I've significantly curtailed my time online, but it's always good to check in with you, Celia. Ever heard of "Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon" by David McGowan? I bought a copy after listening to the following interview, which I stumbled upon about a year ago. It's fascinating and adds layers to what Tom O'Neill shares in "Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties" and fleshes out a bit Kary Mullis's "Dancing Naked in the Mindfield," which I read after reading your amazing Uncover DC post on PCR way back in April of 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSzmvkja-qQ
I'm trying to curtail my time online, but was happy to find Dave McGowan's library maintained in a website centerforaninformedamerica.com. Wow, he gave me a lot to think about. It is really interesting to read his articles from 20+ years ago. Prophetic to say the least.
I'm 71 yrs old and finding out the depth of the operation run on my generation. Over the last 10 years I've caught glimpses of some of what David McGowan is talking about and not totally surprised but, wow, the overlords obviously decided in the 1940s how they would work to destroy this country. Will read the book now. Thanks for posting Cheryl.
Weird Scenes is also available online. Here's a link to chapter one. At the end of each chapter is a link to the next one. More "coincidences" and rabbit holes than you can count.
Thanks. After reading the entire book online last year, I also bought the book. I think I will download this so I can get it into a format that's searchable.
In the early 1970's Paul (Billy???) McCartney put out a song, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish". I think I'll write a song, "Give U2 Back to the Irish!".
I was a huge U2 fan in the 80s. I still think Larry Mullin Jr. is a bad ass. Bono is a lot like Wordsworth. His early works were great and then he got co-opted by evil, and the rest of his career sucked. And he angered and disappointed a lot of people who had considered him to be heroic.
Taylor Swift's "music" is mind-destroying, mind-numbing, derivative garbage, as is nearly all the Grammy Award-winning schlock these days. Pop/rock music has been weaponized by the oligarchic owners, like never before, to dumb down the masses, to keep people unfeeling, numb, and ignorant. A single song by the Shirelles or Laura Branigan or even Courtney Love is worth more than all of Taylor Swift's trash put together. The goal is to create a generation of compliant brain-dead zombies, willing to be jabbed with harmful experimental genetic cocktails ("vaccines"), and it has largely worked. Taylor Swift looks like an overgrown adolescent because that's what she is, appealing to the 12-year-old mindset.
This took me back. Yes, making everything ourselves: little fuses hanging from earrings that were worn in holes I had poked myself. One ear had 5 holes, the other 2. My clothes were often home-made, my black jeans had home-bleached spots, my little jacket had graffiti written with sharpies and the window in my room had black knitted curtains. Home-made of course, with knitting pens I had made by sharpening broomsticks. We went hitchhiking to concerts or drove for hours on little mopeds through the night and yes, we hated U2 with a vengeance. Bloody Bono.
Who cares about Dimbo Bono? Use his T shirt to clean your toilet.
I returned to the civilian world in 1968 from the Marine Corps and Vietnam. I was fortunate to gain employment and three years attend grad school at Columbia in NYC. Left in 1973 never to return . Raised a family and established roots in Texas and now have permanent resident status in Brasil.
I consciously avoided all the bullshit of the 80's. Too busy being serious about life. War does that to you. Each day is a gift. Do something good with it. It is your responsibility to do so.
Right there with with the DIY punk spirit of the early 1980s. Acrylic painted my own favorite band t-shirts, dyed my Converse Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, bought clothes at thrift stores, read fanzines, and hated every inescapable bit corporate Yuppie Boomer propaganda spewed out on MSM 24/7. Youth Highlight: 14-year old me playing bass in a band that did Black Flag covers at the North Park Lions Club (lots of punk shows at this San Diego venue in the 80s) in 1981. But somewhere in my late twenties/early thirties, I started to question how genuine or impactful (at least for me) any of this rock rebellion was. I’m definitely of the Dave McGowan “Weird Scenes in the Canyon” mind now. I think the entirety of American popular culture is infiltrated with mind control of the worst kind, and all stripes of “rock music,” perhaps in the deepest of ways. As for Bono, even though I bought Boy and October—and my then agnostic mind was sympathetic to some of the apparent Christian messages in the music—I found him insufferable even then.
