Learning how the sausage made is never easy. Disgust, horror, fascination are only some among the feelings we experience as we discover how many of our favorite foods are really made. But what about the songs and culture we consume? How often do we get to see how they’re really made?
Since the time of Plato and his Republic, politics has been understood as essentially downstream from culture. The songs and art we emote with and the stories which capture our hearts and minds shape our affective systems and color our imaginations in ways that are hard to quantify. Indeed, the effects are nearly impossible to measure because they permeate all facets of our being, including the unconscious and automatic dimensions. As a result, the consequences of various cultural phenomena may often only become apparent years after they’ve weaved their magic and cast their spells over generations.
So, why not take a closer look at some of the most popular artists of our times and get to know the wizards behind the magic? In our immediate times, two of global pop superstar Lady Gaga’s spiritual and artistic mentors stand out.
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Take, for example, Fernando Garibay. Known as a Mexican-American Polymath, record producer, songwriter, entrepreneur, author, and academic, Garibay describes himself as someone who teaches creativity and helps pop stars “find themselves.” One of the leading artists behind the artists, Garibay served as a musical mentor for Lady Gaga and now teaches creativity as a skill to World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leaders.
In his own words, Garibay describes his creative relationship with various global pop stars in the following manner: “I am your mirror; I am going to show you the best version of yourself, a version you can’t see because you can’t put a mirror to your brain.”
When it comes to the question of song-writing and the magical art of creating new “hits,” Garibay explained the following in an interview with Gulf Business:
People don’t know what they want. You must show them. Or, more accurately, you must create a reality they have not yet perceived. Show me a part of me I never knew existed, and you have a hit. The way you create reality for people is to author a story that is genuine, that they can buy into, so it becomes their story. The story you’re telling, what you’re wearing, what your video is projecting, must be congruent with your message and identity.
Create that world to be so authentic they want to be like you, hang out with you, or want to have a romantic relationship with you. Hit all those marks and you have something. That’s N.W.A, Beatles, Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. They created entire worlds. What N.W.A. and Prince did is create a reality different to the one where you’re risking your life and fighting off the bad guys. You listen to one song, and you’re immediately transported. Reality shifts, and it connects with audiences from the Middle America to Japan. When art, pop music, film, or any media scales, it’s because you have created an alternate reality for people.
While perhaps little-known by the general population, Fernando is indeed exemplary of the artists behind the artists. Founder of the Garibay Institute, Fernando plays the role of polymath and creativity guru for a new generation of Young Global Leaders, pop stars and “high performance” individuals who desire to transcend the regular “limits” of everyday life and access their deeper “human potential.”
Under the banner of the “Creative Industrial Complex,” the Garibay Institute’s webpage describes itself in the following terms:
“THE CREATIVE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX™ is an ecosystem founded by the Garibay Institute, the first and only research and development institution focused on art, creativity, entertainment (film, gaming, music, experiential) as an instrument for soft power, cultural identity and patrimony, intellectual renaissance, and sustainable economic growth.
The brainchild of renowned hit record producer and polymath Fernando Garibay, the Institute unites global leaders, world-class universities and academicians, financial institutions, and thought leaders with elite members of the creative class to catalyze innovation, empowered dialogue, and cultivate engaged and inspiring icons of the future.
Our research and applied methodologies bring together creative industries’ best practices. We collaborate with an extraordinary network of top artists, performers, producers, influencers/key opinion leaders, financiers, empresarios, intelligentsia, and entertainers. We deliver innovative breakthroughs in creativity, instinct/intuition, and sense literacy™ for organizations, public and private, sovereign and disruptive, for-profit and not-for-profit.”
At this point, we must warn readers: this is a rabbit hole.
Alas, we see and hear so very little about the artists behind the artists, and yet, they’re the far the more interesting and creative ones. Indeed, with more elaborate ideas and refined perspectives, one could argue that they are the real artists and visionaries.
