Steve Wright via Classical Music:

‘Laurel Canyon gave the world some of the most influential music of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, David Crosby, Joni Mitchell and the Mamas & the Papas were among the artists who gravitated towards the wooded hills above Los Angeles, creating a close-knit musical community whose songs came to define an era.

But what if their remarkable concentration in one small neighbourhood was more than a happy accident? A controversial conspiracy theory suggests that the counterculture’s unlikely birthplace was connected to the American military-industrial complex – and that the music scene may have served a hidden political purpose.

According to the theory, the aim was not simply to encourage young people to rebel, but to turn that rebellion against itself. By cultivating or infiltrating the counterculture, its supposed architects could encourage drug abuse, instability and scandal, eventually associating the wider movement with violence and social disorder. The ultimate target, in this interpretation, was the anti-Vietnam War movement and the broader challenge to American authority that the hippie generation represented.

It sounds like the plot of a paranoid thriller. Yet the theory draws on several genuine historical details: musicians with military family connections, a secret military film studio operating in the canyon, and a cast of famous artists whose lives sometimes intersected with some of the darkest episodes of the era. Taken together, these details have fuelled a story considerably more sinister than the familiar tale of young musicians finding one another in the California sunshine….’