Bono should forever be used as an example of why we should only care about an artists art, not the stupid shit they say. And The Joshua Tree is art. Both can be true.
It’s not all that complicated why young people or anyone for that matter go to see U2: they have some pretty good songs, far, far better than most of the recent drivel. As much as I abhor the politics, presentation and shameless promotion of Bono, that doesn’t take away from the value of some of their music, especially the earlier stuff. (I haven’t followed them in years.)
I agree with this. I think a lot of young people grew up hearing the U2 music their parents (people now in their late 50s/early 60s) were listening to and now want to see the band themselves. I used to love U2 and saw them over 100 times in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had a great time traveling and meeting other fans around the world, but I haven't followed them in years either. Things that Bono says and does bother me now, including his friendship with Bill Gates. I was feeling some regret about not traveling to Vegas to go to a show at the Sphere like most of my U2 fan friends are doing, but now I am glad I decided to stay home.
back in the 80s bono was derided for not only his narcissism but also his fractured latin. "vox bono" should be "vox bona" guess he didn't like being a feminine noun ;)
"fuck the edge too" 🎯
his signature style was 100% dependent on that idiot digital repeater pedal
the childhood vaccine schedule has decimated the available talent pool to the point where the most important rock artists now are guys in their 70s like van morrison and mark crispin miller (who is also a first class songwriter) https://www.simplelists.com/nfu/cache/17470338/2.mp3
I think you would have to add psych drugs to this. On YouTube I'll watch old videos of David Lee Roth and Phil Collins, and both of them would have been heavily drugged if they had shown up to class all hyper and jittery, with their brains working a mile-a-second making connections and demanding to experience everything.
I miss the Clash - had the good fortune to see them at Red Rocks in '82. They used to get local acts to open for them and that night, this lounge band in tuxes came out and the crowd booed and threw tomatoes at them. Real "Fin-de-siècle Vienna." Those were good times.
"Roger Waters Was Right" was the nickname I used to use when I joined substack. Musicians normally don't have enough knowledge of the human soul (that's more for poets) or enough courage to speak as Roger Waters does. It would have been painful if he had sold out to the fascists these years. But he didn't. He remained true to himself. Very rare in a rock star. Admirable.
Celia, your reflections about rock and the absurd mass culture sustained by pop music are very interesting. I've always loved rock music, in part because it was very old music for my time and very different from the pop music of the 90s and 2000s. I preferred instrumental music to songs. My first musical love was Vivaldi. I listened many times a few concertos in a cassette.
There are many great instrumental passages in the rock music of the 1960s, 70s, and part of the 80s. But it is noisy and often very dark and disturbing. I think it resonates with my own inner turmoil. As I got older, I started paying attention to classical music again, and I think I developed inner structure thanks to that. Was it because I left the damned SSRIs or because of the music itself? I prefer to think that the old stuff from Bach, Weiss or Handel is a music that heals many things that are out of reach of chemicals. I listen to the recordings by Andrés Segovia on the guitar almost every day. He really was the best. There was an American guitarist who played a surprising adaptation of one very famous cantata from Bach. Here is a link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iX8tsA0N7E
Even something more modern as Beethoven seems to produce the opposite effect of pop music. I feel dirty when I listen to recent pop songs, but then I remember the beginning of the Waldstein sonata and it feels like walking out of a car wash.
It makes a lot of sense to me to say that music was weaponized to demoralize everyone. Perhaps it affects more the individuals most sensitive to music.
This Bono guy was always boring to me. I remember the Cranberries. That was OK. The son "Zombie" was very moving. I started learning English because of that song. U2 was... meh.
Well, in classical music there are bizarre compositions that can be described as repetitive, mind-numbing, and lacking development or closure. I'm thinking about Ravel's Boléro, a piece loved by anyone who loves rock music, and hated by anyone who hates rock music. Some critics say it's too sensual and simplistic, just like rock music.
