'Echo' of 1960s Los Angeles - Page 2

The main draw of 'Echo in the Canyon' is twofold, both of which are easier to appreciate if you know and like the pop music made in L.A. from 1965 to 1967.

One is the candor of musicians like Michelle Phillips, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and even Eric Clapton in admitting mistakes and liberties they took in the heady atmosphere of the times. They clearly trust Dylan, who met some of them as a boy living with his parents in Malibu.

"That's kind of the fun part, really—you never know what they might say," he told the theater audience, referring to Stills confessing that Neil Young barred him from the studio when recording the Buffalo Springfield song 'Expecting to Fly.'

The partly full house at the Berkeley Q&A laughed aloud at moments when Crosby admits he was booted from the Byrds for being a body-part epithet, Clapton that he copped a hook from a Byrds song to use in one of his, Stills that he deserted his friends with a quick exit out the back during a '60s pot bust, and Phillips that she was "a busy girl" romantically between the two guys with her in the Mamas and the Papas.

A perhaps more substantial attraction of the film is the progression it draws in musical connections and influences, like Clapton's confession. It purports a direct lineage during the period from classical influences on the Rubber Soul album by the Beatles, to the Byrds electrifying folk tunes to the complex arrangements on Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, to Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club, and concluding with 'Expecting to Fly,' in which Young intimates his intent to leave Buffalo Springfield.

"That song—I think it represents the '60s for us," said Salter, a former record producer and executive who first met Dylan when the latter was a teen. The director concluded the Berkeley session stating, "We just wanted to make a film about the kindness and the sensitivity that these people had."

Story originally published in 2019. To view the film trailer 'Echo in the Canyon,' click here.