Laurel Canyon

Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation Part I May 8, 2008
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr93.html
http://www.cieliparalleli.com/Politica/la-strana-storia-ma-soprattutto-vera-di-laurel-canyon-e-la-nascita-della-generazione-hippie.html
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-stem-cells-harvested-death.html
http://www.meritfields.com/Texte/musicoftime.html
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_tema.htm

http://www.lawmall.com/jfk.mm/


Melanie Safka, conosciuta come folk singer già nel '67, eccola 40 anni dopo.


"There’s something happening here What it is ain’t exactly clear" Join me now, if you have the time, as we take a stroll down memory lane to a time nearly four-and-a-half decades ago – a time when America last had uniformed ground troops fighting a sustained and bloody battle to impose, uhmm, ‘democracy’ on a sovereign nation. It is the first week of August, 1964, and U.S. warships under the command of U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under attack while patrolling Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf. This event, subsequently dubbed the ‘Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ will result in the immediate passing by the U.S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which will, in turn, quickly lead to America’s deep immersion into the bloody Vietnam quagmire. Before it is over, well over fifty thousand American bodies – along with literally millions of Southeast Asian bodies – will litter the battlefields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. 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 that 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 Tonkin 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. (It is quite possible, however, that the intent was to provoke a defensive response, which could then be cast as an unprovoked attack on U.S ships. The ships in question were on an intelligence mission and were operating in a decidedly provocative manner. It is quite possible that when Vietnamese forces failed to respond as anticipated, Uncle Sam decided to just pretend as though they had.) Nevertheless, by early February 1965, the U.S. will – without a declaration of war and with no valid reason to wage one – begin indiscriminately bombing North Vietnam. By March of that same year, the infamous “Operation Rolling Thunder” will have commenced. Over the course of the next three-and-a-half years, millions of tons of bombs, missiles, rockets, incendiary devices and chemical warfare agents will be dumped on the people of Vietnam in what can only be described as one of the worst crimes against humanity ever perpetrated on this planet. Also in March of 1965, the first uniformed U.S. soldier will officially set foot on Vietnamese soil (although Special Forces units masquerading as ‘advisers’ and ‘trainers’ had been there for at least four years, and likely much longer). By April 1965, fully 25,000 uniformed American kids, most still teenagers barely out of high school, will be slogging through the rice paddies of Vietnam. By the end of the year, U.S. troop strength will have surged to 200,000. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world in those early months of 1965, a new ‘scene’ is just beginning to take shape in the city of Los Angeles. In a geographically and socially isolated community known as Laurel Canyon – a heavily wooded, rustic, serene, yet vaguely ominous slice of LA nestled in the hills that separate the Los Angeles basin from the San Fernando Valley – musicians, singers and songwriters suddenly begin to gather as though summoned there by some unseen Pied Piper. Within months, the ‘hippie/flower child’ movement will be given birth there, along with the new style of music that will provide the soundtrack for the tumultuous second half of the 1960s. An uncanny number of rock music superstars will emerge from Laurel Canyon beginning in the mid-1960s and carrying through the decade of the 1970s. The first to drop an album will be The Byrds, whose biggest star will prove to be David Crosby. The band’s debut effort, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” will be released on the Summer Solstice of 1965. It will quickly be followed by releases from the John Phillips-led Mamas and the Papas (“If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears,” January 1966), Love with Arthur Lee (“Love,” May 1966), Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention (“Freak Out,” June 1966), Buffalo Springfield, featuring Stephen Stills and Neil Young (“Buffalo Springfield,” October 1966), and The Doors (“The Doors,” January 1967). One of the earliest on the Laurel Canyon/Sunset Strip scene is Jim Morrison, the enigmatic lead singer of The Doors. Jim will quickly become one of the most iconic, controversial, critically acclaimed, and influential figures to take up residence in Laurel Canyon. 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 turns out, of the aforementioned Admiral George Stephen Morrison. 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 that. And it is not as if Jim Morrison’s story is in any way unique.

