After a decade of rejections, in 1980 the infamous biography of The Door’s Jim Morrison, No One Here Get Out Alive, was published, but only after “additional, sensationalistic content” was “added by Danny Sugerman.” Sugerman, described by Wikipedia as “Jewish-American,” started working for The Doors at 12 years of age, opening fan mail, and after Morrison’s death, became The Doors new manager, at 17.
Morrison’s bandmates hated the book, saying that the Jim Morrison it portrayed was “unrecognizable” and nothing at all like the man they knew. Sugerman’s tale was a fictional account of “rock and roll excess” and despite the close association between The Doors and the 1960’s “psychedelic” scene, and despite the “official story” that Morrison overdosed on heroin in a Paris bathtub, his bandmates insisted that Morrison was not a drug user.
Morrison himself denied being into either marijuana or LSD and in an interview explained that his song, The Crystal Ship, was about the only drug he indulged in habitually – shaking his ice-filled tumbler for emphasis:
The crystal ship is being filled
A thousand girls, a thousand thrills
The “Crystal Ship” that is “being filled” is a cocktail glass, and the “drug” is alcohol. Despite the long hair and Gypsy outfits, Morrison was not a “hippie” – that was a character. Morrison was the son of a Navy officer, attended private Christian schools, and graduated high school in Alexandria, Virginia, commuting distance from the Pentagon.
It seems that Jim Morrison was a lot like his father, Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was – quite interestingly – involved in the staging of the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” that began America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Perhaps in the end, the Process should be remembered as a BritCom rather than anything more sinister
The cringe-worthy “Satanic occult” aspects of the Process Church are indeed more comedy than tragedy, but the sinister aspects are related more to MK-Ultra than to anything “spiritual.” Indeed, one simply needs to zoom out to see it more clearly: the Process Church came out of the same Hollywood network that birthed Scientology, the brainchild of Naval Intelligence officer L. Ron Hubbard, who infamously snatched away MI6 agent Aleister Crowley’s top assert, Jack Parsons, of the US Army’s, and later NASA’s, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, intimately involved in building America’s nuclear armed ICBM’s.
The term “Deep State” comes from the Susurluk car crash, where it was discovered that, in Turkey, the elected government, the top levels of law enforcement, organized criminal drug cartels, and the entertainment business all socialized with each other after hours.
This exact same confluence of four social institutions – Government, Police, Mafia, and Media – describes the 1960’s Hollywood Television scene precisely – and especially its “counter-culture” “hippie” phase.
This exact time period – “the Sixties” – is what is often called “The Television Era” because it is when virtually every single family in America bought a Television and watched the broadcasts every single day.
This phenomenon, while being discussed in one way or another constantly, is never seen in its proper context. It’s called “the Entertainment Business” as opposed to what would be a much more accurate descriptor, “the Propaganda Business.”
It’s always discussed as “a business” – a profit-seeking enterprise operating in a “free market” – despite it not being anything close to that at all. The TV was dominated by three companies, ABC, CBS, and NBC, barely separate organizations that developed from the early radio propaganda networks of FDR. They were always departments of the state. There has never been anything resembling a “free market” in Mass Electronic Media and the entire “business” has been intimately connected to not just “the government” in general, but specifically, the Intelligence Agencies.
Why is this a surprise? Why is this obvious fact always seen as some sort of a “conspiracy theory?” Isn’t that what an “intelligence agency” does – broadcast propaganda? Isn’t that what they titled the book?
This side of the internet likes to constantly complain about “The Boomers” – but what is it that is so infuriating about “The Boomers?”
It’s the fact that their entire reality was shaped by the newly ubiquitous technology of Television and they have spent their entire lives – as in Plato’s Cave – believing that what they were seeing on the Television was a more-or-less random assortment of “entertainment” that became popular through a system of “free market competition.”
And as for Sugerman – good lord. Does anyone really believe this story? A 12 year old “Jewish-American” works for the son of the Navy Admiral at the exact same time his father is starting the Vietnam war, and after his death in Paris, at 27, of an overdose on a drug he never uses, goes on to “manage” this valuable entertainment property at 17?
It gets better. Sugerman “dated” Mackenzie Phillips, the daughter of The Mommas and the Pappas leader John Philips, one of the spookiest men in Hollywood.
The pre-Boomers were entertained by Frank Sinatra – and the fact that Old Blue Eyes had many friends in “The Mafia” just added to his appeal.
But the Boomers growing up watching the Long-Haired Hippies never suspected that their “hip” entertainers were connected to organized crime too. Sure, John Phillips didn’t dress like what you would expect a Mafia hoodlum to dress like, but the crowd surrounding him were nothing more than a cross between a Mexican Drug Cartel and a Jeffrey Epstein style underage sex trafficking racket.
I mean, for God’s sake, they wrote songs about trafficking little girls:
Young girls are coming to the canyon And in the mornings I can see them walkin' I can no longer keep my blinds drawn And I can't keep myself from talkin'
The song was titled “Twelve Thirty” – a hardly subtle reference to the ages involved: 12 year old girls and 30 year old men.
To this day, the constant sex trafficking of young girls by “Rock Stars” and “Hollywood Actors” in the 60’s and 70’s is written off as just “the times.” Entire books are filled with the stories, and the girls are referred to as “groupies” as opposed to “victims of sex trafficking.”
As for Sugarmen, he ended up marrying … no, wait for it … Fawn Hall, the infamous secretary of Colonel Oliver North of Iran Contra fame – you know, the Oliver North that wrote in his diaries about the “kilos” – of cocaine – that he and his CIA friends were flying into the United States in the 1980’s to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
As for the Process Church, well, O’Meara kind of gets it:
The Process was created in London by Robert de Grimston, a recent Oxford graduate, and his wife, Mary Ann Maclean, whose origins were a bit mysterious but were eventually revealed, as they are in the doco’s last minutes, as a Scottish whore who had come down to London to work as a dominatrix for some Levantine pimps.
