Laurel Canyon’s Heart of Darkness

And the withering of flower power

Photo by Nora Hutton on Unsplash

Anyone with a passing interest is sixties flower power counterculture will be aware of two main events that occurred at the butt end of the decade, and holed the dreams and ideals of the entire movement below the waterline. They were the free festival at Altamont, headlined by the Rolling Stones (chronicled in Don McLean’s American Pie — ‘and as I watched him on the stage, my hands were clenched in fists of rage/No Angel born in hell, could break that Satan’s spell/And as the flames climbed high into the night, to light the sacrificial rite/I saw Satan laughing with delight…’) where the Hells Angels, acting as ‘security,’ reverted to type with murderous consequences; and the infamous Charles Manson murders of Sharon Tate et al (also referenced in McLean’s epic. Anyone wishing for an alternative history of the latter must check out Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood).

My first non fiction read of this new year was the late David McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon (2014 -title taken from The Doors lyric, The End). It uses the bloody backdrop of the Manson murders to weave something of a conspiracy theory, concerning the musicians and artists who gravitated to Laurel Canyon in the sixties and seventies. Prior to the hype surrounding Haight Ashbury, the place became the initial bedrock of…