![]() ![]() (There’s so much interesting chat from that latter guitarist, we could almost subtitle this “Echols in the Canyon.”) But the wisdom of that choice quickly becomes apparent. It’s a little frustrating, at first, to gradually figure out that we’re never going to see the 21st century faces of, among others, Browne, Crosby, Stills, Chris Hillman, Richie Furay, Robbie Krieger, Michelle Phillips or Love’s Johnny Echols. Looking at these two looking at contact sheets permits them to be unofficial narrators, although Ellwood doesn’t overdo that as a a gambit. Legendary photographer Henry Diltz is the first person we see in contemporary footage, and he’s almost the last, too, eventually joined by another shutterbug, Nurit Wilde. In dramatizing all this, Ellwood takes a bold leap by keeping almost all her interview subjects off-screen and limited to audio-only reminiscings, except for two. After a funny bit in which Steve Martin admits he wasn’t sexually aggressive enough in dating Linda Ronstadt (for whom he used to regularly open at the Troubadour), she talks about how she and the boyfriend she eventually settled in with, JD Souther, would “go through some horrible row, and he’d write a song about it and I’d sing it. At times, it feels like the whole scene was a precursor to Fleetwood Mac’s eventual romantic complications, writ even larger when it came to the Mamas and the Papas’ cross-entanglements, or half of CSNY being more in love with Mitchell than she was with them. But that Zappa and especially Cooper come up for mention is a good example of Ellwood not keeping her focus too narrow in search of a common theme.Ĭommingling was the order of the day, with an almost comical disorder to the roommate assignments - fatefully, as when Stephen Stills was nixed for a role in “The Monkees” because of his imperfect smile, so he sent his housemate Peter Tork instead, with mutually happy results for both the counterculture and moptop American TV. Most of the names are more expected ones: Love, the Doors, the Flying Burrito Brothers. One of the questions no one asked after seeing “Echo in the Canyon” was: “Where the hell is Alice Cooper?” But he’s in this, too, not in his later guise as a shock-rocker, but as a kid arriving fresh outta Phoenix in the late ‘60s as a protégé of (and next door neighbor to) the canyon’s log-cabin-dwelling freak outlier, Frank Zappa. “Laurel Canyon” is a nearly four-hour exercise in bliss, throwing us back to a fleeting time when musical warmth and formal excellence went hand in hand and made the whole world want to go “California Dreamin’.” With apologies to Joni Mitchell, this, not Woodstock, is the garden you’ll be left wanting to get back to. ![]() But let’s face it: this project exists as an excuse to indulge in highly warranted nostalgia for a golden age, enveloped in a slightly-above-the-smog-level golden haze. Long shadows are cast from a world beyond the canyon (Kent State, Altamont) and, in the horrifying case of the Manson murders, within it. ![]() It also allows for the advents of David Geffen, arena-rock and cocaine, any one of which the canyon’s casual vibe might not have survived.Įllwood, the director of “History of the Eagles,” a movie that was weirdly liked by Eagles fans, detractors and even the actual Eagles (and who also helmed Showtime’s terrific upcoming Go-Go’s documentary), does her best to occasionally darken the door of this bungalow heaven. That affords us milestones like the arrivals of Browne and Mitchell in the woodsy ‘hood as baby-faced wizard-cherubs, the Mitchell/Graham Nash live-in romance that produced the song “Our House,” country music supplanting folk as the dominant extra ingredient in the rock stew. Ellwood’s “Laurel Canyon” happily extends the timeline into the mid-‘70s. It was like seeing a promising pilot for a series that never got green-lit, leaving out not just Mitchell but Jackson Browne, the Eagles and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as Joni-come-latelies. The biggest problem with the previous doc - other than how it betrayed, rather than transcended, its origins as a glorified EPK for a Jakob Dylan duets project - was that it arbitrarily set a cutoff date for the end of the movie, with the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield breaking up in the late ‘60s, as if that really marked the end of an era. ![]()
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