(EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece was originally published as "Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation, http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr93.html

PHOTO shows the late Frank Zappa, godfather of the L.A./ Laurel Canyon music scene in the 1960s. McGowan's brilliantly researched essay exposes the spooky military intelligence mind control driven origins of the so-called counter-culture of the 1960s.)

(May 8, 2008) In those early months of 1965, a new scene is just beginning to take shape in the city of Los Angeles.

In a geographically and socially isolated community known as Laurel Canyon, a heavily wooded, rustic, serene, yet vaguely ominous slice of LA nestled in the hills that separate the Los Angeles basin from the San Fernando Valley, musicians, singers and songwriters suddenly begin to gather as though summoned there by some unseen Pied Piper.

Within months, the 'hippie/flower child' movement will be given birth there, along with the new style of music that will provide the soundtrack for the tumultuous second half of the 1960s.