Consider another spin-off of Garibay and his circles: the Liminal Collective. Driven by a 2.0 vision of humanity,itdescribes itself as an elite institution bringing together high performance individuals from the military, entertainment, science and business world:
We assemble bespoke, multi-disciplinary teams to work at the threshold of humanpotential, applying the deep science of elite performance, tapping ancient traditions and breaking convention…
The Liminal Collective’s role is to bring together various high performance individuals who seek to challenge their limits and work at the “threshold of human potential.” Take its intimate and invitation-only “Legends of Ibiza” gatherings. The exclusive get-together is described in the following terms:
An invitation-only, intimate and exclusive gathering for a diverse group of high performers including entrepreneurs, business leaders, athletes, military, music, culture or arts. If you are at the top of your game or looking to increase your human potential, this experience is for you. This immersive journey through creativity, science, technology, music and ancient wisdom is designed to be life-changing.
Interestingly, the collective’s Executive Acheron offers “experiential adventures” that bring together the world’s so-called “elite leaders” so that they can learn to unlock their hidden “human potential.” A description of the exclusive program reads as follows:
A reference to Dante’s infamous journey, we will guide you on an experiential adventure that brings cohorts of the world’s elite leaders together to explore the first principles of humanity. We will infuse the powerful and transformational practices of ancient rites of passage with cutting-edge science and insights, so you can optimize yourself for both life and business. In challenges lie our greatest transformations.
While perhaps seen as a generic term by many, the notion of unlocking one’s deeper “human potential” or hidden reserves is a theme popularized by one of the vanguard counter-cultural institutions and New Age meccas, the Esalen Institute. Pioneering the works of Abraham Maslow, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Sigmund Freud, among others, the notion of expanding one’s human potentials has its roots in a very specific historical development in the modern West, one whose deeper implications remain largely unknown, despite its having shaped generations of artists and thought-leaders across the Western world.
Human Potential
Established in 1962, the Esalen Institute served as vanguard for a new counter-cultural vision of America and the Western world. Specifically, it sought to establish a new religious and spiritual ethic to replace what were regarded as the outdated religious traditions of Platonism and Judeo-Christianity. Among its interests were drug-infused mysticism, psychical research, the integration of Eastern mysticism into American life, and a heavy focus on the “liberating” effects of altered-states of consciousness through chemicals, meditation and various forms of “experiential” learning.
As Jeffrey J. Kripal notes in his Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion:
In 1960 Price went to hear Aldous Huxley deliver a lecture called “Human Potentialities” at the university of California, San Francisco Medical Center. Although “we are pretty much the same as we were twenty thousand years ago,” said Huxley, we have “in the course of these twenty thousand years actualized an immense number of things which at the time for many, many centuries thereafter were wholly potential and latent in man.” He went on to suggest that other potentialities remain hidden in us, and he called on his audience to develop methods and means to actualize them. “The neurologists have shown us,” said Huxley, “that no human being has ever made use of as much as ten percent of all the neurons in his brain. And perhaps, if we set about it in the right wat, we might be able to produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is.” (Kripal., 85)
This notion of “human potential” would go on to inspire more than just an intellectual movement, replete with countless new self-actualization gurus, New Age prophecies, eastern tantric practices and psychedelic liberation schools, all of which would be heralded as a new “religion of no religions.” With generous funding from Lawrence Rockefeller, whose “seed money” would be handed out across California to help found a blossoming new ecosystem of “spiritual” institutions, this new religion of no religions would be one in which America and modern Western civilization would finally liberate itself from the strictures of classical Western philosophy and spirituality.
For, this was an age, we are told, in which Being and becoming were separated. In his book, Kripal references Aldous Huxley’s remarks from his The Doors of Perception:
Istigkeit—wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy—except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged…. a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. (The Doors of Perception., 17-18)
But these were now things of the past, we are told.
As Kripal notes, regarding the advent of new psychedelic proselytizers like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary and others advocating a new “enlightenment of the body”:
As for Watts’ Joyous Cosmology, the subtitle alone suggests that the enlightenment of the body was quickly entering the chemical, and even molecular and genetic, levels through a kind of micromysticism. With Leary, moreover (who co-wrote the foreword to The Joyous Cosmology with his Harvard colleague Richard Alpert), it would not be long before an entire genetic mysticism of DNA stands was set loose in the culture. A very small number of writers, artists, and intellectuals were transforming an entire generation, and they were doing it with what were essentially chemical-spiritual tracts infused, more often than not, with a kind of subtle reductionism of the sacred to the chemical. (Kripal., 123)
Now, mankind would finally have the chance to reunite the material and immaterial, matter and spirit, body and mind, we are told. In Lawrence Rockefeller’s terms, man would now be united in “mind, body and spirit.”
