By Zack Kopp
NOW I’M NO CONSPIRACY THEORIST but I think the government made this whole thing up behind our backs with the help of Esalen Institute, and we paid them to do it. We’re all the way inside their program now. Part of the rock and roll lifestyle involves accepting or denying or in some way processing these allegations on an artist vs. art level. Almost every rock and roll superstar you can think of is easily implicated in one thing or another, and most of them already have been.
I’m not exactly complaining or trying to prove anything. I might be wrong, but in my opinion, Papa John Phillips’ and Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s offspring and Julian and Sean Taro Ono Lennon may be considered as third generation examples of the Military-Entertainment-Complex (perhaps unknowingly, and their parents might not have known, either, however unlikely it seems). It all probably started as an OSS Project, with J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, which went on to inspire a couple of assassination attempts, one of which, John Lennon’s murder by Mark David Chapman, was successful. Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassination by John Hinckley (didn’t have a middle name?) was not. Both had unnatural affinities with Salinger’s book. This brings in George Herbert Walker Bush and the CIA, Operation Paperclip and all that. Our whole society is driven by trauma-based mind control and X-based mind control, X being any extremity of emotional association. That’s the basis of historical military events. When it comes to entertainment, The 3 Stooges are an example are trauma-based media fixation, the way they keep smacking each other and it’s meant to be funny. That was the first run of this crazy project, and then came the hippies, including LSD and other psychedelics, free love and sex and cult and concert killings. There was a self-help center with hot tubs cut into the hillside called Esalen founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962 to explore what early tripper Aldous Huxley called the “human potentialities” inherent in consciousness that was more centrally important to the project than has been recognized:, and before I continue, let me add that I don’t know any of this for sure, and it’s really just an entertaining story. I mean, something like this couldn’t possibly be true. Right?
Here I’ll introduce Trusty, a mysterious figure from my past dressed all in denim who rode a motorcycle and was formerly co-owner of a market research firm in Denver I used to work for. According to him, the plot to direct our imaginations is even stranger and more far-reaching (while being at the same time insidiously inherent) than anyone has so far predicted or even imagined. It was a conversation with Trusty which led me to a new respect for Esalen. Says he, “R.D. Laing and Kesey and some others got ahold of the chunk, set it down in the center of one of the hot tubs there, known thereafter as the ‘acid tub,’ since everyone who set foot inside started tripping mind-bogglingly instantly. Right away! Some of the greatest heads of our time. Amiri Baraka. Lee “Scratch” Perry. Gloria Steinem. Ginsberg. Hunter Thompson. JFK, Flannery O’Connor. Steve Jobs. Ken Kesey. Nelson Mandela, Andy Kaufman, the Count of St. Germain, Lennon-McCartney. The whole world sat in those hot tubs, and by proxy, all those inventions, heh heh . . . one more, if you don’t mind, please, Summer.”
Trusty seemed to be describing a conspiracy that went beyond logic and transcended history and time centered around the hot tubs at the Esalen Institute involving figures who’d certainly never set foot there. “What nobody knew, and they never found out,” he went on, “is that we had already taken that chunk out and broken it up into hundreds of little chunks and dispersed them throughout all the hot tubs, ha haaa—” His voice cracked as he trailed off into a satisfied bleat of proud laughter.
The chunk referred to is wreckage from the crashed flying saucer reported in Roswell, New Mexico, circa 1947 and rapidly denied by public relations. This piece, according to Trusty, included coded information destined to infect entertainment and advertising culture via market research surveys. We’ll get back to Trusty and the chunk in a minute, but to deal in facts, the Beatles stayed in “Doris Day’s house” [said John Lennon] on one of their visits overseas. The same house in Benedict Canyon later became Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s house, where the Manson family murders happened.
The Beach Boys were part of the Laurel Canyon music scene next door, along with The Mamas & the Papas, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Charles Manson in a band called Family Jams and one of his friends, Bobby Beausoleil, in the Milky Way, also featuring Manson. Most people know members of the Family including Charlie stayed at Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson’s house for a while. They also cut some tracks for Terry Melcher at Brian Wilson’s in-home studio. Melcher, Doris Day’s son, was married to Candice Bergen, daughter of Mortimer Snerd ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, which brings in Hollywoodian nepotism. Melcher was producer for most of the Laurel Canyon bands mentioned above, the vast majority of whom are composed of members descended from military intelligence families, even (especially) Frank Zappa.
This stuff happened around the time Brian was working on his “teenage symphony to God,” Smile, said to have impressed Paul McCartney into conceptualizing Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Smile was suppressed for about forty years, and is arguably superior to Pepper’s)”
There are a few great conspiracies going about the Beatles. It follows logically that if McCartney was there when Wilson was recording Smile, and Charles Manson was, too, they might have crossed paths. The Beatles were all descended from Masons, long rumored to be the real movers and shapers of western history. And if McCartney was replaced by Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band in 1966, as strongly suggested by lots of mostly overlooked or unconsidered evidence—who’s to say early Beatles bassist Stu Sutcliffe (pictured below with hands steepled in a Masonic gesture) might not have resurfaced years later as Andy Warhol? They look exactly like each other, at any rate. Which could be a coincidence. Those things happen sometimes.
