by Mae Brussell, November 1976
(unpublished)
American and British pop/rock music during the 60's created an art form that has been described as one of the most important cultural revolutions in history.
Within a few years, between 1968 and 1976, many of the most famous names associated with this early movement were dead. Mama Cass Elliott (earlier with the Mamas and Papas), Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Brian Jones (helped form the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards), Janis Joplin were all at the Monterey Pop celebration, summer 1967.
Duane Allman Berry Oakley (helped form Allman group with Duane and Gregg Allman), Tim Buckley, Jim Croce, Richard Farina, Donald Rex Jackson (road manager for Grateful Dead) Michael Jeffery (Jimi Hendrix' personal manager), Brian Epstein (Beatles manager), Al Jackson (drummer for Wilson Pickett, back-up drummer for Otis Redding), Vinnie Taylor (Sha-Na-Na) Paul T. Williams (choreographer for the Temptations, and one of the original Temptations), Clarence White (Byrds), Robbie McIntosh (drummer Average White Band), Jim Morrison (Doors), Pamela Morrison (Jim's wife), Rod McKernan "Pig Pen" (Grateful Dead), Phil Ochs, Gram Parsons (Byrds, Flying Burritos, International Submarine Band, singing with Emmylou Harris), Sal Mineo, Meredith Hunter (victim of ritual killing at Altamont Festival), Steve Perron (lead singer of Children, wrote hit songs for ZZ TOP), and Jimmy Reed (influenced many groups, combined harmonica with guitar) were a few possible victims.
Family and friends accepted the musicians depressions or accidents as having to do with alcohol, drug usage, or both. Was anything added to their beverages or drugs to cause personality changes and eventual suicides?
Almost every death was shrouded with unanswered questions and mystery.
Persons around the musicians had strange backgrounds and were often suspect.
All of these musicians were at the peak of a creative period and success at the time they were offered LSD. Their personalities altered drastically. Optimism and gratification were replaced with doubt and misery.
Why would young people with so much talent and influence as Phil Ochs, Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons, or Brian Jones wallow in suffering, self doubt, and despondency? They were all loved, doing important contributions to their concerts and compositions, cutting new records, recognized for their talent. It just doesn't make sense.
Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass Elliott, Steve Perron choking from their vomit? I doubt it!!
Phil Ochs just happened to be touring Africa when a native "robber" jumped after him and cut his throat so that it affected his singing? The most political symbol of protest against the war in Vietnam, songwriter for Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and many others, is selected from millions of U.S. tourists for assault to his vocal chords. Incredible!!
Way back in 1966 the American Broadcasting Co. was planning to merger with International Telephone and Telegraph Co.(ITT). ABC had put aside $100,000 advance for the first television special by writer-poet Bob Dylan. The production was to climax the season.
On Saturday, July 30, 1966, Bob Dylan had a motorcycle accident. Dylan never got on the air, and ABC never merged with ITT. The merger required a lack of protest from the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. No comment. By now you know what I am thinking!!!
In addition to Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, and the Dave Mason band, many others suffered near fatal accidents.
The nine years in which the musicians allegedly overdosed, drank themselves to death, drove over cliffs, hung themselves, choked, crashed their motorcycles, went insane, or freaked out without any reasonable explanation, were the same years that the FBI and CIA waged a domestic war against any kind of dissent.
Was Lennie Bruce the first victim? How about Jack Kerouac? Did Bruce pay his dues for comparing United States police to Hitler's Gestapo. Was all the fuss about dirty words only a cover story?
An important part of neutralizing any group is to kill or discredit the leaders.
Monterey Pop set the combined Government agencies in motion.
"Never again was there a festival such as the one that took place that weekend of 1967. Never was there another event where over thirty rock groups were inflated by no more that the joy of an enraptured audience and the gorgeous pleasure of performance itself. There were eight, nine, ten times as many people running rock festivals taking place only two years later. There was never another Monterey! The weekend was too intoxicating, too radiant, too pure."
