Manipulating Culture

It has been four years since alternative media journalist Dave McGowan published Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream. It didn't exactly set the publishing world on fire when it came out, and it isn't exactly doing that now, but it hangs around and slowly gains ground with conspiracy buffs.

McGowan is an amateur investigator, and a writer without formal education, whose previous interest in weird stories had been mostly around UFOs. But then he came upon this odd statistical anomaly.

He started looking into the development of the 1960s music scene, with many venues centered in West Hollywood, as described in the story on the right (Nancy's Great Hangover), and he started looking into the family backgrounds of the people involved. Laurel Canyon was populated with young creative types, who played the clubs along the Sunset Strip and moved still-new Rock'n Roll into a rapidly developing swirl of musical styles, from the jangle rock of The Byrds, through the surreal brooding of The Doors, the progressive rock of Frank Zappa, and the country rock of Buffalo Springfield. Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, The Mamas and the Papas, and many other legends-in-the-making came out of that single musical scene. Many resided in the rugged and leafy Laurel Canyon, just minutes from what in the late 1960s was America's cultural center.

McGowan determined that many of those young people, who became enormously successful and influential in American musical culture, were the children of CIA and military families. And he further determined that may have been influenced to be in Laurel Canyon in the first place because there was a Top Secret CIA research facility there. (That property was recently purchased by musician and Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto.)

Exhibit 1, in McGowan's conspiracy framework, is Jim Morrison, the front man of The Doors, who named his band after LSD pioneer Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception. Morrison was the son of the admiral who had been in charge of the fleet patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin. An incident there, which conspiracy buffs believe to have been a false flag operation, was the trigger that dragged the U.S into the quagmire of the Viet Nam War. It is ironic that the Lizard King, an avatar of anti-establishment convention, was the progeny of a man complicit in sending his son's generation to war.

It only begins there. Laurel Canyon had influential salon keepers, most notably Frank Zappa and David Crosby. Frank Zappa grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, near Edgewood Arsenal, where his father, who had top security clearance, was a chemical warfare specialist. Zappa somehow got unusual attention early on, even showing up on Steve Allen's Tonight Show playing the bicycle as a musical instrument. He represented counter-culture, but listen to any Zappa interview and you'll see his inclinations were not what one might expect. He was a pro-military arch conservative.

Zappa took over a commune known at the time as "The Tree House" that served as a crash pad where the famous bedded down with runaways and others from the area's active street life. According to McGowan, attendees over time included Mick Jagger Marianne Faithfull, members of the Animals, Mark Lindsay from Paul Revere and the Raiders, Alice Cooper who joined Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, Janis Joplin, and Roger McGuinn and Mike Clarke from the Byrds. LSD guru Timothy Leary was there, according to reports, as were George Harrison and Ravi Shankar.

David Crosby's soirees are legendary - the kind that only a trust fund kid could host.

David Van Cortlandt Crosby is the progeny of American aristocrats from the Van Cortlandt and Van Rensselaer families. Van Ressselaers founded the Dutch West Indies Company, and since the 1600s have held positions of prominence in all aspects of American governance and military leadership. Ditto the Van Cortlandts. That means that Crosby's ancestors were closely associated with the African slave trade.

In McGowan's thesis, Laurel Canyon in the late 1960s was a place of avant garde salons, charismatic charlatans (including Charles Manson) with secretive agendas, and LSD. Central to the premise was the savant Owsley Stanley, who is notable as the largest private producer of LSD in history. Stanley had become involved in LSD research being done at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC. He wasn't a researcher, but rather a 15-year old test subject in the CIA's MK-Ultra program.

Stanley was something of a genius, who eventually came to California to work at Jack Parson's Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL). That cutting edge research facility was led by a founder with connections to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, Church of Satan founder Anton Lavay, and the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. Crowley allegedly documented the first encounter with a Grey alien, if that's what the entity Lam was, which was conjured up through Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) rituals. Parson's was allegedly the first to encounter the Nordic alien race.