During the early years of its heyday, Laurel Canyon’s father figure is the rather eccentric personality known as Frank Zappa. Though he and his various Mothers of Invention line-ups will never attain the commercial success of the band headed by the admiral’s son, Frank will be a hugely influential figure among his contemporaries. Ensconced in an abode dubbed the ‘Log Cabin’ – which sat right in the heart of Laurel Canyon, at the crossroads of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue – Zappa will play host to virtually every musician who passes through the canyon in the mid- to late-1960s. He will also discover and sign numerous acts to his various Laurel Canyon-based record labels. Many of these acts will be rather bizarre and somewhat obscure characters (think Captain Beefheart and Larry “Wild Man” Fischer), but some of them, such as psychedelic rocker cum shock-rocker Alice Cooper, will go on to superstardom. Zappa, along with certain members of his sizable entourage (the ‘Log Cabin’ was run as an early commune, with numerous hangers-on occupying various rooms in the main house and the guest house, as well as in the peculiar caves and tunnels lacing the grounds of the home; far from the quaint homestead the name seems to imply, by the way, the ‘Log Cabin’ was a cavernous five-level home that featured a 2,000+ square-foot living room with three massive chandeliers and an enormous floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace), will also be instrumental in introducing the look and attitude that will define the ‘hippie’ counterculture (although the Zappa crew preferred the label ‘Freak’). Nevertheless, Zappa (born, curiously enough, on the Winter Solstice of 1940) never really made a secret of the fact that he had nothing but contempt for the ‘hippie’ culture that he helped create and that he surrounded himself with. Given that Zappa was, by numerous accounts, a rigidly authoritarian control-freak and a supporter of U.S. military actions in Southeast Asia, it is perhaps not surprising that he would not feel a kinship with the youth movement that he helped nurture. And it is probably safe to say that Frank’s dad also had little regard for the youth culture of the 1960s, given that Francis Zappa was, in case you were wondering, a chemical warfare specialist assigned to – where else? – the Edgewood Arsenal. Edgewood is, of course, the longtime home of America’s chemical warfare program, as well as a facility frequently cited as being deeply enmeshed in MK-ULTRA operations. Curiously enough, Frank Zappa literally grew up at the Edgewood Arsenal, having lived the first seven years of his life in military housing on the grounds of the facility. The family later moved to Lancaster, California, near Edwards Air Force Base, where Francis Zappa continued to busy himself with doing classified work for the military/intelligence complex. His son, meanwhile, prepped himself to become an icon of the peace & love crowd. Again, nothing unusual about that, I suppose. Zappa’s manager, by the way, is a shadowy character by the name of Herb Cohen, who had come out to L.A. from the Bronx with his brother Mutt just before the music and club scene began heating up. Cohen, a former U.S. Marine, had spent a few years traveling the world before his arrival on the Laurel Canyon scene. Those travels, curiously, had taken him to the Congo in 1961, at the very time that leftist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was being tortured and killed by our very own CIA. Not to worry though; according to one of Zappa’s biographers, Cohen wasn’t in the Congo on some kind of nefarious intelligence mission. No, he was there, believe it or not, to supply arms to Lumumba “in defiance of the CIA.” Because, you know, that is the kind of thing that globetrotting ex-Marines did in those days (as we’ll see soon enough when we take a look at another Laurel Canyon luminary). Making up the other half of Laurel Canyon’s First Family is Frank’s wife, Gail Zappa, known formerly as Adelaide Sloatman. Gail hails from a long line of career Naval officers, including her father, who spent his life working on classified nuclear weapons research for the U.S. Navy. Gail herself had once worked as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development (she also once told an interviewer that she had “heard voices all [her] life”). Many years before their nearly simultaneous arrival in Laurel Canyon, Gail had attended a Naval kindergarten with “Mr. Mojo Risin’” himself, Jim Morrison (it is claimed that, as children, Gail once hit Jim over the head with a hammer). The very same Jim Morrison had later attended the same Alexandria, Virginia high school as two other future Laurel Canyon luminaries – John Phillips and Cass Elliott. “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 (along with Manson associate Terry Melcher) the famed Monterrey 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 Monterrey Pop Festival, the song will be instrumental in luring the disenfranchised (a preponderance of whom are underage runaways) to San Francisco to create the Haight-Asbury 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 the aforementioned 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 street 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 U.S. 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, D.C. area, culminating in an appointment to the prestigious U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis After leaving Annapolis, John married Susie Adams, a direct descendant of ‘Founding Father’ John Adams. Susie’s father, James Adams, Jr., had been involved in what Susie described as “cloak-and-dagger stuff with the Air Force in Vienna,” or what we like to call covert intelligence operations. Susie herself would later find employment at the Pentagon, alongside John Phillip’s older sister, Rosie, who dutifully reported to work at the complex for nearly thirty years. John’s mother, ‘Dene’ Phillips, also worked for most of her life for the federal government in some unspecified capacity. And John’s older brother, Tommy, was a battle-scarred former U.S. Marine who found work as a cop on the Alexandria police force, albeit one with a disciplinary record for exhibiting a violent streak when dealing with people of color. John Phillips, of course – though surrounded throughout his life by military/intelligence personnel – did not involve himself in such matters. Or so we are to believe. Before succeeding in his musical career, however, John did seem to find himself, quite innocently of course, in some rather unusual places. One such place was Havana, Cuba, where Phillips arrived at the very height of the Cuban Revolution. For the record, Phillips has claimed that he went to Havana as nothing more than a concerned private citizen, with the intention of – you’re going to love this one – “fighting for Castro.” Because, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of folks in those days traveled abroad to thwart CIA operations before taking up residence in Laurel Canyon and joining the ‘hippie’ generation. During the two weeks or so that the Cuban Missile Crisis played out, a few years after Castro took power, Phillips found himself cooling his heels in Jacksonville, Florida – alongside, coincidentally I’m sure, the Mayport Naval Station. Anyway, let’s move on to yet another of Laurel Canyon’s earliest and brightest stars, Mr. Stephen Stills. Stills will have the distinction of being a founding member of two of Laurel Canyon’s most acclaimed and beloved bands: Buffalo Springfield, and, needless to say, Crosby, Stills & Nash. In addition, Stills will pen perhaps the first, and certainly one of the most enduring anthems of the 60s generation, “For What It’s Worth,” the opening lines of which appear at the top of this post (Stills’ follow-up single will be entitled “Bluebird,” which, coincidentally or not, happens to be the original codename assigned to the MK-ULTRA program). Before his arrival in Laurel Canyon, Stephen Stills was (*yawn*) the product of yet another career military family. Raised partly in Texas, young Stephen spent large swaths of his childhood in El Salvador, Costa Rica, the Panama Canal Zone, and various other parts of Central America – alongside his father, who was, we can be fairly certain, helping to spread ‘democracy’ to the unwashed masses in that endearingly American way. As with the rest of our cast of characters, Stills was educated primarily at schools on military bases and at elite military academies. Among his contemporaries in Laurel Canyon, he was widely viewed as having an abrasive, authoritarian personality. Nothing unusual about any of that, of course, as we have already seen with the rest of our cast of characters. There is, however, an even more curious aspect to the Stephen Stills story: Stephen will later tell anyone who will sit and listen that he had served time for Uncle Sam in the jungles of Vietnam. These tales will be universally dismissed by chroniclers of the era as nothing more than drug-induced delusions. Such a thing couldn’t possibly be true, it will be claimed, since Stills arrived on the Laurel Canyon scene at the very time that the first uniformed troops began shipping out and he remained in the public eye thereafter. And it will of course be quite true that Stephen Stills could not have served with uniformed ground troops in Vietnam, but what will be ignored is the undeniable fact that the U.S. had thousands of ‘advisers’ – which is to say, CIA/Special Forces operatives – operating in the country for a good many years before the arrival of the first official ground troops. What will also be ignored is that, given his background, his age, and the timeline of events, Stephen Stills not only could indeed have seen action in Vietnam, he would seem to have been a prime candidate for such an assignment. After which, of course, he could rather quickly become – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – an icon of the peace generation. 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 just happened to be, coincidentally of course, under military occupation by the U.S. Marines. One of the Marines doing that occupying was a guy that we met earlier by the name of Captain Claude Andrew Phillips. But David 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 Rensselaer families. And while you’re probably thinking, “the Van Who families?,” 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, oh, two-and-a-quarter centuries or so. Suffice it to say that the Crosby family tree includes a truly dizzying array of US senators and congressmen, state senators and assemblymen, governors, mayors, judges, Supreme Court justices, Revolutionary and Civil War generals, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and members of the Continental Congress. It also includes, I should hasten to add – for those of you with a taste for such things – more than a few high-ranking Masons. Stephen Van Rensselaer III, for example, reportedly served as Grand Master of Masons for New York. And if all that isn’t impressive enough, according to the New England Genealogical Society, David Van Cortlandt Crosby is also a direct descendant of ‘Founding Fathers’ and Federalist Papers’ authors Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. If there is, as many believe, a network of elite families that has shaped national and world events for a very long time, then it is probably safe to say that David Crosby is a bloodline member of that clan (which may explain, come to think of it, why his semen seems to be in such demand in certain circles – because, if we’re being honest here, it certainly can’t be due to his looks or talent.) If America had royalty, then David Crosby would probably be a Duke, or a Prince, or something similar (I’m not really sure how that shit works). But other than that, he is just a normal, run-of-the-mill kind of guy who just happened to shine as one of Laurel Canyon’s brightest stars. And who, I guess I should add, has a real fondness for guns, especially handguns, which he has maintained a sizable collection of for his entire life. According to those closest to him, it is a rare occasion when Mr. Crosby is not packing heat (John Phillips also owned and sometimes carried handguns). And according to Crosby himself, he has, on at least one occasion, discharged a firearm in anger at another human being. All of which made him, of course, an obvious choice for the Flower Children to rally around. Another shining star on the Laurel Canyon scene, just a few years later, will be singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who is – are you getting as bored with this as I am? – the product of a career military family. Browne’s father was assigned to post-war ‘reconstruction’ work in Germany, which very likely means that he was in the employ of the OSS, precursor to the CIA. As readers of my “Understanding the F-Word” may recall, U.S. involvement in post-war reconstruction in Germany largely consisted of maintaining as much of the Nazi infrastructure as possible while shielding war criminals from capture and prosecution. Against that backdrop, Jackson Browne was born in a military hospital in Heidelberg, Germany. Some two decades later, he emerged as … oh, never mind. Let’s talk instead about three other Laurel Canyon vocalists who will rise to dizzying heights of fame and fortune: Gerry Beckley, Dan Peek and Dewey Bunnell. Individually, these three names are probably unknown to virtually all readers; but collectively, as the band America, the three will score huge hits in the early ‘70s with such songs as “Ventura Highway,” “A Horse With No Name,” and the Wizard of Oz-themed “The Tin Man.” I guess I probably don’t need to add here that all three of these lads were products of the military/intelligence community. Beckley’s dad was the commander of the now-defunct West Ruislip USAF base near London, England, a facility deeply immersed in intelligence operations. Bunnell’s and Peek’s fathers were both career Air Force officers serving under Beckley’s dad at West Ruislip, which is where the three boys first met. We could also, I suppose, discuss Mike Nesmith of the Monkees and Cory Wells of Three Dog Night (two more hugely successful Laurel Canyon bands), who both arrived in LA not long after serving time with the U.S. Air Force. Nesmith also inherited a family fortune estimated at $25 million. Gram Parsons, who would briefly replace David Crosby in The Byrds before fronting The Flying Burrito Brothers, was the son of Major Cecil Ingram “Coon Dog” Connor II, a decorated military officer and bomber pilot who reportedly flew over 50 combat missions. Parsons was also an heir, on his mother’s side, to the formidable Snively family fortune. Said to be the wealthiest family in the exclusive enclave of Winter Haven, Florida, the Snively family was the proud owner of Snively Groves, Inc., which reportedly owned as much as 1/3 of all the citrus groves in the state of Florida. And so it goes as one scrolls through the roster of Laurel Canyon superstars. What one finds, far more often than not, are the sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and the sons and daughters of extreme wealth and privilege – and oftentimes, you’ll find both rolled into one convenient package. Every once in a while, you will also stumble across a former child actor, like the aforementioned Brandon DeWilde, or Monkee Mickey Dolenz, or eccentric prodigy Van Dyke Parks. You might also encounter some former mental patients, such as James Taylor, who spent time in two different mental institutions in Massachusetts before hitting the Laurel Canyon scene, or Larry “Wild Man” Fischer, who was institutionalized repeatedly during his teen years, once for attacking his mother with a knife (an act that was gleefully mocked by Zappa on the cover of Fischer’s first album). Finally, you might find the offspring of an organized crime figure, like Warren Zevon, the son of William “Stumpy” Zevon, a lieutenant for infamous LA crimelord Mickey Cohen. All these folks gathered nearly simultaneously along the narrow, winding roads of Laurel Canyon. They came from across the country – although the Washington, DC area was noticeably over-represented – as well as from Canada and England. They came even though, at the time, there wasn't much of a pop music industry in Los Angeles. They came even though, at the time, there was no live pop music scene to speak of. They came even though, in retrospect, there was no discernable reason for them to do so. It would, of course, make sense these days for an aspiring musician to venture out to Los Angeles. But in those days, the centers of the music universe were Nashville, Detroit and New York. It wasn’t the industry that drew the Laurel Canyon crowd, you see, but rather the Laurel Canyon crowd that transformed Los Angeles into the epicenter of the music industry. To what then do we attribute this unprecedented gathering of future musical superstars in the hills above Los Angeles? What was it that inspired them all to head out west? Perhaps Neil Young said it best when he told an interviewer that he couldn’t really say why he headed out to LA circa 1966; he and others “were just going like Lemmings.” Part II May 13, 2008 “He was great, he was unreal – really, really good.” “He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing. I thought he really had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet.” [Today’s first trivia question: both of the above statements were made, on separate occasions, by a famous Laurel Canyon musician of the 1960s era. Both quotes were offered up in praise of another Laurel Canyon musician. Award yourself five points for correctly identifying the person who made the remarks, and five for identifying who the statements refer to. The answers are at the end of this post.] In the first chapter of this saga, we met a sampling of some of the most successful and influential rock music superstars who emerged from Laurel Canyon during its glory days. But these were, alas, more than just musicians and singers and songwriters who had come together in the canyon; they were destined to become the spokesmen and de facto leaders of a generation of disaffected youth (as Carl Gottlieb noted in David Crosby’s co-written autobiography, “the unprecedented mass appeal of the new rock ‘n’ roll gave the singers a voice in public affairs.”) That, of course, makes it all the more curious that these icons were, to an overwhelming degree, the sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and the scions of families that have wielded vast wealth and power in this country for a very long time. When I recently presented to a friend a truncated summary of the information contained in the first installment of this series, said friend opted to play the devil’s advocate by suggesting that there was nothing necessarily nefarious in the fact that so many of these icons of a past generation hailed from military/intelligence families. Perhaps, he suggested, they had embarked on their chosen careers as a form of rebellion against the values of their parents. And that, I suppose, might be true in a couple of cases. But what are we to conclude from the fact that such an astonishing number of these folks (along with their girlfriends, wives, managers, etc.) hail from a similar background? Are we to believe that the only kids from that era who had musical talent were the sons and daughters of Navy Admirals, chemical warfare engineers and Air Force intelligence officers? Or are they just the only ones who were signed to lucrative contracts and relentlessly promoted by their labels and the media? If these artists were rebelling against, rather than subtly promoting, the values of their parents, then why didn’t they ever speak out against the folks they were allegedly rebelling against? Why did Jim Morrison never denounce, or even mention, his father’s key role in escalating one of America’s bloodiest illegal wars? And why did Frank Zappa never pen a song exploring the horrors of chemical warfare (though he did pen a charming little ditty entitled “The Ritual Dance of the Child-Killer”)? And which Mamas and Papas song was it that laid waste to the values and actions of John Phillip’s parents and in-laws? And in which interview, exactly, did David Crosby and Stephen Stills disown the family values that they were raised with? In the coming weeks, we will take a much closer look at these folks, as well as at many of their contemporaries, as we endeavor to determine how and why the youth ‘counterculture’ of the 1960s was given birth. According to virtually all the accounts that I have read, this was essentially a spontaneous, organic response to the war in Southeast Asia and to the prevailing social conditions of the time. ‘Conspiracy theorists,’ of course, have frequently opined that what began as a legitimate movement was at some point co-opted and undermined by intelligence operations such as CoIntelPro. Entire books, for example, have been written examining how presumably virtuous musical artists were subjected to FBI harassment and/or whacked by the CIA. Here we will, as you have no doubt already ascertained, take a decidedly different approach. The question that we will be tackling is a more deeply troubling one: “what if the musicians themselves (and various other leaders and founders of the ‘movement’) were every bit as much a part of the intelligence community as the people who were supposedly harassing them?” What if, in other words, the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray? And what if the harassment these folks were subjected to was largely a stage-managed show designed to give the leaders of the counterculture some much-needed ‘street cred’? What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team? I should probably mention here that, contrary to popular opinion, the ‘hippie’/’flower child’ movement was not synonymous with the anti-war movement. As time passed, there was, to be sure, a fair amount of overlap between the two ‘movements.’ And the mass media outlets, as is their wont, did their very best to portray the flower-power generation as the torch-bearers of the anti-war movement – because, after all, a ragtag band of unwashed, drug-fueled long-hairs sporting flowers and peace symbols was far easier to marginalize than, say, a bunch of respected college professors and their concerned students. The reality, however, is that the anti-war movement was already well underway before the first aspiring ‘hippie’ arrived in Laurel Canyon. The first Vietnam War ‘teach-in’ was held on the campus of the University of Michigan in March of 1965. The first organized walk on Washington occurred just a few weeks later. Needless to say, there were no ‘hippies’ in attendance at either event. That ‘problem’ would soon be rectified. And the anti-war crowd – those who were serious about ending the bloodshed in Vietnam, anyway – would be none too appreciative. As Barry Miles has written in his coffee-table book, Hippie, there were some hippies involved in anti-war protests, “particularly after the police riot in Chicago in 1968 when so many people got injured, but on the whole the movement activists looked on hippies with disdain.” Peter Coyote, narrating the documentary “Hippies” on The History Channel, added that “Some on the left even theorized that the hippies were the end result of a plot by the CIA to neutralize the anti-war movement with LSD, turning potential protestors into self-absorbed naval-gazers.” An exasperated Abbie Hoffman once described the scene as he remembered it thusly: “There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers … all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these ‘flower children’ who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?!” As it turns out, they came, initially at least, from a rather private, isolated, largely self-contained neighborhood in Los Angeles known as Laurel Canyon (in contrast to the other canyons slicing through the Hollywood Hills, Laurel Canyon has its own market, the semi-famous Laurel Canyon Country Store; its own deli and cleaners; its own elementary school, the Wonderland School; its own boutique shops and salons; and, in more recent years, its own celebrity reprogramming rehab facility named, as you may have guessed, the Wonderland Center. During its heyday, the canyon even had its own management company, Lookout Management, to handle the talent. At one time, it even had its own newspaper.) One other thing that I should add here, before getting too far along with this series, is that this has not been an easy line of research for me to conduct, primarily because I have been, for as long as I can remember, a huge fan of 1960s music and culture. Though I was born in 1960 and therefore didn’t come of age, so to speak, until the 1970s, I have always felt as though I was ripped off by being denied the opportunity to experience firsthand the era that I was so obviously meant to inhabit. During my high school and college years, while my peers were mostly into faceless corporate rock (think Journey, Foreigner, Kansas, Boston, etc.) and, perhaps worse yet, the twin horrors of New Wave and Disco music, I was faithfully spinning my Hendrix, Joplin and Doors albums (which I still have, or rather my eldest daughter still has, in the original vinyl versions) while my color organ (remember those?) competed with my black light and strobe light. I grew my hair long until well past the age when it should have been sheared off. I may have even strung beads across the doorway to my room, but it is possible that I am confusing my life with that of Greg Brady, who, as we all remember, once converted his dad’s home office into a groovy bachelor pad. Anyway … as I have probably mentioned previously on more than one occasion, one of the most difficult aspects of this journey that I have been on for the last decade or so has been watching so many of my former idols and mentors fall by the wayside as it became increasingly clear to me that people who I once thought were the good guys were, in reality, something entirely different than what they appear to be. The first to fall, naturally enough, were the establishment figures – the politicians who I once, quite foolishly, looked up to as people who were fighting the good fight, within the confines of the system, to bring about real change. Though it now pains me to admit this, there was a time when I admired the likes of (egads!) George McGovern and Jimmy Carter, as well as (oops, excuse me for a moment; I seem to have just thrown up in my mouth a little bit) California pols Tom Hayden and Jerry Brown. I even had high hopes, oh-so-many-years-ago, for (am I really admitting this in print?) aspiring First Man Bill Clinton. Since I mentioned Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown, by the way, I must now digress just a bit – and we all know how I hate it when that happens. But as luck would have it, Jerry Brown was, curiously enough, a longtime resident of a little place called Laurel Canyon. As readers of Programmed to Kill may recall, Brown lived on Wonderland Avenue, not too many doors down from 8763 Wonderland Avenue, the site of the infamous “Four on the Floor” murders, regarded by grizzled LA homicide detectives as the most bloody and brutal multiple murder in the city’s very bloody history (if you get a chance, by the way, check out “Wonderland” with Val Kilmer the next time it shows up on your cable listings; it is, by Hollywood standards, a reasonably accurate retelling of the crime, and a pretty decent film as well). As it turns out, you see, the most bloody mass murder in LA’s history took place in one of the city’s most serene, pastoral and exclusive neighborhoods. And strangely enough, the case usually cited as the runner-up for the title of bloodiest crime scene – the murders of Stephen Parent, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski and Abigail Folger at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, just a couple miles to the west of Laurel Canyon – had deep ties to the Laurel Canyon scene as well. As previously mentioned, victims Folger and Frykowski lived in Laurel Canyon, at 2774 Woodstock Road, in a rented home right across the road from a favored gathering spot for Laurel Canyon royalty. Many of the regular visitors to Cass Elliot’s home, including a number of shady drug dealers, were also regular visitors to the Folger/Frykowski home (Frykowski’s son, by the way, was stabbed to death on June 6, 1999, thirty years after his father met the same fate.) Victim Jay Sebring’s acclaimed hair salon sat right at the mouth of Laurel Canyon, just below the Sunset Strip, and it was Sebring, alas, who was credited with sculpting Jim Morrison’s famous mane. One of the investors in his Sebring International business venture was a Laurel Canyon luminary who I may have mentioned previously, Mr. John Phillips. Sharon Tate was also well known in Laurel Canyon, where she was a frequent visitor to the homes of friends like John Phillips, Cass Elliott, and Abby Folger. And when she wasn’t in Laurel Canyon, many of the canyon regulars, both famous and infamous, made themselves at home in her place on Cielo Drive. Canyonite Van Dyke Parks, for example, dropped by for a visit on the very day of the murders. And Denny Doherty, the other “Papa” in The Mamas and the Papas, has claimed that he and John Phillips were invited to the Cielo Drive home on the night of the murders, but, as luck would have it, they never made it over. (Similarly, Chuck Negron of Three Dog Night, a regular visitor to the Wonderland death house, had set up a drug buy on the night of that mass murder, but he fell asleep and never made it over.) Along with the victims, the alleged killers also lived in and/or were very much a