Today, perhaps no artist embodies the new “limitless” ethos of a so-called fully self-actualized self than Marina Abramavić, the renowned Luciferian performance artist. Known as the grandmother of performance art, she is a chief spiritual/creative mentor of Lady Gaga.
Listening to Lady Gaga describe the “limitless human being” that is Abramavić is itself quite revealing.
The “boundless” Marina was famously mentioned in the DNC email leaks as the host of “spirit cooking” soirees attended by Washington movers and shakers, including the likes of John Podesta, whose association with child sex trafficking rings is hardly a taboo in 2023. No less than the likes of Lady Gaga has become a devote of the “Abramavić Method,” which consists of various practices designed to push people to their absolute “limits.”
At this point, we should note that because ideas often take the form of new aesthetic movements, they can often be difficult to analyze or discern. Often expressed in the form of hypnotic rhythms, spectacles, catchy lyrics and cathartic musical performances, songs function much as Plato observed in his Laws over 2000 years ago, that is, as “charms.” For, songs do not take the form of any discrete set of logical propositions or arguments, but rather manifest themselves through a series of “altered states” and emotional transformations conjured by the subtle treatment of imagery, musical rhythms and stories. In most cases, to the degree any particular messages are stated, they remain largely hidden below the deep-structures of our psyche, taking the form of “felt-thoughts,” feel-good melodies and catchy anthems.
Regardless of whether the songs usually suggest any direct course of action, these “felt thoughts” often anchor us to a given set of ideas and emotions, whether we so desire it or not. We hear a line or a lyric and then associate it with a particular mood; and that particular mood becomes associated with a set of thoughts or behaviors. For these reasons, art becomes one of the most difficult things to question or analyze beyond its charming surface, given its effects are so subtle and covert. It also therefore becomes one of the most potentially subversive.
Alas, we find ourselves moved without being able to articulate exactly how or why—and yet the effects are definite, immediate, though often temporary. However, over time, a constant and regular experience of such ethereal charms may exert a seemingly lasting spell over us and numberless other individuals.
Today, it would not be controversial to regard much of what we know as modern pop culture and music as a kind of artificial magiccreated by a group of largely invisible wizards, but the question becomes: is this really new?
In a word: do we really know how the sausage is made?
Riders of the Storm
Ackeridge, Susan. This image of Jim Morrison is from a professional photo shoot. Photo licensed under Creative Commons.
Most of us have probably swayed to the seductive rhythms of “Riders of the Storm” or bobbed our heads to the magical anthems of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” But what exactly have many of us been bobbing our heads to? Many might simply argue: “Who cares? It makes us feel good.” From the Summer of Love to “Chaos Theory,” various fashionable narratives and historicist explanations have shaped the officials story.
While we’ve all been hit with cartoonish depictions of plastic devil horn conspiracy theories and heard the ravings of many a suburbanite conservative mom warning about “the devil’s music,” the actual story of rock and modern music is indeed a fascinating and rarely explored story. Sure, legend and whispers about occult influences have always floated around, but in most cases the reaction has been to simply shrug one’s shoulders or laugh off whatever possible connections and/or negligible influences they may have had.
However, in 2023, with Satanic and Luciferian imagery now essentially serving as a hallmark of modern pop music (if we’ve even bothered to pay attention), and that in light of the Jeffrey Epstein revelations which exposed that large swaths of our political elite are beholden to pedophile blackmail rings, curiosity has understandably grown: where exactly does all the Luciferian jesting and satanic trolling come from?
And is it only just that, trolling?
Marina Abramović and Lord Jacob Rothschild behind “Satan summoning his Legions” (1796-1797) by Sir Thomas Lawrence
No doubt, some of it is trolling by would-be contrarians who have nothing better to do. But the curiosity of some diligent researchers has shown that it’s by no means all jest… Take an avid investigator of conspiracy theories like Jules Evans. With a tendency to reject any kind of global conspiracy or cartoonish plastic devil horn variety of narrative, Evans explores the history and profile of one of the chief “artists behind the artists” of the 1960s rock, drug, sex counter culture: Aleister Crowley. In his piece “Crowley’s Children,” Jules explores the Crowleian and occult influences on the 1960s counter-culture in an unusually sober and artistically gratifying way.
