Consider the popular theory that Deep State Svengalis psy-opped the Laurel Canyon rock scene into existence in 1965. Isn't that expecting a little much of middle-aged civil servants?
Blood, Sweat and Tears were flashes in the pan. The Knack of its age. Below even The Turtles and Spanky and Our Gang.
When I think of the average CIA employee of the 60s, I see Bob Haldeman types. I don't think the CIA seeded the rock movement of the 60s. Rock's growth was very organic, an outgrowth of the youth culture and the affluence of the age.
Amazingly enough, Blood Sweat and Tears still tours to this very day. I doubt they include any original or early members but I suppose they perform their early repertoire.
About 45 years ago I got a one-day job to help clean the Salisbury Civic Center after a Glenn Miller Band concert. From what I could tell, the whole band was born after Miller was killed in 1944.
Similarly, the New York Yankees carry on despite the absence of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Berra, Mantle, and Jeter.
I read an interview with the leader of the current incarnation of the Woody Herman swing orchestra. He noted that when Stravinsky wrote his Ebony Concerto for the original Woody Herman band, they were stumped by how hard it was to play. But now, his current members have no problem with it.
I like the Christopher Marlowe (via TS Eliot?) reference. When I hear 'Laurel Canyon', I think of the porn industry, but I suppose that I am mistaken about that.
I recently re-watched Don't Look Back (the Dylan film), and had forgotten how funny Bob Neuwirth was. Check out his razzing of Joan Baez (who was seemingly there just to be ridiculed).
I think that there was a porn star named Laurel Canyon, which is why I always assumed that that was a primary location. I also seem to remember a murder involving John Holmes that happened in Laurel Canyon, but I could be mistaken about that as well.
I think Holmes (or some other porn guy) who inspired Boogie Nights was involved in a murder robbery of a coke dealer and Laurel Canyon seems like where that scene occurred in the movie. I'll look it up now....
yup,
In late 1980, a mutual friend introduced Holmes to Chris Coxx, who owned the Odyssey nightclub. In turn, Coxx introduced Holmes to Eddie Nash, a drug dealer who owned several nightclubs, including the Starwood in West Hollywood.[18] At the same time, Holmes was closely associated with the Wonderland Gang, a group of heroin-addicted cocaine dealers, so called for the rowhouse located on Wonderland Avenue in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, out of which they operated. Holmes frequently sold drugs for the gang. Gang members included Ronnie Lee Launius, David Clay Lind and their "wheelman" Tracy McCourt.[citation needed]
I like the idea of 'heroin addicted cocaine dealers'; those guys followed the cardinal rule of not doing their own product.
Bob Dylan was signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond, who was a left-leaning scion of Republican aristocracy (nephew of an ambassador, his mother a Vanderbilt and his father the grandson of a Civil War general). The “Complete Unknown” movie makes the point that the major labels were looking for “their folksinger” during the early 60s folk boom. Hammond was quick to recognize the latent star power of a then mostly apolitical kid who owed more to rock’n’roll than the average Dave Van Ronk type. But Dylan’s adoption and dropping of left-wing politics from 1962-64 seems to have more to do with his romance with Suze Rotolo, who was the daughter of card-carrying Italian Communists.
Otherwise the power balance seems to be the other way around: in Britain politicians like Harold Wilson and Ted Heath were pathetically eager to associate themselves with the success of the Beatles (eg, the OBE’s to John, Paul, George and Ringo which so offended many war veterans). Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan intervened personally to allow the Beatles to buy four Greek islands at a time of strict currency controls when they were planning to live like Homeric heroes under the influence of their Greek Svengali Mad Alex. In his program on pop music Leonard Bernstein makes the point that pop is something new in culture: music made and produced by the young, for the young. Brian Epstein was only a few years older than John Lennon. Folk impresario Albert Grossman (Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary, Janis Joplin) was born in 1926, making him 35 in 1961, still not old.
