California Dreamin Monday Monday Dancing In The Street The Mamas and The Papas

California Dreamin' Album: If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears (1966)
Monday Monday Album: If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears (1966)
Dancing In The Street Album: The Mamas & the Papas (1966)
The Mamas and The Papas

After John Phillips discovered that group member Michelle Phillips was having an affair with Gene Clark of the Byrds, he fired her from the group on June 4, 1966. In June, a new singer was hired to replace her. Jill Gibson was producer Lou Adler's girlfriend at the time and was already a singer/songwriter who had performed on several Jan and Dean albums.

The photo already chosen for the The Mamas & the Papas album's cover featured Michelle Phillips prominently, so Dunhill had Gibson take a photo posed in exactly the same position as Michelle, and then superimposed the new photo over that of Phillips. However, the decision was then made to shoot an entirely new picture with the new line-up and to also change the album's title to Crashon Screamon All Fall Down, which it was promoted under before release. With the return of Michelle to the group just prior to the LP's release, the original cover and eponymous title were reinstated.

Did you know that LSD and hippies were invented by the CIA in the 1960s? No? Well, the idea was to hook kids on sex, drugs and rock & roll (hey, it worked!), so they would not overthrow the military industrial complex. Accomplices in this diabolical scheme were, in England, the Beatles and, in America, Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa and other residents of Laurel Canyon like the Mamas and the Papas.

Imagine living right down the street from Joni Mitchell, The Byrds and Modern Folk Quartet.

Those were just a few of Michelle Phillips' famous neighbors in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon in the late 1960s and early '70s, where she co-founded folk group The Mamas and the Papas with then-husband John Phillips, Denny Doherty and Cass Elliot.

"Cass had an open-door policy – anybody could swing by her place any time," Phillips says. "They'd smoke a joint, drink some wine and play their guitars. That's how she got Crosby, Stills & Nash together: She heard them all singing (separately) and said, 'You guys should sing together.' And that's how that happened." Trust the Laurel Canyon lore!!!

Graham Nash, for instance, wrote the wistful "Our House" at Mitchell's Laurel Canyon home, which the then-couple shared. The Doors were the house band at nearby nightclub Whiskey A Go Go before they hit big, and Peter Tork was roommates with Stephen Stills pre-The Monkees fame. (In fact, it was Stills who helped get him the gig.) Michael Nesmith also a very connected Monkee who later produced 1984's Repo Man.

"What was so unique about Laurel Canyon at that time was just how many of the artists who were there became really influential musicians – it's the music of our lives even still to this day," director Alison Ellwood says. "It was a really fun process of discovery, finding the myriad ways these artists connected and interacted with each other."

She prefers not to discuss Charles Manson, an aspiring rocker-turned-cult leader who attended at least one party at Elliot's house before orchestrating the murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others in 1969. ("Even after all this time, it just makes me want to cry," Phillips says.) The singer gets similarly emotional talking about Elliot, fondly known as "Mama Cass," who died of heart failure in 1974 at just 32.

"It was a huge loss for everybody," Phillips says. "She had such a stage presence. So funny and quick on her feet. She always had the audience in the palm of her hand."

"I would never have become a singer if it hadn't been for John," Phillips says. "Really, all I wanted to do was dress up in a cute cocktail dress, put my hair up, drink a Brandy Alexander, have a Marlboro, and be the bandleader's girlfriend. That's what I thought I had in front of me."

“There’s this guy from the CIA, and he’s creepin’ around Laurel Canyon…”

— Frank Zappa, “Plastic People”

The 1960s was conceived in a government lab somewhere as a way to defuse the nascent antiwar movement. The plan was, simply put, to hook the kids on rock music and hard drugs, taking their minds off of revolution in the process.

John Coleman first found out how the world really works while serving as an agent of Britain’s Special Intelligence Service. After he got out he made it his "life’s mission" to expose the cabal of Jesuits, Freemasons, Jesuit Freemasons, intelligence agencies, and others that secretly run the world on the behest of the Queen of England.

“The phenomenon of the Beatles,” Coleman writes, “was … a carefully crafted plot to introduce by a conspiratorial body which could not be identified, a highly destructive and divisive element into a large population group targeted for change against its will.”

The Fab Four were the vehicle that “social engineers” from a think tank called The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations used to manipulate American youth. He labeled this plan the “Aquarian Conspiracy.”

