Admiral George Stephen Morrison
Inside the LC: The Strange But Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation
By Dave McGowan (2008)
Free PDF: Inside the LC
Book Review
Inside the LC is a collection of blog posts Dave McGowan published in 2008 about the close relationship between the US military intelligence complex and the rock stars who created the hippy rock culture that emerged from the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. As he relates the detailed family histories of various rock stars, it’s uncanny how many of them originated from Washington DC and families with military intelligence backgrounds. A few of them had personal intelligence backgrounds.
Examples include
- Jim Morrison – son of George Stephen Morrison, the admiral piloting the warship involved in the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify the introduction of ground troops into Vietnam.
- Frank Zappa – son of chemical warfare specialist at facility implicated in MKUltra.*
- John Phillips (The Mamas and the Papas) – son of military intelligence officer. By strange coincidence, Philips himself was in Cuba “fighting for Castro” at the time of the Cuban revolution.
- Stephen Stills (The Byrds/Crosby, Stills and Nash) – product of career military family. Stills himself served in Vietnam (presumably either as CIA or Special Operations) prior to the introduction of ground troops.
- David Crosby (The Byrds/Crosby, Stills and Nash) – son of military intelligence officer.
- Jackson Browne – son of OSS** officer.
- Joan Baez – daughter of CIA officer who worked at MIT
- John Denver (aka Henry John Deutschendorft) – son of career Air Force officer stationed at Roswell.
- Emilylou Harris – daughter of career military officer stationed in Washington DC
- Phil Ochs – openly talked about working for CIA. Also happened to be in Chile in 1973 during CIA coup.
McGowan also explores the intelligence links of the movie stars and Rand Corporation*** employees and supporters who lived in Laurel Canyon. Various movie stars worked clandestinely at the CIA’s secret movie studio the Lookout Mountain Laboratory (in Laurel Canyon). McGowan believes it’s no coincidence that the start of the anti-Vietnam War movement in 1965 was quickly followed by a flood of rock stars moving from Washington DC to Laurel Canyon – to rub shoulders with Hollywood actors who worked for the CIA in their spare time. In fact, he makes a strong case that the whole hippy/drug/sex/music scene was engineered by the CIA (and heavily promoted by CIA-controlled corporate media outlets) to lure young people away from the antiwar movement.
About half the book is devoted to the absurd number of freak uninvestigated deaths (including those committed by singer/songwriter Charles Manson and his followers) in Laurel Canyon. Among the suspicious deaths McGowan covers are those of Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass Elliot, James Dean, Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, Brian Jones (Rolling Stones), Ricky Nelson, John Belushi, John Denver, Phil Hartman, Dennis Wilson (Beach Boys) and Jim Morrison.
McGowan also finds it quite strange that a number of these bands came out of nowhere despite having virtually no talent. Jim Morrison, for example, was incarnated virtually overnight as a Sunset Strip rock star with a backing band (which had no prior band experience) and a full repertoire of songs he allegedly wrote before the Doors was even formed. Exactly how he wrote these songs is even more mysterious given that he couldn’t play an instrument or read music, especially given his sudden transformation from a clean cut collegiate conservative to a brooding sex symbol.
*MKUltra – a CIA mind control project that engaged in illegal experimentation on human subjects.
**The Office of Strategic Service (OSS) – the US intelligence agency that morphed into the CIA following World War II
***Rand Corporation – a nonprofit research corporation with close links to the US military-intelligence complex
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