But like Steve says, if the awards were intended to buy the Beatles’ loyalty to the Labour government, they failed even at that as John Lennon returned his in protest over “the Nigeria-Biafra thing…our support of America in Vietnam” and his latest single slipping down the charts.
Regarding Dylan's turning away from preachy and self-righteous folk music, you (Steve) should remember that he did 'My Back Pages' on 'Another Side of Bob Dylan', which was still completely acoustic. So, if the CIA got to Bob, it was before he turned electric. Here are some of the lyrics (sorry for the lengthy quote):
Dylan’s frustration with the establishment left can be dated from as early as December 13, 1963, when he accepted an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and gave a rambling drunken speech saying he could relate to Lee Harvey Oswald and also implying that not all negroes were the model future citizens northeastern liberals wanted them to be.
I find it amusing that people back then thought a musical style would influence people's politics. My parents were the only conservatives for miles around and frustratingly square in their musical taste. They had no cool early rock records to leave me, but they sure had Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. I have a charity store find LP of Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall and I love it. I think I would have gone to a Seeger show, but he could no more turn me commie than gay.
Depressed people dig happy pop dance songs. I don't know what the word would be for people like me who don't tend towards depression, but a lot of us like super dark depressing songs.
From the mid sixties on the boomers decided as one that the most important thing in music was authenticity. The bands who could fake that, had it made. The ones that failed to hide the puppet strings would remain embarrassing.
Mike Nesmith, whose mom invented liquid paper, was the actual inventor of country rock, but is hardly mentioned because of that damn TV show (which was also great).
Great song as covered by Linda Rondstadt. 'Papa Gene's Blues' and 'What am I doing Hangin' round' are also great. More trivia- internet says his mom left him 48 million bucks in 1980. He wore the wool hat when he showed up for the Monkees audition (to hawk his songs) and was cast and required to wear the hat forever.
Incidentally, I once saw the guy from Cheap Trick who was always pictured with the flat baseball cap. It was a bar in Rockford, IL in the early 1990s. He was wearing the cap.
"Incidentally, I once saw the guy from Cheap Trick who was always pictured with the flat baseball cap. It was a bar in Rockford, IL in the early 1990s. He was wearing the cap."
That would Rick Nielsen, the lead guitarist. Cheap Trick was all over the radio in my adolescent youth, since I was living in the Western suburbs of Chicago, and they were originally from Rockford. So, DJs gave the local boys mucho air time.
I went to see Cheap Trick opening for Foreigner in 1979. (For reasons that are hard to explain today, critics like me loved Cheap Trick in 1978 but the public did not.) We got bored with Foreigner so we left, and ran into Cheap Trick's drummer Bun E. Carlos in the parking lot and fawned all over him. He said we should look out for their Japanese import live album "Live at Budokan" real soon now. That struck me as pretty pathetically delusional for an obviously doomed band, but I said "Sure!"
To my surprise, it turned out that "Live at Budokan," complete with Japanese schoolgirls screaming through the whole thing as if Cheap Trick were the second coming of the Beatles, was a big hit and made Cheap Trick into medium level stars.
Baroque Rock seems like a tiny sub-genre that has a remarkably high percentage of great songs, such as "Different Drum," "Whiter Shade of Pale," "In My Life," "God Only Knows," and "Light My Fire."
I'd guess that Baroque Rock's 1965-1967 era was the peak of the transition from rock n roll to rock.
I can recall a Rice U. professor coming to lunch with us students in 1979 and we were talking about the latest rock bands. He looked at us and asked, "Is any of this stuff you like better than the Doors' 'Light My Fire?'" As the rock critic for the Rice Thresher newspaper and thus spokesman for my generation, I pondered this for a moment, and then, said, "Nah."
The 30-something professor looked happy and said, "I thought so!"