Owsley Stanley became the soundman for the Grateful Dead, which in the conspiracy world was a band whose reason for being was to encourage the creation of a "Hippie Movement" to protest the War in Viet Nam. The idea was that the CIA used all of the well-placed, well-resourced Laurel Canyon people to create a Hippie icon, a type of straw man so ineffectual and ridiculous that they would undermine the anti-war movement.

If that was the goal, it may not have worked. Timothy Leary inveighed the troops to "Turn on, tune in, drop out" for the purpose of creating an army of "Dead Heads". Many historians would argue that anti-war demonstrations eventually made continuance of the War in Viet Nam impossible.

That only touches upon McGowan's treatise, which presents a raft of other Laurel County celebrities with connections to military intelligence and defense industry groups. My guess is that there is probably some truth to all of it, no absolute truth to any. As a child of that era, I know that messages were sent and received that stayed with segments of the Baby Boomer population for decades, and resonate to this day.

Here is an interview with McGowan that won't convince you that anything he says is real, but at least gives him the opportunity to use his words.-RAR

Nancy's Great Hangover

One of my favorite websites is The Great Hollywood Hangover (click here), which was launched way back in the year 2000. It is truly great for all kinds of reasons, including that it is a beautiful dinosaur from an early age of personal websites. The primitive level of its design and technology seems perfectly aligned with the authenticity of its purpose, which is to commemorate a wonderful time from long ago - West Hollywood in the late 1960s.

The Hollywood that is being remembered is that which existed along that section of Sunset Boulevard sandwiched between between Beverly Hills and Hollywood proper. The area initially lay outside the corporate boundary of Hollywood, which exempted it from certain legal restrictions, and so it became a hotbed of sub-culture activity. In the 1920s, it was a place where prohibition was violated, and organized crime moved in. They opened night clubs and gambling casinos, and later high profile clubs (Ciro's, the Mocambo, the Trocadero). It was an area where movie people hung out. The storied Chateau Marmont is at its eastern border. Movie people started to avoid the place as it became a tourist destination, but in the '60s it also became a counter-culture magnet, with venues like the Whiskey A-GoGo and The Roxy hosting The Doors, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and every other L.A. band you can think of from that era. And it was special, at least through the eyes of Nancy Deedrick, who was witness and participant to American cultural history.

Deedrick (pictured above, center-right, with her sister Dixie) was an exotic dancer who arrived in West Hollywood, with a sister, about the time The Doors broke into stardom. They were playing at a dive called London Fog on the Strip, but were about to hit the big time. Nancy, who went by the stage name Nancy Seaman, was on her way to becoming the Strip's first dancer to go fully nude. It made her somewhat famous, though she drew plenty of attention since arriving in town with a Groupies nameplate in the back window of her car. Even as an exotic dancer, she entered topless contests and won amateur titles. The Tonight Show became interested in her, but Nancy was conflicted. Her parents back home would not have understood that her life in L.A. was all good fun and good spirits.

Nancy knew everyone, dating the legends of rock. It all left her a little shell-shocked, according to her own extraordinarily honest site. She gave up stripping in the 1970s and moved to Nashville to become a singer-songwriter, surviving for two decades on dreams that didn't work out. She spiraled into emotional and mental problems, all part of what she eventually called "the Great Hollywood Hangover". And then somehow she exorcised her demons and committed to letting others know that they could do it, too.

I was not around to know Nancy Deedrick, though I would come to know people who knew her in those West Hollywood days. She eventually had three children and emerged out of the back end of her long, dark, post-Hollywood period, but with her website she contributed greatly to the documentation of an important time and place in time. And she reaffirmed the notion that young people can be wild and crazy, and leave wonderful memories, which will help when the bills for living a life finally come due.- RAR

Travis Fullerton

That is Travis Fullerton, pictured center in this clipped photograph of Sylvester and the Hot Band, from back in the day. Starting in San Francisco, from 1966 to 1980, Fullerton played drums for bands ranging from Sam the Sham to Graham Nash. He was around during the heyday of West Hollywood Rock, as described by Nancy Deedrick, and we had a mutual friend, the late Buddy Zoloth, who was known to many readers of this site. One of the joys of the late Nancy Deedrick's The Great Hollywood Hangover is using her home page search tool to find people you know. I found Buddy Zoloth, and I found the excerpt below from Fullerton, which is the finest summary I have ever read of our late friend's life.

