Were Your Favorite Musicians From the Sixties CIA Assets?
Too many coincidences is not a coincidence
The music scene that sprang out of Laurel Canyon in the late sixties was legendary. It produced bands like The Doors, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, The Byrds, CSN, The Mamas & Papas, Amercia, and Jackson Browne.
Most of the bands listed made music synonymous with the hippie movement. But they have something else in common. All these bands have at least one or two members who come from military/intelligence backgrounds.
Jim Morrison’s dad was a US Navy Admiral involved in the ‘Tonkin Gulf Incident.’
Frank Zappa’s dad was a chemical warfare specialist.
Jackson Browne was born in Germany to an American father working in the OSS.
These are just a few of the big names from the Laurel Canyon music scene who had military/intelligence ties. There’s a whole lot more.
Coincidence?
Maybe. Perhaps the Laural Canyon musicians who seemingly rose to fame out of nowhere were just young kids rebelling against their strict military upbringings.
Or maybe it was more sinister. Maybe a lot of the Laural Canyon rockstars were actually just CIA assets.
Thanks to Tom O’Neill’s Chaos we now know that Charlie Manson was a CIA asset used to discredit the counterculture movement.
Could the great bands of Laural Canyon be the same?
David McCowan makes a convincing argument that they were in his book Wierd Scenes Inside the Canyon. He also highlights a ridiculous amount of mysterious deaths that happened in the Canyon around the same time.
Think about it, in the sixties, the anti-war and civil rights movements were gaining real momentum. The movements weren’t started by “hippies.” They were started by professors, students, and other intellectuals.
The hippies just hijacked the movement. At some point, they became tied to these movements. But the hippies didn’t care so much about stopping the war and civil rights. They cared more about taking drugs and dropping out.
None of this is by accident. The CIA wanted to infiltrate these movements and turn these protestors into nothing more than self-absorbed naval gazers. Thus weakening the movement and discrediting it in the eyes of many Americans.
Who knows how much of this stuff is true, but it’s a fun conspiracy rabbit hole to go down. If you would like to go down that rabbit hole I suggest reading Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon.
If you want to keep your romantic vision of the hippy movement alive don’t read it.
CIA asset or not, Jim Morrison and The Doors are still one of my favorite bands. As well as a lot of the other music that came out of Laural Canyon in the sixties.