He begins by simply pointing out a few peculiar “tells”:
His [Crowley’s] influence is huge. It turns out all those nutty Christian evangelists who warned that rock and roll is demonic were right. The wafer of pop music is soaked in the occult, particularly in Aleister Crowley’s highly egotistical version of it.
So, a quick magickal mystery tour:
Crowley appears on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. John Lennon once said ‘The whole Beatles thing was do what you want, you know?’
sgt-pepper-crowley
According to Jules, Crowley’s effigy even appears on one of the Doors albums:
A statue of him also appears on the cover of the Doors’ album, Doors 13. The Doors admired Crowley as someone who’d ‘broken through to the other side’, and who was a master of anarchic showmanship. Jim Morrison once said, in very Crowley-ite words: ‘I’m interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning.’
doors_aleister
Jimmy Page was a huge Crowley fan, and bought his house next to Loch Ness. Crowley’s famous motto, ‘Do What Thou Wilt’, was embossed on the vinyl of Led Zeppelin III.
The Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull were into Crowleian magic through the film-maker Kenneth Anger – hence their album His Satanic Majesties and their song Sympathy for the Devil. Jagger also made the soundtrack to Anger’s film, Invocation to my Demon Brother, while Marianne Faithful appeared in Anger’s Lucifer Rising, which starred a future member of the Manson Family.
CIS:S.468-1984
Speaking to former Blondie bassist turned scholar on the occult, Gary Lachman, concerning occult influences on the rock n’ roll scene—and Crowley’s “do as thou whilst” ethos in particular— Evans writes:
This new aeon would be, writes Lachman, ‘a time of unconstrained personal freedom’, in which a handful of supermen (led by Crowley) would perfect their wills and become gods. ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ for the supermen. They will delight in ‘wines and strange drugs’ which ‘shall not harm ye at all’, as well as every kind of sexual excess. Meanwhile, the rest of humanity, ‘the slaves’, shall be made to serve the supermen. ‘Compassion is the vice of kings’, Aiwass told Crowley. ‘Stamp down the wretched and the weak.’
Crowley was excited, though perhaps not surprised, to discover he was the Messiah of the New Age. He tried to usher in the New Age with magic rituals, both private ones (long orgies of sex, drugs and magic) and public ones – most famously, a ‘Rite of Eleusis’ which he organized in London in 1910, where participants took peyote, danced to bongoes and listened to Crowley declaiming his magickal poetry. This was, I think, the first hallucinogenic rave of the modern age.
According to author, historian and researcher David McGowan and his Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops and the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, super groupie Pamela Des Barres noted that he [Morrison] had, along with consuming all things Crowley, also “read all he could about incest and sadism.”
As McGowan writes:
“Like Hendrix, Morrison had been an avid student of the occult, with a particular fondness for the work of Aleister Crowley. According to super-groupie Pamela Des Barres, he had also “read all he could about incest and sadism.” (McGowan., 32)
However, on a higher level, McGowan notes that Jim Morrison was a particularly curious and interesting individual who rose to the crests of the counter-cultural tsunami as the mysterious lead singer of The Doors.
Named after Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, whichoutlined a new vision of an enlightened humanity dissolving old bonds and accessing a new realm of hidden “human potential,” The Doors would quickly serve as the musical gateway helping new generations of young people to break on through to “the other side.”
Speaking specifically on Morrison, McGowan notes a few curious facts about the mysterious Lizard King, especially his family background:
Curiously enough though, the self-proclaimed “Lizard King” has another claim to fame as well, albeit one that none of his numerous chroniclers will feel is of much relevance to his career and possible untimely death: he is the son, as it happens, of the aforementioned Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who would go on to lead the US Tonkin gulf incident that would be used to accelerate the Vietnam war.