part of the Laurel Canyon scene. Bobby “Cupid” Beausoleil, for example, lived in a Laurel Canyon apartment during the early months of 1969. Charles “Tex” Watson, who allegedly led the death squad responsible for the carnage at Cielo Drive, lived for a time in a home on – guess where? – Wonderland Avenue. During that time, curiously enough, Watson co-owned and worked in a wig shop in Beverly Hills, Crown Wig Creations, Ltd., that was located near the mouth of Benedict Canyon. Meanwhile, one of Jay Sebring’s primary claims-to-fame was his expertise in crafting men’s hairpieces, which he did in his shop near the mouth of Laurel Canyon. A typical day then in the late 1960s would find Watson crafting hairpieces for an upscale Hollywood clientele near Benedict Canyon, and then returning home to Laurel Canyon, while Sebring crafted hairpieces for an upscale Hollywood clientele near Laurel Canyon, and then returned home to Benedict Canyon. And then one crazy day, as we all know, one of them became a killer and the other his victim. But there’s nothing odd about that, I suppose, so let’s move on. Oh, wait a minute … we can’t quite move on just yet, as I forgot to mention that Sebring’s Benedict Canyon home, at 9820 Easton Drive, was a rather infamous Hollywood death house that had once belonged to Jean Harlow and Paul Bern. The mismatched pair were wed on July 2, 1932, when Harlow, already a huge star of the silver screen, was just twenty-one years old. Just two months later, on September 5, Bern caught a bullet to the head in his wife’s bedroom. He was found sprawled naked in a pool of his own blood, his corpse drenched with his wife’s perfume. Upon discovering the body, Bern’s butler promptly contacted MGM’s head of security, Whitey Hendry, who in turn contacted Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. All three men descended upon the Benedict Canyon home to, you know, tidy up a bit. A couple hours later, they decided to contact the LAPD. This scene would be repeated years later when Sebring’s friends would rush to the home to clean up before officers investigating the Tate murders arrived. Bern’s death was, needless to say, written off as a suicide. His newlywed wife, strangely enough, was never called as a witness at the inquest. Bern’s other wife – which is to say, his common-law wife, Dorothy Millette – reportedly boarded a Sacramento riverboat on September 6, 1932, the day after Paul’s death. She was next seen floating belly-up in the Sacramento River. Her death, as would be expected, was also ruled a suicide. Less than five years later, Harlow herself dropped dead at the ripe old age of 26. At the time, authorities opted not to divulge the cause of death, though it was later claimed that bad kidneys had done her in. During her brief stay on this planet, Harlow had cycled through three turbulent marriages and yet still found time to serve as Godmother to Bugsy Siegel’s daughter, Millicent. Though Bern’s was the most famous body to be hauled out of the Easton Drive house in a coroner’s bag, it certainly wasn’t the only one. Another man had reportedly committed suicide there as well, in some unspecified fashion. Yet another unfortunate soul drowned in the home’s pool. And a maid was once found swinging from the end of a rope. Her death, needless to say, was ruled a suicide as well. That’s a lot of blood for one home to absorb, but the house’s morbid history, though a turn-off to many prospective residents, was reportedly exactly what attracted Jay Sebring to the property. His murder would further darken the black cloud hanging over the home. As Laurel Canyon chronicler Michael Walker has noted, LA’s two most notorious mass murders, one in August of 1969 and the other in July of 1981 (both involving five victims, though at Wonderland one of the five miraculously survived), provided rather morbid bookends for Laurel Canyon’s glory years. Walker though, like others who have chronicled that time and place, treats these brutal crimes as though they were unfortunate aberrations. The reality, however, is that the nine bodies recovered from Cielo Drive and Wonderland Avenue constitute just the tip of a very large, and very bloody, iceberg. To partially illustrate that point, here is today’s second trivia question: what do Diane Linkletter (daughter of famed entertainer Art Linkletter), legendary comedian Lenny Bruce, screen idol Sal Mineo, starlet Inger Stevens, and silent film star Ramon Novarro, all have in common? If you answered that all were found dead in their homes, either in or at the mouth of Laurel Canyon, in the decade between 1966 and 1976, then award yourself five points. If you added that all five were, in all likelihood, murdered in their Laurel Canyon homes, then add five bonus points. Only two of them, of course, are officially listed as murder victims (Mineo, who was stabbed to death outside his home at 8563 Holloway Drive on February 12, 1976, and Novarro, who was killed near the Country Store in a decidedly ritualistic fashion on the eve of Halloween, 1968). Inger Steven’s death in her home at 8000 Woodrow Wilson Drive, on April 30, 1970 (Walpurgisnacht on the occult calendar), was officially a suicide, though why she opted to propel herself through a decorative glass screen as part of that suicide remains a mystery. Perhaps she just wanted to leave behind a gruesome crime scene, and simple overdoses can be so, you know, bloodless and boring. Diane Linkletter, as we all know, sailed out the window of her Shoreham Towers apartment because, in her LSD-addled state, she thought she could fly, or some such thing. We know this because Art himself told us that it was so, and because the story was retold throughout the 1970s as a cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs. What we weren’t told, however, is that Diane (born, curiously enough, on Halloween day, 1948) wasn’t alone when she plunged six stories to her death on the morning of October 4, 1969. Au contraire, she was with a gent by the name of Edward Durston, who, in a completely unexpected turn of events, accompanied actress Carol Wayne to Mexico some 15 years later. Carol, alas, perhaps weighed down by her enormous breasts, managed to drown in barely a foot of water, while Mr. Durston promptly disappeared. As would be expected, he was never questioned by authorities about Wayne’s curious death. After all, it is quite common for the same guy to be the sole witness to two separate ‘accidental’ deaths. Art also neglected to mention, by the way, that just weeks before Diane’s curious death, another member of the Linkletter clan, Art’s son-in-law, John Zwyer, caught a bullet to the head in the backyard of his Hollywood Hills home. But that, of course, was an unconnected, uhmm, suicide, so don’t go thinking otherwise. I’m not even going to discuss here the circumstances of Bruce’s death from acute morphine poisoning on August 3, 1966, because, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know too many people who don’t already assume that Lenny was whacked. I’ll just note here that his funeral was well-attended by the Laurel Canyon rock icons, and control over his unreleased material fell into the hands of a guy by the name of Frank Zappa. And another rather unsavory character named Phil Spector, whose crack team of studio musicians, dubbed The Wrecking Crew, were the actual musicians playing on many studio recordings by such bands as The Monkees, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, and The Mamas and the Papas. (As for the trivia question, the person being praised, of course, was our old friend Chuck Manson. And the guy singing his praises was Mr. Neil Young.) Part III May 13, 2008 “I mean, fuck, he auditioned for Neil [Young] for fuck’s sake.” Graham Nash, explaining to author Michael Walker how close Charlie Manson was to the Laurel Canyon scene. During the ten-year period during which Bruce, Novarro, Mineo, Linkletter, Stevens, Tate, Sebring, Frykowski and Folger all turned up dead, a whole lot of other people connected to Laurel Canyon did as well, often under very questionable circumstances. The list includes, but is certainly not limited to, all of the following names: Marina Elizabeth Habe, whose body was carved up and tossed into the heavy brush along Mulholland Drive, just west of Bowmont Drive, on December 30, 1968. Habe, just seventeen at the time of her death, was the daughter of Hans Habe, who emigrated to the U.S. from fascist Austria circa 1940. Shortly thereafter, he married a General Foods heiress and began studying psychological warfare at the Military Intelligence Training Center. After completing his training, he put his psychological warfare skills to use by creating 18 newspapers in occupied Germany – under the direction, no doubt, of the OSS. Christine Hinton, who was killed in a head-on collision on September 30, 1969. At the time, Hinton was a girlfriend of David Crosby and the founder and head of The Byrd’s fan club. She was also the daughter of a career Army officer stationed at the notorious Presidio military base in San Francisco. Another of Crosby’s girlfriends from that same era was Shelley Roecker, who grew up on the Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County. Jane Doe #59, found dumped into the heavy undergrowth of Laurel Canyon in November 1969, within sight of where Habe had been dumped less than a year earlier. The teenage girl, who was never identified, had been stabbed 157 times in the chest and throat. Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson, singer, songwriter and guitarist for the Laurel Canyon blues-rock band, Canned Heat, was found dead in his Topanga Canyon home on September 3, 1970. His death was written off as a suicide/OD. Wilson had moved to Topanga Canyon after the band’s Laurel Canyon home – on Lookout Mountain Avenue, next door to Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash’s home – burned to the ground. “Blind Owl” was just twenty-seven years old at the time of his death. A little more than a decade later, Wilson’s former bandmate, Bob “The Bear” Hite, who had once acknowledged in an interview that he had partied in the canyons with various members of the Manson Family, died of a heart attack at the ripe old age of 36. Jimi Hendrix, who reportedly briefly occupied the sprawling mansion just north of the Log Cabin after he moved to LA in 1968, died in London under seriously questionable circumstances on September 18, 1970. Though he rarely spoke of it, Jimi had served a stint in the U.S. Army with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. His official records indicate that he was forced into the service by the courts and then released after just one year when he purportedly proved to be a poor soldier. One wonders though why he was assigned to such an elite division if he was indeed such a failure. One also wonders why he wasn’t subjected to disciplinary measures rather than being handed a free pass out of his ostensibly court-ordered service. In any event, Jimi himself once told reporters that he was given a medical discharge after breaking an ankle during a parachute jump. And one biographer has claimed that Jimi faked being gay to earn an early release. The truth, alas, remains rather elusive. At the time of Jimi’s death, the first person called by his girlfriend – Monika Danneman, who was the last to see Hendrix alive – was Eric Burden of the Animals. Two years earlier, Burden had relocated to LA and taken over ringmaster duties from Frank Zappa after Zappa had vacated the Log Cabin and moved into a less high-profile Laurel Canyon home. Within a year of Jimi’s death, an underage prostitute named Devon Wilson who had been with Jimi the day before his death, plunged from an eighth-floor window of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. On March 5, 1973, a shadowy character named Michael Jeffery, who had managed both Hendrix and Burden, was killed in a mid-air plane collision. Jeffery was known to openly boast of having organized crime connections and of working for the CIA. After Jimi’s death, it was discovered that Jeffery had been funneling most of Hendrix’s gross earnings into offshore accounts in the Bahamas linked to international drug trafficking. Years later, on April 5, 1996, Danneman, the daughter of a wealthy German industrialist, was found dead near her home in a fume-filled Mercedes. Jim Morrison, who for a time lived in a home on Rothdell Trail, behind the Laurel Canyon Country Store, may or may not have died in Paris on July 3, 1971. The events of that day remain shrouded in mystery and rumor, and the details of the story, such as they are, have changed over the years. What is known is that, on that very same day, Admiral George Stephen Morrison delivered the keynote speech at a decommissioning ceremony for the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard, from where, seven years earlier, he had helped choreograph the Tonkin Gulf Incident. A few years after Jim’s death, his common-law wife, Pamela Courson, dropped dead as well, officially of a heroin overdose. 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 DesBarres, he had also “read all he could about incest and sadism.” Also like Hendrix, Morrison was just twenty-seven at the time of his (possible) death. Brandon DeWilde, a good friend of David Crosby and Gram Parsons, was killed in a freak accident in Colorado on July 6, 1972, when his van plowed under a flatbed truck. In the 1950s, DeWilde had been an in-demand child actor since the age of eight. He had appeared on screen with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Alan Ladd, Lee Marvin, Paul Newman, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda. Around 1965, DeWilde fell in with Hollywood’s ‘Young Turks,’ through whom he met and befriended Crosby, Parsons, and various other members of the Laurel Canyon Club. DeWilde was just thirty at the time of his death. Christine Frka, a former governess for Moon Unit Zappa and the Zappa family’s former housekeeper at the Log Cabin, died on November 5, 1972 of an alleged drug overdose, though friends suspected foul play. As “Miss Christine,” Frka had been a member of the Zappa-created GTOs, a musical act, of sorts, composed entirely of very young groupies. She was also the inspiration for the song, “Christine’s Tune: Devil in Disguise” by Gram Parson’s Flying Burrito Brothers. Frka was probably in her early twenties when she died, possibly even younger. Danny Whitten, a guitarist/vocalist/songwriter with Neil Young’s sometime band, Crazy Horse, died of an overdose on November 18, 1972. According to rock ‘n’ roll legend, Whitten had been fired by Young earlier that day during rehearsals in San Francisco. Young and Jack Nietzsche, Phil Spector’s former top assistant, had given Whitten $50 and put him on a plane back to LA. Within hours, he was dead. Whitten was just twenty-nine. Bruce Berry, a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, died of a heroin overdose in June 1973. Berry had just flown out to Maui to deliver a shipment of cocaine to Stephen Stills, and was promptly sent back to LA by Crosby and Nash. Berry was a brother of Jan Berry, of Jan and Dean. (Dean Torrence, the “Dean” of Jan and Dean, had played a part in the fake kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr., just after the JFK assassination. The staged event was a particularly lame effort to divert attention away from the questions that were cropping up, after the initial shock had passed, about the events in Dealey Plaza.) Clarence White, a guitarist who had played with The Byrds, was run over by a drunk driver and killed on July 14, 1973. White had grown up near Lancaster, not far from where Frank Zappa spent his teen years. At least one member of White’s immediate family was employed at Edwards Air Force Base. The driver who killed young Clarence, just twenty-nine years old at the time of his death, was given a one-year suspended sentence and served no time. Gram Parsons, formerly with the International Submarine Band, The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, allegedly overdosed on a speedball at the Joshua Tree Inn on September 19, 1973. Just two months before his death, Parson’s Topanga Canyon home had burnt to the ground. After his death, his body was stolen from LAX by the Burrito’s road manager, Phil Kaufman, and then taken back out to Joshua Tree and ritually burned on the autumnal equinox (Kaufman had been a prison buddy of Charlie Manson’s at Terminal Island; when Phil was released from Terminal Island in March of 1968, he quickly reunited with his old pal, who had been released a year earlier.) By the time of Gram’s death, his family had already experienced its share of questionable deaths. Just before Christmas, 1958, Parson’s father had sent Gram, along with his mother and sister, off to stay with family in Florida. The next day, just after the winter solstice, “Coon Dog” caught a bullet to the head. His death was recorded as a suicide and it was claimed that he had sent his family away to spare them as much pain as possible. It seems just as likely, however, that “Coon Dog” knew his days were numbered and wanted to get his family out of the line of fire. The next year, 1959, Gram’s mother married again, to Robert Ellis Parsons, who adopted Gram and his sister Avis. Six years later, in June of 1965, Gram’s mother died the day after a sudden illness landed her in the hospital. According to witnesses, she died “almost immediately” after a visit from her husband, Robert Parsons. Many of those close to the situation believed that Parsons had a hand in her death (very shortly thereafter, Robert Parsons married his stepdaughter’s teenage babysitter). Following his mother’s death, Parsons briefly attended Harvard University, and then launched his music career with the formation of the International Submarine Band, which quickly found its way to – where else? – Laurel Canyon. Gram’s death in 1973 at the age of 26 left his younger sister Avis as the sole surviving member of the family. She was killed in 1993, reportedly in a boating accident, at the age of 43. “Mama” Cass Elliot, the “Earth Mother” of Laurel Canyon whose circle of friends included musicians, Mansonites, young Hollywood stars, the wealthy son of a State Department official, singer/songwriters, assorted drug dealers, and some particularly unsavory characters the LAPD once described as “some kind of hit squad,” died in the London home of Harry Nilsson on July 29, 1974 (Nilsson had been a frequent drinking buddy of John Lennon in Laurel Canyon and on the Sunset Strip). At thirty-two, Cass had lived a long and productive life, by Laurel Canyon standards. Four years later, in the very same room of the very same London flat, still owned by Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon of The Who also died at thirty-two (on September 7, 1978). Though initial press reports held that Cass had choked to death on a ham sandwich, the official cause of death was listed as heart failure. Her actual cause of death could likely be filed under “knowing where too many of the bodies were buried.” Moon reportedly died from a massive overdose of a drug used to treat alcohol withdrawal. Like Cass, Moon had at one time been a resident of Laurel Canyon. Amy Gossage, Graham Nash’s girlfriend at the time, was murdered in her San Francisco home on February 13, 1975. Just twenty years old at the time, she had been stabbed nearly fifty times and was bludgeoned beyond recognition. Amy’s father, a famed advertising/PR executive, had died of leukemia in 1969. Not long after, her half-sister had been killed in a car crash. In May of 1974, her mother, the daughter of a wealthy banking family, died as well, reportedly of cirrhosis of the liver. That left just Amy, age 19, and her brother Eben, age 20, both of whom reportedly had serious drug dependencies. Amy’s brutal murder, cleverly enough, was pinned on Eben. Police had conveniently found bloodstained clothes, along with a hammer and scissors, sitting on the porch of Eben’s apartment, looking very much as though it had been planted. A friend of Eben’s would later remark, perhaps quite tellingly, “If Eben did kill her, I’m convinced he doesn’t know he did it.” Tim Buckley, a singer/songwriter signed to Frank Zappa’s record label and managed by Herb Cohen, died of a reported overdose on June 29, 1975. Buckley had once appeared on an episode of The Monkees, and, like Monkee Peter Tork (and so many others in this story), he hailed from Washington, DC. Buckley was just twenty-eight at the time of his death. His son, Jeff Buckley, also an accomplished musician, managed to remain on this planet two years longer than his dad did; he was thirty when he died in a bizarre drowning incident on May 29, 1997. Phyllis Major Browne, wife of singer/songwriter Jackson Browne, reportedly overdosed on barbiturates on March 25, 1976. Her death was – you all should know the words to this song by now – ruled a suicide. She was just thirty years old. There are a few other curious deaths we could add here as well, though they were only indirectly related to the Laurel Canyon scene. Nevertheless, they deserve an honorable mention, especially the Bobby Fuller and Phil Ochs entries; the former because it is a rather extraordinary example of the exemplary work done by the LAPD, and the latter because it just may contain a key to understanding the Laurel Canyon phenomenon: Bobby Fuller, singer/songwriter/guitarist for the Bobby Fuller Four, was found dead in his car near Grauman’s Chinese Theater on July 18, 1966, after being lured away from his home by a mysterious 2:00-3:00 AM phone call of unknown origin. Fuller is best known for penning the hit song “I Fought the Law,” which had just hit the charts when he supposedly committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. There were multiple cuts and bruises on his face, chest and shoulders, dried blood around his mouth, and a hairline fracture to his right hand. He had been thoroughly doused with gasoline, including in his mouth and throat. The inside of the car was doused as well, and an open book of matches lay on the seat. It was perfectly obvious that Fuller’s killer (or killers) had planned to torch the car, destroying all evidence, but likely got scared away. The LAPD, nevertheless, ruled Fuller’s death a suicide – despite the coroner’s conclusion that the gas had been poured after Bobby’s death. Police later decided that it wasn’t a suicide after all, but rather an accident. They didn’t bother to explain how Fuller had accidentally doused himself with gasoline after accidentally killing himself. At the time of his death, one of Fuller’s closest confidants was a prostitute named Melody who worked at PJ’s nightclub, where Bobby frequently played. The club was co-owned by Eddie Nash, who would, many years later, orchestrate the Wonderland massacre. A few years after Bobby’s death, his brother and bass player, Randy Fuller, teamed up with drummer Dewey Martin, formerly of Buffalo Springfield. Gary Hinman, a musician, music teacher, and part-time chemist, was brutally murdered in his Topanga Canyon home on July 27, 1969. Convicted of his murder was Mansonite Bobby Beausoleil, who had played rhythm guitar in a local band known as the Grass Roots. To avoid confusion with the more famous band already using that name, the Laurel Canyon band changed its name to Love. Beausoleil would claim that the band’s new name was inspired by his own nickname, Cupid. Janis Joplin, vocalist extraordinaire, was found dead of a heroin overdose on October 4, 1970 at the Landmark Hotel, about a mile east of the mouth of Laurel Canyon, where she occasionally visited. Indications were that she had taken or been given a “hot shot,” many times stronger than standard street heroin. Joplin’s father, by the way, was a petroleum engineer for Texaco. And though it might normally seem an odd coupling, it somehow seems perfectly natural, in the context of this story, that Janis once dated that great crusader in the war on all things immoral, William Bennett. Like Morrison and Hendrix, Joplin died at the age of twenty-seven. Duane Allman and Berry Oakley, lead guitarist and bass player for the Allman Brothers, were killed in freakishly similar motorcycle crashes on October 29, 1971 and November 11, 1972. Allman was the son of Willis Allman, a US Army Sergeant who had been murdered by another soldier near Norfolk, Virginia (home of the world’s largest naval installation) on December 26, 1949. In 1967, Duane and his younger brother, Gregg, then billing themselves as The Allman Joys, ventured out to Los Angeles. While there, Gregg auditioned for and was almost signed by the Laurel Canyon band Poco, which featured Buffalo Springfield alumni Richie Furay and Jim Messina, as well as future Eagle Randy Meisner. Duane was killed when a truck turned in front of his motorcycle at an intersection and inexplicably stopped. Just over a year later, Oakley had a similar run-in with a bus, just three blocks from where Allman had been killed. Following the crash, Berry had dusted himself off and declined medical attention, insisting that he was okay. Three hours later, he was rushed to the hospital, where he died. Both Oakley and Allman were just twenty-four years old. Phil Ochs, folk singer/songwriter and political activist, was found hanged in his sister’s home in Far Rockaway, New York on April 9, 1976. Throughout his life, Ochs was one of the most overtly political of the 1960s rock and folk music stars. A regular attendee at anti-war, civil rights, and labor rallies, Ochs appeared to be, at all times, an unwavering political leftist (he named his first band The Singing Socialists). That all changed, however, and rather dramatically, in the months before his death. Born in El Paso, Texas on December 19, 1940, Phil and his family moved frequently during the first few years of his life. His father, Dr. Jacob Ochs, had been drafted by the US Army and assigned to various military hospitals in New York, New Mexico and Texas. In 1943, Dr. Ochs was shipped overseas, returning two years later with a medical discharge. Upon his return, he was immediately institutionalized and didn’t return to his family for another two years. During that time, he was subjected to every ‘treatment’ imaginable, including electroshock ‘therapy.’ When he finally returned to his family, in 1947, he was but a shell of his former self, described by Phil’s sister as “almost like a phantom.” Beginning in the fall of 1956, Phil Ochs began attending Staunton Military Academy, the very same institution that future ‘serial killer’/cult leader Gary Heidnik would attend just one year after Ochs graduated. During Phil’s two years there, a friend and fellow band member was found swinging from the end of a rope (I probably don’t need to add here that the death was ruled a suicide). Following graduation, Phil enrolled at Ohio State University, but not before, oddly enough, having a little plastic surgery done to alter his appearance (doing such things, needless to say, was rather uncommon in 1958). In early 1962, just months before his scheduled graduation, Ochs dropped out of college to pursue a career in music. By 1966, he had released three albums. In 1967, under the management of his brother, Michael Ochs, Phil moved out to Los Angeles. Michael had begun working the previous year as an assistant to Barry James, who maintained a party house at 8504 Ridpath in Laurel Canyon. In the early 1970s, with his career beginning to fade, Phil Ochs began to travel internationally, usually accompanied by vast quantities of booze and pills. Those travels included a visit to Chile, not long before the US-sponsored coup that toppled Salvador Allende. In early summer of 1975, Phil Ochs’ public persona abruptly changed. Using the name John Butler Train, Ochs proclaimed himself to be a CIA operative and presented himself as a belligerent, right-wing thug. He told an interviewer that, “on the first day of summer 1975, Phil Ochs was murdered in the Chelsea Hotel by John Train … For the good of societies, public and secret, he needed to be gotten rid of.” That symbolic assassination, on the summer solstice, took place at the same hotel that Devon Wilson had flown out of a few years earlier. One of Ochs’ biographers would later write that Phil/John “actually believed he was a member of the CIA.” Also in those final months of his life, Ochs began compiling curious lists, with entries that clearly were references to US biological warfare research: “shellfish toxin, Fort Dietrich, cobra venom, Chantilly Race Track, hollow silver dollars, New York Cornell Hospital …” Many years before Ochs’ metamorphosis, in an interesting bit of foreshadowing, psychological warfare operative George Estabrooks explained how US intelligence agencies could create the perfect spy: “We start with an excellent subject … we need a man or woman who is highly intelligent and physically tough. Then we start to develop a case of multiple personality through hypnotism. In his normal waking state, which we will call Personality A, or PA, this individual will become a rabid communist. He will join the party, follow the party line and make himself as objectionable as possible to the authorities. Note that he will be acting in good faith. He is a communist, or rather his PA is a communist and will behave as such. Then we develop Personality B (PB), the secondary personality, the unconscious personality, if you wish, although this is somewhat of a contradiction in terms. This personality is rabidly American and anti-communist. It has all the information possessed by PA, the normal personality, whereas PA does not have this advantage … My super spy plays his role as a communist in his waking state, aggressively, consistently, fearlessly. But his PB is a loyal American, and PB has all the memories of PA. As a loyal American, he will not hesitate to divulge those memories.” Estabrooks never explained what would happen if the programming were to go haywire and Personality B were to become the conscious personality, but my guess is that such a person would be considered a severe liability and would be treated accordingly. They might even be find themselves swinging from the end of a rope. Phil Ochs was thirty-five at the time of his death. And with that, I think we can move on now from the Laurel Canyon Death List. The list is not yet complete, mind you, since we have only covered the years 1966-1976. Rest assured then that we will continue to add names as we follow the various threads of this story. Some of those names will be quite familiar, while others will be significantly less so. One of the names from that era that has been all but forgotten is Judee Lynn Sill, who was once favorably compared to such other Laurel Canyon singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judi Collins and Carole King. By the time of her death on November 23, 1979, however, she had been all but forgotten, and not a single obituary was published to note her passing. Judee was born in Studio City, California, not far from the northern entrance to Laurel Canyon, on October 7, 1944. Her father, Milford “Bud” Sill, was reportedly a cameraman for Paramount Studios with numerous Hollywood connections. When Judee was quite young, however, Bud moved the family to Oakland and opened a bar known as “Bud’s Bar.” He also operated a side business as an importer of rare animals, which required him to spend a considerable amount of time traveling in Central and South America. Such a business, it should be noted, would provide an ideal cover for covert intelligence work. In any event, Bud Sill was dead by 1952, when Judee was just seven or eight years old. Depending on who is telling the story, Bud died either from pneumonia or a heart attack. Following Bud’s death, the family relocated back to Southern California and Judee’s older brother Dennis, still in his teens, took over the family importing business. That didn’t last long though as Dennis soon turned up dead down in Central America, either from a liver infection or a car accident. The animal importing business, I guess, is a rather dangerous one. Judee’s mother, Oneta, met and married Ken Muse, an Academy Award winning animator for Hanna-Barbera who was described by Judee as an abusive, violent alcoholic. At fifteen, Judee fled her violent home life and lived with an older man with whom she pulled off a series of armed robberies in the San Fernando Valley. Those activities landed her in reform school, which did little to curb her appetite for drugs, crime and alcohol. She spent the next few years with a serious heroin addiction, which she financed by dealing drugs and turning tricks in some of LA’s seedier neighborhoods. By 1963, Judee had cleaned herself up enough to enroll in junior college. In the early winter of 1965, however, Judee’s mom, her last surviving family member, died either of cancer or of complications arising from her chronic alcoholism (take your pick; the details of this story will likely remain forever elusive). Barely an adult, Judee was left all alone in the world, and thus began another downward spiral into drugs and crime, which culminated in her being arrested and possibly serving time on forgery and drug charges. In the late 1960s, with her addictions apparently temporarily curbed, Sill joined the Laurel Canyon scene, where she attempted to forge a career as a singer/songwriter. Her first big break came when she sold the song “Lady O” to The Turtles (yet another Laurel Canyon band to hit it big in the mid-1960s; best known for the hit single “Happy Together,” The Turtles were led by lead vocalist/songwriter Howard Kaylan, who happened to be, small world that it is, a cousin of Frank Zappa’s manager and business partner, Herb Cohen). The band released the song, which featured Judee’s guitar work, in 1969. The next year, Sill became the first artist signed to David Geffen’s fledgling Asylum record label. The year after that, her self-titled debut album became Asylum’s first official release. The first single from the album, “Jesus Was a Crossmaker,” was produced by Graham Nash, whom she opened for on tour following the album’s release. Though critically well-received, the album’s sales were disappointing, in part because the record was overshadowed by the debut albums of Jackson Browne and The Eagles, both released by Asylum shortly after the release of Judee’s album. Sill’s second album, 1973’s “Heart Food,” was even more of a commercial disappointment. Nevertheless, in 1974 she began work on a third album in Monkee Mike Nesmith’s recording studio. Prior to completion, however, she abandoned the project and promptly disappeared without a trace. What became of her between that time and her death some five years later remains largely a mystery. It is assumed that she once again descended into a life of drugs and prostitution, but no one seems to know for sure. It is alleged that she was seriously injured when her car was rear-ended by actor Danny Kaye, causing her to suffer from chronic back pain thereafter, thus contributing to her drug addictions. According to a friend of hers, she lived in a home that featured an enormous photo of Bela Lugosi above the fireplace, a large ebony cross above her bed, and racks of candles. She is said to have read extensively from Rosicrucian manuscripts and from the writings of Aleister Crowley, to have possessed a complete collection of the work of Helena Blavatsky, and to have been a gifted tarot card reader. What is known for sure is that, on the day after Thanksgiving, 1979, Judee Sill, the last surviving member of her family, was found dead in a North Hollywood apartment. The cause of death was listed as “acute cocaine and codeine intoxication.” It was claimed that a suicide note was found, but friends insisted that the supposed note was either a portion of a diary entry or an unfinished song. One of her friends would later note that, at some point in her life, Judee began to realize that “there was a part of her that wasn’t under her conscious control.” I’m guessing that Phil Ochs, and quite a few other characters in this story, could relate to that. * * * * * * * * * * It has occurred to me, as I have been working on these first posts of this new series, that a lot of this information will probably make more sense to those of you out there in Readerland who have successfully waded through my last book, Programmed to Kill. Those of you who haven’t done so may find yourselves pondering the significance of some of the references contained herein. Much of this material is tied in, to varying degrees, with material that is covered in the book, which last time I checked could be had in the E-version from www.IUniverse.com for the low, low price of just $6. And what else are you going to do with $6 – buy a gallon of gas? Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation Part IV The bridge of the USS Bon Homme Richard, January 1964. Just months later, the guy on the right would guide his ship into the Tonkin Gulf, and the young man on the left would begin a remarkable transformation into a brooding rock god. The Bon Homme Richard, by the way, was launched on April 29, 1944, under the sponsorship of Catherine McCain, the grandmother of a certain presidential contender. Until around 1913, Laurel Canyon remained an undeveloped (and unincorporated) slice of LA – a pristine wilderness area rich in native flora and fauna. That all began to change when Charles Spencer Mann and his partners began buying up land along what would become Laurel Canyon Boulevard, as well as up Lookout Mountain. A narrow road leading up to the crest of Lookout Mountain was carved out, and upon that crest was constructed a lavish 70-room inn with sweeping views of the city below and the Pacific Ocean beyond. The Lookout Inn featured a large ballroom, riding stables, tennis courts and a golf course, among other amenities. But the inn, alas, would only stand for a decade; in 1923, it burned down, as tends to happen rather frequently in Laurel Canyon. In 1913, Mann began operating what was billed as the nation’s first trackless trolley, to ferry tourists and prospective buyers from Sunset Boulevard up to what would become the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue. Around that same time, he built a massive tavern/roadhouse on that very same corner. Dubbed the Laurel Tavern, the structure boasted a 2,000+ square-foot formal dining room, guest rooms, and a bowling alley on the basement level. The Laurel Tavern, of course, would later be acquired by Tom Mix, after which it would be affectionately known as the Log Cabin. Shortly after the Log Cabin was built, a department store mogul (or a wealthy furniture manufacturer; there is more than one version of the story, or perhaps the man owned more than one business) built an imposing, castle-like mansion across the road, at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and what would become Willow Glen Road. The home featured rather creepy towers and parapets, and the foundation is said to have been riddled with secret passageways, tunnels, and hidden chambers. Similarly, the grounds of the estate were (and still are) laced with trails leading to grottoes, elaborate stone structures, and hidden caves and tunnels. Across Laurel Canyon Boulevard, the grounds of the Laurel Tavern/Log Cabin were also laced with odd caves and tunnels. As Michael Walker notes in Laurel Canyon, “Running up the hillside, behind the house, was a collection of man-made caves built out of stucco, with electric wiring and light bulbs inside.” According to various accounts, one secret tunnel running under what is now Laurel Canyon Boulevard connected the Log Cabin (or its guesthouse) to the Houdini estate. This claim is frequently denounced as an urban legend, but given that both properties are known to possess unusual, uhmm, geological features, it’s not hard to believe that the tunnel system on one property was connected at one time to the tunnel system on the other. The Tavern itself, as Gail Zappa would later describe it, was “huge and vault-like and cavernous.” With these two rather unusual structures anchoring an otherwise undeveloped canyon, and the Lookout Inn sitting atop uninhabited Lookout Mountain, Mann set about marketing the canyon as a vacation and leisure destination. The land that he carved up into subdivisions with names like “Bungalow Land” and “Wonderland Park” was presented as the ideal location to build vacation homes. But the new inn and roadhouse, and the new parcels of land for sale, definitely weren’t for everyone. The roadhouse was essentially a country club, or what Jack Boulware of Mojo Magazine described as “a masculine retreat for wealthy men.” And Bungalow Land was openly advertised as “a high class restricted park for desirable people only.” “Desirable people,” of course, tended to be wealthy people without a great deal of skin pigmentation. As the website of the current Laurel Canyon Association notes, “restrictive covenants were attached to the new parcel deeds. These were thinly veiled attempts to limit ownership to white males of a certain class. While there are many references to the bigotry of the developers in our area, it would appear that some residents were also prone to bias and lawlessness. This article was published in a local paper in 1925: Frank Sanceri, the man who was flogged by self-styled ‘white knights’ on Lookout Mountain in Hollywood several months ago, was found not guilty by a jury in Superior Judge Shea’s courtroom of having unlawfully attacked Astrea Jolley, aged 11. “Wealthier residents were also attracted to Laurel Canyon. With the creation of the Hollywood film industry in 1910, the canyon attracted a host of ‘photoplayers,’ including Wally Reid, Tom Mix, Clara Bow, Richard Dix, Norman Kerry, Ramon Navarro, Harry Houdini and Bessie Love.” The author of this little slice of Laurel Canyon history would clearly like us to believe that the “wealthier residents” were a group quite separate from the violent hooligans roaming the canyon. The history of such groups in Los Angeles, however, clearly suggests otherwise. Paul Young, for example, has written in L.A. Exposed of Los Angeles’ early “vigilance committees, which stepped in to take care of outlaws on their own, often with the complete absolution of the mayor himself. Judge Lynch, for example, formed the Los Angeles Rangers in 1854 with some of the city’s top judges, lawyers, and businessmen including tycoon Phineas Banning of the Banning Railroad. And there was the Los Angeles Home Guard, another bloodthirsty paramilitary organization, made up of notable citizens, and the much-feared El Monte Rangers, a group of Texas wranglers that specialized in killing Mexicans. As one would expect, there was no regard for the victim’s rights in such kangaroo courts. Victims were often dragged from their homes, jail cells, even churches, and beaten, horse-whipped, tortured, mutilated, or castrated before being strung up on the nearest tree.” And that, dear readers, is how we do things out here on the ‘Left’ Coast. Before moving on, I need to mention here that, of the eight celebrity residents of Laurel Canyon listed by the Association, fully half died under questionable circumstances, and three of the four did so on days with occult significance. While Bessie Love, Norman Kerry, Richard Dix and Clara Bow all lived long and healthy lives, Ramon Navarro, as we have already seen, was ritually murdered in his home on Laurel Canyon Boulevard on the eve of Halloween, 1968. Nearly a half-century earlier, on January 18, 1923, matinee idol Wallace Reid was found dead in a padded cell at the mental institution to which he had been confined. Just thirty-one years old, Reid’s death was attributed to morphine addiction, though it was never explained how he would have fed that habit while confined to a cell in a mental hospital. Tom Mix died on a lonely stretch of Arizona highway in the proverbial single-car crash on October 12, 1940 (the birthday of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley), when he quite unexpectedly encountered some temporary construction barricades that had been set up alongside a reportedly washed-out bridge. Although he wasn’t speeding (by most accounts), Mix was nevertheless allegedly unable to stop in time and veered off the road, while a crew of what were described as “workmen” reportedly looked on. It wasn’t the impact that killed Mix though, but rather a severe blow to the back of the head and neck, purportedly delivered during the crash by an aluminum case he had been carrying in the back seat of his car. There is now a roadside marker at the spot where Mix died. If you should happen to stop by to have a look, you might as well pay a visit to the Florence Military Reservation as well, since it’s just a stone’s throw away. Harry Houdini died on Halloween day, 1926, purportedly of an attack of appendicitis precipitated by a blow to the stomach. The problem with that story, however, is that medical science now recognizes it to be an impossibility. According to a recent book about the famed illusionist (The Secret Life of Houdini, by William Kalush and Larry Sloman), Houdini was likely murdered by poisoning. Questions have been raised, the book notes, by the curious lack of an autopsy, an “experimental serum” that Houdini was apparently given in the hospital, and indications that his wife, Bess, may have been poisoned as well (though she survived). On March 23, 2007, an exhumation of Houdini’s remains was formally requested by his surviving family members. It is unclear at this time when, or even if, that will happen. Houdini’s death, on October 31, 1926, came exactly eight years after the first death to occur in what would become known as the “Houdini house.” In 1918, not long after the home was built, a lover’s quarrel arose on one of the home’s balconies during a Halloween/birthday party. The gay lover of the original owner’s son reportedly ended up splattered on the ground below. According to legend, the businessman managed to get his son off, but only after paying off everyone he could find to pay off, including the trial judge. The aftermath of the party proved to be financially devastating for the family, and the home was apparently put up for sale. Not long after that, as fate would have it, Harry Houdini was looking for a place to stay in the Hollywood area, as he had decided to break into the motion picture business. He found the perfect home in Laurel Canyon – the home that would, forever after, carry his name. By most accounts, he lived there from about 1919 through the early 1920s, during a brief movie career in which he starred in a handful of Hollywood films. A key scene in one of those films, “The Grim Game,” was reportedly shot at the top of Lookout Mountain, near where the Lookout Inn then stood. On October 31, 1959, precisely thirty-three years after Houdini’s death, and forty-one years after the unnamed party guest’s death, the distinctive mansion on the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Willow Glen Road burned to the ground in a fire of mysterious origin (the ruins of the estate remain today, undisturbed for nearly fifty years). On October 31, 1981, exactly twenty-two years after the fire across the road, the legendary Log Cabin on the other side of Laurel Canyon Boulevard also burned to the ground, in yet another fire of mysterious origin (some reports speculated that it was a drug lab explosion). And twenty-five years after that, on October 31, 2006, The Secret Life of Houdini was published, challenging the conventional wisdom on Houdini’s death. Far more compelling than the revelations about Houdini’s death, however, was something else about the illusionist that the book revealed for the first time: Harry Houdini was a spook working for both the U.S. Secret Service and Scotland Yard. And his traveling escape act, as it turns out, was pretty much a cover for intelligence activities. Just as, as I think I wrote in a previous newsletter, John Wilkes Booth used his career as a traveling stage performer as a cover for intelligence operations. And just as – sorry to have to break it to you – many of your favorite movie and television actors and musical artists continue in that tradition today. The book, of course, doesn’t make such reckless allegations about any performers other than Houdini. I added all of that. What the book does do, however, is compellingly document that Houdini was, in fact, an intelligence asset who used his magic act as a cover. Not only did the authors obtain corroborating documentation from Scotland Yard, they also received an endorsement of their claim from no less an authority than John McLaughlin, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (who knew it was that easy? – maybe I should give John a call and run some of my theories by him). It appears then that, of the eight celebrity residents of Laurel Canyon listed on the Laurel Canyon Association website, at least two (Novarro and Houdini), and possibly as many as four, were murdered. That seemed like a rather high homicide rate to me, so I looked up a recent study on the Internet and found that, on average, a white person in this country has about a 1-in-345 chance of being murdered. Non-white persons, of course, have a far greater chance of being murdered, but nowhere near the 1-in-4 to 1-in-2 odds that a white celebrity living in Laurel Canyon faces. Statistically speaking, if you were a famous actor in the 1920s, you would have been better off playing a round of Russian Roulette than living in Laurel Canyon. Anyway … two ambitious projects in the 1940s brought significant changes to Laurel Canyon. First, Laurel Canyon Boulevard was extended into the San Fernando Valley, providing access to the canyon from both the north and the south. The widened boulevard was now a winding thoroughfare, providing direct access to the Westside from the Valley. Traffic, needless to say, increased considerably, which probably worked out well for the planners of the other project, because it meant that the increased traffic brought about by that other project probably wasn’t noticed at all. And that’s good, you see, because the other project was a secret one, so if I tell you about it, you have to promise not to tell anyone else. What would become known as Lookout Mountain Laboratory was originally envisioned as an air defense center. Built in 1941 and nestled in two-and-a-half secluded acres off what is now Wonderland Park Avenue, the installation was hidden from view and surrounded by an electrified fence. By 1947, the facility featured a fully operational movie studio. In fact, it is claimed that it was perhaps the world’s only completely self-contained movie studio. With 100,000 square feet of floor space, the covert studio included sound stages, screening rooms, film processing labs, editing facilities, an animation department, and seventeen climate-controlled film vaults. It also had underground parking, a helicopter pad and a bomb shelter. Over its lifetime, the studio produced some 19,000 classified motion pictures – more than all the Hollywood studios combined (which I guess makes Laurel Canyon the real ‘motion picture capital of the world’). Officially, the facility was run by the U.S. Air Force and did nothing more nefarious than process AEC footage of atomic and nuclear bomb tests. The studio, however, was clearly equipped to do far more than just process film. There are indications that Lookout Mountain Laboratory had an advanced research and development department that was on the cutting edge of new film technologies. Such technological advances as 3-D effects were apparently first developed at the Laurel Canyon site. And Hollywood luminaries like John Ford, Jimmy Stewart, Howard Hawks, Ronald Reagan, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney and Marilyn Monroe were given clearance to work at the facility on undisclosed projects. There is no indication that any of them ever spoke of their work at the clandestine studio. 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 installation 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. The existence of the facility 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. Filmmaker 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, some 15 years after its public disclosure, one would have trouble finding even a single mention of this secret military/intelligence facility anywhere in the ‘conspiracy’ literature. I think we can all agree though that there is nothing the least bit suspicious about any of that, so let’s move on. In the 1950s, as Barney Hoskyns has written in Hotel California, Laurel Canyon was home to all “the hippest young actors,” including, according to Hoskyns, Marlon Brando, James Dean, James Coburn and Dennis Hopper. In addition to Hopper and Dean, yet another of the young stars of “Rebel Without a Cause” found a home in the canyon as well: Natalie Wood. In fact, Natalie lived in the very home that Cass Elliot would later turn into a Laurel Canyon party house. A fourth young star of the film, Sal Mineo, lived at the mouth of the canyon, and the fifth member of the “Rebel Without a Cause” posse, Nick Adams, lived just a mile or so away (as the crow flies) in neighboring Coldwater Canyon. With the exception of Hopper, all of their lives were tragically cut short, proving once again that Laurel Canyon can be a very dangerous place to live. First there was that great American icon, James Dean, who ostensibly died in a near head-on collision on September 30, 1955, at the tender age of twenty-four. Next to fall was Nick Adams, who had known Dean before either were stars, when both were working the mean streets of Hollywood as young male prostitutes. Adams died on February 6, 1968, at the age of thirty-six, in his home at 2126 El Roble Lane in Coldwater Canyon. His official cause of death was listed as suicide, of course, but as actor Forrest Tucker has noted, “All of Hollywood knows Nick Adams was knocked off.” Nick’s relatives reportedly received numerous hang-up calls on the day of his death, and his tape recorder, journals and various other papers and personal effects were conspicuously missing from his home. His lifeless body, sitting upright in a chair, was discovered by his attorney, Ervin “Tip” Roeder. On June 10, 1981, Roeder and his wife, actress Jenny Maxwell (best known for being spanked by Elvis in “Blue Hawaii”), were gunned down outside their Beverly Hills condo. Next in line was Sal Mineo, whose murder on February 12, 1976 we have already covered. Last to fall was Natalie Wood, who died on November 29, 1981 in a drowning incident that has never been adequately explained. Before being found floating in the waters off Catalina Island, Wood had been aboard a private yacht in the company of actors Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken. She was forty-three when she was laid to rest. The list of famous former residents of the canyon also includes the names of W.C. Fields, Mary Astor, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Errol Flynn, Orson Welles, and Robert Mitchum, who was infamously arrested on marijuana charges in 1948 at 8334 Ridpath Drive, the same street that would later be home to rockers Roger McGuinn, Don Henley and Glen Frey, as well as to Paul Rothchild, producer of both The Doors and Love. Mitchum’s arrest, by the way, appears to have been a thoroughly staged affair that cemented his ‘Hollywood bad boy’ image and gave his career quite a boost, but I guess that’s not really relevant here. Another famous resident of Laurel Canyon, apparently in the 1940s, was science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who reportedly resided at 8775 Lookout Mountain Avenue. Like so many other characters in this story, Heinlein was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and he had served as a naval officer. After that, he embarked on a successful writing career. And despite the fact that he was, by any objective measure, a rabid right-winger, his work was warmly embraced by the Flower Power generation. Heinlein’s best-known work is the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which many in the Laurel Canyon scene found to be hugely influential. Ed Sanders has written, in The Family, that the book “helped provide a theoretical basis for Manson’s family.” Charlie frequently used Strange Land terminology when addressing his flock and he named his first Family-born son Valentine Michael Manson, in honor of the book’s lead character. David Crosby was a big Heinlein fan as well. In his autobiography, he references Heinlein on more than one occasion, and proclaims that, “In a society where people can go armed, it makes everybody a little more polite, as Robert A. Heinlein says in his books.” Frank Zappa was also a member of the Robert Heinlein fan club. Barry Miles notes in his biography of the rock icon that his home contained “a copy of Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince and other essential sixties reading, including Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi classic, Stranger in a Strange Land, from which Zappa borrowed the word ‘discorporate’ for [the song] ‘Absolutely Free.’” And that, fearless readers, more or less brings us to the Laurel Canyon era that we are primarily concerned with, the wild and wooly 1960s, which we will take a closer look at in the next chapter of this saga. So what, if anything, have we learned today? We have learned that murder and random acts of violence have been a part of the culture of the canyon since the earliest days of its development. We have also learned that spooks posing as entertainers have likewise been a part of the canyon scene since the earliest days. And, finally, we have learned that spooks who didn’t even bother to pose as entertainers were streaming into the canyon to report to work at Lookout Mountain Laboratory for at least twenty years before the first rock star set foot there. One final note is in order here: we are supposed to believe that all of these musical icons just sort of spontaneously came together in Laurel Canyon (one finds the words “serendipitous” sprinkled freely throughout the literature). But how many peculiar coincidences do we have to overlook in order to believe that this was just a chance gathering? Let’s suppose, hypothetically speaking, that you are the young man in the photo at the top of this post, and you 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 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. This other guy’s business partner/manager is a spooky ex-Marine who just happens to have a cousin who, bizarrely enough, also fronts a rock band on the verge of superstardom. And this third rock-star-on-the-rise also happens to live in Laurel Canyon, just a mile or two from your house. Just down a couple of other streets, also within walking distance of your home, live two other kids who – wouldn’t you know it? – also happen to front a new rock band. These two kids happened to attend the same Alexandria, Virginia high school that you attended, and one of them also attended Annapolis, just like your dad did, and just like your kindergarten friend’s dad did. Though almost all of you hail from (or spent a substantial portion of your childhood in) the Washington, D.C. 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 Lookout Mountain Laboratory, as is the father of your kindergarten friend, and probably the fathers of a few other Laurel Canyon figures as well. My question here, I guess, is this: what do you suppose the odds are that all of that just came together purely by chance?
 To Be Continued …

