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Echo in the Canyon (2019)

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Edgy MD Sep 22 2019 07:42 PM

Jakob Dylan talks with veteran folk rockers from California's Laurel Canyon scene, meanwhile bringing performers from his own generation to LA to soak up the vibe and cover songs from the Echo Canyon artists, on stage and in the studio. http://prod3.agileticketing.net/images/user/capri_3986/Echo_Agile_Wide.jpg>

Johnny Lunchbucket Sep 23 2019 02:51 PM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

I was told this was very good and intend to see it

Edgy MD Sep 23 2019 04:47 PM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

I would like to talk to the person who told you that. ----------------------------------- MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW ----------------------------------- . . . . . . . . . . . . . A few things shine through: (1) This is a vanity project for Jakob Dylan, in that he wants to record songs from this era, so the movie promotes that collection of music. Rather than a broad sample of who and what Laurel Canyon was about, we only feature the songs and artists he's covering. I kind of like Jakob's sound but that's what the deal is. (2) Jakob Dylan is friends with a lot of singers who — and I don't want to be ungenerous here — did not impress me as singers. Young Fiona Apple sure was a powerhouse, but these days she has a jarring tremolo that makes your eyebrows go up. Regina Spektor still has her power but punts on melody and hunches and sways in distractingly inappropriate stage-theatricality. Jade Castrinos seemed to think it was peachy keen to wear sixties looks and belt out Cass Elliott parts, but her pitch didn't match her enthusiasm. Cat Power growls like Bonnie Raitt when she was in the bag. Maybe all these folks make great records (Beck certainly has), but they (Beck included) don't have a surfeit of skills coming through live in person. But Beck's singing felt honest, at least. Norah Jones isn't a favorite of mine, but she's a pro and it came through. When I'm listing Jakob Dylan (and his very narrow range) as one of the better singers here, that's saying something. And him trying to sing "In My Room"? Bad idea. (3) They really avoid the dark side of Laurel Canyon. Where are The Doors? Where is Phil Spector? Where is Charles Fucking Manson? How do you tell a story that's not only about Laurel Canyon in the mid-to-late sixties, but largely focus on The Beach Boys and The Mamas & The Papas, but leave out Manson? No mention of Roman Polanski or Sharon Tate, either. (4) Michelle Phillips is a bad person. Her Lori Partridge hair and cute overbite may have looked adorable, but she was a Machiavellian backstabber, and considering she has to be one of the four or five least qualified people in The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, she gets a lot of screen time here to justify her bullshit. That would be alright, if they immediately cut from her to John Sebastian or somebody saying, "Michelle Phillips is a really bad person," but they didn't. (5) Steven Stills seems like he's recovering from a stroke, but I get the idea that he's simply drunk. And not like having-a good-time drunk. More like I'm-so-saturated-on-a-daily-basis-it-only-takes-a-few-sips-to-get-me-drunk drunk. That's just sad but impossible to ignore. If I paid money to see him in this condition, I'd be embarrassed. Stills is (or at least was, the last time I heard him) a GREAT guitarist, but he fumbles around on his acoustic in the interview in his house like he's not sure what he wants to do with it, and his fingers are turning into thumbs. Later, he's invited into the studio to lay down an electric solo, and while he seems more lucid and solid in his playing, he's playing his solo UNDERNEATH Eric Clapton's, and as if that wasn't perfectly clear, the sound board behind him explicitly shows Clapton's level at around an 8 while Stills is at a two. And I kid you not here, when he's finished, you can explicitly see Jakob take the guitar back and point to him where the door is. Good God. (6) Impossibly, Joni Mitchell's name is not mentioned once. Judy Collins and Jakob's dad only come up once each in passing. But Joni was the queen of Laurel Canyon, and if you go looking for photos of these musicians in that era, they're all at Joni's house. They seem to claim they were limiting their scope to 1965-1967, and Joni arrives in 1968, but cutting from the story Joni, Manson, the wave of cocaine that would snow down on the valley, and for that matter, Crosby introducing heroin to half of LA, really bowdlerizes things. They don't really want to talk about the seventies Canyon generation, but they allow Tom Petty and Jackson Browne to speak liberally about the era that preceded them. (7) They attempt to take this (typically) boring French Nu Wave film as their inspiration, and as a metaphor for the era, it just points out how sickly doomed the whole idealistic thing is. (8) Crosby, Stills, and Nash are interviewed at length, but separately. Crosby is the most interesting, because he admits he was an asshole, but he seems to think he was in the right when The Byrds didn't want to record his song about a menage-a-trois. Neil only appears at the very end, as a ghostly figure filmed in the recording studio, through the glass from the control room. His guitar and his sound are totally him, but it's weird how apart from laying down this one track he distanced himself from the project. It's like at the end, somebody realized they were unable to get any footage of Neil so they shot him through a keyhole and showed it during the closing credits. (9) This is some of the last interview footage of Petty you'll find, and he says some illuminating stuff, but he also says some stupid stuff. There's a sub-theme running through it that would have made for a better angle for the whole story, and that's the Rickenbacker 12-string. John Lennon had a 3/4-size Rickenbacker, and when the Beats were in California, a representative of the company tried to give John their brand new second-ever-made 12-string. But John, Paul and Ringo had gone out that night while George stayed in the hotel sick, so George got the guitar, and the sound of him playing it just woke up Roger McGuinn and John Sebastian — like it made the crossover of folk and rock possible. It's impossible to listen to TP & the Heartbreakers do "The Waiting," for instance, now and not think of it as as song born out of 1966 in Laurel Canyon. That would have been a better movie. Instead we get a combo of Jakob ego-stroking a bunch of old hippies, and rounding up his friends to put on a show that seems to want to celebrate the great records by demonstrating how bad some of these songs might otherwise sound. It gives me no pleasure to write that, and the backing band and sound were mostly solid or better. I also might have wanted to hear from the kids who grew up in all this madness: Sonny & Cher's kids and the Wilson Phillips girls. They might have a more measured sense of what the culture of this crowd cost everybody. Jesus, let's hear about the wreckage from MacKenzie.

