Deep Canyon Blues and the 12-String Revolution

L-R: Regina Spektor, Jakob Dylan, Beck, and Cat Power
rehearse their arrangement in Echo in the Canyon

Andrew Slater (director), Echo in the Canyon

In 1965, as America struggled to handle the British Invasion, an answering sound emerged from the margins of Los Angeles. Though the Beach Boys pioneered the West Coast Sound, the real movement began when Roger McGuinn, a disaffected folkie, quit Greenwich Village and moved west. Back then, young artists could still afford to starve in La-La Land. Many of them found their way to the same place, an incubator of ambition and innovation: Laurel Canyon.

Fifty years later, several Los Angeles recording professionals organized a concert and accompanying cover album to memorialize Laurel Canyon’s impact on musical history. This documentary, with son-of-the-times Jakob Dylan interviewing several of Laurel Canyon’s surviving veterans, lingered in post-production purgatory for years, but it creates an atmosphere to help audiences, jaded on a half-century of intervening history, understand just how momentous these few years really were.

It’s hard to define the Laurel Canyon sound. It was characterized, in part, by complex, layered arrangements, poetic lyrics sometimes derived directly from East Coast folk music, and dense multi-part vocal harmonies. This documentary quickly chucks any attempt to define the sound, preferring instead to identify its most influential proponents. There are fleeting references to the Monkees, Joni Mitchell, and Frank Zappa, but the greatest screen time goes to four acts: the Byrds, the Mamas & the Papas, the Beach Boys, and Buffalo Springfield.

Young Dylan interviews a cast of thousands to reconstruct the culture and climate of 1965. Luminaries like Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, recount what they brought into the Canyon scene. Eric Clapton, John Sebastian, Graham Nash, and Ringo Starr recount what they brought out of it. Their recollections are hectic and sometimes contradictory, but brimming with classic rock spirit.

It’s important to note, nobody onscreen purports to reveal the only true account. David Crosby admits his youthful arrogance made him pugnacious, and he frequently didn’t get along with other Canyon artists. McGuinn and Stills are remarkably forthcoming about the quantity of drugs they consumed, something they were cagier about previously. Phillips describes how band members frequently became so isolated from the outside world that their perceptions became distorted, their memories unreliable.

Between these interviews, we get music. Vintage TV performances and rare studio footage depict original artists performing their most important tracks. But the emphasis lies on younger artists recreating the music. Jakob Dylan is joined, alternately in studio and on the Olympic Theatre stage, by luminaries like Regina Spektor, Cat Power, Fiona Apple, and Beck. These recordings and concert performances don’t just mimic the classics, they recreate how new, dangerous, and exciting the hits felt.

The Echo in the Canyon house band performs before footage of the Byrds

Taken together, the mingling of interviews and concert performance resembles Scorsese’s The Last Waltz. Like Robbie Robertson in that documentary, these vintage artists are desperate to curate how survivors remember their influence after they go. (The gushing fan tributes include, heart-wrenchingly, Tom Petty’s last onscreen interview. He visibly has trouble moving.) And like The Band’s concert segments, these artists don’t let age stand between them and providing the most muscular performances possible.

Upon release, this documentary received warm reviews, and enjoys an overwhelmingly positive Rotten Tomatoes score. Within months, though, critics began reassessing their opinions. Some began fault-finding, criticizing Jakob Dylan for not exercising more journalistic rigor in his interviews. Others complained about the Laurel Canyon artists omitted from the roster: Joni Mitchell gets a single fleeting mention, while Jim Morrison, Linda Ronstadt, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band never get mentioned at all.

These nitpicks, however, are pretty unfair. Considering that the documentary was organized to support the concert, the included bands were probably just the ones from whom they could get performance rights. Track selection probably also reflects who they could secure for on-camera interviews: the surviving Doors are notoriously media-shy, and the Dirt Band seldom plays their early Laurel Canyon songs anymore. What some critics see as “a missed opportunity,” probably stems from simple logistical limits.

My opinion, though, is biased. These bands, particularly the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, are the acts who sprung me from a conservative youth dominated by slick, chart-friendly music. Even though these bands dissolved before I was born, their lyrical and instrumental complexity opened new vistas for me. Then, like everybody else, I got accustomed to them and forgot. This documentary doesn’t just recount what the original acts sounded like. It reminds me how innovative, even revolutionary, their music once sounded.