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Throughout the last decade, Preston Nichols has developed a considerable reputation for his alleged involvement in time travel and secret government projects. However, it is not very well known at all that he was just as deeply involved in the music scene of the 1960's as rock 'n roll came to center stage in world pop culture.

Although I have acted as Preston's ghostwriter and co-researcher for a number of years, it was his expertise in sound engineering that brought me to meet him in the first place. This is very curious to me because I grew up with an antipathy to the subject. As I kid, I never understood what all the fuss was about when it came to stereo sound as opposed to monaural. It seemed to me that people were spending far too much time discerning the quality of sound rather than just listening to the music. I could detect a difference, but I always thought the music being played was far more important than the sound system it was played on. Therefore, I tended to tune out when someone would start talking about the virtue of one stereo system over another.

That was until, one day, I heard about quadraphonic stereo. All of a sudden, my ears perked up. I wanted to know everything about it. I was even surprised at my own interest in the subject. I was not a technical buff, but I wanted to know about each track and each speaker and what all of the functions were. Unfortunately for my interests at the time, quad stereo in the late 1970's was nothing but a flash in the pan. Before I could begin to seriously think about buying a system, the fad was gone and written off as a complete failure, never to return to the commercial market since. In retrospect, there was only one significant aspect with regard to my capricious interest in a subject I had shown no previous interest in. It proved to be a premonition of my future and eventual collaboration with Preston Nichols.

In 1990, it had been over a decade since I had heard about quadraphonic sound. It was the last thing on my mind when I learned about another device that had elements of quad sound. At least, it had four speaker-like boxes and played music. It was owned by a chiropractor in Manhattan and was purported to balance the electro-magnetic field that surrounds the human body. It was called the Betarand was put together by a man named Peter Kelly. A patient of the chiropractor told me about the machine and told me that a public company was being created to market it.

The Betar was going to retail to the public for $70,000 a unit but would also be marketed to the medical and healing community. They were going to need a full brochure. As I was in the field of advertising and design, this patient thought that maybe I could help them. This interested me as a potential business proposition, and I felt that I had a good angle as I knew I understood much more than most advertisers do when it comes to esoteric aspects about the human body. I pursued the lead.