Truth be told, rock music is designed to appeal directly to the masculine aspects of personality. Even rock ballads are hopelessly male. The most balanced popular music is that of David Bowie, and it's still too masculine in his rock-genre songs. The most feminine popular music I know of is James Taylor and Carol King, maybe. But classical music is better than popular music because it has something for everyone. It's hardly a product of mass consumption, but it satisfies every musical need.
I think of the mid- to late-1950's rock music exemplified by Buddy Holly, Dion, and Ritchie Valens as a grassroots evolution of music that got turned by late 1960's into a corporatized made for AM radio bang-bang-bang formula. Stopped listening to most all pop radio by about 1972 because it just all sounded the same to me. Disco? Ugh. Amplified music so loud my ears hurt? I walk out. I preferred by then listening to and performing classical and folk music plus mostly pre-1967 pop songs. Taylor Swift? All her songs sound the same to me. Bono? Couldn't name one of his songs. Loathe any hint of autotune singing. Lots of research out there about particular beats capable of lulling about 50% of humans into a zombie mental torpor.
I try to search out independent singer-songwriters who self-produce. Mona Lisa Twins who have been inspired by the Zombies and early Beatles are worth a listen. Dion is still alive and writing, more into blues than rock now.
Eh, I wouldn’t read too much into it. U2 was pop shit (with the exception of the bass riff in New Year‘s Day which is fantastic) but still better than the Stock Aitken Waterman drek that was much more popular at the time. Teenagers are uncultured popularity addicts and many never grow out of it.
Bono, living tombstone. Just the headline is fantastic.
And the article was great, too.
I've significantly curtailed my time online, but it's always good to check in with you, Celia. Ever heard of "Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon" by David McGowan? I bought a copy after listening to the following interview, which I stumbled upon about a year ago. It's fascinating and adds layers to what Tom O'Neill shares in "Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties" and fleshes out a bit Kary Mullis's "Dancing Naked in the Mindfield," which I read after reading your amazing Uncover DC post on PCR way back in April of 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSzmvkja-qQ
I'm trying to curtail my time online, but was happy to find Dave McGowan's library maintained in a website centerforaninformedamerica.com. Wow, he gave me a lot to think about. It is really interesting to read his articles from 20+ years ago. Prophetic to say the least.
I think it’s Dave’s daughter who is maintaining the website. Great information indeed.
Yes, God bless her. Dave McGowan has left us true history and oh how it is repeating itself!
I'm 71 yrs old and finding out the depth of the operation run on my generation. Over the last 10 years I've caught glimpses of some of what David McGowan is talking about and not totally surprised but, wow, the overlords obviously decided in the 1940s how they would work to destroy this country. Will read the book now. Thanks for posting Cheryl.
Weird Scenes is also available online. Here's a link to chapter one. At the end of each chapter is a link to the next one. More "coincidences" and rabbit holes than you can count.
https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/inside-the-lc-the-strange-but-mostly-true-story-of-laurel-canyon-and-the-birth-of-the-hippie-generation-part-i/
Download the whole thing to a local drive here...use a VPN just in case...recommend choosing Slow Partner Server #3, then click on Download Now on the page after that. https://annas-archive.org/md5/977542b38846d62374b8c2466bb5e02e
Thanks. After reading the entire book online last year, I also bought the book. I think I will download this so I can get it into a format that's searchable.
Thank you
Chaos is a great read.
Hidden History, another.
Operation Gladio, eye opener
Thank you for the recommendations.
The CIA tortured me with Rock & Roll and LSD.
In the early 1970's Paul (Billy???) McCartney put out a song, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish". I think I'll write a song, "Give U2 Back to the Irish!".
I was a huge U2 fan in the 80s. I still think Larry Mullin Jr. is a bad ass. Bono is a lot like Wordsworth. His early works were great and then he got co-opted by evil, and the rest of his career sucked. And he angered and disappointed a lot of people who had considered him to be heroic.
