No, they were kind of the antithesis of the Dead in some ways whom, for all their morbid and necrotic imagery, really played mostly happy upbeat music while the Doors seemed (to me) to play down, dirty drunken music. But that’s the Stanford/Palo Alto connection. They had access to all that sweet sweet acid coming out of the labs there. The Dead did have a Jim Morrison type, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, but he died very early on. Things might have been different had he not.
I should say, however, that the Laurel Canyon posts I’m reading talk about Timothy Leary, an obvious C_A agent, was hanging out at the Whiskey a go go back in 65, which is about when the Dead were meeting up in Palo Alto, so he may have been bringing the LSD south. Also, Zappa and his Mothers were undoubtedly heavily into the acid scene, though Zappa, interestingly, never partook.
Also, SO fascinating that in March 1965, just as Jim Morrison was moving into Laurel Canyon from where he would become a rock god in a matter of months; his father was commanding a carrier group in the Gulf of Tonkin which would execute the False Flag (which was not really a false flag because the incident never even happened) that started the Vietnam war. Incidentally, the carrier Admiral Morrison was commanding was the Bon Homme Richard, which had been commissioned in 1944 and christened by Mrs. Admiral John S. McCain.
It seems the acid rock movement was a deliberate creation of the CIA to draw people away from the anti war movement and into the passive ecstasy of the LSD experience. I can’t imagine they expected it to transform the country into something other than what it had been, but the clowns are notorious for playing the sorcerers apprentice.
ALso, the Wonderland murders, a.k.a. the Four on the Floor murders; a.k.a.the Laurel Canyon murders which deeply involved porn star John “Johnny Wad” Holmes. Acquitted.