McGowan reminds his readers:
For the record, the Tonkin Gulf incident appears to differ somewhat from other alleged provocations that have driven this country to war. This was not, as we have seen so many times before, a “false flag” operation (which is to say, an operation involves Uncle Sam attacking himself and then pointing an accusatory finger at someone else). It was also not, as we have also seen on more than one occasion, an attack that was quite deliberately provoked. No, what the Tokin Gulf Incident actually was, as it turns out, is an “attack” that never took place at all. The entire incident, as has been all but officially acknowledged, was spun from whole cloth. (Ib., 11)
As McGowan explains:
And so it is that, even while the father is actively conspiring to fabricate an incident that will be used to massively accelerate an illegal war, the son is positioning himself to become an icon of the “hippie” anti-war crowd. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. It is you know, a small world and all. And it is not as if Jim Morrison’s story is in any way unique. (Ib., 13)
Jim Morrison’s father was none other than US Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, a high ranking military official who oversaw one of the military industrial complex’s most notorious psyops.
But stranger things have happened.
Jim Morrison and his father George Stephen Morrison on the bridge of the USS Bon Homme Richard (1964)
However, referencing the curious background of the Laurel Canyon artists who seemed to always hail from military and intelligence establishment families, McGowan notes:
At the very beginning of this journey, it was noted that Jim Morrison’s story was not “in any way unique.” That, however, is not exactly true. It is certainly true that Morrisson’s family background did not differ significantly from that of his musical peers, but in many other significant ways, Jim Morrison was indeed a most unique individual, and quite possible, the unlikeliest rock star to ever stumble across a stage.
Morrison essentially arrived on the scene as a fully developed rock star, complete with a backing band, a stage persona and an impressive collection of songs—enough, in fact to fill the Doors’ first few albums.
How exactly he reinvented himself in such a radical manner remains something of a mystery, since before his sudden incarnation as a singer/songwriter, James Douglass Morrison had never shown the slightest interest in music. None whatsover. He certainly never studied music and could neither read nor write it. By his own account, he never had much of an interest in even listening to music. He told one interviewer that he “never went to concerts—one or two at most.” And before joining the Doors, he “never did any singing. I never even conceived of it.(Ib., 128)
McGowan then continues:
So here we had a guy who had never sang, who had “never even conceived” of the notion that he could open his mouth and make sounds come out, who couldn’t play an instrument and had no interest in learning such a skill, and who had never much listened to music or been anywhere near a band, even just to watch one perform, and yet he somehow emerged, virtually overnight, as a fully formed rock star who would quickly become an icon of his generation. Even more bizarrely, legend holds that he brought with him enough original songs to fill the first few Doors’ albums. Morrison did not, you see, do as other singer/songwriters do and pen the songs over the course of the band’s career; instead, he allegedly wrote them all at once, before the band was ever formed. As Jim once acknowledged in an interview, he was “not a very prolific songwriter. Most of the songs I’ve written I wrote in the very beginning, about three years ago.”
In fact, all of the good songs that Morrison is credited with writing were written during that period,—the period during which, according to rock legend, Jim spent most of his time hanging out n the rooftop of a Venice apartment building consuming copious amounts of LSD. This was just before he hooked up with Ray Manzarek to form The Doors. Legend also holds, strangely enough, that the chance meeting occurred on the beach, though it seems far more likely that the pair would have actually met at UCLA, where both attended the university’s rather small and close-knit film school. (Ib., 128-129)
With that said, McGowan notes that in reality, none of the members of The Doors had any previous band experience:
It wasn’t just Morrison who was, in retrospect, a bit of an oddity; the entire band different from other Laurel Canyon bands in a number of significant ways. As Vanity Fair once noted, “The Doors were always different.” All four members of the group, for example, lacked previous band experience. Morrison and Manzarek, as noted, were film students, and drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Kreiger were recruited by Manzarek from his Transcendental Medication class—which is, I guess, where one goes to find musicians to fill out of one’s band. That class, however, apparently lacked a bass player, so they did without—except for those times when they used session musicians and then claimed that they did without.
According the band’s producer, Paul Rothchild:
The Doors weren’t great live performers musically. They were exciting theatrically and kinetically, but as musicians they didn’t make it; there was too much inconsistency, there was too much bad music. Robby would be horrendously out of tune with Ray, John would be missing cues, there was bad mic usage too, where you couldn’t hear Jim at all. (Id., 131)
But who was Paul Rothchild?