I like Achtung Baby but after that they seemed to start following a boring formula
Taylor Swift's "music" is mind-destroying, mind-numbing, derivative garbage, as is nearly all the Grammy Award-winning schlock these days. Pop/rock music has been weaponized by the oligarchic owners, like never before, to dumb down the masses, to keep people unfeeling, numb, and ignorant. A single song by the Shirelles or Laura Branigan or even Courtney Love is worth more than all of Taylor Swift's trash put together. The goal is to create a generation of compliant brain-dead zombies, willing to be jabbed with harmful experimental genetic cocktails ("vaccines"), and it has largely worked. Taylor Swift looks like an overgrown adolescent because that's what she is, appealing to the 12-year-old mindset.
Taylor not born female.
This took me back. Yes, making everything ourselves: little fuses hanging from earrings that were worn in holes I had poked myself. One ear had 5 holes, the other 2. My clothes were often home-made, my black jeans had home-bleached spots, my little jacket had graffiti written with sharpies and the window in my room had black knitted curtains. Home-made of course, with knitting pens I had made by sharpening broomsticks. We went hitchhiking to concerts or drove for hours on little mopeds through the night and yes, we hated U2 with a vengeance. Bloody Bono.
Bono was always a dork. Has he ever taken those stupid sunglasses off? Is that you in the extended eyeliner? You all were so cute!
Who cares about Dimbo Bono? Use his T shirt to clean your toilet.
I returned to the civilian world in 1968 from the Marine Corps and Vietnam. I was fortunate to gain employment and three years attend grad school at Columbia in NYC. Left in 1973 never to return . Raised a family and established roots in Texas and now have permanent resident status in Brasil.
I consciously avoided all the bullshit of the 80's. Too busy being serious about life. War does that to you. Each day is a gift. Do something good with it. It is your responsibility to do so.
Right there with with the DIY punk spirit of the early 1980s. Acrylic painted my own favorite band t-shirts, dyed my Converse Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, bought clothes at thrift stores, read fanzines, and hated every inescapable bit corporate Yuppie Boomer propaganda spewed out on MSM 24/7. Youth Highlight: 14-year old me playing bass in a band that did Black Flag covers at the North Park Lions Club (lots of punk shows at this San Diego venue in the 80s) in 1981. But somewhere in my late twenties/early thirties, I started to question how genuine or impactful (at least for me) any of this rock rebellion was. I’m definitely of the Dave McGowan “Weird Scenes in the Canyon” mind now. I think the entirety of American popular culture is infiltrated with mind control of the worst kind, and all stripes of “rock music,” perhaps in the deepest of ways. As for Bono, even though I bought Boy and October—and my then agnostic mind was sympathetic to some of the apparent Christian messages in the music—I found him insufferable even then.
South Park does Bono the best, just thinking about the episode makes me laugh.
Bono should forever be used as an example of why we should only care about an artists art, not the stupid shit they say. And The Joshua Tree is art. Both can be true.
Unforgettable Fire is art. Joshua Tree -- a bit less so.
It’s not all that complicated why young people or anyone for that matter go to see U2: they have some pretty good songs, far, far better than most of the recent drivel. As much as I abhor the politics, presentation and shameless promotion of Bono, that doesn’t take away from the value of some of their music, especially the earlier stuff. (I haven’t followed them in years.)
I agree with this. I think a lot of young people grew up hearing the U2 music their parents (people now in their late 50s/early 60s) were listening to and now want to see the band themselves. I used to love U2 and saw them over 100 times in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had a great time traveling and meeting other fans around the world, but I haven't followed them in years either. Things that Bono says and does bother me now, including his friendship with Bill Gates. I was feeling some regret about not traveling to Vegas to go to a show at the Sphere like most of my U2 fan friends are doing, but now I am glad I decided to stay home.
Remember when U2's 13th album was forced on anyone who purchased the I-Phone 6 in 2014?
back in the 80s bono was derided for not only his narcissism but also his fractured latin. "vox bono" should be "vox bona" guess he didn't like being a feminine noun ;)
"fuck the edge too" 🎯
his signature style was 100% dependent on that idiot digital repeater pedal
the childhood vaccine schedule has decimated the available talent pool to the point where the most important rock artists now are guys in their 70s like van morrison and mark crispin miller (who is also a first class songwriter) https://www.simplelists.com/nfu/cache/17470338/2.mp3
I think you would have to add psych drugs to this. On YouTube I'll watch old videos of David Lee Roth and Phil Collins, and both of them would have been heavily drugged if they had shown up to class all hyper and jittery, with their brains working a mile-a-second making connections and demanding to experience everything.
