We keep with strange stuff in the music scene for Volume 43, as US author and researcher Dave McGowan guests. Dave was behind the recent series of web articles shining the spotlight on the Laurel Canyon neighbourhood of Los Angeles, which has now become his new book, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon. We ask the question why, of all places, did LC became the birthplace of the counter-culture/ hippie movement of the mid-1960s, rather than San Francisco as is often assumed, and why did a staggering number of the most prominent musicians from that era just happen to congregate in this community?

The waters get muddied when it turns out that LC was home to a covert military intelligence base, and some delving into the backgrounds of the artists reveals that, almost without exception, they came from families connected with arms of the government. The most striking example is the father of The Doors' Jim Morrison, who just happened to be US naval commander at the site of the Gulf Of Tonkin false flag incidents that catapulted America into the Vietnam War.

This raises the alarming question of whether the hippie movement was as organic and grass-roots as has always been believed, or whether it could have all been a cynically manipulated exercise in mass social engineering and mind control.

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