Three years later, I saw the LA art-punk band X with their producer Ray Manzarek of the Doors playing the keyboards for them. Their climactic song was "The World's a Mess It's In My Kiss" featuring an extended solo by Manzarek.
The Monkees were more talented than given credit for by many. Nesmith sang the country songs of The Monkees. Peter Tork, a pal of Stephen Stills, was a fine talent who might have been better off not being a Monkee.
Supposedly Stephen Stills went in for an audition and didn't get it. He was sharing a place with Peter Tork and advised him that they weren't looking for people who could actually play so act like you can't...and the rest is history.
Something tells me people in the SoCal suburbs were especially prone to conspiracy theorizing, probably due to the confluence of the huge defense/aviation sector and Hollywood. Also the corporatist master planning communities by the Irvine company and co. giving off a Stepford Wives vibe (the futuristic civic and office buildings designed by William Pereiras firm also add to the strangeness of the place although I like many of their buildings). I think it was Orange County where a John Bircher was elected to congress.
The only dedicated conspiracy theorist I ever knew was an Italian guy, a spec home builder in Los Gatos, who told me the world was run by a guy named "Nitler."
I can possibly see the hand of the British deep state or Establishment (in the person of the urbane Home Secretary Roy Jenkins) intervening to spring Jagger and Richards from jail in 1967. That same day Jagger was flown by helicopter to a country garden in Essex for a televized interview with the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, a Jesuit priest, a Church of England bishop and a Tory politician and member of the House of Lords (recalling the scene in “Vile Bodies” when an unexpected concurrence of Church and State surprise an interloping gossip columnist).
Waugh had written a Jagger-like young man with long shirts, long hair and an acoustic guitar into his 1962 short story “Basil Seal Rides Again”, who he said was based on glimpses of the social life of the younger generation at Ian and Ann Fleming’s house, who if not at the center of power are pretty deep state.
Interestingly, Waugh’s description of how Basil Seal’s possible illegitimate son looked in 1962 seems to predict how Jagger and the Beatles would look by 1966-7, which suggests that the upper class was out ahead of the lower-middle class musicians who would supply their tunes.
Similarly, the French New Wave movies of c. 1960 were subsidized by the de Gaulle government to make France seem cool again but without Communist Party influence.
Ann cuckolded Ian with her affair with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party from 1955-1963. Served Ian right. He cuckolded Lord Rothermere by having an affair and impregnating Ann. She surely got around.
The gay Labour parliamentarian Tom Driberg, whom Waugh had hated since the 1930s, was the political mentor of Mick Jagger in the mid to late 1960s. Driberg's view was that Jagger, who seemed to him devoted at the time to his girlfriend Marianne Faithful, was disappointingly strait-laced, but was incredibly charismatic so he might prove politically useful, even if he couldn't tempt him from straightness.
Rather than the oldsters concocting the youngsters' popularity, the history seems to be that young rock stars, once they had already made themselves famous, chose old time seers for political advice, such as Paul McCartney deciding in 1965 that he ought to have an informed opinion on the Vietnam War and so he knocked on the door of the nonagenarian polymath Lord Bertrand Russell to get him up to speed.
Waugh and Driberg met at their school Lancing in 1918, where he told him he was already obsessed with politics. There is a lightly fictionalised version of him in “Charles Ryder’s School Days”.
Wait, I thought of two oldsters who were responsible for shaping the tastes of a younger generation in sixties music: Murry Wilson and Joe Jackson! Sure, they were frustrated musicians themselves, who influenced their own sons, among whom they were lucky to have two bona fide musical geniuses, both of whom then grew up pretty damaged, but heck! Imagine what a trained government professional could do!
For about a year, The Captain and Tennille were on top of the world. I absolutely hated "Love Will Keep Us Together" but the public loved it. "Muskrat Love" is their absolute worst. At the end of their career, I read they gave a concert and about twenty people showed up. How very humiliating.