By 1968, the FBI's Counterintelligence Program, and the CIA's Operation Chaos, had included among their long list of domestic enemies "Advocates of New Lifestyles," "New Left," "Apostles of Non-Violence and Racial Harmony" and "Restless Youth."
Justification for indexing 300,000 law abiding citizens into files, and wiretapping, bugging, or burglarizing offices was rationalized on the basis that violence was prevalent, the cities were burning.
Now we find out that being "non-violent" and wanting "racial harmony," according to recent Congressional investigations, was also a crime.
The meeting place for this social, economic, and soon to become political, revolution was at the folk festival, rock concerts, free park love-ins, at the FM radio stations, or home with favorite records.
In the music there were many messages.
American youth were provided with a wide variety of radio stations to manage, alternative news sources, and new ways to learn what was going on in the world.
For the first time, young Americans found themselves with enough space and time to communicate.
The space was the entire continent, then the globe. They wandered. Many left homes in large numbers, seeking contacts from strangers in distant communities.
The time was often twenty four hours each day. They dropped out from established institutions. Clocks disappeared.
Musicians were bringing these young people together from far away places.
"I see a great deal of danger in the air. Teenagers are not screaming over pop music anymore, they're screaming for much deeper reasons. We're only serving as a means of giving them an outlet. Pop music is just the superficial tissue. When I'm on the stage I sense that the teenagers are trying to communicate to me, like by telepathy, a message of some urgency. Not about me or my music, but about the world and the way they live. I interpret it as their demonstration against society and it's sick attitudes. Teenagers the world over are weary of being pushed around by half-witted politicians who attempt to dominate their way of thinking and set a code for their living. This is a protest against the system. And I see a lot of trouble coming in the dawn."
Everything was beautiful until the insanity began.
The CIA got into the business of altering human behavior in 1947.
"Project Paperclip," an arrangement made by CIA Director Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, brought one thousand Nazi specialists and their families to the United States. They were employed for military and civilian institutions.
Some Nazi doctors were brought to our hospitals and colleges to continue further experimentations on the brain.
American and German scientists, working with the CIA, then the military, started developing every possible method of controlling the mind.
Lysergic Acid Diethylmide, LSD, was discovered at the Sandoz Laboratories, Basel, Switzerland, in 1939 by Albert Hoffman. This LSD was pure. No other ingredients were added.
The U.S. Army got interested in LSD for interrogation purposes in 1950. After May, 1956, until 1975, the U.S. Army Intelligence and the U.S. Chemical Corps "experimented with hallucinogenic drugs."
The CIA and Army spent $26,501,446 "testing" LSD, code name EA 1729, and other chemical agents. Contracts went out to forty-eight different institutions for testing. The CIA was part of these projects. They concealed their participation by contracting to various colleges, hospitals, prisons, mental hospitals, and private foundations.
The LSD I will refer to is the same type of LSD that the CIA used because of the similarity of symptoms between their reports and what happened to musicians or hippies after 1967. We shall be speaking of CIA-LSD, not pure LSD.
Government agents and the ability to cause permanent insanity, identical to schizophrenia, without physician or family knowing what happened to the victim.
"No physical examination of the subject is required prior to the administration of LSD. A physician need not be present. Physicians might be called for the hope they would make a diagnosis of mental-breakdown which would be useful in discrediting the individual who was the subject of CIA interest. Richard Helms, CIA Director, argued that administering drugs, including poisonous LSD, might be on individuals who are unwitting as this is the only realistic method of maintaining the capability considering the intended operational use to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly be unwitting."
When the first reports came out that the CIA could administer a tasteless substance into the beverage of one of their most responsible co-workers, and drive that man into a mental institution, or cause him to jump out of a window to his death, all existing CIA records were destroyed.