Well, as McGowan informs us:
Yet another curious character to take up residence in Laurel Canyon was producer Paul Rothchild, who played a key role in shaping the sound of both the Doors and Love. In June 1981, Sports Illustrated publisher Philip Howlett penned a short piece to introduce readers to new writer Bjarne Rostaing:
Born in Lincoln, N.Y., Rostaing grew up in various places in Connecticut, where he attended what he recalls as an even dozen schools. “I got my B.A. and master’s in English from the University of Connecticut,” he says. “Then I did part of a Ph.D. at the University of Washington before going into the Army Intelligence Corps in 1959. We had Paul Rothchild, who later became producer for the Doors and Janis Joplin, to give you some idea of what the unit was like.’” (Ib., 101)
McGowan muses on one of those open secrets in the “entertainment” world:
It was, in all likelihood, like countless other intelligence units designed to churn out shapers of public opinion, whether actors, novelists, newsmen, or, in this case, sportswriters and producers of popular music. It is quite shocking, of course, to learn that the handler of two of Laurel Canyon’s most influential and groundbreaking bands had a background in intelligence work. Apparently, the search is still on for anyone of any prominence in the Laurel Canyon scene who didn’t have direct connections to the intelligence community. (Ib., 102)
As if not already obvious, readers should be warned that McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream is a seemingly never-ending rabbit hole in which one can venture deeper, and deeper and deeper.
More Weird Scenes?
The list of members belonging to Laurel Canyon acts with military and intelligence backgrounds is almost “limitless.”
As the forward of Weird Scenes notes:
Consider, for example, “Papa” John Philips, who penned the smash hit San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) imploring thousands of runaways to make bacchanal-laced pilgrimages to the City by the Bay. The son of a Marine Corps captain, Philips was among the more prominent fixtures of Laurel Canyon who had a particularly interesting interrelationship with the military machine. (Ib., 2)
As McGowan later remarks in the book :
“Papa” John Phillips, more so than probably any of the other illustrious residents of Laurel Canyon, will play a major role in spreading the emerging youth “counterculture” across America. His contribution will be twofold: first, he will co-organize the famed Monterey Pop Festival, which, through unprecedented media exposure, will give mainstream America its first real look at the music and fashions of the nascent hippie movement. Second, Phillips will pen an insipid song known as San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair), which will quickly rise to the top of the charts. Along with the Monterey Pop Festival, the song will be instrument in luring the disenfranchised (a preponderance of whom will be underage runaways) to San Francisco to create the Haight-Ashbury phenomenon and the famed 1967 Summer of Love.
Before arriving in Laurel Canyon and opening the doors of his home to the soon-to-be famous, the already famous, and the infamous (such as Charlie Manson, whose “Family” also spent time at the Log Cabin and at the Laurel Canyon home of “Mama” Cass Elliot, which, in case you didn’t know, sat right across the road from the Laurel Canyon home of Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here), John Edmund Andrew Phillips was, shockingly enough, yet another child of the military/intelligence complex. The son of the US Marine Corp Captain Claude Andrew Phillips and a mother who claimed to have psychic and telekinetic powers, John attended a series of elite military prep schools in the Washington, DC area, culminating in an appointment to the prestigious US Naval Academy at Anapolis. (Id., 16)
With ready-made anthems calling a new generation to participate in events that would crystallize a new counter-cultural movement in which experimentation with “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll” would be heralded as the new magic door to an age of “liberation,” and all that with a curious secret military facility and laboratory situated atop Lookout Mountain and overlooking the entire Laurel Canyon, perhaps it was fair for McGowan to be at least a little curious.
Naturally, the Doors and the Mamas and the Papas were not the only acts whose central members had direct connections to high level US Military and intelligence operatives. As McGowan observes, virtually every act out of Laurel Canyon did. And this was the true cradle of the hippie dream, which is curiously usually overlooked in the official story. Unfortunately, the list of lead figures in the Laurel Canyon music scene spawned from shady intelligence and military families would take some time to exhaust.
As another example, McGowan notes:
Like the Lizard King’s dad, Zappa, Sr. was a cog in the intelligence community’s dark machinations; Francis Zappa was a chemical warfare specialist with a top security clearance at the Edgewood Arsenal near Baltimore, Maryland. Some readers might recognize Edgewood as the location of ominous mind control experiments conducted by the CIA under the rubric of MK-ULTRA. (Id., 2)
As McGowan notes the existence of a secret military laboratory and film studio perched above Laurel Canyon had been established over 20 years before any of the future rock stars would arrive.