Daryl Dragon (Captain) and Tony Tennille were fine as far as it goes. That was the formula for sale at the time. Plenty of cheesy acts from those days. Tony Orlando and Dawn, The Bay City Rollers, David Cassidy and the Partridge Family. How about the Italian answer to the Jackson Five, Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco Family!
There's a long podcast series that presupposes that "Winds of Change" by Scorpion is a CIA plant. It goes through all the conspiracy theories --- 8 episodes. In the end, they talk to the lead singer of Scorpion and it's kind of the funniest thing he's heard. (or So That's How He's Paid to Respond!) --- https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/
I don't know anything about this. Can someone explain if the conspiracy theory originated with Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, or is that book a rehash of stories already in circulation?
We can turn around Steve's initial question: how did the CIA's knowledge of and complicity in the Contra's drug trafficking in the 80's (protecting traffickers, funding operations ala North's diary, the Hitz Report, etc) into inner cities unwittingly galvanize the rise of gangsta rap, which in turn resulted in a black culture shift that resulted in thousands of incremental and unnecessary deaths?
Blood, Sweat and Tears were flashes in the pan. The Knack of its age. Below even The Turtles and Spanky and Our Gang.
When I think of the average CIA employee of the 60s, I see Bob Haldeman types. I don't think the CIA seeded the rock movement of the 60s. Rock's growth was very organic, an outgrowth of the youth culture and the affluence of the age.
Amazingly enough, Blood Sweat and Tears still tours to this very day. I doubt they include any original or early members but I suppose they perform their early repertoire.
About 45 years ago I got a one-day job to help clean the Salisbury Civic Center after a Glenn Miller Band concert. From what I could tell, the whole band was born after Miller was killed in 1944.
Similarly, the New York Yankees carry on despite the absence of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Berra, Mantle, and Jeter.
I read an interview with the leader of the current incarnation of the Woody Herman swing orchestra. He noted that when Stravinsky wrote his Ebony Concerto for the original Woody Herman band, they were stumped by how hard it was to play. But now, his current members have no problem with it.
Somebody oughta make a movie about Dylan that highlights the differences that arose between him and Pete Seeger.
That's a great idea.
Can they find a singer with a lousy enough voice? Maybe. I'll bet they can find a young actress who's prettier than Joan Baez!
Did you mean can't? Joan Baez was pretty but I agree they could find an actress who is prettier, but probably not both prettier and with the voice.
Right, the lady actress in Joan Baez's role couldn't do the famous vibrato.
I’d like to see a “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” ending to that movie in which Pete gets beaten to death with Woodie Guthrie’s guitar.
Is that the one inscribed 'This Machine Kills Fascists'?
The very one.
I like the Christopher Marlowe (via TS Eliot?) reference. When I hear 'Laurel Canyon', I think of the porn industry, but I suppose that I am mistaken about that.
I recently re-watched Don't Look Back (the Dylan film), and had forgotten how funny Bob Neuwirth was. Check out his razzing of Joan Baez (who was seemingly there just to be ridiculed).
Porn? Nah. Porn was done in Van Nuys, miles northwest of Laurel Canyon.
I think that there was a porn star named Laurel Canyon, which is why I always assumed that that was a primary location. I also seem to remember a murder involving John Holmes that happened in Laurel Canyon, but I could be mistaken about that as well.
I think Holmes (or some other porn guy) who inspired Boogie Nights was involved in a murder robbery of a coke dealer and Laurel Canyon seems like where that scene occurred in the movie. I'll look it up now....
yup,
In late 1980, a mutual friend introduced Holmes to Chris Coxx, who owned the Odyssey nightclub. In turn, Coxx introduced Holmes to Eddie Nash, a drug dealer who owned several nightclubs, including the Starwood in West Hollywood.[18] At the same time, Holmes was closely associated with the Wonderland Gang, a group of heroin-addicted cocaine dealers, so called for the rowhouse located on Wonderland Avenue in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, out of which they operated. Holmes frequently sold drugs for the gang. Gang members included Ronnie Lee Launius, David Clay Lind and their "wheelman" Tracy McCourt.[citation needed]
I like the idea of 'heroin addicted cocaine dealers'; those guys followed the cardinal rule of not doing their own product.
