The Center for an Informed America

 "There’s something happening here What it is ain’t exactly clear" Join me now, if you have the time, as we take a stroll down memory lane to a time nearly four-and-a-half decades ago – a time when America last had uniformed ground troops fighting a sustained and...

“He was great, he was unreal – really, really good.” “He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing. I thought he really had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet.” [Today’s first trivia question: both of the above statements were made, on...

 “I mean, fuck, he auditioned for Neil [Young] for fuck’s sake.” Graham Nash, explaining to author Michael Walker how close Charlie Manson was to the Laurel Canyon scene. During the ten-year period during which Bruce, Novarro, Mineo, Linkletter, Stevens, Tate,...

The bridge of the USS Bon Homme Richard, January 1964. Just months later, the guy on the right would guide his ship into the Tonkin Gulf, and the young man on the left would begin a remarkable  transformation into a brooding rock god. The Bon Homme Richard, by the...

"Call them freaks, the underground, the counter-culture, flower children or hippies – they are all loose labels for the youth culture of the 60s …" Barry Miles, author of Hippie “This is how I remember my life. Other folks may not have the same memories, even though...

“Vito was in his fifties, but he had four-way sex with goddesses … He held these clay-sculpting classes on Laurel Avenue, teaching rich Beverly Hills dowagers how to sculpt. And that was the Byrds’ rehearsal room. Then Jim Dickson had the idea to put them on at...

“As all halfway-decent managers in the rock era have done, [Jim] Dickson worked on seducing the in-crowd and creating a buzz around [The Byrds] … The timing was perfect … LA’s baby-boomers were mobile, getting around, looking for action. And now they were joined by...

“No one here gets out alive” Jim Morrison Sometimes pieces of the puzzle just seem to fall from the heavens. I don’t really know why that happens – and to be honest, I find it somewhat disconcerting at times. On Sunday, July 6, the venerable Washington Post, in a most...

“Everybody was experimenting and taking it all the way. It opened up a negative force of energy that was almost demonic.” Frank Mazolla, editor of the film Performance “There were a lot of weird people around. There was one guy who had a parrot called Captain Blood,...

 “By the time Manson shifted base from Rustic Canyon to an old ranch in Chatsworth, he'd begun formulating the notion that he and his followers had to prepare themselves for a race war with Black America.” —Barney Hoskyns (in Hotel California, his take on the Laurel...

“By that, I mean, ‘Get me a lead singer. He’s got sort of an androgynous blonde hair, very pretty. We need a guitar player, sort of hatchet-faced, wears a hat, plays very fast, very dramatic. He must be very dramatic. Get me a pound of bass player, pound of drummer …...

“I’d have to say that, personally speaking, Crosby was worse for the good feelings of [the local] rock’n’roll [scene] than Manson was.” -Terry Melcher “I had been to Terry Melcher’s house on Cielo Drive many times.” -David Crosby I believe we were discussing the Byrds...

  "No one could recall ever seeing or hearing about Gram being involved in a protest of any sort.” —Author Ben Fong Torres, who interviewed scores of people close to Gram Parsons while researching Hickory Wind Gram Parsons Timing is a curious thing. When I first...

Oh, 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 The day the music died -Don...

The Byrds were the very first folk-rock band to take flight, and the one that achieved the greatest fame, but to many discerning ears, Laurel Canyon’s other folk-rock powerhouse, the Buffalo Springfield, was the more talented band. In the literature chronicling the...

At the time of the ‘serendipitous’ encounter on Sunset Boulevard, Stills was living at the home of Barry Friedman, a former circus clown, fire-eater, TV producer, and freelance publicist. To say that his home was a bit odd would probably be an understatement....

“[Gene] used to slip into these dream states, which I thought was really amazing. He’d go into these dream states and lay down on the couch and go, ‘I’ll be right back, Patrick.’” -Pat Robinson, a friend and bandmate of Gene Clark “[Gene] had these multiple...

“Our music was far from political or antiwar … I never felt comfortable with political advocacy.” -John Phillips “There were no political speeches or overt protest songs performed.” -John Phillips, discussing the Monterey Pop Festival, of which he was a key organizer...

“This is going to break your heart, but much of the music you heard in the ‘60s and early ‘70s wasn’t recorded by the people you saw on the album covers. It was done by me and the musicians you see on these walls … Many of these kids didn’t have the chops and were...

“What struck both of us was that there were huge gaps in Houdini’s life story and some puzzling inconsistencies. So we embarked on a journey to discover the real man. Early on, we discovered an important connection that most biographers seemed to miss.” From the...

“Why people even said Dr. Crandon committed illegal operations on little children and murdered them.” -Mina/Margery Crandon On April 29, 1911, Houdini debuted his famed Chinese Water Torture Cell escape in Southampton, England, though he had perfected and copyrighted...

No, this isn't actually a new installment of the Laurel Canyon series. It is, instead, an explanation of why there haven't been any new chapters posted in quite some time now. There are, I can assure you, a number of new chapters that have been written - one on Frank...