Hippies and musicians, previously normal and creative, with families and loved ones identical to Dr. Frank Olson, responded in the same manner as Dr. Olson after their introduction to the same drugs.
Valuable documentation of LSD experiments should not have been in the hands of CIA Director Richard Helms. January 31, 1973, one day before he retired from the CIA, he removed some possible answers as to the fate of persons minds the past ten years.
Helms had been behind all the types of experimentations since 1947.
Mind altering projects went under the code names of Operation Chatter, Operation Bluebird/Artichoke, Operation Mknaomi, Mkultra, and Mkdelta.
By 1963, four years before Monterey Pop, the combined efforts of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, Department of U.S. Army Intelligence, and U.S. Chemical Corps were ready for any covert operations that seemed necessary.
U.S. agents were able to destroy any persons reputation cause by inducing hysteria or excessive emotional responses, temporary or permanent insanity, suggest or encourage suicide, erase memory, invent double or triple personalities inside one mind, prolong lapses of memory, teach and induce racism and hatred against specific groups, cause subjects to obey instructions on the telephone or in person, hypnotically assure no memory remains of the assignments.
The CIA has poison dart guns to kill from far away, tranquilizers for pets so the household or neighborhood is not alerted by entry or exit.
While pure LSD is usually 160 micrograms, the CIA was issuing 1600 micrograms. Some of their LSD was administered to patients at Tulane University who already had wired electrodes in their brain.
Was being crazy an occupational disease of being a musician? Or does this LSD, tested and described in Army documents, explain how a cultural happening that was taking place in 1967-68 could be halted and altered radically?
Janis used to say that her speed experience was induced by a man. He had been the cause of it. He had brought her lower than she had ever been in her life. Her involvement with the young man started in the spring of '65.
He was a very sharp brain and questionable character, engaged in some rather odd activities. Neither his history or his name was his own. He set up a fraudulent international pharmaceutical company in Canada to obtain drugs. He was also a methadrine addict. Janis was an exceptionally vulnerable girl. It had taken Janis about seven months from the time she returned from New York to degenerate into a vegetable, an eighty pound spastic speed-freak.
Chrissie Shrimpton described how Mick Jagger's mind was affected after he started taking acid. Jagger had a nervous breakdown in the United States, June 1966, some months after he started taking acid. His collapse came just weeks before the start of a new concert tour.
Several friends from America visited Jagger and Chrissie and surreptitiously slipped acid into her drink. She was literally out of her mind. A short while later, Chrissie attempted to kill herself.
"Henry Schneiderman, a sinister American, or Canadian...he had so many passports no one was certain of his origin, brought to Keith Richards home a suitcase...which contained several pounds of heroin, cannabis, pills acid, DMT, every herb and chemical to stab or stroke the mind...along with choice LSD from San Francisco.
Schneiderman had let believe he was really bending the law all over the world. He was on a James Bond thing, the CIA or something."
Brian Jones had a complete personality change after taking LSD.
Janis Joplin's first LSD was administered surreptitiously. When she discovered what happened, she ran to spit it out.
Before Watergate, long before our understanding of Government agents interfering with our privacy or right to assemble, many autopsies and descriptions of mental conditions were never challenged. Today there is healthy suspicion.
When Tim Buckley died, following a successful concert in Dallas, Texas, his death was first attributed to a heart attack. Ten days later, Buckley's cause of death was discovered to be brought on by a drug overdose.
UCLA graduate student Richard Keeling was finally charged with murder after it was discovered that Buckley had sniffed heroin-morphine-ethanol. A police eyewitness actually saw Buckley ingest the powder.
Robbie McIntosh sniffed cocaine at a party.
The cocaine was laced with heroine and strychnine. Host Kenneth Moss was charged with murder.
In the cases of rock musicians becoming ill or passing away, there were so many variations of possibilities that could have been narrowed down toe facts if the doctors had been aware of all the circumstances. Jimi Hendrix was given a tab of acid just before his show at Madison Square Garden where he was playing with Buddy Miles and Bill Cox. The audience, as well as Hendrix, were completely freaked out by his irrational behavior. The result was that Hendrix was discredited.
