Echo In The Canyon

Dir: Andrew Slater UNIVERSAL The Laurel Canyon scene gets its time in the sun in vivid documentary.

LA’s Laurel Canyon in the late 60s and early 70s wasn’t so much a place as a golden fantasy world where a pantheon of musical gods smoked, screwed and wrote the soundtrack to the post-hippie, pre-Watergate era.

This Californian Olympus is the focus of Echo In The Canyon, a vivid portrait of a movement whose musical output was matched by the characters who made it. Ex-Wallflowers frontman Jakob ‘Son Of Bob’ Dylan acts as guide, interviewing key players from original protagonists like Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of The Byrds (rightly celebrated as the groundbreaking band they were) to musicians it inspired, such as Tom Petty.

Aside from a few coy asides, the film largely concentrates on the ‘rock’n’roll’ part of the ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ equation. This is fine when it’s focusing on 1970, but it begins to jam up when things shift to Bob Dylan and a bunch of muso mates (Beck, Regina Spektor, Cat Power) as they rework some of the songs for a one-off concert in LA, channelling some of the original scene’s selfsatisfied smugness.

That’s not enough to ruin this documentary, nor is the fact that it’s frustratingly short: it could have been a multi-part epic to match Ken Burns’s masterful Country Music. But it will drive you back to the music, which is ultimately the one job any good documentary needs to do. ■■■■■■■■■■

Dave Everley