Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon

by David McGowan (2014)

1/10

I just read McGowan’s most famous work, Programmed to Kill and I wrote that it’s “one of the laziest, most cowardly and most tedious compilations of conspiracy theory I’ve ever come across…” This one is not quite as bad but only because it’s shorter. It has the same issue of vague insinuations and unstated hypotheses; McGowan just doesn’t seem to want to be pegged down to any single claim, he prefers to throw a bunch of slop at the wall in hopes that something will stick, for which he can then claim credit.

His main claim here appears to be that most of the L.A. music scene of the 60s and 70s — including such huge bands as The Doors, The Byrds, Frank Zappa and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and also the entire Hippie counterculture — were created by military intelligence in order to water down the anti-war movement. His proof of this is that almost all of the main actors were children of military intelligence officers, they all spontaneously and abruptly coalesced around Laurel Canyon, where secret military labs might be, many of them had no real musical talent, and all of them were able to avoid the draft. Oh also Satanism, there always seems to be Satanism with McGowan.

Some of the basic questions raised by this hypothesis:
-So all of these young 20-something debaucherous libertines were just following daddy’s orders?
-So the military anticipated at least 5-10 years before an unprecendented anti-war movement that they would need to invent something to defuse it?
-So the music scene and the hippies and drugs had a measurable effect on the anti-war movement?

It’s just a very convoluted and very dumb theory. After two books I’ve also noticed that McGowan’s theories tend to implicitly ascribe this almost superhuman intellect and planning and execution to the military and our government, when I’m pretty sure they’re just made up of humans who are probably even dumber than average, just incredibly power-hungry. Like wouldn’t the people capable of executing a plan like this also be capable of winning the Vietnam War? I’m pretty sure those two outcomes — secret creation of an effectual counterculture + losing Vietnam — can’t logically exist side-by-side.

I’m not saying there was not weird stuff going on, but that a bunch of privileged baby boomers all happened to be born to decently high-up WWII officers is not the amazing coincidence McGowan seems to think it is. Does McGowan know that pretty much everyone’s dad back then was in WWII? And that the higher your social class was, the higher the rank of your father? It seems like he doesn’t!

Some of the weirdest stuff McGowan discusses is how little musical talent Jim Morrison or The Byrds had, and how Morrison especially seemed to just have several dozen songs ready for recording by the time he came to Laurel Canyon. So the (unstated) implication (because McGowan almost never explicitly states his implications, imo because he’s a coward) is that there were some powerful people who wanted to make these two bands specifically happen, and that a lot of these guys were actual intelligence assets themselves. There’s a few problems with this:

-No living non-musician can simply engineer a dozen or so timeless classics (in the case of The Doors), and if they could why would they waste this unprecedented power on a frankly stupid scheme to marginally influence youth away from being political.

-Even if David Crosby wasn’t talented, the rest of The Byrds ultimately amounted to basically nothing and Crosby eventually latched onto actually talented musicians to create one of the most famous anti-fascist songs in U.S. history (“Ohio”). So again, whatever “the powers” wanted to accomplish with that one, they failed.

-He’s basically claiming that all of these guys were secret fascists working deep undercover. Okay I guess, but…

-WHY??? Again McGowan never really gets into why he thinks these powers would want to do any of this. Did they really believe that a few bands can meaningfully impact anything? In that case they’re morons.

-Let me put it another way: this plot was never uncovered and thus never stopped, therefore let’s assume they succeeded at their nefarious intentions. What did they even accomplish? Did they keep the antiwar movement from pressuring the government to pull out for a couple extra years? Did they quell the Race Riots of the late 60s/early 70s and the Black Panther Party? Oh wait that was the FBI and Cointelpro. So WHAT DID THIS EVIL PLAN EVEN DO? I’m pretty sure McGowan doesn’t know.

The most annoying part of this, apart from him still pointing out whenever Hitler’s birthday occurs (and in one case, implying being born on Halloween is some sort of indication of something!) is how he just ends up listing basically every musician who ever passed through southern California as some sort of example of the sinister machinations at play. Even if they died like 20-30 years later, or even if they were several degrees removed from some of the main players. Guys like John Denver and Sonny Bono and Phil Hartmann are included on this “list,” although McGowan of course will never state why we should consider their deaths suspicious or evidence of some larger plot. Even if he states, as in the case of Nick Adams, that “everyone believes he was knocked off,” he doesn’t explain why he would have been knocked off.

McGowan clearly believes the sheer quantity of bullshit he shovels will distract people from remembering it’s actually just bullshit. At one point, after a ridiculous digression of a (let’s see if I can get this right) park in NYC that originally had the same name of a house near Laurel Canyon where some murders happened, and was also where some Son of Sam murders may have happened, and there was another park where Son of Sam murders happened that was named after an ancestor of David Crosby, and he had another ancestor whose name is on a road near Laurel Canyon, McGowan wraps it up with, “I have no idea what, if anything, any of that means, but I thought it best that I toss it in the mix.” p.127

I cannot imagine anything lazier than the previous sentence in a work of nonfiction. McGowan is what happens when you don’t incorporate any Marxism into your anti-government paranoia. He even admits he was a fan of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Because liberals have no true understanding of how power works, they are totally unequipped to analyze the inconsistencies in official explanations of various phenomena.

Please don’t be like McGowan. Please don’t read any books by McGowan. He has very little to offer anyone who is actually interested in how power works through the world. I am now going to place this trash book where it belongs, in the garbage.