O’Meara sees this as an “esoteric tradition” – and in a sense, it is.
But once you strip away all the “spiritual” mumbo-jumbo and “religious” trapping, the Process Church – like so much of “the Sixties” phenomenon, is a lot more pedestrian.
The MK-Ultra program is infamous, and notorious, and is shrouded in mystery, “the occult” and “conspiracy theories.”
But if anyone bothered to actually read the documents, much of it was quite banal and easily understandable. In fact, so is all the “occult” trappings – which, let’s not forget, is to this day used to mystify the reality of sex trafficking – see, “the Satanic Panic” or for that matter “Pizzagate.”
The Process Church is trawling the streets of Los Angeles for young girls and boys, perhaps runaways, who may fall for a “alternative spiritual” hook before finding themselves involved in a scene of “liberated sexuality” that – without the verbal diarrhea – looks and functions exactly like any other sex trafficking ring used to gain blackmail leverage over well-placed customers.
The “group meditation” and “spiritual” nonsense “just happens” to be indistinguishable from the exact sort of psychological experimentation that was at that exact same time being developed by the Intelligence Agencies in programs like the most infamous parts of MK-Ultra.
And everyone involved “just happens” to be directly connected to the Intelligence agencies of USA and UK, drug trafficking, and sex trafficking.
But dress these people up in a “Hippie” costume with long hair and “love beads” and no one bats an eye.
Because, after all, everyone knows that Organized Crime wears fancy business suits and are all Italian.
If it was broadcast on national – even international – television in 1970, it was for a reason, and that reason was more than just “entertainment.”
Alas, don’t expect right-wingers to ever tell these truths, because they are as invested in the Illusion as anyone else.
To this day, it astonishes how easily people are fooled by something as simple as a costume.
Back in the post-9/11 era, all they had to do was dress up an Israeli Jew in a “Muslim costume” and half the country were convinced they were watching “home grown Al Qaeda domestic terrorists” inexplicably allowed to wander around Times Square giving interviews on the nightly news.
I can imagine the Boomers, screaming at the TV, “why don’t they just arrest the guy when he leaves the Television studio? Damn liberals!“
I read that Sugarman book when I was in high school. I’ll have to re-read it.
LikeLike
Good article. But before 1927 there was a free market in radio. The FCC was set up to end the “chaos” of choice and so was born the cartel.
LikeLike
While it’s probably preaching to the converted, The Century of the Self is worthwhile.
LikeLike
The free market means that the market is free. It says nothing about the customers of the market.
LikeLike
So the entire counter-culture was from the beginning a setup. That´s an interesting thesis… and unfortunately, a lot speaks for that view. But… for me, it begs the question: WHO…. devises such plans? Seems unbelievably devious to me… who comes up with the idea of building a hippie flower-power drug movement… for liberation, nature, etc… only to… lead the herd once again into the corral of the oligarchs. I mean… this is an incredibly sophisticated scheme… we should now unravel that and see who came up with that.. why that seemed a plausible idea at that time, what was necessary to enact it… etc… so we can probably learn a lot about TPTB. E.g., I guess, about the Tavistock Institute, and the Fabian Society… etc. !?
LikeLike
@Pjotr
While I find it plausible that someone in some three letter agency thought, “let’s control the opposition to our war,” it wasn’t really particularly devious.
I’m sure that the Momas and the Popas were more compatible with the American Liberal Capitalists than the “folk” acts that came before, like the Weavers and Woody Guthrie, who were both literally having lyrics written by the Communist party.
I’m sure that Phillips staged the Montery Pop Festival with the express intention of profits, from both the ticket sales and the drug sales. But that is hardly all that James Bond – it’s a pretty standard way drug dealers operate.
What makes it all seem so amazing – both good and bad – is simply because it was on the TV and TV was a really new thing at the time.
When I was a kid and got to used a video camera for the first time, I thought it was magic. Now it’s in everyone’s phone, so it’s not magic anymore.
“The Sixties” were nothing but the Boomers doing drugs and getting laid for the first time. It lasted maybe four years. But it’s very influential because it was broadcast on the TV the first time.
There was just as much crazy shit going down when I was growing up in the 90’s – but by that point, TV wasn’t magic anymore.
LikeLike
Fawn Hall’s mother Wilma was Henry Kissinger’s Secretary. Her father was the main still photographer at the Pentagon. Pop traveled with the top Pentagon brass and photographed them at official functions. Her step brother killed himself at Fairfax Hospital in 1979. Wilma had called the Fairfax County Police to escort her son to a mental hospital when her son took a policeman’s gun and shot himself. I can’t help but wonder if one of the “delusions” her son had was insisting that he kept seeing Jim Morrison around the family’s Annandale /Alexandria , VA neighborhoods.
LikeLike
@Steven Uanna
Interesting… so I assume you have looked into this stuff – how did you find this blog? Searching for something related to this?
LikeLike
McGowan’s book probably led me to look into things political/Hollywood. My father William Uanna has a listing in Wikipedia. He was involved with the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. He wrote the Q Clearance. Lookout Mountain and underground bases involve his work. He built the A Bomb storage bases 1948-49. He ended up as the Chief of Physical Security at the Department of State 1953 – 61. He died mysteriously in Addis Ababa in 1961. He is buried in Arlington Cemetery. He knew the Dulles brothers well. Edward Lansdale too. I grew up in Fairfax County, Virginia. I know DC and Fawn’s neighborhood. And the Tow Path area where Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered. My mother and I were in Addis Ababa when my father died of a ( heart attack).
LikeLike