WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE CANYON LAUREL CANYON, COVERT OPS & THE DARK HEART OF THE HIPPIE DREAM DAVID McGOWAN HEADPRESS TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword by Nick Bryant 1 Preface 7 1 Village of the Damned By Way of an Introduction 11 2 Power to the People Call this a Counterculture? 22 3 Dig! The Laurel Canyon Death List 30 4 Related Lives and Relative Deaths 41 5 Desirable People The Canyon’s Peculiar Past 50 6 Vito and his Freakers The Sinister Roots of Hippie Culture 62 7 The Death of Godo Paulekas Anger’s Infant Lucifer 73 8 All the Young Turks Hollywood Tripping 85 9 Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon 96 10 Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter Return of the Death List 106 11 Detours Rustic Canyon & Greystone Park 120 12 Riders on the Storm The Doors 128 13 Eight Miles High and Falling Fast The Byrds 136 14 The Great Serendipity Buffalo Springfield 147 15 Beyond Buffalo Springfield and the Monkees, too 159 16 Altamont Pie Gram Parsons 169 17 The Lost Expedition of Gene Clark 187 18 The Wolf King of LA “Papa” John Phillips 200 19 Hungry Freaks, Daddy Frank Zappa 216 20 Born To Be Wild John Kay 227 21 A Whiter Shade of Pale Arthur Lee and Love 236 22 Endless Vibrations The Beach Boys 249 23 The Grim Game Houdini 263 24 Won’t Get Fooled Again Punk and New Wave Arrive 277 Epilogue 284 Acknowledgements 301 Selected Bibliography & Filmography 302 Index 306 About the Author 315 iii iv FOREWORD by Nick Bryant Oscar Wilde said of art, “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.” And author David McGowan has found that Wilde’s quote is quite prophetic for the rock’n’roll scene that thrived in Lau- rel Canyon in the 1960s and 1970s. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon is McGowan taking a hammer to the icons and mythologies of 1960s counterculture, reducing them to dust, swept away by gusts of pomp, pretense, and even deceit. McGowan though isn’t wielding his ham- mer with the zeal of an establishment conformist or neocon, but rather in the same forlorn spirit as Nietzsche declaring that “God is dead.” As a homegrown product of Los Angeles with an encyclopedic knowledge of the southern California rock scene, McGowan appears to be essen- tially declaring that the gods of his youth are dead. Laurel Canyon was the fountainhead for the peace, love, and brown rice vibes that overflowed America’s airwaves as the Vietnam War raged, but lurking beneath its tie-dyed and florid veneer was an exquisite dark- ness of drugs, unbridled debauchery, full-tilt depravity, and shocking carnage. When readers of this book are delivered to Laurel Canyon’s blood-drenched tapestry of murder and mayhem, they will have to de- cide whether or not those sinister synchronicities are uncanny coinci- dences, conspiracies—or perhaps a kaleidoscopic blending of both. Sprinkled throughout these pages is the ominous specter of the mili- tary/intelligence complex, and perched quite literally atop Laurel Can- yon was the top-secret Lookout Mountain Laboratory, which seems to be McGowan’s grand metaphor for Dr. Strangelove having a bird’s-eye view of the nascent hippie movement, treating it as though it were a 1 weird scenes inside the canyon petri dish brimming with a lethal biological weapon that could be un- leashed in meticulously monitored increments. Indeed, many of Laurel Canyon’s rock ’n’ roll idols had former incarnations steeped in the world of military/intelligence operations. Jim Morrison, aka “the Lizard King,” was one such example. Mr. Mojo Risin’ didn’t much like to talk about his parents and was even known to tell reporters that his parents were dead. But as it turns out, Lizard King, Sr. was not only alive and well, he just happened to be the commander of the US warships that allegedly came under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking America’s napalm-fueled bloodbath in Vietnam. Frank Zappa, another major mover and shaker of the Laurel Canyon scene, was certainly the raddest of the rad, so surely he couldn’t have had any connections to the military/intelligence complex… right? Not exactly. According to various accounts collected by McGowan, Zappa was a pro-military autocrat who didn’t really resonate with the coun- terculture’s peace and love vibe. Like the Lizard King’s dad, Zappa, Sr. was a cog in the intelligence community’s dark machinations; Francis Zappa was a chemical warfare specialist with a top security clearance at Edgewood Arsenal near Baltimore, Maryland. Some readers might rec- ognize Edgewood as the location of ominous mind control experiments conducted by the CIA under the rubric of MK-ULTRA. Guilt by familial association has the potential to be an ill-fated for- mula for speculation, but McGowan relates accounts of Laurel Canyon luminaries whose own hands were possibly awash in the blood of the military/intelligence complex. Consider, for example, “Papa” John Phil- lips, who penned the smash hit San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flow- ers in Your Hair), imploring thousands of runaways to make bacchanal- laced pilgrimages to the City by the Bay. The son of a Marine Corps captain, Phillips was among the more prominent fixtures of Laurel Can- yon who had a particularly interesting interrelationship with the mili- tary machine. Rock superstar Stephen Stills was the cofounder of two Laurel Can- yon dynamos—Buffalo Springfield, and, of course, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Surely then hippie icon Stills couldn’t possibly be enmeshed in the military-intelligence complex? Maybe, maybe not. The progeny of yet another military family, Stills spent chunks of his childhood in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama, where the US has a history of spread- 2 foreword ing a genocidal form of “democracy.” And McGowan has sifted through accounts of Stills actually confessing to running around the jungles of Vietnam in the early 1960s—anecdotes generally dismissed, as the au- thor notes, as drug-fueled delusions. Tales of drugs, unbridled debauchery and full-tilt depravity are often populated by ethical eunuchs whose elite deviance yields to particularly malignant appetites, and the people calling Laurel Canyon home were no exception. McGowan introduces us to aging beatnik Vito Paulekas and his “Freaks,” a dance troupe of Dionysian goddesses who accompa- nied Vito to the LA nightclubs where the fledgling Laurel Canyon bands were playing their early gigs. In addition to saturating the dance floors with sultry young nubiles for emerging bands, Vito was also a purveyor of teenage girls for the up-and-coming rockers. McGowan also com- ments on Vito’s swift exodus to Haiti, for reasons explained herein. Vito Paulekas certainly isn’t a household name, but he was far from being a fringe player on the Laurel Canyon scene, where he and his Freaks mingled freely with rock ’n’ roll’s burgeoning royalty. McGowan collects anecdotes suggesting that Vito may have played a key role in the formation and early success of the Byrds—though his name is con- spicuously absent from the autobiographical tome of Byrds co-founder David Crosby. We also find Vito in a string of low-budget films, and in a cameo appearance on one of rock’s first concept albums: Zappa’s Freak Out! Vito’s parental skills, however, left a lot to be desired, as evinced by the very mysterious and bizarre death of his young son, Godo. Further excavating the idolatry of his youth, McGowan encounters Laurel Canyon fixture Billy Bryars, a male madam and gay porn entre- preneur. Bryers was investigated for trafficking child pornography in the 1970s, whereupon his stable of male hustlers began coughing up the names of frequent flyers at his bordello, the most notable among them being super freak G-man J. Edgar Hoover and partner Clyde Tolson. The 1960s was a “revolutionary” epoch not only in music but also in Hollywood, and McGowan discusses the symbiosis between the Laurel Canyon music scene and Hollywood’s “Young Turks,” with the box office phenomenon Easy Rider providing a salient nexus between Laurel Can- yon rockers and Hollywood upstarts. Many of those upstarts, including Warren Beatty, Peter and Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Marlon Brando, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, Peter Lawford, Den- 3 weird scenes inside the canyon nis Hopper, Ryan O’Neal, Mia Farrow, Peter Sellers, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, were among Papa John and Mama Michelle Phillips’ circle of friends. Also making the rounds in Laurel Canyon was America’s favorite psy- chopath, Charles Manson. And Charlie and his “Family” weren’t just a peripheral flock of crazed killers among the Laurel Canyon sovereigns; to the contrary, the Family mingled with many of the Canyon’s rock stars. Manson even laid down tracks in Brian Wilson’s home studio, stunning the likes of Neil Young. “He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing,” said Neil of Charlie. “I thought he really had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet.” Charlie also impressed Terry Melcher, the Byrds’ first producer and a major force in sculpting the Laurel Canyon music scene. Melcher also recorded Manson, finding him to be a much more amicable character than David Crosby. Manson’s homicidal lieutenant Bobby Beausoleil also had some im- pressive moves as a guitarist—and an occultist. Beausoleil played in a number of forgotten bands that had an occult topspin, one of which even opened for Buffalo Springfield. Bobby eventually landed a gig as a rhythm guitarist for the Grass Roots, which later transmuted into the Laurel Canyon band Love. McGowan also touches on the grisly “Four on the Floor” or “Won- derland” murders, which left notorious drug dealer Ron Launius and three of his gang bludgeoned to death on the floor of a house on Laurel Canyon’s Wonderland Avenue. Launius dealt drugs to Laurel Canyon’s aristocracy, as well as to porn star John Holmes, then in the twilight of his career. Holmes also befriended LA crime boss/club owner Eddie Nash, who he then betrayed, with fatal consequences. Truth be told, the Manson and Wonderland Murders were merely spatters on Laurel Canyon’s blood-drenched tapestry. In the pages of this fascinating book, McGowan chronicles tale after tale of suicide and murder, while delivering readers to a web of sinister synchronicities. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to decide whether Laurel Canyon, in its heyday, was the counterculture haven portrayed by other chroniclers of the era, or whether it was the epicenter of intrigues whose ripple effects are like the aftershock of a nuclear bomb. Nick Bryant July 29, 2013 4