Bob Dylan was signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond, who was a left-leaning scion of Republican aristocracy (nephew of an ambassador, his mother a Vanderbilt and his father the grandson of a Civil War general). The “Complete Unknown” movie makes the point that the major labels were looking for “their folksinger” during the early 60s folk boom. Hammond was quick to recognize the latent star power of a then mostly apolitical kid who owed more to rock’n’roll than the average Dave Van Ronk type. But Dylan’s adoption and dropping of left-wing politics from 1962-64 seems to have more to do with his romance with Suze Rotolo, who was the daughter of card-carrying Italian Communists.
Otherwise the power balance seems to be the other way around: in Britain politicians like Harold Wilson and Ted Heath were pathetically eager to associate themselves with the success of the Beatles (eg, the OBE’s to John, Paul, George and Ringo which so offended many war veterans). Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan intervened personally to allow the Beatles to buy four Greek islands at a time of strict currency controls when they were planning to live like Homeric heroes under the influence of their Greek Svengali Mad Alex. In his program on pop music Leonard Bernstein makes the point that pop is something new in culture: music made and produced by the young, for the young. Brian Epstein was only a few years older than John Lennon. Folk impresario Albert Grossman (Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary, Janis Joplin) was born in 1926, making him 35 in 1961, still not old.
It is silly how many rock legends are now knights. I'd give knighthoods to the veterans of the Falklands War before I'd give one to Elton John.
But like Steve says, if the awards were intended to buy the Beatles’ loyalty to the Labour government, they failed even at that as John Lennon returned his in protest over “the Nigeria-Biafra thing…our support of America in Vietnam” and his latest single slipping down the charts.
Regarding Dylan's turning away from preachy and self-righteous folk music, you (Steve) should remember that he did 'My Back Pages' on 'Another Side of Bob Dylan', which was still completely acoustic. So, if the CIA got to Bob, it was before he turned electric. Here are some of the lyrics (sorry for the lengthy quote):
A self-ordained professor's tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
"Equality," I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now
In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I'd become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now
My guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I defined these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now
Dylan’s frustration with the establishment left can be dated from as early as December 13, 1963, when he accepted an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and gave a rambling drunken speech saying he could relate to Lee Harvey Oswald and also implying that not all negroes were the model future citizens northeastern liberals wanted them to be.
"My Back Pages" is wonderfully reactionary.
I find it amusing that people back then thought a musical style would influence people's politics. My parents were the only conservatives for miles around and frustratingly square in their musical taste. They had no cool early rock records to leave me, but they sure had Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. I have a charity store find LP of Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall and I love it. I think I would have gone to a Seeger show, but he could no more turn me commie than gay.
Depressed people dig happy pop dance songs. I don't know what the word would be for people like me who don't tend towards depression, but a lot of us like super dark depressing songs.
From the mid sixties on the boomers decided as one that the most important thing in music was authenticity. The bands who could fake that, had it made. The ones that failed to hide the puppet strings would remain embarrassing.
Mike Nesmith, whose mom invented liquid paper, was the actual inventor of country rock, but is hardly mentioned because of that damn TV show (which was also great).
Different Drum is one of my all-time favorites.
Great song as covered by Linda Rondstadt. 'Papa Gene's Blues' and 'What am I doing Hangin' round' are also great. More trivia- internet says his mom left him 48 million bucks in 1980. He wore the wool hat when he showed up for the Monkees audition (to hawk his songs) and was cast and required to wear the hat forever.
Incidentally, I once saw the guy from Cheap Trick who was always pictured with the flat baseball cap. It was a bar in Rockford, IL in the early 1990s. He was wearing the cap.