Some comments about our good friend Buddy Zoloth......I met him when he came out to LA from Florida with Blues Image. I think it was 1970 and after playing around town, they quickly became the house band for Marshall Brevitz's club, Thee Experience, on Sunset. Buddy earned Marshall's trust, managed the bar, then the entire club. By that time, BI had a big hit on their hands with "Ride Captain Ride". I played with various bands at Thee Experience when I met Buddy. His intelligence was one of the first things I noticed about him. His mind worked at a higher "clockrate" than folks around him....he was always three steps ahead in those days. He loved people, he was a great communicator, and boy, did he had fun doing it! So, in the days of English roadies (being the cream of the crop), Buddy was one of the handful of American roadies, that were also experts at their craft. He went on to manage Marshall's new club, Thee Club, but by that time the call of the road was summoning Buddy. After a short stint with Rita Coolidge & Graham Nash's fine band (sorry, I couldn't resist), he joined Stephen Stills with his best friend, Joe Lala. Along with the great keyboardist, Jerry Aiello.......Joe, Buddy, and Jerry became an inseparable trio for years in Hollywood. Buddy and Joe went on to work with Stephen and then Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in their various forms. Years later he was captain of a sloop, based out of Amsterdam, and worked and lived in the Virgin Islands for a while. One year ago, Buddy came to see me and take a little trip on our boat in the Seattle area. We hadn't seen each other for over 20 years, so we had a lot of catching up to do. It was great fun to reminisce although he was greatly weakened by the growing tumor in his kidney. His spirit, curiosity, humor, and intelligence was still evident. A month before he passed away on June 10th, I sent him a mail about some opportunity and he responded with "what have I not done in my life? I've done it all." It's true, Buddy lived the life folks dream about! Those of us lucky enough to have shared the "dream life" with him, will remember him fondly.

Kind Regards, Travis Fullerton

Learn more about Travis Fullerton by clicking here.

Documentary: Capital Radio 604

Musical Defense Against Apartheid

WDIA in Memphis is typically cited as the first radio station in the United States to target its playlist to the "African American" market, though in 1949, when a young B.B. King got an on-air talent job there, it was likely not referenced that way. There was a time when music, via the radio, pushed societal change in the way that GitHub pushes code and technological change today. It is hard to imagine, in our present-day age of media fracture, but there was once a time when a pirate radio voice could move mountains and make history. It happened with WDIA, and on another cultural front it happened across America through XERF-AM, which was broadcast from Ciudad Acuña in Mexico in covered the entire United States. It introduced most of America to Wolfman Jack, and in many ways created a Rock'n Roll radio culture that shaped subsequent generations of people around the world. Radio was once something really special.

Such is the story of Capital Radio 604, a pirate radio station in South Africa that has become the subject of a documentary looking for development and distribution help. Check out the trailer below, which does an excellent job of setting up the story. Until 1991, South Africa was a country in which majority Black populations were restricted to autonomously ruled ghetto regions that kept them apart from one another, and out of the daily lives of the ruling White population. Then an enterprising group of rebels, with the help of the U.K.'s Capital Radio network, and charity sponsor Richard Attenborough CBE, used Apartheid's own restrictions against it, mounting a powerful radio transmitter on land the government couldn't touch. They played the music the government had banned: The Police, Dire Straits, and other stuff that was mainstream fare in most of the world but outlaw thought in South Africa. And they broadcast the political truth of South Africa to the world via short wave radio transmissions.

Capital Radio 604 worked, and it is inspiring to watch this trailer and learn of their story. - RAR

Painter, Lithographer, Musician, Magician, Actor, Champion Golfer

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