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25 reviews for:
Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream
Nick Bryant, David McGowan
3.21 AVERAGE
25 reviews for:
Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream
Nick Bryant, David McGowan
3.21 AVERAGE
While a lot of this stuff is likely true, it comes off as Qanon level garbage. Lots of conjecture and full of coincidences but lacking in compelling proof of anything. At times McGowan makes huge leaps in logic to tie two unrelated facts together and at others will make conclusions out of a single fact where millions of other conclusions are also equally plausible. For example, the fact that Jimi Hendrix was in the 101st Airborne Division doesn't even deserve mentioning and proves nothing but that McGowan doesn't actually know anything about the military. It certainly doesn't prove that Hendrix was a military intelligence asset. Tom O'Neill's Chaos is a far better book on the subject that does more to back up some of the claims in this book than it does itself. Not giving it one star and keeping it off my books-for-idiots shelf but only because of O'Neill's book. Writing like this is dangerous, even if you're right sometimes.
The best thing I can say about this is that it served as a pointer to some projects I was unaware of.
Everything else is just outrageous. Main source seems to be wikipedia and the author is proud of that. It is written laughably badly with many, MANY 'is that a coincidence or what' and 'but I'm sure that that's nothing' and similar terms mixed in. It also has no goal. It's just a bunch of info with some imaginary conclusions that lead absolutely nowhere, what's the point of this book? Because it felt like I was reading author's therapy notes justifying him leaving the hippie music behind.
One of the main points seemed to be that many people who gained popularity in the Laurel canyon had parents who were in the military, so that, according to the author, means that the whole hippie movement was some kind of a government orchestrated thing? But no, that was less than 30 years after the end of WWII, it's only logical, people go to war, gain new ranks and so on, don't piss me off. Even if that is true, do you think that the government would approve CSN's horrible 'hot dog' album? I doubt it.
In short: terrible, if you want to save yourself the rage that you'll experience, avoid this at all costs.
Everything else is just outrageous. Main source seems to be wikipedia and the author is proud of that. It is written laughably badly with many, MANY 'is that a coincidence or what' and 'but I'm sure that that's nothing' and similar terms mixed in. It also has no goal. It's just a bunch of info with some imaginary conclusions that lead absolutely nowhere, what's the point of this book? Because it felt like I was reading author's therapy notes justifying him leaving the hippie music behind.
One of the main points seemed to be that many people who gained popularity in the Laurel canyon had parents who were in the military, so that, according to the author, means that the whole hippie movement was some kind of a government orchestrated thing? But no, that was less than 30 years after the end of WWII, it's only logical, people go to war, gain new ranks and so on, don't piss me off. Even if that is true, do you think that the government would approve CSN's horrible 'hot dog' album? I doubt it.
In short: terrible, if you want to save yourself the rage that you'll experience, avoid this at all costs.
informative
dark
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
dark
medium-paced
This was an interesting book. I am not quite sure of what to think about the information presented. Does it seem to be a strange coincidence that so many people from Laurel Canyon who involved in the music industry have family members in the military and intelligence services? Yes, but the military/intelligence apparatus at that time was large, considering the years in which all of those musicians were growing up were within 20 years of WWII. The implied thesis is that all of these people (Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Gram Parsons, Gene Clarke, etc.) were either knowingly or unknowingly part of a plot to derail support for the antiwar movement by shifting the perception of the people involved from being young, intelligent, clean-cut college students to drug addled hippies. I am not sure the book has the evidence to prove that, but the idea is interesting. The parts of the book I found much more interesting were those about The Monkees (even though they are criticized as being a band created for television, their origins were not that much different than the other bands in Laurel Canyon at the time) and the amount of time and number of people Charles Manson ran around with in that particular community. Everyone knows about his involvement with Dennis Wilson, but apparently many more people also recorded demos of his music and hours worth of his conversations.
Densely packed with wild details but I don't care about the people involved enough to wade through the whole thing
this book, although easy to see as congested with singular kept notions of an author’s ideas based around the popular musicans of this era, still managed to derail my own ideas and information that i had of said musicians as well. interesting novel nonetheless.
This book is a history of sorts about the 60s and 70s music/movie scene centering in and around Laurel Canyon and the Hollywood Hills in LA. The author is a noted conspiracy theorist yet this book seems well-researched and is certainly very readable. The eeriest connection throughout is that there appears to be almost this "six degrees of Charles Manson" with everyone mentioned. The occult/hippie/mass murder leader was everywhere.
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
McGowan here is at his sloppiest and most smug. While I’m inclined to believe his thesis— that, as they have many times in the past and most assuredly continue to do, the US state and intelligence apparatus used and manipulated mass culture through media, music, and money— McGowan doesn’t help himself with how he chose to write his final book. Unfortunately less rigorous than Programmed to Kill, this book brings up many interesting and worthwhile questions and connections, but smugly let’s them sit idly by while it breaks the fourth wall and looks at the reader knowingly. I wish he had composed this in a more scholarly manner.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Child death, Incest, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Mass/school shootings, Murder, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Toxic friendship, War