I just finished reading the book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream. I don't do book reviews. What I do instead is give the book a rating, on the scale of one to five, and then make a few comments about it. It's the lazy way, but it works for me.
Anyway, I gave this book 2.5 stars. It wasn't a bad book, but it felt rushed and incomplete, like the author tried to fit in too much information, without really connecting the information in a meaningful way. It's like he took all his research notes and tried to squeeze them all into this book 'as is' without telling an engaging story. Ultimately this book raised more questions than it answered and left me with a feeling of complete information overload, but I did learn a few things.
Basically, the idea is that 1) Laurel Canyon, and by extension Sunset Blvd, was the birthplace of the hippies. 2) That most of the countercultural rock stars that settled there in the 1960s had family connections to military intelligence. There's too many names to list, but a few examples include Jim Morrison, David Crosby, and Frank Zappa. And 3) there was a classified military intelligence facility located in Laurel Canyon, with a fully operational movie studio, which was not made public until modern times. 4) With the hippies, and the birth of psychedelic rock, came the consumption and widespread promotion of psychedelic drugs. There was heavy drug use, promiscuity, and exploration of the occult. To cater to the drug fueled hippies, a drug trafficking industry was born, and with it came prostitution and pornography, and the emergence of hippie communes and satanic cults.
The main theory of this book I think is that the whole drug fueled hippie countercultural phenomena was a PsyOp. It did not happen naturally, but was socially engineered. That there was an agenda, and the hippies were actors in a story they did not write. That possibly the whole thing was this massive mind control experiment. Give people drugs, encourage them to engage in behaviors that are unhealthy and immoral, and convince them that what is happening is good, and that there mind is being expanded and that they are being liberated.
Besides the hippies, the rock stars, the drugs, and the cults, there was also a huge amount of unexplained murders and suicides and all sorts of weird phenomena going on in 1960s Laurel Canyon. Most notable were the Manson murders. But there were many more that occurred long before the hippies even arrived on the scene. Maids and butlers that ended up floating dead in the pool or thrown out of windows. Numerous suicides and car accidents that seem a little fishy. There were huge multi-million dollar mansions from the 1920s that looked like something out of an old black and white horror movie, with peepholes in the eyes of paintings, secret levers with hidden passageways behind book cases, and subterranean tunnel systems all over the Canyon connecting different houses and parks, with evidence for occult activity having occurred.
Anyway, since I've never been to California, and prior to reading this book, didn't really know much about the history of Laurel Canyon, which is located in the Hollywood Hills outside Los Angeles, what I did while reading it was supplement my reading with looking up pictures from the era online, looking at archived photos of the people and houses and specific locations mentioned in the book. I also went on YouTube and looked up some of the bands and listened to a sampling of songs. I was already familiar with a lot of the music groups from the era, was a huge Doors fan back in my teenage years, but some of the music I wasn't too familiar with. Most notably Frank Zappa, which I had heard of, but didn't really listen to, and the band Love, which I don't think I ever listened to, or if I had heard it didn't know who it was. I don't know how I managed to not listen to Love before, because their really good.
This is the best album of there's by far: Love - Forever Changes (1967).
In closing, here's a sample from that album: