The SECRET ANTENNA podcast took Dave McGowan’s tour of Laurel Canyon once, long ago. We did not even know that we were, in fact, SECRET ANTENNA yet. So now we return as such, with our heightened powers, to the Canyon.
Laurel Canyon is frequently credited as the birthing place of America’s 1960’s rock n roll revolution. But was it? Aside from the fact that American rock n roll itself finds its roots in a combination of the soul music coming out of Motor City in the 1950’s and the more commercially driven ‘British Invasion’, the Canyon became a hub for the lifestyles of those who would eventually be known as legends. Both the merely famous like Neil Young and the infamous like Charles Manson would rub shoulders in this unlikely settlement just outside of Los Angeles. Why did all of these young, almost entirely white, children of high-ranking military personnel establish a spontaneous community in an otherwise empty and inconvenient canyon far from where they had been raised?
One of the first settlers was Jim Morrison, the son of Admiral George Stephen Morrison, one of the conspirators in the Gulf of Tonkin deception. On its own, this detail holds no meaning or consequence, it only shows its oddness in the context of the scene that quickly fills the echoing hills around a young Jim who claimed he did not even listen to music.
The Canyon will soon acquire its father figure in a man named Frank Zappa who will provide an ever-shifting maternal presence by way of his band the Mothers of Invention. His ‘Log Cabin’, as his house was known, occupied a spot in the center of Laurel Canyon where he would play host to neatly every musician to pass through the canyon during the 1960’s, thereby creating a formidable entourage around him. He will do this despite the fact that his authoritarian leanings, perhaps derived from his chemical warfare specialist of a father, were entirely antithetical to the philosophy of the ‘hippie’ movement.
Oh, and you are wondering about Lookout Mountain? We will get there in good time.
Check out the first two seasons of SECRET ANTENNA on Anchor or wherever you like to get your pods and we will begin our journey back to the Canyon for season three.
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