He must be bald. I know some bald guys who won’t be seen without a hat.
Maybe- I assumed that it was without the hat, people might not recognize him.
"Incidentally, I once saw the guy from Cheap Trick who was always pictured with the flat baseball cap. It was a bar in Rockford, IL in the early 1990s. He was wearing the cap."
That would Rick Nielsen, the lead guitarist. Cheap Trick was all over the radio in my adolescent youth, since I was living in the Western suburbs of Chicago, and they were originally from Rockford. So, DJs gave the local boys mucho air time.
I went to see Cheap Trick opening for Foreigner in 1979. (For reasons that are hard to explain today, critics like me loved Cheap Trick in 1978 but the public did not.) We got bored with Foreigner so we left, and ran into Cheap Trick's drummer Bun E. Carlos in the parking lot and fawned all over him. He said we should look out for their Japanese import live album "Live at Budokan" real soon now. That struck me as pretty pathetically delusional for an obviously doomed band, but I said "Sure!"
To my surprise, it turned out that "Live at Budokan," complete with Japanese schoolgirls screaming through the whole thing as if Cheap Trick were the second coming of the Beatles, was a big hit and made Cheap Trick into medium level stars.
Fine song well covered by Linda Ronstadt just as she was going to leave The Stone Poneys.
Baroque Rock seems like a tiny sub-genre that has a remarkably high percentage of great songs, such as "Different Drum," "Whiter Shade of Pale," "In My Life," "God Only Knows," and "Light My Fire."
I'd guess that Baroque Rock's 1965-1967 era was the peak of the transition from rock n roll to rock.
I can recall a Rice U. professor coming to lunch with us students in 1979 and we were talking about the latest rock bands. He looked at us and asked, "Is any of this stuff you like better than the Doors' 'Light My Fire?'" As the rock critic for the Rice Thresher newspaper and thus spokesman for my generation, I pondered this for a moment, and then, said, "Nah."
The 30-something professor looked happy and said, "I thought so!"
Three years later, I saw the LA art-punk band X with their producer Ray Manzarek of the Doors playing the keyboards for them. Their climactic song was "The World's a Mess It's In My Kiss" featuring an extended solo by Manzarek.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MKi82ezkaQ
I reflected while getting bounced around by the slam dancers, "Wow, these old guys [Manzarek had just turned 43] are actually pretty good."
The Monkees were more talented than given credit for by many. Nesmith sang the country songs of The Monkees. Peter Tork, a pal of Stephen Stills, was a fine talent who might have been better off not being a Monkee.
Supposedly Stephen Stills went in for an audition and didn't get it. He was sharing a place with Peter Tork and advised him that they weren't looking for people who could actually play so act like you can't...and the rest is history.
That's as I know it. I also read that Stills didn't make the cut because he had imperfect teeth.
That's my recollection, too.
Something tells me people in the SoCal suburbs were especially prone to conspiracy theorizing, probably due to the confluence of the huge defense/aviation sector and Hollywood. Also the corporatist master planning communities by the Irvine company and co. giving off a Stepford Wives vibe (the futuristic civic and office buildings designed by William Pereiras firm also add to the strangeness of the place although I like many of their buildings). I think it was Orange County where a John Bircher was elected to congress.
The only dedicated conspiracy theorist I ever knew was an Italian guy, a spec home builder in Los Gatos, who told me the world was run by a guy named "Nitler."
I can possibly see the hand of the British deep state or Establishment (in the person of the urbane Home Secretary Roy Jenkins) intervening to spring Jagger and Richards from jail in 1967. That same day Jagger was flown by helicopter to a country garden in Essex for a televized interview with the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, a Jesuit priest, a Church of England bishop and a Tory politician and member of the House of Lords (recalling the scene in “Vile Bodies” when an unexpected concurrence of Church and State surprise an interloping gossip columnist).