Eventually, I met the chiropractor in Manhattan. He showed me the Betar but complained that it was not set up right when he received it. It needed adjustments, and he had to make them himself. I did not know what he was talking about, but the device was aesthetically pleasing in its construction, and I just scoped it out. It had a reclining platform with four speaker-like boxes surrounding it so that while you rested comfortably, musical sound penetrated your energetic field. Two of the boxes were actually speakers and were directed at the center of the body. Two other boxes were opposite the other boxes and were input devices. The speakers sent waves directed at the body which bounced off and went into the input device. The doctor explained that this was a biofeedback device.

He gave me a pair of goggles which he said would reflect my state of being at the time I was looking at them. I would see colors and patterns that my own biological system was generating as I listened to the music. As I listened to the music, the colors were a cross between a kaleidoscope and what you might see looking under a microscope, but they were always moving. After forty-five minutes, the doctor came over and brought me back to the real world. I was completely relaxed. What was particularly significant to me was that I remained relaxed for the entire day, even after a train ride from Manhattan to Long Island. Riding the Long Island Railroad has never been a pleasant experience for me. It has always been somewhat stressful, so this was a very welcome surprise.

Nothing ever came of the public offering for the Betar, but one day I was talking to a guy named Jeff who was studying to be a chiropractor. I was telling him about the Betar, and he said that he had been on it, too. In fact, he said there was an even better machine. It was put together by an inventor named Preston Nichols, and he said that I should check it out. Jeff said that Preston was not so much into marketing, but maybe I could help him. The device, he said, was about $60,000 cheaper. Another one of Jeff's friends was Margo Geiger, a nice older lady who worked as my proofreader up until her death. She told me that I must go to the Long Island Psychotronics Association and listen to Preston. She said it would be absolutely fascinating.

I met Preston soon after but never got a chance to ask him about his inventions. He was lecturing with others and talked on and on about the Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project. I was subjected to an earful of science-fiction-like information that I deemed the best story-telling that I had ever heard. It was all about time travel with a stunning array of technical oriented information.

His stories also included the subjects of mind control, aliens, and Nazis who were allegedly operating an activity right under our noses on Long Island. Even if his stories were untrue, they were worthy of an "A" for creativity and holding one's interest. As it turned out, my life would be changed forever by the remarkable stories I heard that night. I met Preston to see if I could help him market his equipment but ended up marketing his incredible stories. Since then, writing and researching the history, legends, and circumstances surrounding Montauk has become an entire career.

When I finally got the opportunity to sit down with Preston and talk about his machine, he told me that he was the one who had invented the prototype for Peter Kelly's machine. He said that his own system did not have the goggles which he called "blinky lights." Preston did not advocate the use of these as they tend to be hypnotic and can be used to entrain a person's thought patterns to their detriment. Preston also told me that when the original quadraphonic systems were introduced, the people behind them did not really know what they were doing. He could show me a far superior system.

It was not a quad system in the same sense that the sound industry had already produced. There were four boxes, but two of them were input devices, not speakers. The idea behind both stereo and quad stereo was to reproduce the actual experience of listening to live performers. His system, he explained, did that better than any other system on the market. After all, he had been in sound engineering since its emergence in the 1960's. He called his device the Biofiss. I will defer the technical description of that device to Preston, and you will read about it later on in this book.

Preston's music system was very much a focal point of his research into the paranormal, but as I interviewed him in order to write the The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, he never really linked the subject of music to Montauk. Nevertheless, I heard many stories about his experiences in the music business and his work with different artists. These anecdotes were told to me in bits and pieces throughout the years. The Montauk Project book was basically a summary of a decade worth of research by Preston. It consisted of scuttlebutt he had heard throughout his years in the defense industry, countless interviews conducted at Montauk, as well as research done with people involved in the project.

The Montauk Project itself was put together as a result of human behavioral studies conducted secretly under the umbrella of Brookhaven Laboratories. These studies were done as a result of thePhiladelphia Experiment in 1943 when the Navy experimented with degaussing technology and sought to make a ship, the U.S.S. Eldridge, appear invisible to radar. The Navy denies this, but the subject matter is still highly classified and considered to be the forerunner of today's stealth technology. Not only was the U.S.S. Eldridge reported to have become invisible, but the sailors involved were hurled out of this dimension. Upon their return, some were imbedded in the bulkheads and other fixtures of the ship with others spontaneously combusting or suffering severe psycho-logical trauma.

Even if one does not accept the more sensational aspects of the Philadelphia Experiment, there is absolutely no doubt about the fact that the sailors were exposed to non-ordinary electromagnetic fields as a result of the degaussing coils that were employed to demagnetize the hull. In order to first prevent negative effects on human beings, a massive study was eventually begun after the war, at Brookhaven Laboratories, in order to under-stand how human beings and the human consciousness relate to different electromagnetic fields. This research project also had at its disposal human behavioral studies conducted by the Nazis. Many of them were quite gleesome, but they were empirical in nature and were as meticulous as only Germans can be. They provided considerable information about human reactions.

It is no small irony that when Brookhaven Laboratories was erected in 1946, the location selected was Yaphank, home to the largest concentration of Nazis outside of Germany. Before the war, Yaphank sported an "Adolf Hitler Boulevard" with other streets named after Goebbels, Goring and the like. Many people of German descent worked at the lab as well, and there have always been questions about their loyalties. Not only did Brookhaven entertain top international scientists, many of whom were German, but it became the premier atomic and scientific research center in the world.

Shortly thereafter, the National Security Act was passed and the CIA was brought into being. Covert connections between the Nazis and the U.S. were completely affirmed when Allen Dulles, the first director of the CIA, hired Reinhard Gehlen to set up the working procedures of the CIA Gehlen had served as the director of Nazi intelligence in Europe. Dulles also hired Ewen Cameron, the head of the American Psychiatric Association, to conduct mind control experiments under a program known as MK-ULTRA. These are documented facts, and no one who honestly researches this subject will deny it.

As the human mind was studied, and sometimes quite brutally, all sorts of empirical observations were made. Just as the Nazis had their own occult bureau and re-searched the supernatural, so did the researchers at Brookhaven. Finally, after years of research, there were successes in integrating the human mind with computers. The experiments in mind control, although limited, were successful.

Eventually, this clandestine research was considered to be potentially very dangerous and the funding was denied. Nevertheless, great strides had been made in terms of technology and secret forces carried forward, eventually moving the project to a decommissioned Air Force Station at Montauk, New York. It was there that eye witnesses say that the research reached its apex on August 12,1983, when a full scale hook up was made to the U.S.S. Eldridge in 1943 and time travel became a reality. The general pattern of this research is related in The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time.

Preston Nichols remembers entering the fold of the Montauk research when he became a paid employee of Brookhaven Labs in the late 1960's. But, his first recollections occurred when he was having a family dinner that included his cousin and her husband. The husband mentioned that he had seen Preston at Montauk, yet Preston had no recollection of ever having been there. This resulted in a heated argument. Over the years, more people began to recognize Preston from Montauk and other associations he had no conscious memory of. Preston soon realized that he had an entire life he knew nothing about. Memories were buried, including what appeared to be memories of other realities which were elusive but nevertheless tangible in many respects. All of these experiences fostered Preston's research which resulted in the book The Montauk Project.

This pattern of unrecovered memories is a primary reason why the music aspect of the Montauk Project was never dealt with in the earlier books. The connection was never completely made. He remembered being in the music business, and I knew something about it, but the working components of it and how it related to Montauk were overlooked by both of us. There was also another factor. Although I had suggested for years to Preston that he should do a book about his music experiences, he was always reluctant. He said he had angered enough people with The Montauk Project, and he thought this music book might be even more aggravating to certain folks. Consequently, he has not relayed many anecdotes at all about various musicians and their bizarre behavior. Nevertheless, there was key information he was willing to release that will hopefully serve as a springboard to further research and understanding.

Working with Preston on this book was not an easy task. For example, he gave me four separate times (about seven years apart) for when he first met his boyhood friend, Mark Harnill. Finally, I asked his dad, Bob Nichols, if he remembered Mark. Bob remembered Mark raking leaves in their backyard as a youngster. By going over different information from different angles, we were able to arrive at as accurate a representation as possible. Preston explained his disparities by telling me that he seems to live on at least three different time lines, and they get confused. He has appreciated this attempt to put his history into words because it straightens out his own memories

Preston is a genius. He is unsurpassed when it comes to understanding electromagnetic functions and all of the technical details that go with it. This is verifiable in science and industry and also makes him an irritant to those who would want to dismiss him as a mere crackpot or nut. He is also knowledgeable in psychology, religion and occultism and sees realms that regular human beings are cut off from. In esoteric terms, Preston occupies nonlinear space. This means that he is operating in a consciousness that is not regulated by linear thought. Therefore, his memories and experiences do not always conform to linear applications. This book is an attempt, and certainly not a perfect one, to put his experiences into a linear reality.

There are many controversial statements herein. I have made reasonable attempts to verify certain information, but these are Preston's memories, not mine. I can neither prove nor disprove certain statements. Also, his experiences often defy ordinary attempts to verify them. For example, false identities are common throughout his experiences at Montauk. Sometimes, people appear to be one person when they are really another. Preston Nichols was definitely in the music business as a key player and knew plenty of famous people. Whatever the truth is, it is always stranger than fiction. After you have read the entire book, I will offer some additional perspective on the relative truth of the situation.

The second half of this book takes us on another adventure all together. It concerns some of Preston's key activities post Montauk and attempts to harass and attack him that ultimately ended in the indefinite incarceration of one of his associates, John Ford, the founder and president of the Long Island UFO Network. What happens here is based upon cold hard documented facts that were chronicled in the local newspaper. It is an exposition of human rights violations, and a massive effort to hide the truth.

If the future contains endless possibilities, including a time when the truth of the universe will be fully known and the consciousness of man can move fluidly through time, there will be many stepping stones of realization along the way. This book and the stories herein are not a step back to the "The Land Time Forgot" but rather to the "The Land Where Time Remembered."

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PART ONE
 

CHAPTER ONE MY START IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS

My involvement in the music world goes back to 1958 when my father and I were deeply involved in scouting. One evening, while attending a "Blue and Gold Dinner" for Webelo scouts at Oscar's Bowling Alley in East Islip, the public address system suddenly went dead. We had been listening to a live band known as "The Recorders." I thought they were fantastic and so did all most everyone else. No one knew what to do about the busted sound system until the pack master told the band that one of his Cub Scouts could probably fix it. They got a charge out of that and said "Sure, let's see if the kid can fix it."

That kid was me. I took a look at the amplifier and found out it had a burned out resistor. I bridged it with some aluminum foil and this turned out to be an excellent temporary solution. The amplifier was working again, and the band continued to play. During a break in the music, I talked to the guys in the group and convinced them to let me do a demo tape of their music. My father then took me down to St. Mary's Church in East Islip where we borrowed their big Ampex tape recorder. We took it back to the bowling alley and did a demo tape of a song called "I've Had It".

The leader of the Webelo scouts from Bayshore was Cal Mann, a small time record producer and an aspiring performer. He thought the recording was great and played it for a friend of his who had just started his own label. This man liked the song, too, but he needed a better recording than what I had provided. He eventually called the Recorders up to Belough Instruments in Manhasset for a more conventional recording, but the sound was faulty. Finally, they had to get me out of grade school to g recording they wanted. The record "I've Had It" was subsequently cut at Grand Award of Pickering and Company in Freeport, New York and was released under the label "Time Records." It can be found in CD format to this day. The name of the group "The Recorders" was changed to "The Bell Notes."

Cal Mann, the scout leader and record producer, had noticed my acumen in the area of recording. When I ran into him again during a camping weekend, he talked to me about his interest in music and told me that he was originally from Philadelphia. He was trying to break into the music scene in New York City.
One Saturday, Cal and I got together and talked for most of the entire day. At the time, he was renting a house that was filled with all sorts of old audio equipment which would be considered antiques by today's standards.

Even in those days, most of what he had was considered to be old for the time period we were in. Based upon our discussion and what he had already witnessed with my recording of "I've Had It," Cal recognized that I was a whiz in electronics. He offered me four dollars an hour to work as his recording engineer in the hopes that I could do something with his old equipment and get his music career to take off. To a twelve year old kid at that time, his offer was huge money. I accepted it and told my parents that I had a job with a black fellow in Bayshore. When my mother saw his big limousine, she figured that he must be all right.

One of Cal's old audio pieces soon came in very handy for both of us. It was a "brush development corporation sound-mirror" and was patterned after the German ferograph, a recording device which came to this country after World War II. It had a cork capstan and was used to produce a hit song entitled "The Twist", a hit record which topped the charts in the early 1960's. Al-though I knew this man as Cal Mann, most of you will recognize him by his stage name of Chubby Checker.

When we took our taped recording of "The Twist" to Crest Records, they put it on their Ampex 350 but could not get the speed right whatsoever. Consequently, we had to trudge the sound-mirror down to Crest. When we played it on the sound mirror and put it on the 350, the audio engineer was curious about this piece of equipment and wanted to know where we got it. Cal told him that he had found it in the attic of the house he was renting. There were also some preamps and mixers in his collection which took me about three days to fix. This was accomplished primarily by changing the capacitors.

Once I got everything to work, including the sound-mirror, "The Twist" did not sound too bad, as long as the speed was right. God only knows what speed that sound-mirror ran at as they did not have a standard in those days. It depended on how big the piece of cork on the capstan was. The capstan literally had a piece of cork wrapped around it and still does to this day. I know as I actually own the machine.

For those of you who are too young to remember, "The Twist" was a huge fad and started a new trend in pop music. It is the only record other than "White Christmas" to reach number one on the charts two different times. One reason it caught on as a fad has to do with a very esoteric principle in sound recording. In fact, it has been a closely guarded secret until now, but we will go into that in detail later on in this book.

Although I had proven to be a success in the recording business, I still had to attend school. By the age of sixteen, I met up with a group of guys who became known as "The Ventures" and did a few of their albums. While working for them, I met up with Frankie Valle and the Four Seasons and eventually recorded them at St. Mary's Church in East Islip. Sometimes, I even used to fill in on the drums for them. If you listen to the song "Big Girls Don't Cry," you will hear me in the background. At the end of the song, you can hear my voice exactly, singing "Big Girls Don't Cry."

My early work with the Four Seasons taught me what I considered to be a very valuable lesson. Frankie Valli's real name was Frank Valenti and when his songs were released, the records contained the words "written by Frank Valenti." Of course, he lived under that name and could be easily found. Consequently, he was besieged by fans and ended up moving to New Jersey. I took this to heart and insisted that my name never be put on any recordings, even if only listed as sound engineer. That is why you will not see my name in too many places.

The general public does not realize how contrived some aspects of the music business really are. A prime example is Chubby Checker himself. If you consult the internet, you might find a web site that says his real name is "Ernest Evans". This is possibly going to cause people to say that I am making up what I am saying. If one looks at the particular web site I am referring to, it says that "Ernest Evans" is the "name" that was contracted to Cameo Parkway and was later changed to "Chubby Checker". It is not necessarily the true name of Chubby Checker. The man I knew referred to himself as Cal Mann, and he was the Chubby Checker who has become a part of pop culture.

As you read this book, there will be other discrepancies between my experiences and what publicity people write about music stars. In the music business, publicity is designed to cultivate an image that will sell records and make the person well thought of. There is also a deeper side to some celebrities and that includes mind control. Sometimes there are even stand-ins or doubles. The world of celebrity can be very convoluted. I know because I was right in the middle of it for many years.

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CHAPTER TWO
THE WALL OF SOUND

After getting involved with Chubby Checker, my career began to blossom. I became heavily involved at his company which was known as Parkway Records. Park-way subsequently bought Cameo and became known as Cameo Parkway. At the age of twelve, I was probably the youngest recording engineer in the field. As I continued my part time career in the record business, I was still growing up in East Islip. At the age of sixteen, I combined forces with a group of friends in the neighborhood. They provided the musical writing and performance, and I worked as their sound engineer. Although this group had considerable talent, we could not sell the music we produced to anybody.

