There are so many wonderful moments in the new film, Echo in the Canyon, that it's hard to pick a favorite. But for the sake of a local connection, let's go with this one: The exquisitely talented Norah Jones, a graduate of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, singing a gorgeous duet of "Never My Love," a song made popular by The Association in 1967.
Anyone who graduated from high school between 1967 and 1970 will know the song as one of the sock-hop, make-out ballads of a generation. Jones sings the duet with Jakob Dylan, son of Bob. And Jakob is the driving force of Echo in the Canyon, serving as performer, executive producer and interviewer.
Not to diminish his other roles, but one of the sweet surprises of this gem of a film is how good he is as an interviewer. He listens incredibly, almost eerily well and casts an aura — as do the best journalists — of inducing people to tell him things.
He interviews, among others, the great Brian Wilson (whom interviewee Tom Petty compares to Mozart), David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, Jackson Browne, Roger McGuinn, Michelle Phillips, John Sebastian, Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton.
The years between 1965 and 1967 serve as the rainbow arc covered in Echo in the Canyon, which documents in thorough detail the collaboration and cross-pollination that defined the Los Angeles neighborhood of Laurel Canyon and popular music as a whole for years to come. As the subtitle on the movie poster puts it, it was "the birth of the California sound."
Graham Nash goes so far as to compare it to literary Paris in the 1930's or Fin de siècle Vienna in the early 1900's, when one century gave way to the next with a renaissance in art, literature and music.
In explaining the strange synthesis of rock 'n' roll and folk that exploded in Laurel Canyon, it's Crosby who says: "We were putting good poetry on the radio — AM radio."
One of the sweetest aspects of Echo in the Canyon is how some of the best music from the period gets performed, but not by old-timers. In addition to Norah Jones, Jakob Dylan assembles a killer band of Cat Power, Beck, Fiona Apple and Regina Spektor to give the songs a charismatically fresh sound.
Dylan does a superb job of pulling juicy details from those he interviews. Michelle Phillips describes, grinning ear to ear, how she savored an affair with fellow band member Denny Doherty while married to John Phillips, the leader of The Mamas and the Papas, whose signature songs, "California Dreamin' " and "Monday Monday," get a sublime airing in Echo in the Canyon.
Michelle also describes the room in which Beach Boys genius Brian Wilson wrote the landmark album Pet Sounds, by composing on a Steinway piano mired in beach sand. And incredibly, as multiple subjects say, his signature achievement, Pet Sounds, was so beyond its time, it compelled the Beatles to counter with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Imagine that.
Details
Echo in the Canyon will be playing at the Angelika Dallas at Mockingbird Station and the Angelika Plano through June 20.