Other times they seem arranged. Like the way Nico connects Jim Morrison with Warhol, who might have been Sutcliffe, for all we know, or another third party with an unknown name, for all we know. And what about the Warhol-promoted Velvet Underground band (of which Nico was one figurehead) reminds you of the early Beatles? Maybe not everything, but I can think of a couple of things right away. Maybe even three or four. According to Trusty’s logic, all these people were conditioned by the tubs at Esalen, to say the least, an interesting thing to believe. Meanwhile, Jim Morrison’s father fired the first shot in the Vietnam War. This a work of fiction but that’s a fact. Did he ever go there? It sounds like the kind of thing he totally would have done, right?
“You’ve heard of MK-Ultra,” Trusty interrupted my thoughts with a gnomic air of wisdom.
“Sure,” I told him. That was the code name for a CIA mind control project involving LSD that was supposedly discontinued in 1972 and rumored to have continued unabated under different code names using different tactics for all this time.
“So that’s where all the market research comes from, see? All the mind control techniques developed, using semiotics, subliminal text, and visual cues, all the ways they dreamed up, a whole staff working as hard as they could day and night, without any ethical oversight! And maybe you’ve heard about Col. C. Baloombo Jenkinson?”
I remembered some story about LSD and wild romping with prostitutes, Wild Bill something. “I think I’ve heard something about it, wild LSD guy?”
“Yes and no,” said inscrutable Trusty, “I know the guy you mean, but no. This is a different guy. He had a three-lane wild streak, and he lost a lot of money in a poker game with Proctor and Gamble and the CEO of NBC. This was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.” “Okay. But—Trusty? You keep beating around the bush.”
“Well now, Baloombo Jenkinson or whoever he really was . . . lost those secrets playing poker, the winning parties in the same game kept playing, spreading and trading them amongst themselves with every bet, ‘til all that shit got into the hands of all the advertisers over the last sixty years, and now everyone’s walking around brainwashed and slack-jawed, and they think it’s their own bright ideas, all the shit between their ears. Whoever’s in charge kept having elections, they just changed the standards over time. That’s how the president got elected.”
The president at the time was an obnoxious game show host and that kind of mind control explained it. Esalen had been a place where people studied human potential and the habits of their minds. Once MK Ultra and advertising got in there, the whole mix went crazy. Society got out of hand. That’s why I say the government made this whole thing up behind our backs, and we paid them to do it. All us strange rock and rollers. Not to mention all the reverse-engineered ET technology on sale cheap everywhere, which is a whole other spaghetti sandwich.
“That’s right. Today’s mind control is a worldwide, multi-billion-dollar undercover economy with players at the highest levels of society, celebrity, and wealth. Once they legalized greed, everybody got into that game, soda companies, the CIA, athletic shoe manufacturers, Facebook . . . and everyone’s having a good time, heh heh.” Trusty swirled the liquid around in the bottom of his glass, then lifted it to his lips and took another drink.
According to John Phillips’s daughter, Mackenzie, in her memoir, High on Arrival, Rolling Stone Mick Jagger and her father (of Laurel Canyon band the Mamas and the Papas) both attempted to have sex with her as a teenager, and she carried on a sexual relationship with her father for years. This statement distanced her from sister Bijou, who briefly dated Sean Lennon, who’s partnered with Les Claypool formerly of Primus in recent years to create psychedelic rock and roll. There have always been a lot of outrageous theories about Sean’s mom, Yoko Ono, many of which can be put down to racism and rightly discounted, but her father, a banker, was descended from a former Japanese emperor, which must mean something. This third generation seems to be dealing mostly with the after-effects of the first two, at least so far. I guess we’ll see what’s coming next.
“You said something about inventions, you said ‘all those inventions’.”
“Well, It even got into the drinking water there, and all the plumbing, so now . . . hahaa . . . that’s where all those surveys came from, all the surveys we did on the cell phones and pagers at Zylon, and the ones you’re doing now, not to mention things like the Enneagram and Color Wheels, different personality tests, the Leary MMPI personality test. That’s where the cell phones themselves came from! From those hot tubs! Even the Rubik’s Cube! The Merry Pranksters! That book, The Game, by William S. DeRopp! All inspired by that chunk.”
“So how? What can we—”
“The antidote is in the venom,” Trusty concluded, before climbing down off the stool and clopping across the floor in his cowboy boots and into the Leisure Pleasure Restroom. He didn’t come out for a long time and after a while I went over there and there wasn’t even a door. I left the room, shaking my head. That Trusty. I’m not sure what he meant but I’m starting a new band now.
Camp Elasticity 