It was during this period with the band that I met one of the most beautiful girls I have ever known. Her name was Lucy, and she was the cousin of one of my friends in the group. Lucy's two brothers hung out with their cousin, and I decided to make friends with them in order to meet their sister. These two brothers were Chuck and Mark Hamill, two people who were to figure prominently later on in my music career. Lucy and I did become very close friends, but she had already dedicated her life to God and eventually joined a convent and has since lived her life as a nun.

Despite the disappointment with Lucy and the neighborhood band, I still had a very active life and career in the music business. Nevertheless, I attended school and kept up with my studies. When I graduated from high school, my mother wanted me go to college. I not only thought that was a good idea, but I was also interested in studying psychiatry. My interest in the subject was no different than most students who study psychiatry or psychology: they want to figure themselves out. My mother was in seventh heaven because she was an art teacher with a psychology background and now I was going to follow in her footsteps. I attended Stony Brook University on Long Island. This was great for her until I came home one day and told her the subjects were not being approached properly. My language was not so diplomatic.

Although the subjects of psychiatry and psychology have made some progress over the years, they basically work on a paradigm of statistical analysis. In other words, they are trying to tell you that the mind of man can be statistically analyzed. The quantum model of the human mind is now beginning to come into psychiatry, but most of it is statistical and that is garbage. I soon realized that I did not want to study psychiatry.

I had now blown a year studying a subject I would not get a degree in. Consequently, I transferred to Suffolk County Community College and decided to study a subject that was already quite familiar to me: electronics. This was fun and relatively easy for me, but I decided I needed to get back in business and make some money. I spoke to one of my professors, Mr. Mayer, and told him I needed some work. He asked me what I could do, and I informed him that I had worked off and on in the recording industry for years, recording the Four Seasons out at St. Mary's Church as well as Chubby Checker and other local groups. Mr. Mayer said he had some contacts at Columbia Records and set me up for a meeting in Westchester at some sort of research facility for CBS Records.

I met with Mr. Mayer's contacts. They were very nice, but they said they had no place for me. One of the guys said he knew someone who had just purchased an old NBC studio on West 57th Street in Manhattan and wanted to rebuild it. I was told to go to the building and ask for Phil. He might be able to use me. I was not given his last name. When I arrived at the address and asked for Phil, this freaky looking fellow came out with a hairdo that extended out all over the place.

He said, "Hi, I'm Phil."

I told him that I was Preston Nichols, a friend of Charlie from CBS.

"Oh, Charlie, how's he doing?" Phil asked.

"I haven't seen him in such a while."

After we spoke for a while, Phil looked at me and said, "Why are you here?"

"Charlie said you needed someone with technical skills to rebuild some of your studio," I responded.

"Oh, yes, we do. We've got no money to pay for it though."

I told Phil we could make an arrangement. He claimed he could pay me $5 an hour. This was not horrible money in those days and was certainly well above average for a college kid, but it was not great either. Asking what else he could give me, Phil said he could hook me up with record producing and that sort of thing. I took the job and began working for Phil. His full name is Phil Spector, arguably the most famous and heralded record producer in the music business. Most of his success as a producer was in the early 1960's, but he also worked with the Beatles in their later years at Apple Records.

I began my work for Phil in Studio A on 57th Street. It was the oldest, dumpiest studio in the place. They had equipment in there from the time of Woodrow Wilson. But, it had an echo chamber, a real echo chamber. This was the famous Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" which many of you have heard of and all of you have actually heard through the radio at one time or another. It was a very reflective echo chamber.

If you would clap into it, about fifty claps came back at you. On one wall in the back, he had six big speaker cabinets. He also had a group of microphones set up in the chamber. First, he would have the performer record the regular music tracks in the standard studio. Then, he would play the tapes into Western Electric amplifiers which drove these big old Western Electric drivers in the back of the echo chamber. The performer then sang in front of the microphone as everything reverberated. That wall of speakers was the Phil Spector "Wall of Sound".

Although this might sound glamorous, I can tell you that this was no dream job. The place was a mess, and it seemed every damned capacitor in the system was leaking and making noises. We called these strange noises "anti-artifacts". It was my job to literally rebuild Studio A and the system in the echo chamber.

One day, I saw Phil standing nearby and asked him what standards he wanted this studio built to.

"I don't care. Do whatever you feel like."

That was all he said so I did whatever I felt like. I spent about three months, part time, building this facility.

Finally, it was beautiful and brand new. Phil called in his engineers and said to go in and have fun with it. When they went in, the engineers looked around at the equipment and said they had no idea how to run it. They said the kid he had hired (meaning me) had done some very strange things. Nevertheless, Studio A was THE state-of-the-art recording studio for Phil's company which was known as Bell Sound East. There was also a Bell Sound in Los Angeles and one in Memphis. Phil owned all three and all were very popular, but Bell Sound East was best and became the Mecca for the best recording industry. What I did in New York was eventually copied in Los Angeles and Memphis.

When the top rock bands came in to do a recording, their producers and audio men would ask Phil for his best studio. He would refer them to Studio A, his newly rebuilt studio, but would also tell them that there was only one engineer who could operate it. That was me. They typically viewed me as a young kid cleaning the tape heads. When they asked about my qualifications as a sound engineer, they were informed that I had literally built the studio. Obviously, if I had built the studio, I must know how to operate it. In fact, I was the only one who could. In this way, I became the technical czar of Bell Sound and got to work with more famous recording acts than you could imagine. These included the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Beach Boys, BeeGees, the Mamas and the Papas, Jim Morrison and too many more to mention.

Although no one consciously realized it at the time, when Phil Spector gave me carte blanche to build a studio, he created a circumstance that would leave a lasting impression on the recording industry as well as all of humanity itself.

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CHAPTER THREE BUDDHA RECORDS

Although I had given up my formal study of psychiatry, I still had a profound interest in psychology and what made the mind work. As I worked at Phil Spector's studio in Manhattan and studied electronics at Suffolk Community College, I was also doing experiments at Long Island University in the area of ESP. They had an open forum with all sorts of independent study programs.

It was during this time period that one of my friends in the neighborhood band said his cousin would be very interested in my ESP research. This cousin turned out to be Mark Hamill who I was already familiar with as described earlier. At that time, Mark was a member of a recording group called the "Ohio Express." He volunteered for some of my experiments and we hit it off and became friends. He had a very deep interest in the occult, metaphysics, ESP and all types of psychic phenomena. Originally, he lived in Ohio and would visit his family on Long Island. When he did, we would get together and discuss all sorts of different subjects. I tried to develop his ESP. We pooled our information and sought out many different types of occultism. Mark was extremely mystical. He consulted astrologers and was always looking for patterns in numbers and names.

Mark was not only a metaphysician, he was a gifted and prolific lyricist. He was an extremely talented musician as well and eventually starred on Broadway as Mozart in Amadeus. One of the reasons he was chosen for the role was that his musicianship was flawless. He also had the petulant personality that fit the role of Mozart exactly. He could basically be himself. Although he was offered the role for the movie, he turned it down. Perhaps he did not realize what a big hit it would become or did not want to be typecast in the role. I do not really know what his reasons were, but I saw his performance at least two times and it was excellent.

Before I got to know Mark very well, I was already acquainted with his older brother Chuck, an even more gifted musician. Chuck had been hanging around the studio for some time because he wanted to break into the music business. He had always demonstrated a great interest in electronics, audio systems and weird technology. Chuck was more of a technician than Mark and was down-to-earth. Sometimes he thought his brother was a complete idiot with his head in the clouds. I helped Chuck understand his brother, and I think I kept them in a decent brother relationship. There were times when he would have abandoned Mark had I not stepped in.

Chuck was also very interested in time travel and used to talk to me about it. He asked me if I knew anything about time travel technology or making a time machine. Whenever this subject came up, I could only joke about it. He took it quite seriously and said I would be the one making a time machine for the private sector in the future. When I asked him how he knew this, all he said was that "he had seen it."

If I did not know him better at the time, I would have thought that he was just one of the kids in the neighborhood trying to wind up the "scientific nerd" (meaning me) in the community to see what he could get him going on. This was not the case however because he had tremendous respect for my technical abilities. After all, I was the one who made his recordings work. Since those early years, I have also spoken to quite a few people who believe Chuck to be a time traveler. He was always interested in cutting-edge technology and eventually became very involved in the intelligence community.

As I became involved with the Hamill's, I began to record their music. I had access to Studio A and Chuck was already familiar with the studio set-up from hanging around. The first record I produced for them was "Beg, Borrow and Steal" which was released by Cameo in October 1967 under the name "Ohio Express." Even though this record made the charts, it did not bring us instant success.

Chuck was not only a genius with electronics and music, he also had an acumen for business. One day, he said,

"Let's make our own (recording) label."
"Sure," I said. "Why not? Everything else we've done is ludicrous. Let's try and make a label too. "

After deciding to create our own company, the group of us sat around the kitchen table and brainstormed over what we were going to call our new record label. About this time, a young seven-year-old kid came into the room and looked around. Seeing me sitting about in a lotus position, which is the way I used to sit, he suddenly and unexpectedly blurted out "Mr. Buddha!" We all thought that "Buddha" was a great label name and decided to use it. One of the guys saw to the registration of the name, and we began to record songs under the name and spelling of "Buddha".

Once we actually had a label, I was able to use all of my contacts at Columbia. Atlantic and elsewhere to get proper distribution. Although things started to happen, we soon discovered that none of us knew the record business all that well. I basically knew how to record and that was about as far as our expertise went. Consequently, we hired a man by the name of Neil Bogart to run the company. He claimed to be the nephew of Humphrey Bogart and certainly had a fascination with him. After my involvement with him, he renovated the entire first floor of his music publishing business to look like the night club set in the movie Casablanca. In our operation, he contributed about $250,000 to get Buddha off the ground. He became the president and owned about forty-eight percent of the stock. Another group of us owned the remainder. The company began to do well under his leadership.

A lot of the recordings we did for Buddha were performed and recorded with direct participation by the Hamill brothers. Many times, they would simply arrange the music and whip a band into shape so the recording would work. If the band was not up to snuff, they would work with studio musicians in order to produce a decent sounding recording. As a sound engineer, I used them liberally because they knew their music and were consummate professionals. Not all of the work we did together was released under the Buddha label. As an engineer at Bell Sound, I recorded all different types of groups. Sometimes, I would utilize the Hamills for the work I did under Phil. Other times, we recorded at Bell Sound for our own interests.

In Chapter One, I mentioned that publicity accounts of rock stars are not always accurate. A prime example of this can be found in the book Rock On: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock N' Roll: The Modern Years: 1964-Present (Volume II). If you look under the group with the name "Ohio Express," you will discover that Mark is not listed as one of the members. However, if you read further, it will tell you that Neil Bogart, one of the executives of Cameo, became affiliated with Buddha Records and took the name "Ohio Express," as well as his association with the producers, to release "bubble gum7' music, the kind that had worked so well for the "1910 Fruitgum Company."

This listing in Rock On also states that as the records of the Ohio Express became major best sellers, the "above lineup of musicians" were recruited to make personal appearances as the Ohio Express. This book is stating that the listed members of the band were for touring purposes only. This was very typical. Names were bought and sold all the time. The producers referred to above were myself and the Hamill's.

The 1910 Fruitgum Company was also a result of my association with the Harnill's. The book Rock On even lists "Mark" as the keyboard and rhythm guitar player for this group but gives no last name for him. It further states that the recordings were made by studio musicians and featured the lead voice of "writer-producer Joey Levine." This was one of Mark's pen names, taken from Joe E. Levine, the producer of the movie The Ten Commandments.

Again, the listing in Rock On tells us that as the records began selling in the millions, a touring group was organized to make personal appearances. The first hit by the 1910 Fruit Gum Company was Simon Says. It was bubble gum music aimed at youth and was composed by Mark and Chuck. Mark wrote the lyrics and gave credit for them to my mother because he remembered her teaching him a similar song as his kindergarten teacher. The fidelity on that particular recording was phenomenal, and it is still equally good today in CD format.

The above involvement by the Hamill's is corroborated by the book Rock On, but other involvements may be a little more controversial because popular "documentation" in the way of publicity books might not show it. These include Chuck Hamill singing the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" which was credited to Scott McKenzie and became the top hit song during the Summer of Love (1967). Chuck also penned and performed songs in the studio for Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. They outsold every other rock group for the year 1969, including the Beatles.

There were many other identities these friends of mine assumed to produce hit records along with myself. They always wanted to keep their personal lives very private nor did they have the time to do all the touring that was requested as a result of their music. Together, we were trying to build a successful company at Buddha. As the hits began to roll out of Buddha and Bell Sound, I became known as "Little Buddha." I logged about two thousand hours of studio time and about two hundred of the songs I engineered made it to the top forty. That is a very good rate. It became "the thing" to make a recording at Bell Sound East with "Little Buddha." 

Buddha Records did well under Bogart's leadership until we bought Kamasutra. That turned out to be a mistake. After buying another company, Plantation Records, we realized we had to get out of the record business altogether. But, that was many years later. There was still plenty of recording and excitement to be had in the music world.

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CHAPTER FOUR DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED

While attending college and also working at Bell Sound, my friend Chuck attended Juilliard, a prestigious musical conservatory in New York City. Looking back, I believe something strange happened to him there. One reason for this is that Peter Moon had some people do some research at Juilliard to find out if he attended the school. After looking for Chuck under different names that he has used, there was no record of him even having been at Juilliard in any capacity. I definitely remember him attending but also telling me that he became associated there with the Skull and Cross Bones society, a group that is more commonly associated with Yale University.

Chuck was apparently set up as some sort of CIA operative who was slated to work out of England. His father was already in military intelligence so the connection probably came from that quarter. Musicians are generally considered to be very good agents because they are innocuous and fade into the background. They come and go through different countries throughout the world and the governments never think anything of it. He ended up working at the London Philharmonic, and I believe it was the CIA who got him that assignment. They did not have to pull too many strings either because Chuck was a genius. You could give him a new instrument that he had never touched, and in a few hours, he would be able to play it as a virtuoso.

As Chuck worked with the Philharmonic, he also became affiliated with E.M.I., the primary music company in Great Britain. They recorded the Beatles and almost every significant group that came out of England.

The Beatles themselves had been connected with Phil Spector from their early days. If you have a chance to see the films clips of the Beatles arriving in New York for the first time, you will see Phil getting off the plane with them. Popular literature suggests that their first drug experiences were with him. Although I did not do drugs myself, they were very prevalent in the music industry and their factor with regard to mind control should not be discounted.

I became associated with the Beatles through my connection with Phil Spector at Bell Sound, a studio they utilized as it was the best money could buy. If you notice their early recordings, they are of poor quality compared to their later days. All of this changed with their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band which has been hailed as the most revolutionary rock album of all time. Whatever its merits, it inarguably changed the direction of rock 'n roll. I was actually a participating witness to certain events which brought this new type of art form into being.

Most people will be surprised to learn that Sgt. Pepper was done by the Beatles as an answer to the then unreleased recording known as Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues. All of the great rock groups were very competitive. They listened to each others' recordings with appreciation but also with the idea of incorporating what they could learn for use in their own work. The Beatles were no exception, and as the most hailed and successful rock band in history, it stands to reason that they were at one time the most competitive.

My memories of how they utilized the Moody Blues are as follows.