The effect of one LSD dose could cause permanent brain injury. Anything Hendrix did after this experience, up to and including the time of his death, could be attributed to that earlier event.
Government manufactured LSD included countless combinations of chemicals.
New York State Psychiatric Institute was granted the first known contract for research into psychochemical drugs. The purpose was to determine the psychological effect of psychological chemical agents on human subjects. These subjects were given derivatives of LSD and mescaline. Other chemicals that were tested, which could be distributed at a later date included morphine, demerol, seconal, scopolamine, ditan, atrophine, psilocybin, BZ (benzilate), glycolate, atrophine substitutes, dimethyl, tryptamine, chlorpromazine, LSD with Dibenzyline (blocking agents), LSM (Lysergic acid morpholide), LSD like compounds, psilocybin, and various chemical glycolate agents.
It is no easy feat to alter society's consciousness. An arsenal of weapons was available.
Included among the chemicals were also choking agents, nerve agents, blood agents, blister agents, vomiting agents, incapacitating agents and toxins.
"The glycolates cause incapacitation by interfering with muscle, gland functions and the central nervous system, they depress or inhibit nervous activity. In addition to delirium there is physical incoordination, blurred vision inhibition of sweating and salivation, rapid heart rate, elevated blood pressure, increased body temperature and , at high doses, vomiting, prostration, and stupor or coma. The onset may be minutes, hours, or days."
"How does it feel
to be
One of the
Beautiful people?"
The Beatles "Baby, You're Rich Man"
Magical Mystery Tour Album
Robert Hall, a private detective in Hollywood, was killed by a single bullet on July 22, 1976.
So far, there has been a wire service news blackout on the implications of Hall's murder for obvious reasons. The facts in this case should expose more than the tip of Watergate. What was going on is Los Angeles is part and parcel of the Washington, D.C. scandals.
If one Army report alone exposes that millions of dollars were spent using and testing chemical combinations for operational purposes, then somebody has to be around to distribute the poison.
Managers of seven rock groups, seven different groups, had hired private eye Hall to find out how their stars were getting "stoned."
Turning on or feeling "high" doesn't warrant hiring the professional assistance of a detective. That they were obviously complaining about was that the stars were being altered in such a way that it hampered with their public appearances, credibility, personal lives, and recordings.
Hall's inquiry revealed the drugs were coming from two pharmacies with which he had been employed.
Hall used to own a drug store in Hollywood with co-partner Jack Ginsburg, an admitted pornographer, who was charged with Hall's murder.
Gene LeBell, 44, the other man arrested along with Ginsburg, refereed the Muhammed Ali bout with a Japanese wrestler in July, '76. LeBell, a professional wrestler, is the son of Aileen Eaton, a well known boxing promoter who owns and operates the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles.
The reports that Hall concluded for the managers of the rock musicians included the names of two physicians and one dentist as having supplied false prescriptions. The cause of apparent freaking out was centered in a small area of operation.
This information was turned over to the proper authorities for arrests before Hass was murdered. No actions were taken by the police. No arrests have been made.
The same frustrations plagued Robert Hall that bothered Phoenix, Arizona reporter Don Bolles. The higher-ups get police and law protection. The investigators get killed.
Don Bolles and Robert Hall were investigating some of the same people, an actual who's who of the cold war.
Hall's contacts were important because they touched the prime movers of our politics, movies, electoral processes, entertainment, and also our tastes in music and in sounds.