Nobody would have paid much attention to the motley crew from Liverpool and the 12-atonal system of “music” that was to follow had it not been for an overabundance of press exposure. The 12-atonal system consisted of heavy, repetitive sounds, taken from the music of the cult of Dionysus and the Baal priesthood by Adorno and given a “modern” flavor by this special friend of the Queen of England and hence the Committee of 300. Tavistock and its Stanford Research Center … created a distinct new break-away largely young population group which was persuaded by social engineering and conditioning to believe that the Beatles really were their favorite group. All trigger words devised in the context of “rock music” were designed for mass control of the new targeted group, the youth of America.

In other words, these four talentless Liverpudlians were recruited, dressed up, given silly haircuts, and paid to perform music specifically designed to brainwash the youth. And it worked with help from other devices such as cyclotrons. I guess that we’re supposed to believe that after the process was perfected on The Beatles, it was taken to Southern California. Besides The Doors and The Mommas and the Papas, a large number of groups and musicians are implicated, including:

The Byrds
Frank Zappa
Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Love
Gram Parsons
Neil Young
Poco
America

According to his New York Times obit, the elder Morrison “commanded American naval forces in the gulf [of Tonkin] when the destroyer Maddox engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats on Aug. 2, 1964. A skirmish and confused reports of a second engagement two days later led President Lyndon B. Johnson to order airstrikes against North Vietnam and to request from Congress what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing him to carry out further military operations without declaring war.” My father entered Military Service as a Commissioned 2nd Lieutenant Aviator of the Marine Corps. I was born on a Military base in 1966 as this music was being released.

This Laurel Canyon operation was under the aegis of something called OPLAN 34A, a series of covert operations targeting North Vietnam. These attacks were carried out by South Vietnamese mercenaries and Special Forces, with the United States in a support and advisory role. As Douglas Valentine points out in The Phoenix Program, this role included placing Navy SEALs in the South Vietnamese units. As is always the case, the use of “advisors” here was little more than a pretext for putting American boots on the ground in the days before it was legal. My Uncle served with the The Americal Division in Vietnam... if you question what I know, go research these guys in Vietnam.

While Admiral Morrison was overseeing military operations in the Gulf of Tonkin — operations which, depending on who you believe, either accidentally or purposefully drew us into war in Vietnam — his son was being used as a tool to crush the peace movement at home. Remember the song "Peace Frog"?

Following the web from the United States Navy through Jim Morrison leads us to Frank Zappa. This connection was facilitated by Zappa’s wife, Gail, who like Jim Morrison was the child of a naval officer. In fact, as Barry Miles revealed in Zappa: A Biography, both Jim and Gail “used to play together in the same naval kindergarten in Virginia where, according to Frank, Gail once hit Jim on the head with a hammer.”

Frank Zappa’s father arrived in the United States from his native Sicily in 1908. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, Mr. Zappa spent his life “in the employ of the US military establishment,”. This eventually brought him to the West Coast, where the family lived for a time in Lancaster, California. I suppose this is important, but he never says how — that other past residents of Lancaster include Clarence White (who replaced Gram Parsons in The Byrds), Dewey Bunnell of “A Horse With No Name” infamy, and Captain Beefheart himself, Don Van Vliet. The city of Lancaster is “right alongside” Edwards Air Force Base. Lancaster supplied the civilian population for the base. The recognizable equivalent would be Fayetteville North Carolina next to Ft. Bragg or Columbus Georgia Next to Ft. Benning etc, etc, etc... As it so happens, Area 51 is under the administration of Edwards AFB, so perhaps Zappa, Van Vliet, et. al, were working for whoever it is that’s been running "operations" since the Roswell Incident in 1947.

In 1968, Frank and Gail Zappa were living at 2401 Laurel Canyon Boulevard, in a home referred to as the Log Cabin. This structure began life as a roadhouse in the early 20th century and was later the home to silent movie cowboy Tom Mix and his horse, Tony. The 2,000-square-foot, five-level house featured an 80-foot long living room and a bowling alley in the basement. It was here, according to McGowan, that Frank hosted a perpetual salon attended by “virtually every musician who passe[d] through the canyon in the mid-to-late-1960s.”

Zappa is “a rigidly authoritarian control-freak and a supporter of U.S. military actions in Southeast Asia” who used his roles as a producer, label head, and one of the most famous freaks in America to bring down the anti-war movement. (Of course, there’s nothing to the rumor that Zappa supported the Vietnam war... wink wink, nod nod, but why let that ruin a good story?)

What are we to make of the fact that “some have claimed” that J. Edgar Hoover frequented a brothel in the Canyon, or that Frank Zappa’s father once worked at the Edgewood Arsenal Chemical Warfare Facility (where the U.S. military conducted MK-ULTRA-type experiments on human subjects)? Then throw in Charlie Manson and Harry Houdini into the mix... and I saved two special words for the very end that were totally designed to be a psyop...
HAM SANDWHICH.