The original Moody Blues style was from the famous song "Go Now". That was their signature song and music style until Justin Hayward joined the group. I became acquainted with him during my days at Bell Sound in New York. At that time, there was a British fellow who used to hang around the studio a lot, and we played around with a lot of innovative technology and recordings. His name was Alan Parsons, and we were friends for years. He subsequently became famous as the leading member of "The Alan Parsons Project". Alan was also very strong friends with Justin Hayward and brought him to the Bell Sound studio.

The Moody Blues, mainly Hayward, wanted to do something symphonic, so I introduced him to the Hamill brothers. Chuck Hamill was the classical musician and Mark was the lyricist. They sold them a concept and wrote up a story to music entitled "Days of Future Passed". At that time, as Chuck was working with the London Philharmonic, they were able to get sections of the orchestra over to the studio. That is how we did "Days of Future Passed."

At that point, Paul McCartney was hanging around with Phil Spector at Bell Sound and heard some of the musical rushes being played in the control room as the mix down was being done. McCartney liked it and subsequently came up with the concept for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. I was brought in to help with certain sound effects. Almost every book claims that the sound was done exclusively at Abbey Road, but this is just not true.

They did not have a proper facility at that time.

If you see a copy of Days of Future Passed, you will see that Peter Knight is the conductor of the London Festival Orchestra. This is actually Chuck as the conductor with members of the London Philharmonic in the orchestra. According to my friend and journalist, John Quinn, Peter Knight was interviewed in Rolling Stone magazine several years ago and talked about being on the run from theCIA. From what I heard, something went wrong with one of his operations and he became sought after himself. I do not know exactly what went wrong, but he never talked about it. In the early nineties, I would see him at ham fests from time to time and he would visit. He was always moving clandestinely and feared for his life. I have not seen or heard from him for many years now.

Here we had a mysterious genius who believed himself to be a time traveler and also thought that I would build a time machine myself. With his brother, he had conceived a record album that not only made major waves in the music industry, it was based on the theme of time travel with the words "Days of Future Passed." To this day, I still do not know what all these strange connections add up to, but it all has a lot to do with becoming more conscious of the principles of time itself.

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CHAPTER FIVE BACK TO BROOKHAVEN

One day, I was doing a recording session for the Rolling Stones. I forget what recording we were doing, but I believe it was Jumping Jack Flash. Mick Jagger suddenly walked into the control room and said he wanted to talk to "Little Buddah" and see all of my recording equipment. He knew of my reputation as a recording engineer and considered me a fountain of good ideas. He said that every time I worked for the group, he learned something new. He usually knew what sound he wanted, and it was my job to produce it. On that day, he wanted to learn what secrets I had to share. Subsequently, I took him home so that he could see what I had. He talked a lot about the occult and procedures of sexual magick. He often used these techniques before recording.

As things developed, I decided it would be a good idea to introduce Mick to the acoustics of the old Montauk Pavilion. It was called Caswell's Pavilion and was at Caswell' s Beach, not too far from Dick Cavett's house and the future home of Mark Hamill. We got permission to use the pavilion in order to record a couple of songs for one of the Stones' albums. Both of the songs, "You Don't Always Get What You Want" and "Street Fighting Man," utilized a choir of young boys from Montauk who showed up at the pavilion and sang. I have no idea where they came from.

Mick became enchanted with Montauk during this period and began to live there for long stretches of time. To this day, his picture can still be found in certain bars around the town. He expressed part of his affiliation with Montauk in a song entitled "Memory Motel" which is the exact name of a motel on the main street in town. An interesting anecdote about the Memory Motel was told to me at a lecture by a woman from Montauk who said she suspected that "Room #1" of the motel was a secret entrance to the underground. She had seen military personnel there and said the room always had something weird associated with it. As I recall, this was the room just to the north side of the bar. I told her that I had tried to rent that room several times but was always refused.

I really do not know if Mick Jagger had any direct connection to the Montauk Project. My memories of him were of a regular and routine nature although his interest in the occult and his strong attraction to Montauk and the Memory Motel will cause everyone, including myself, to wonder. His song "Sympathy for the Devil" is supposed to refer to Aleister Crowley. He has also produced low budget videos which explore satanism.

What is interesting about this time period is that I had begun to work at Brookhaven Labs during my summer vacation from college. This was in 1968. As an engineer and scientist, I had signed up for a program whereby I could work with their particle accelerator. There were several other budding scientists who were similarly interested. This was a paid job, and I was sold a bill of goods that I was doing something very patriotic for the good of my country. Unfortunately for myself, I was not assigned to the particle accelerator work as I had hoped. Instead, they put me on human factor research. I was to set up electromagnetic fields of certain types and subject actual human beings to them. Behavioral scientists, including myself, would record the stress and reactions of the test subjects. Looking back, this was research carried forward from the original Philadelphia Experiment. I was being used on some level by characters and factors I knew very little about.

As my work at Brookhaven occurred during my heyday at Bell Sound, I believe they hired me so that I could put thought forms on the recordings I was doing in the rock world. I do remember literally encoding thought forms into the music in what can best be called an "electromagnetic telepathy" of subtle energies.

As the recordings were being transferred to the tapes, I concentrated on the heads of the tape recorder in order to place a thought form on the tapes. If you want to encode a thought form, all you have to do is listen to the music that is being copied and concentrate on the playback machine heavily. By "grooving along" on the music but also concentrating on the thought form, you get a parametric impression on that tape of the thought form. We put thought forms into the music mainly to make people respond.

At the recording studio, I literally compressed thought forms that people responded to in particular ways. One of the most simple thought forms projected were to make certain rock groups popular. We simply put a thought form on the recording that you would want to hear it again. Once you heard the song over a transistor radio, the thought form would go out to "buy the record and play it over and over again until it was worn out." Then, you would go out and buy another record. That is how come we sold so many records.

In Chapter One, I alluded to "The Twist" being popular due to a very esoteric principle in sound recording. There are actually two thought inputs into a sound system when a recording is made. This includes what could be termed the "psychic input" of the musicians as well as that of the performer. When the performer stands in front of the microphone and sings, he projects a thought form into the coil or the capacitative element of that microphone. That capacitative element (the capacitor), basically consists of electronic plates with an insulator designed for the purpose of storing electrical potentials which can be reproduced at a distant point, such as a speaker. There is also an amplification process which amplifies the wave forms and eventually creates loud music at the receipt point (the audience).

Sound waves are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is the electromagnetic function which is the key. Thought forms also make their own impingement on the electromagnetic background of the universe. For ex-ample, if you hear sound waves telling you there is a sale at a department store, you have also acquired the thought form that the managers of the store wanted you to have. Sound waves themselves are generally much more easily measurable and discernible than those wave forms produced by thought forms. In other words, the electromagnetic functions of thought forms are much more subtle and is indeed an esoteric subject in itself. But, all of you can easily perceive how thought forms are carried by sound waves when you consider the prospect of hearing some- thing you don't believe.

For example, suppose you hear a politician say something. Inside of you, you can perceive that he is not telling the truth. It is not necessarily the sound itself which tips you off. The radio or sound system is actually projecting a duplication of what emanated from the origination point. You just "pick up on it". In actual fact, the thoughts you "picked up on" were the result of electromagnetic impulses. The telepathic wave forms are subtle (less dense) in comparison to what ordinary science would refer to as wave forms, but they are nevertheless present and can be monitored within the realm of the electromagnetic spectrum.

As I said earlier, it is an esoteric science. We will go more into the technical details of how this can occur in the physical spectrum, but first it will be necessary to go into some background theory on the metaphysics and physics of music itself.

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CHAPTER SIX
THE LOST CHORD 
Many of you have heard of the Moody Blues' album entitled In Search of the Lost Chord. For those of you who have not, perhaps you have heard of this "lost chord which is commonly referred to and pronounced as "om" or "ohm" in esoteric circles, particularly those of the eastern tradition. It is also known as the "mono chord."

The lost chord refers to the perfect state of creation or that state of consciousness which existed before reality existed. The idea of expressing the word om is to reunite one with the supreme consciousness. Om, in its most perfect sense, represents the complete electromagnetic spectrum. That includes all of creation. When we consider the principles of hard physics, everything in creation falls within the realm of the electromagnetic spectrum. This includes all matter and energy, including light, sound and different types of matter. When we consider the lost chord, we are talking about what Lao Tzu called "the uncarved block." In other words, it is creation undisturbed by anything. In the Qabala, the first principle of creation is known as "The Fool" and it is represented by the Tarot card of the same name.

The fool refers to a capricious or whimsical impression upon the inherent state of perfection and creates a break in the supreme state referred to as om. Ironically, the word "ohm" refers to a unit of electro-magnetic resistance. In a general sense, this is analogous to what happens when "the fool" whimsically presses upon the lost chord. He has created a unit of electromagnetic interference. Actually, the foolish impulse has created a whole series of electromagnetic waves that conform to some whimsical principle. More impulses create more waves, including light, energy, and matter. Ultimately, you have an entire universe such as the one that we live in. The search for the lost chord refers to our attempt to regain the understanding of all of this.

When we contemplate these matters in a more practical sense, we are faced with another amazing irony or synchronicity when we consider E.M.I. Thorn, the electronics and music conglomerate which figures so enigmatically in the Montauk Project book series. The initials "E.M.I." stand for Electronic Musical Industries. At least, this is what the company's name is. But, in the field of electronics, "EMI" stands for "Electromagnetic Interference" and is in common English dictionaries as well. It is as if this company is somehow directly responsible for the electromagnetic interference which has taken us away from the lost chord and attaches us to this reality. If you then throw in the concept of "thorn," you have more esoteric significance. It refers to the thorn in the "Christ Consciousness," another name for the perfect state of creation.

The above is the metaphysical background of music, for all music derives from the above. Next, we will look at some of the principles of music from a more physical perspective.

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CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PHYSICS OF MUSIC
 

As we examine the physical aspects of music, it is necessary to address the human factor and how the human mind interfaces with the entire scenario. The first step is to realize that our reality, or reference frame for consciousness, is based purely on sounds, notes, tones, or whatever you want to call them. All of these aspects are frequencies. In actual fact, every physical object or manifestation you can conceive of conforms to a frequency or can be identified as having a particular frequency. It is all frequency based.

Matter itself starts out as a wave traveling through space. Next, the wave hits a magnetic field. That magnetic field hits it, twists it and turns it into a particle. It is now matter. This immediately brings to mind an age old consideration of when does a particle become energy and when does energy become particle based, i.e. matter. This is best explained as the difference between "particle light" and "wave light."

When light is traveling in a vacuum, without a magnetic field, it's a wave. When it hits a magnetic field, that field will take the wave (or energy) and curve it. It particle. It is known as a photon. Based upon nothing else but the spin of the energy being spun into a particle, we can safely say that we are dealing with a frequency. When psychics talk of "vibes", they are referring to frequencies.

A human mind, or human being for that matter, is composed (or at least situated with) many complex frequencies. We are all a very complex group of frequencies. The (electromagnetic) signature of a human being is a complex group of frequencies.

Our reality is actually a group of frequencies or an ensemble of notes. Intelligence, or lack thereof, is dependent upon how the frequencies relate to each other. Frequencies can be related in amplitude, cycles per second and phase. Amplitude signifies how strong the frequency is, i.e. how much power is behind it. In musical terms this would be loudness. Cycles per second is the tone. But, what is phase?

Phase, not frequency, is probably the most important concept when it comes to understanding the mind. Phase refers to the relationship of the starting point of one wave to another wave. For example, if you have one cycle starting at one point in time; then another begins five seconds later or five seconds before, that is phase. Phase is primarily concerned with timing. Let us say you have one cycle starting off at Point A. Phase would refer to another cycle starting at a slightly different time, before or after the preceding cycle. Phase can become very complicated because it can refer to the same frequency or multiple frequencies. When we are dealing with phase, there is an infinite variety of relationships that can be very difficult to understand. The role of phase is better under-stood when we consider thought forms.

What exactly is a thought form? It is a group of interrelated frequencies, including amplitude, phase and every other aspect one can measure. This is illustrated very well when we consider a piano where each key on the piano strikes two strings called a doublet. Although both strings are tightened to relatively the same degree, it is theoretically impossible for them to be exactly identical in tension. Therefore, two different frequencies sound out when they are struck by the hammer. Although they are almost the same for practical purposes, the difference would be undetectable to most human ears. The reason two strings are used is that the two separate offset frequencies (again, they are only very slightly offset) created a "single" sound of their own which is more harmonious than if you just heard one of the strings by itself.

The example with the piano is also referred to as a heterodyne effect.

"Heterodyne" in the dictionary is defined as "designating or of the combination of two different radio frequencies to produce beats whose frequencies are equal to the sum or difference of the original frequencies."

In esoteric or psychotronic lingo, a hetero-dyne refers to the fact that two or more frequencies make a sum which is entirely different than its respective parts. This is an excellent way to control the masses.

By playing with certain frequencies you can induce riots or raucous behavior. Conversely, you can subdue a wild crowd by the same methods. Such manipulations were reportedly accomplished by black helicopters in Los Angeles during riots that were triggered as a result of the Rodney King verdict. The helicopters allegedly transmitted frequencies that induced peaceful behavior in the crowd. In New York, black helicopters were also observed but no significant damage occurred. Although there was plenty of rabble-rousing and protesting of the Rodney King verdict in Brooklyn and Harlem, the New York media helped any helicopter activity by judiciously conspiring with the police to play everything down. When skirmishes happened, they were not reported so as not to alarm the black population. Thus, no riots in New York.

Phase, to surnate, consists of different frequencies (sometimes the differences are very subtle) which are offset but when grouped together develop into a creation of their own. This is often considered a thought form. This thought form can combine again with human thoughts or consciousness in any number of different manifestations.

Now, let us consider the human brain. What is the whole physical human system really all about when we consider the human mind? The model that was accepted in the government projects I was involved with is that the brain is basically a very smart interface to the "real mind." The real mind is multidimensional and its "headquarters" can be found in a parallel reality that is in a reference frame 90' away from this one. In dimensional terms, this can be thought of as the 90^o relation between a line (one dimension) and a cross (two dimensions). An additional projection of 90^o from the cross will give a third dimension.

When I refer to the human mind in terms of phase, it is offset by 90^o from the brain. In science, if you say something is offset by 90^o it is considered to have zero value. This is illustrated in practical terms if you consider that two currents of voltage offset by 90^o equate to no power. It does not exist in our reality. But, there is undeniably a connection between this brain and the mind. The mind is a group of frequencies which the brain represents in its frequencies, but our mind is actually 90^o away from this reality, in a frame that has length, width and no height. It is a two dimensional world.

That is why most people do not think terribly effectively when you consider the wide panorama of intelligence and capability within the brain. They are not making contact to the rest of the dimensions. If they are only thinking in the reference frame 90^o away from here, there are only two dimensional references. This is the mind-set of most of the population on Earth today.

The general population is beginning to rise in awareness, but there is a difference when we consider higher dimensions of existence and extraterrestrials. They think in three or more dimensions. Most humans think in only two dimensions because they are not aware of other reference frames away from the 90^o point. One can also consider the proposition that spiritual beings inside of human bodies have been conditioned not to think in reference frames away from the typical 90^o point. Theoretically, if you are thoroughly hooked up and your mind is totally constituted in all these other dimensions, it is continuous and integrated. It could also be said to be complete or "whole." This concept is the inspiration for the term "holy." To be "whole" is to be "holy". Therefore, if you connect the mind and all of its connections to the physical, you are whole.

The Montauk Project concerned itself with manipulating the way different sections of the mind communicate with different realities in different dimensions. In this manner, one can control what the mind is thinking and what the mind is doing (in this reality). The curative idea is that the more you can consciously get yourself into other dimensions, the more continuous you can be. Consequently, you would be less subject to anything in this three-dimensional reality. Obviously, the Montauk Project dealt with compartmentalization rather than integration.

It is the opposite of what one considers "holy."