Vic Sage Sep 25 2019 03:24 PM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

i didn't read your review above, because i just got it from Netflix. My wife was anxious to see it, so we will and then i'll read your analysis.

Frayed Knot Sep 25 2019 03:56 PM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

Edgy MD wrote: [David] Crosby is the most interesting, because he admits he was an asshole ... There's a separate documentary just on Crosby and apparently he doesn't come off any better in that one. I've known for a while that he and Graham Nash were no longer on speaking terms but apparently Nash was one of the last to jump on that wagon. Now, not only is everyone who once talked to Crosby no longer talking to him but it sounds as if there are people who have never met David Crosby who have gone ahead and preemptively announced that they're no longer on speaking terms with him either. I once heard DC quoted as saying he was 'put on this earth to sing harmonies'. That very well may be accurate and I don't mean to downplay his contributions to several important groups of collaborating musicians, but that doesn't automatically make you both Lennon & McCartney. One example I heard was that he's bitter about somehow being the only one of CSN(and sometimes Y) not to have had a Top-40 hit, as if that was all someone else's fault. Dude, maybe it was your songwriting.

Vic Sage Sep 30 2019 03:43 PM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

He's certain that the menage a trois song would've gone top 40! Damn you, McGuinn! Having just seen it, I can't disagree with anything Edgy says, but i think there is a bit too much damning of the project for what it isn't and what it didn't (and chose not to) do. I liked what i saw more than i didn't like what wasn't there, if that makes any sense. It's not a portrait of the Laurel Canyon cultural scene; it's a more narrowly focused look at the LA music scene of a certain period (65-67), framing it as the response to the Beatles and the birth of folk-rock, and the nature of the feedback loop that musicians were in then, impacted and impacting each other's music as they lived in each other's lives in the canyon. The later artists (Browne, Petty) are commenting in terms of the affect that the music would later have on them (as "echoes" of the canyon). There were some cinematic moves, and i found the piece interesting, even if not the more complete portrait it could have (and maybe should've) been.

Johnny Lunchbucket Oct 01 2019 08:21 AM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

I just finished a book on how intertwined the careers of the Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, CSN, the Byrds, the Doors, the Wrecking Crew, Mama & Papas etc became in that area, all built around a culmination in the Manson Family murders. EVERYDODY HAD AN OCEAN (William McKeen) is a little unweildy at times but pretty comprehensive and insider-y perspective on the connections of the people in those bands. I'd read about a million BBs bios before so knew that stuff pretty intimately but learned more about the Dennis Wilson & Charlie relationship and a lot I didn;t know about Cass Elliott and the rest of em.

Edgy MD Oct 01 2019 11:18 AM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

Vic Sage wrote: He's certain that the menage a trois song would've gone top 40! Damn you, McGuinn! "Triad" did eventually get it's shot, performed by Jefferson Airplane on Crown of Creation in 1968, and by Crosby Stills, Nash & Young on the live album, 4-Way Street, in 1971. Vic Sage wrote: Having just seen it, I can't disagree with anything Edgy says, but i think there is a bit too much damning of the project for what it isn't and what it didn't (and chose not to) do. I liked what i saw more than i didn't like what wasn't there, if that makes any sense. That's true and my comments are largely informed by Ms. Edgy being disappointed by the film early. That said, do you not agree that the live performances of the latter-day artists added little to the film, or the understanding of the music and artists? The best track is a studio recording of Dylan remaking Stills' "Questions." Without the signature CSN(Y) harmonies, and Dylan tracing the lowest vocal line, which I never really thought of as the melody, the underlying composition really shines through. The rest, though ... let's just say that I'm not in a rush to buy any Cat Power recordings.

Vic Sage Oct 02 2019 01:34 PM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

as to the performances, some were appealing, some less so, but they did get me to reconsider the music, which i guess was the point. I liked some of the new arrangements and interpretations, but your mileage may vary.

Edgy MD Jun 01 2020 08:53 AM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

If you can some up my disappointment with this project as: [list] [*]No coverage of the dark side of Laurel Canyon, [*]Absolutely no Joni Mitchell, [*]Arbitrary cutoff date, [*]Too pinned to Jakob Dylan's vanity project, [/list] then, well, there's a new documentary by Alison Ellwood (who made the terrific History of the Eagles) that reportedly seems to acknowledge and attempt to correct all those shortcomings. Exciting. It's like some producer said, "Edgy was disappointed, so let's see if we can do better here."

Frayed Knot Jun 01 2020 01:18 PM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

I saw an ad for LAUREL CANYON just a day or two ago and I couldn't figure out if it was for THIS movie or a different one. Now I know it's a new and different one. Now the only problem is not only have I not seen 'ECHO' but I also don't get the EPIX channel on which this new one appears so don't look for any compare and contrast analysis from me anytime soon.

bmfc1 Jun 10 2020 08:46 PM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

The EPIX documentary was far superior to "Echo". At 3 hours, it went into many more acts, such as Love, and much more detail, including the Manson Murders and the 2d Generation, including The Eagles. It was also better as it didn't have Jakob Dylan.

Edgy MD Jun 11 2020 05:44 AM Re: Echo in the Canyon (2019)

I agree it was better, and I need to put up a separate thread. Still kind of disappointed though.