Within moments of Hall's murder, his name was linked with possible murder for hire, kidnapping plans for millionaire financier Robert Vesco's son, gun running to Vesco in Costa Rica, the unsolved stabbing of actor Sal Mineo, blackmail, the lost safe deposit box of Howard Hughes that could contain his original will, Beverly Hills financier Thomas P. Richardson (recently convicted of a $25 million stock fraud), Hollywood's most famous celebrities in drug and sex scandals, exposures of televisions stars and high Washington officials, drug traffic from Los Angeles to the Malibu community, international sports events, the Los Angeles Police Department (one of their former agents is now retired, heads the Police Science Department at L.A. Valley College and supplied the fatal weapon used to kill Hall), Los Angeles Police Department Chief Ed Davis (because of his links to the FBI and CIA) a possible plot to kidnap Bernard Cornfeld (associate of Robert Vesco), past contacts with Mickey Cohen, the long drug addiction of singer Eddie Fisher, contract employment of Hall by Howard Hughes Summa Corp., the two burglaries of Hughes headquarters in Van Nuys and on Romaine Street. The burglary on Romaine Street set off the Glomar Explorer scandal of Hughes fronting the contract for the CIA.
Hall sent his pals to New York. Dr. Max Jacobson, titled Dr. Feelgood, the source of John F. Kennedy's happy time vitamins. Roy B. Loftin, contractor for NASA, Texan, with a long association and friendship for Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's protege, knew Hall.
Investigations into the slain Burbank private detective caused Beverly Hills Police Captain Jack Eggers, on the force seventeen years, to resign.
Hall worked as a double agent for the Beverly Hills Police and the Los Angeles Police.
The relationship between law enforcement, drug traffic, and personalities as varied as politicians and musicians makes it sometimes impossible to get an impartial investigation of certain deaths. What appears as suicide can be murder.
At the time of Hall's murder, his possessions included tranquilizer guns, drug loaded darts that fire gas canisters, electronic bugging equipment of all kinds, and a wide variety of chemical formulas.
The chemicals were possibly a combination from the many tested by the U.S. Government from 1953 to 1963.
III THE ENEMY
Why were Hippies such a threat, from the President on down to local levels, objects for surveillance and disruptions?
Many of the musicians had the potential to become political. There were racial overtones to the black-white sounds, the harmony between people like Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, and Jimi Hendrix. Black music was the impetus that got the Rolling Stones into composing and performing.
The war in Vietnam was escalating. What if they stopped protesting the war in Southeast Asia and turned to expose domestic policies at home with the same energy? One of the Byrds stopped singing at Monterey Pop to question the official Warren Report conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a "lone assassin."
Bob Dylan's "Bringing it All Back Home" album has a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the cover of Time.
By 1966, LBJ had ordered all writers and critics of his Commission Report on the JFK murder to be under surveillance.
That research was hurting him. Rock concerts and Oswald. What next?
While preacher preach of evil fates
teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
to stand naked.
John and Yoko Lennon were protesting the Vietnam war. The State Department wrote documents describing them as "highly political and unfavorable to the administration." It was recommended their citizenship be denied, and they be put under surveillance.
Mick Jagger, before he was offered Hollywood's choicest women and heavy drugs, was concerned about the youth protests in Paris, 1968, and the anti-war demonstrations at the London Embassy.
"War stems from power-mad politicians and patriots. Some new master plan would end all these mindless men from seats of power and replace them with real people, people of compassion."
Woodstock, summer of 1969, was the turning point of rock festivals. Time magazine described this happening as "one of the most significant political and sociological events of the age."
One half million American youth assembled for a three day rock concert. They were non-violent, fun-loving hippies, who resembled the large followings of Mahatma Gandhi in India and Rev. Martin Luther King in the USA, both strong advocates of non-violence. And both assassinated.
It is important to understand the kinds of drugs and agents available to stifle dissent, the mentality of people hell-bent on changing the course of history, in order to comprehend that cultures and tastes can be moved in directions according to game plans in the hands of a few people.
Adolf Hitler's first targets in Nazi Germany were the Gypsies and the students. LSD was a youth oriented drug; that was perfected in the laboratory. When it was combined with other chemicals, and given the wide distribution necessary all that remained were the marching orders to go to war.