Waugh had written a Jagger-like young man with long shirts, long hair and an acoustic guitar into his 1962 short story “Basil Seal Rides Again”, who he said was based on glimpses of the social life of the younger generation at Ian and Ann Fleming’s house, who if not at the center of power are pretty deep state.
Interestingly, Waugh’s description of how Basil Seal’s possible illegitimate son looked in 1962 seems to predict how Jagger and the Beatles would look by 1966-7, which suggests that the upper class was out ahead of the lower-middle class musicians who would supply their tunes.
Similarly, the French New Wave movies of c. 1960 were subsidized by the de Gaulle government to make France seem cool again but without Communist Party influence.
Ann cuckolded Ian with her affair with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party from 1955-1963. Served Ian right. He cuckolded Lord Rothermere by having an affair and impregnating Ann. She surely got around.
The gay Labour parliamentarian Tom Driberg, whom Waugh had hated since the 1930s, was the political mentor of Mick Jagger in the mid to late 1960s. Driberg's view was that Jagger, who seemed to him devoted at the time to his girlfriend Marianne Faithful, was disappointingly strait-laced, but was incredibly charismatic so he might prove politically useful, even if he couldn't tempt him from straightness.
Rather than the oldsters concocting the youngsters' popularity, the history seems to be that young rock stars, once they had already made themselves famous, chose old time seers for political advice, such as Paul McCartney deciding in 1965 that he ought to have an informed opinion on the Vietnam War and so he knocked on the door of the nonagenarian polymath Lord Bertrand Russell to get him up to speed.
Waugh and Driberg met at their school Lancing in 1918, where he told him he was already obsessed with politics. There is a lightly fictionalised version of him in “Charles Ryder’s School Days”.
Wait, I thought of two oldsters who were responsible for shaping the tastes of a younger generation in sixties music: Murry Wilson and Joe Jackson! Sure, they were frustrated musicians themselves, who influenced their own sons, among whom they were lucky to have two bona fide musical geniuses, both of whom then grew up pretty damaged, but heck! Imagine what a trained government professional could do!
I’ve always been suspect of Captain & Tennille. They were just too dumb and too awful. Screamed “spooks involved.”
President Ford hired them to entertain the Queen.
I bet Prince Philip just shook his head.
The bane of Prince Philip's otherwise pleasant 98-year-long life was the popularity of Tom Jones and Elton John.
For about a year, The Captain and Tennille were on top of the world. I absolutely hated "Love Will Keep Us Together" but the public loved it. "Muskrat Love" is their absolute worst. At the end of their career, I read they gave a concert and about twenty people showed up. How very humiliating.
Daryl Dragon (Captain) and Tony Tennille were fine as far as it goes. That was the formula for sale at the time. Plenty of cheesy acts from those days. Tony Orlando and Dawn, The Bay City Rollers, David Cassidy and the Partridge Family. How about the Italian answer to the Jackson Five, Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco Family!
There's a long podcast series that presupposes that "Winds of Change" by Scorpion is a CIA plant. It goes through all the conspiracy theories --- 8 episodes. In the end, they talk to the lead singer of Scorpion and it's kind of the funniest thing he's heard. (or So That's How He's Paid to Respond!) --- https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/
Interesting. I think Communists are generally better than our Deep State at developing and executing conspiracies.
No, Norbert Sclei was capable of anything.
I figure the CIA got them addicted to drugs.
yes the CIA did Dylan, this is now canon
I don't know anything about this. Can someone explain if the conspiracy theory originated with Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, or is that book a rehash of stories already in circulation?
We can turn around Steve's initial question: how did the CIA's knowledge of and complicity in the Contra's drug trafficking in the 80's (protecting traffickers, funding operations ala North's diary, the Hitz Report, etc) into inner cities unwittingly galvanize the rise of gangsta rap, which in turn resulted in a black culture shift that resulted in thousands of incremental and unnecessary deaths?