Laurel Canyon

A generation's counterculture, raised — a persistent theory notes — by military families.

Picture a narrow, winding canyon in the hills above Los Angeles. Eucalyptus and honeysuckle, wooden houses stacked on stilts, and, for a few years in the 1960s, an astonishing concentration of the people who would write the soundtrack of a generation. That is Laurel Canyon. And halfway up one of its roads sat a windowless compound behind a chain-link fence that almost nobody in the music scene seemed to think about. DOCUMENTED: that compound was real. It was a United States Air Force facility, Lookout Mountain Laboratory, a classified motion-picture studio. Behind its walls, military filmmakers and Hollywood professionals produced and processed film, including footage of nuclear weapons tests. The Air Force genuinely operated photographic and motion-picture units, and the National Archives today holds hundreds of thousands of reels of that government film record. A secret movie studio in the hills, staffed by people with security clearances, is not a legend. It is history. So here's where it gets strange. SPECULATION / LEGEND, clearly marked: the late writer Dave McGowan argued that the timing was no accident. In a series of essays and a book, he noted that a striking number of the canyon's rock stars were children of military and intelligence families, that some arrived with little musical background and vaulted to fame with suspicious speed, and that a secret military film lab sat in their midst. His thesis: the 1960s counterculture was not organic but an intelligence operation, engineered to steer a restless youth movement into drugs and drift. It is a gripping story. It is also, to be fair, unproven. McGowan's case is built almost entirely on proximity and coincidence, this person lived near that person, this father held that job. None of that, on its own, demonstrates a plan. Correlation is not a command. Los Angeles was a company town for both the aerospace-defense industry and the entertainment industry, so overlapping families were close to guaranteed, no conspiracy required. What we can say honestly is this. The military studio: documented. The dazzling scene next door: documented. The claim that one secretly ran the other: an allegation, and only an allegation. That allegation is the bridge to this node's neighbors. Down one path lies the CIA, the intelligence apparatus McGowan believed was pulling the strings, and whose real Cold War programs give the story its menace. Down another lies the Canyon Scene itself, the flesh-and-blood musicians whose tangled biographies keep the legend alive. On the map, set Laurel Canyon at a crossroads: a place where something genuinely secret really did exist, a stone's throw from something genuinely magical, and where the human urge to connect two true dots with a line we cannot actually see has never stopped pulling.