IV THE BATTLEGROUND
July, 1968, the FBI's counterintelligence operations attacked law abiding American individual's and groups.
The stated purpose of these assaults was to disrupt large gatherings, expose and discredit the enemy, and neutralize their selected targets.
Neutralization included killing the leaders,if necessary. Preferably, turn two opposing segments of society against each other to do the dirty work for them.
Remember that among these dangers to the security of the United States were persons with "different lifestyles" and also "apostles of non-violence and racial harmony."
CIA Director Richard Helms warned National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Feb. 18, 1969, that their study on "Restless youth" was "extremely sensitive" and "would prove most embarrassing for all concerned if word got out the CIA was involved in domestic matters."
The FBI sent out a list of suggestions on how to achieve their goals. They can all be applied to what happened to musicians, youngsters at folk rock festivals, and hippies along the highway.
Gather information on their immorality. Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions. Explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death.
The IRS admitted that "people who attend rock concert festivals" were listed among targets for investigation by its special staff. Agent Leon Levine said that "ideological groups such as rock festival patrons were to be watched."
A San Diego police officer was penalized for throwing rocks at a concert that injured a 17 year-old girl. She was treated for a fractured nose and facial lacerations.
John and Yoko's legal problems began when marijuana was planted in some binoculars while moving. After Mr. Schneiderman showed the British police his full suitcase of drugs during the bust with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Robert Frazier, Schneiderman left town. He was never arrested. The Stones went to jail. Mick Jagger was then put on the International Red List as a possible narcotics smuggler every time he went through customs.
Cable Splicer III, martial law plans, set to control civil disturbances, May 1970, described as dangerous "love-in type gatherings in the parks where in large numbers freak out, peace marches, rock festivals where violence is commonplace and sex is unrestrained."
Chicago Police Chief Rockford, overall commander during the police clashes at 1968 demonstrations, was also in charge of the police who fired a volley of shots, wounding one youth in a riot at the 1970 rock festival in Grant Park.
Louis Tackwood, agent provocateur with the Los Angeles Police Department, exposed CREEP and the Republicans who were going to turn San Diego into a scene of violence during the conventions in 1972. Part of the plans were to seal off and them bomb a hundred thousand demonstrators attending a rock concert on Fiesta Island in Mission Bay, San Diego.
Employees at the CIA's Langley, Virginia, headquarters don't have to stand in line to get tickets to these events. They have a top-secret ticketron outlet for rock concert appearances.
A similar top-secret ticketron outlet is administered by the National Security Agency at For George Meade, Md.
Howard Hughes organization ordered "all rock concerts prohibited in Las Vegas."
Fortune, January 1969, described the Movement as encompassing "hippies and doctrinaire Leninists, anarchists and populists, revolutionaries, whose domain is the human mind, rock bands and cultural guerrillas."
During the 1968 riots in Washington, D.C. group singing was outlawed by the police department. They were aware that people "get high" singing together.
Records of Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, Alice Cooper, Simon and Garfunkel, Jethro Tull and others were burned at the Hollywood Christian Academy in Hollywood, Fla. Rock music was described as being "of the devil, having no place in a Christian life."
The rock group Black Cat won a $570,000 slander suit against a minister in Arkansas. Their concert had been prevented, claiming they were a "mongrel group of Satanic origins."
Following the slaying of two Americans in South Korea in August, the government issued tighter controls on long hair and "decadent music." Korea has a list of 260 decadent rock-folk and protest songs. Among them is "I Shot the Sheriff" and "We Shall Overcome." A survey of Quebec policemen showed that more of them were hostile to hippies or beatniks than they are toward criminals.
