger noted in Turn! Turn! Turn!, “Most folk rockers (if they were male), like their audience, were of draft age.” But curiously enough, “Very, very few had their careers interrupted by the draft.” Actually, Unterberger appears to just be playing it safe with the “very, very few” wording; after reading through both of Unterberger’s books and numerous other tomes covering similar ground, I have yet to read about any folk rocker whose career was affected by the draft in the 1960s.



What you will find in the literature are numerous mentions of various people receiving their draft notices, but those are invariably followed by amusing anecdotes about how said people beat the draft board by pretending to be gay or crazy. Of course, if it were really that easy to fool the draft board, then Uncle Sam probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with all those bodies to send over to Vietnam.



Hundreds of thousands of young men from all across the country were swept up and fed into the war machine, but not one of the musical icons of the Woodstock generation was among them. How could that be? Should we just consider that to be another one of those great serendipities? Was it mere luck that kept all the Laurel Canyon stars out of jail and out of the military during the turbulent decade that was the 1960s?



Not likely. The reality is that ‘The Establishment,’ as it was known in those days, had the power to prevent the musical icons of the 1960s from ever becoming the megastars that they became. The state, aka corporate America, could quite easily have prevented the entire countercultural movement from ever really getting off the ground – because then, as now, the state controlled the channels of communication.

you are wrong about the Hippy movement. It started in San Francisco with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

the point is..

it started with military intel.

sandoz. leary & the CIA.

And expanding to 20 parts ( maybe ).

[link to www.davesweb.cnchost.com]

This is an epic work .

Some snips for interest :

As was duly noted in the last installment of this series, the law enforcement community had ample opportunity to silence the muses of the 1960s counterculture. That the state consistently chose not to utilize that power says much about the legitimacy of that counterculture. For if these iconic figures posed a demonstrable threat to the status quo, then why would they not have been silenced? Why, for example, were three members of the Buffalo Springfield – Neil Young, Richie Furay and Jim Messina, along with Eric Clapton, Furay’s wife, the band’s road manager, and nine others – arrested in a drug bust at a Topanga Canyon home, only to then walk away as if nothing had happened? Why was this case, and so many others like it, not aggressively prosecuted?

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 launched the movement to begin with? 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 publication? And insured that new clubs sprung up like mushrooms along Sunset Boulevard so that all the new bands would have venues to play?

There are some readers, no doubt, who will say that this was simply a case of corporate America doing what it does so well: making a profit, off of anything and everything. Blinded by greed, the naysayers will claim, the corporate titans inadvertently created a monster. “Move along now folks, there’s nothing more to see here …”

The question that is begged by that explanation, however, is why, after it had become abundantly clear that a monster had allegedly been created, was nothing done to stop the growth of that monster? Why did the state not utilize its law enforcement and criminal justice powers to silence some of the most prominent countercultural voices? And why did the draft board – in every known case, without exception – allow those same voices to skip out on their military service?

Stephen’s childhood was spent in Illinois, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and various parts of Central America, including Costa Rica, El Salvador and the Panama Canal Zone.

At a fairly young age, he attended the Admiral Farragut Military Academy in St. Petersburg, Florida. In later years, his authoritarian manner and military bearing would earn him the nickname “The Sarge.” He joined his first band, the Radars, as a drummer. In his next band, the Continentals, he played the guitar, alongside another young guitarist named Don Felder, who would later turn up in Laurel Canyon as a member of the Eagles, but we’ll get to that later.

By the summer of 1964, he had drifted to New York’s Greenwich Village, where he became fast friends with folkie Peter Torkelson, who was, like so many others in this story, a child of Washington, DC. The two played together briefly as a duo before Torkelson “migrated to Connecticut then Venezuela.” Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. Torkelson would soon show up in Laurel Canyon, as Monkee Peter Tork. Stills would also audition for the show, but his bad teeth and thinning hair would render him unfit for a leading role on prime-time TV.

Bump

Part 16 ( XVI ) is up !!

[link to davesweb.cnchost.com]

Well, this series here has just about extinguished the last of my cherished youthful fantasies .

Bout time I grew up .

Everyone else too , huh ?

There's a guitar leaning on a Marshall stack
Used to sound like the sun on the horizon, now I think we've been had
There's a young girl screaming all the way in the back
Poor kid, she never saw it coming, now she knows she's been had

Watching the label spinning on my turntable
There's no call waiting in my headphones
And every star that shines in the back of my mind
Is just waiting for it's cover to be blown

There's an eardrum bleeding, yeah it's in my head
How could I still be so in love when I know we've been had?

Republicans and Democrats can't give you the facts
Your parents won't tell you 'til you're grown
Every star that shines in the back of your mind
Is just waiting for it's cover to be blown

Flashing the badges, just like the law of averages
Nobody likes 'em, where they're from?
And every star that hides on the back of the bus
Is just waiting for it's cover to be blown

Father along we'll know all about it
Farther along we'll understand why
Cheer up my brother live in the sunshine
We'll understand it all by and by
We'll understand it all by and by

Just type GLP is a in a search engine and see what it brings up.

I have this album (vinyl).
[link to en.wikipedia.org]
I didn't see it mentioned.

I've still got that one too. Came out just before Blind Owl aka Alan Wilson took his Laurel Canyon dirt nap.

:o(

BUMP

Wait!!
That can't be true! I thought the CIA created Frank Zappa's band?

Another conspiracy theory debunked, lol

When something popular reaches the mainstream, there aint no stopping it. If you send law enforcement against it, it will only give it more attention and make it more popular in the eyes of rebellious youth. Common sense.

Also, why would the state of California send law enforcement to squash the counter culture music scene which would become a large source of revenue for the music industry with many popular groups from Cali.


Silence people from exercising their 1st amendment rights?
That could create legal problems and backlash for the state of CA!


Why did they allow countless tens of thousands of others to skip out?

I think the establishment avoided these stars because if they went after them, it would only generate publicity for their refusal to be drafted.

Also, if these music groups & other stars are all CIA fronts, then why the hell did their names appear on the draft to begin with? Guess the CIA forgot to remove their agents names from the draft list?

Your really that gullible?

those are all shit musicians anyway

what about Eric Burdon? him I respect

was he mentioned anywhere?

Hendrix was genius of course, but that story we know already

The Doors and Mama and The Papa's were not shit.
The Doors are the best band to come out of the 1960's, yes even better than the Beatles!

I been following most of these articles since they came out last year. It makes for some decent reading and speculation but in the end, if you actually believe it then it means that pretty much all of Hollywood and the music industry is a giant CIA psyop. That is truly unbelievable and unlikely. So some guy on a website a year ago just figured this all out?
That's laughable!
How are you going to keep tens of thousands of actors and musicians from blowing the whistle?

Also, this supposed "CIA psyop" has got to be the worst conducted psychological operation in the history of mankind. The goal was to...what...turn the population into a bunch of patriotic flag waving zombies who support war and don't ask questions? It had the opposite effect, LOL

One thing I can thank the CIA for is their role in making LSD popular. The world become a much cooler & artistic place after LSD hit the mainstream. LSD has so many positive benefits, I can't compliment it enough. Psychiatrists used to prescribe LSD to mental patients back when it was legal and they saw miraculous changes in the outcome of patients mental health. It's a damn shame LSD is illegal. LSD and DMT should both be made legal for medical use. They're both actually very safe drugs despite the bullshit government propaganda.