McGowan notes:
The facility retained as many as 250 producers, directors, technicians, editors, animators, etc., both civilian and military, all with top security clearances—and all reporting to work in a secluded corner of Laurel Canyon. Accounts vary as to when the facility ceased operations. Some claim it was in 1969, while others say the facility remained in operation longer. In any event, by all accounts the secret bunker had been up and running for more than twenty years before Laurel Canyon’s rebellious teen years, and it remained operational for the most turbulent of those years. (Ib., 56)
So, remarks McGowan the following concerning the happenstance arrival of high-level industrial complex officials’ children to the curious location that would go on to spawn the children of the counter-culture, such as Jim Morrison and Frank Zappa:
Though almost all of you hail from the Washington, DC area, you now find yourselves on the opposite side of the country, in an isolated canyon high above the city of Los Angeles, where you are all clustered around a secret military installation. Given his background in research on atomic weapons, your father is probably familiar to some extent with the existence and operations of Look Mountain Laboratory, as is the father of your kindergarten friend. (Ib., 60)
For those curious, McGowan explains that Lookout Mountain Laboratory was a:
Facility that remained unknown to the general public until the early 1990s, though it had long been rumored that the CIA operated a secret movie studio somewhere in or near Hollywood. Film maker Peter Kuran was the first to learn of its existence, through classified documents he obtained while researching his 1995 documentary Trinity and Beyond. And yet, even today, nearly twenty years after its limited public disclosure, one would have trouble finding even a single mention of this secret military intelligence facility anywhere in “conspiracy” literature (Ib., 56)
At one point in the book, McGowan addresses his critics who might accuse him of cleverly assorting factoids to fabricate a baseless conspiracy theory:
It is fairly easy to gather together a few different isolated facts and use them to paint a much different portrait of these artists and pen an impassioned defense of any of them… But what I ask is that you try to stand back and take in the big picture, and then ask yourself the following question: Exactly how many coincidences does it take to make a conspiracy? (Ib., 60)
McGowan argues:
Let’s suppose, hypothetically speaking, that you happen to be Jim Morrison and have recently arrived in Laurel Canyon and now find yourself fronting a band that is on the verge of taking the country by storm. Just a mile or so down Laurel Canyon Boulevard from you lives another guy [Frank Zappa] who also recently arrived in Laurel Canyon, and who also happens to front a band on the verge of stardom. He happens to be married to a girl that you attended kindergarten with, and her dad, like yours, was involved in atomic weapons research and testing (Admiral George Morrison for a time did classified work at White Sands). Her husband’s dad, meanwhile, is involved in another type of WMD research: chemical warfare. (Ib., 59)
But McGowan can go on for a pretty long time:
Another of those icons, and one of Laurel Canyon’s most flamboyant residents, is a young man by the name of David Crosby, founding member of the seminal Laurel Canyon band the Byrds, as well as, of course, Crosby, Stills & Nash. Crosby is, not surprisingly, the son of an Annapolis graduate and WWII military intelligence officer, Major Floyd Delafield Crosby. Like others in this story, Floyd Crosby spent much of his post-service time traveling the world. Those travels landed him in places like Haiti, where he paid a visit in 1927, when the country jut happened to be, coincidentally of course, under military occupation by the US Marines. One of the Marines doing that occupying was a guy we met earlier by the name of Captain Claude Andrew Phillips.
But Crosby is much more than just the son of Major Floyd Delafield Crosby. David Van Cortlandt Crosby, as it turns out, is a scion of the closely intertwined van Cortlandt, van Schuyler and van Rensslaer families. And while you’re probably thinking, “the Van Who family?”, I can assure you that if you plug those names in over at Wikipedia, you can spend a pretty fair amount of time reading up on the power wielded by this clan for the last, or, two-and-a-quarter centuries or so. (Ib., 17-18)
As McGowan mentioned, the Byrds were a seminal group in the Laurel Canyon scene, and yet, a very unlikely one:
Richie Unterberger noted in Turn! Turn! Turn! that the guys in the Byrds “had barely known each other before getting thrown into the studio, were still learning electric instruments, and in a couple of cases had never really even played their assigned instruments at all. Actually, Michael Clarke didn’t even have a instrument to start with; on his first rehearsals, and even some recording sessions, he kept time on carboard boxes.