I miss the Clash - had the good fortune to see them at Red Rocks in '82. They used to get local acts to open for them and that night, this lounge band in tuxes came out and the crowd booed and threw tomatoes at them. Real "Fin-de-siècle Vienna." Those were good times.
"Roger Waters Was Right" was the nickname I used to use when I joined substack. Musicians normally don't have enough knowledge of the human soul (that's more for poets) or enough courage to speak as Roger Waters does. It would have been painful if he had sold out to the fascists these years. But he didn't. He remained true to himself. Very rare in a rock star. Admirable.
Celia, your reflections about rock and the absurd mass culture sustained by pop music are very interesting. I've always loved rock music, in part because it was very old music for my time and very different from the pop music of the 90s and 2000s. I preferred instrumental music to songs. My first musical love was Vivaldi. I listened many times a few concertos in a cassette.
There are many great instrumental passages in the rock music of the 1960s, 70s, and part of the 80s. But it is noisy and often very dark and disturbing. I think it resonates with my own inner turmoil. As I got older, I started paying attention to classical music again, and I think I developed inner structure thanks to that. Was it because I left the damned SSRIs or because of the music itself? I prefer to think that the old stuff from Bach, Weiss or Handel is a music that heals many things that are out of reach of chemicals. I listen to the recordings by Andrés Segovia on the guitar almost every day. He really was the best. There was an American guitarist who played a surprising adaptation of one very famous cantata from Bach. Here is a link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iX8tsA0N7E
Even something more modern as Beethoven seems to produce the opposite effect of pop music. I feel dirty when I listen to recent pop songs, but then I remember the beginning of the Waldstein sonata and it feels like walking out of a car wash.
It makes a lot of sense to me to say that music was weaponized to demoralize everyone. Perhaps it affects more the individuals most sensitive to music.
This Bono guy was always boring to me. I remember the Cranberries. That was OK. The son "Zombie" was very moving. I started learning English because of that song. U2 was... meh.
Well, in classical music there are bizarre compositions that can be described as repetitive, mind-numbing, and lacking development or closure. I'm thinking about Ravel's Boléro, a piece loved by anyone who loves rock music, and hated by anyone who hates rock music. Some critics say it's too sensual and simplistic, just like rock music.
Truth be told, rock music is designed to appeal directly to the masculine aspects of personality. Even rock ballads are hopelessly male. The most balanced popular music is that of David Bowie, and it's still too masculine in his rock-genre songs. The most feminine popular music I know of is James Taylor and Carol King, maybe. But classical music is better than popular music because it has something for everyone. It's hardly a product of mass consumption, but it satisfies every musical need.
I think of the mid- to late-1950's rock music exemplified by Buddy Holly, Dion, and Ritchie Valens as a grassroots evolution of music that got turned by late 1960's into a corporatized made for AM radio bang-bang-bang formula. Stopped listening to most all pop radio by about 1972 because it just all sounded the same to me. Disco? Ugh. Amplified music so loud my ears hurt? I walk out. I preferred by then listening to and performing classical and folk music plus mostly pre-1967 pop songs. Taylor Swift? All her songs sound the same to me. Bono? Couldn't name one of his songs. Loathe any hint of autotune singing. Lots of research out there about particular beats capable of lulling about 50% of humans into a zombie mental torpor.
I try to search out independent singer-songwriters who self-produce. Mona Lisa Twins who have been inspired by the Zombies and early Beatles are worth a listen. Dion is still alive and writing, more into blues than rock now.
Eh, I wouldn’t read too much into it. U2 was pop shit (with the exception of the bass riff in New Year‘s Day which is fantastic) but still better than the Stock Aitken Waterman drek that was much more popular at the time. Teenagers are uncultured popularity addicts and many never grow out of it.