‘Echo in the Canyon’ Finds Gen X Musicians Indulging In Baby Boomer Nostalgia

In this post-modern musical landscape, casual listeners can access the combined knowledge of several basements full of foul-smelling, socially awkward record nerds with but a single blog post or Apple Music playlist. In this milieu, the term “Laurel Canyon” conjures any number of “California Sounds,” from breezy yet adventurous ’60s pop to corduroy-wearing post-hippie singer songwriters. The former is the subject of Echo In The Canyon, the all-star album-concert-film project helmed by Jakob Dylan of ’90s MOR rockers the Wallflowers. The film version is currently streaming on Netflix and features a collection of Gen X musicians paying homage to the music of their Baby Boomer forefathers with mixed results.

Not exactly a music documentary, not really a concert film, but with elements of both and a soundtrack album tie-in to boot, Echo In The Canyon most closely resembles Dave Grohl’s Sound City, by focusing on a particular time and place and the music that it produced. Nestled up in the Hollywood Hills north of Los Angeles, the winding country roads of Laurel Canyon have been home to generations of artists attracted to its bucolic lifestyle and easy access to the city below. 

To Dylan and writer-director Andrew Slater, it was also where some of the ’60s greatest musicians crossed paths and pushed each other to ever greater creative heights. David Crosby – who called the area home during tenures with The Byrds and Crosy, Stills & Nash – explains how unlike New York, where musicians hung out at clubs, people in Laurel Canyon arrived at each other’s houses with an acoustic guitar in one hand, a bag of pot in the other, and passed the time playing music for the birds and bees and various hangers on in assorted states of undress. 

The film begins promisingly, with Dylan and Tom Petty guitar shopping and arguing over the proper pronunciation of “Rickenbacker,” manufacturer of the 12-string electric guitars which powered much of the era’s music. To Petty, it’s the guitar itself that allowed the music to travel from East to West to overseas, from folk to rock and back again. Greenwich Village folkie Roger McGuinn heard The Beatles, traded in his acoustic 12-string for an electric, moved to the West Coast and formed The Byrds who covered Jakob’s father Bob Dylan, creating “folk rock” in the process. Dylan The Elder heard what they were doing and went electric. The Beatles would start playing the electric 12-string, which was heard prominently on their album Rubber Soul, which in turn influenced The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album. Mamas and the Papas producer Lou Adler took an acetate of Pet Sounds over to England and played it for The Fab Four, who answered its symphonic orchestrations with their psychedelic masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Other musicians from either coast and country would come and go, rubbing off on each other or collaborating after hooking up at a Laurel Canyon backyard party. 

In telling this story, Echo In The Canyon employs a variety of approaches. We see Jakob Dylan hanging out with collaborators Beck, Regina Spektor and Cat Power, discussing the albums of the ear and what made them special. Then he’s interviewing participants of the original ’60s scene, many of whom are friends of his father, rehashing old hippie war stories about acid trips and run-ins with the police. Then there is footage from an all-star one-off concert, playing some of the era’s most famous songs, as well as recording sessions for the Echo In The Canyon album, which came out earlier this year. While the interviews with musicians like Crosby, McGuinn and Petty provide interesting insights into the period and its creative output, the collab hangs seem staged and disingenuous. The concert performances are seldom presented in unedited form, often cutting back and forth with studio or archival footage, or featuring voiceovers, undermining what appear to be strong performances. It’s odd that a film that seeks to celebrate music, presents so little of it, at times seeming like an infomercial to sell copies of the record.

While Echo In The Canyon was probably made with the best of intentions, it ultimately fails to satisfy or do justice to its source material. It’s at once too scattered, unable to decide if its a documentary or a tribute special, and too focused on too short a period in an area with a rich musical history which spans decades. My lasting takeaway from the film, however, was how much I miss Tom Petty, who tragically died in 2017. Petty explains better than anyone else the importance of the music and how he was drawn to California by its “big dreamers” who believed “it might be possible to do something that’s not ordinary.” 

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

Where to stream Echo In The Canyon