Art Linkletter, a television personality, told a Congressional committee investigating drug abuse that the "Beatles were the leading advocates of an acid society." This is an example of turning one hostile group against another. There is every reason to believe that the LSD that caused Dr. Frank Olson and Diane Linkletter to leap from buildings to their death could be manufactured from the same laboratories. With justified anger, Linkletter became a mouthpiece. Meanwhile, the so-called straight society Linkletter was defending, spent sixteen years and millions of dollars perfecting LSD into an operational weapon.
Los Angeles Police arrested 511 persons attending the Pink Floyd concert. There were no mass arrests at Elton John's performance in the same city, around the same time.
Somebody is selecting their targets, because there is plenty of grass at Elton's concert.
"Peace Pills" were distributed at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds for a folk-rock festival. Youngsters were hospitalized. A strange drug was handed out freely and poured into drinks.
All of those who took the drug were treated, but sent home without any knowledge of the psychological damage.
This pill was blamed for the death of Mrs. Loid Dodd de Lattre, wife of a beatnik priest. Mrs. de Lattre's heart burst under the stimulation of the drug. Under its influence, she tore out her hair and threw herself on the floor.
A man had jumped on the musician's platform and announced they had 4,000 pills to hand out. The pills caused "marked disorientation as to time and space, inability to sustain directed thought, presence of a trance-like state."
This kind of scene was so common that large groups were discouraged from performing in the manner they had before these assaults took place.
The irreplaceable loss of lives and talent has been noticed by persons sensitive to the rock-folk music.
We can't bring them back to life. We might take time to examine their deaths, if only to stop the still going attack upon certain artists and musicians.
Some of my information on the details of these deaths is incomplete. The circumstances surrounding them caused me to ask some hard questions.
JOHN CARPENTER, 45 yrs, Sept. 18, 1976, killed by hit and run driver, Ben Lomand, Calif. Part of the earliest rock scene, once managed Grace Slick, wrote for Rolling Stone from issue one through eight, disc jockey at KPFK, music critic for L.A Free Press. Got "totally crazed" and committed himself to a mental institution for a while.
TIM BUCKLEY, 28 yrs, June 29, 1975, Los Angeles. Just returned from a concert in Dallas, Texas, about to make a movie of Woodie Guthrie's "Bound for Glory." Death caused by heroin-morphine-pentathol. Police eyewitness to his taking the drug. Joe Falsia, Buckely's manager "never knew Tim used drugs." Richard Keeling charged with his murder.
THE CHASE, August 11, 1974, Four in rock group killed, airplane crash. Bill Chase, Jazz trumpeter with Woody Herman, Walt Clark, drummer, John Emma, guitarist, and Wallace Wouhne, organist. Three years ago the Chase had a single, "Get It On," that became a hit. Popular with radio stations. Played often in Las Vegas, Japan, Africa, released three albums.
JIM CROCE, 30 yrs. old, Sept. 20, 1973. Airplane crash, Louisiana. Recorded hit albums, including "Bad, Bad LeRoy Brown." Degree in psychology from Villanova U., sang at small colleges. Croce's widow filed a $2.5 million suit against Federal Aviation Administration. Allegations that preparation of maps on the airport runway were faulty, leaving a tree unmarked which the fatal plane struck.
BRIAN JONES, July, 1969, London. One of the original members of the Rolling Stones. Unique musician, helped the group get started, under control of drugs by 1966, took LSD that caused personality changes and depression. Seemed to have brain damage and disintegrated. Compared his arrests and planted grass to the treatment Lennie Bruce had received, forced to drop from the group. Keith Richards, of the Stones, said,
"Some very weird things happened the night Brian died. We had these chauffeurs working for us, and we tried to find out. Some of them had a weird hold over Brian. I got straight into it and wanted to know who was there and couldn't find out. The only cat I could ask was the one I think who got rid of everybody, and did a whole disappearing thing so that when the cops arrived, it was just an accident. Maybe it was. I don't know. I don't even know who was there that night, and finding out is impossible. It's the same feeling with who killed Kennedy. You can't get to the bottom of it."
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