Gene Clark, though by far the most gifted songwriter in the band and a talented vocalist as well, could barely play his guitar and so was relegated to banging the tambourine, which was Jim Morrison’s (and various non-musically inclined members of the Partridge Family’s) instrument of choice as well. David Crosby, tasked with rhythm guitar duties, wasn’t much better. Crosby himself admitted, in his first autobiography (does anyone really need to write more than one autobiography, by the way?), that, “Roger was the only one who could really play.”
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Carl Franzoni perhaps summed it up best when he declared rather bluntly, that, the Byrds’ records were manufactured.” The first album in particular was an entirely engineered affair created by taking a collection of songs by outside songwriters and having them performed by a group of nameless studio musicians (for the record, the actual musicians were Glenn Campbell on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electronic piano, and Jerry Cole on rhythm guitar), after which the bands trademark vocal harmonies, entirely a studio creation, were added to the mix. (Ib., 134-135)
But we could go on for a very long time.
At this point, we can observe that many historians of the 1960s counter-cultural revolution have noted that the intelligence institutions and entrenched Anglo-American spy agencies had long deemed the anti-war rebellion of young people as one of the biggest threats to official government policy by the American ruling class, intelligence agencies and military industrial complex.
Having more than outlined the countless “synchronicities” and fortuitous encounters that would give rise to the Laurel Canyon groups, McGowan asks a fair question:
As the story is usually told, the 1960s countercultural movement posed a rather serious threat to the status quo. But if that were truly the case, then why was it that the “pillars of the establishment,” to use Unterberger’s words, initially launched the movement? Why was it “the man” that signed and recorded these artists? And that heavily promoted them on the radio, on television, and in print? And that set them up with their very own radio station and their very own monthly magazine?
It could be argued, I suppose, that this was simply a case of corporate America doing what it does best: making a profit off of anything and everything. Blinded by greed, a devi’s advocate might say, the corporate titans inadvertently created a monster. The question that is begged by that explanation however, is why, after it had become abundantly clear that a monster had allegedly been created, was nothing done to stop the growth of that monster? Why did the state not utilize its law enforcement and criminal justice powers to silence some of the most prominent countercultural voices?
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The literature is littered with mentions of various rock stars receiving their draft notices, but those mentions are invariable followed by amusing anecdotes about how said people fooled the draft board by pretending to be gay, or pretending to be crazy, or pretending to be otherwise unfit for service. Of course, if it had really been that easy to pull the wool over the draft board’s eyes, then Uncle Sam probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with all those bodies to send over to Vietnam. The reality is that thousands of young men across the country tried those very same tricks, but they only ever seemed to work for the Laurel Canyon crowd. (Ib., 154-155)
We could go on for a very long time.
At this point, we can observe that through culture, ideas once considered taboo or subversive have often become the norm by seemingly magical means. What exactly lies behind this slew of synchronicities, we’ll perhaps never fully know. But what is apparent is that this “magic” does indeed have a definite structure and pattern. And the wizards and their spells are not beyond any degree of comprehension. But our little journey begs the question: if the popular culture consumed by the general population is actually a kind of artificial magic, then what does the real thing look like today? In a word: what does real magic look like?
I grew up as a big fan of The Doors and Love, both who were on Elektra Records under Paul A Rothchiild. I think that these groups may have been influenced by Domenico Scarlatti, particularly his Harsichord pieces in minor chords. Or, I guess I should say, Elektra Records and Paul A Rothchild and the Military families behind the Doors and Love may have been influenced by Scarlatti. I particularly like his darker and more melodic pieces.
Bach Air on G string
I grew up as a big fan of The Doors and Love, both who were on Elektra Records under Paul A Rothchiild. I think that these groups may have been influenced by Domenico Scarlatti, particularly his Harsichord pieces in minor chords. Or, I guess I should say, Elektra Records and Paul A Rothchild and the Military families behind the Doors and Love may have been influenced by Scarlatti. I particularly like his darker and more melodic pieces.