Laurel Canyon

With a majority of today's pop\rock music either created inside a game show, or lost in streaming obscurity Laural Canyon shines a light on what could be possible again. Obviously the record business is not the same, and the modality of sharing new music has radically changed. However, LC teaches us the music that changed us came from a group of people who were first and foremost community minded. The concept of a ' music scene' cannot be lost on the viewer. What that music offers the listener, the enthusiast is an energy. It seems to me it's difficult if not impossible for a lasting music scene filled with energy and life to exist inside one's and zero's alone. If you love music and want to share how it was created out of thin air (and how it could happen again), show this to your teenager. Before it fades away into the dust of 'old stuff'.

This three hour epix Documentary does a pretty solid job of covering the story of the famed Hollywood Hills enclave's music scene from the mid-60s to the mid-70s. The California Sound as it later became known as.

In this Doc's telling the beginnings of the Laurel Canyon scene flowed through The Byrds and The Buffalo Springfield into the super-group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The tribal leader seemed to be David Crosby, who not only was a member of all three bands, but, also helped nurture singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne (the sad irony being, as Crosby says in the Doc about him, REMEMBER MY NAME, is that none of the artists he ever played with will even speak to him now). As the scene grew, so did the number of musicians who drifted through including The Doors, Love and The Eagles.

Still photographers Henry Diltz and Nurit Wilde are here to share their vast vaults of pictures they snapped along with the stories that went with them. Director Alison Ellwood and her team also cobbled together a good array of film clips to illustrate, along with healthy doses of the actual music (licensing rights permitting, I assume). I'll leave it to those with a more encyclopedic knowledge to argue over which artists got enough/not enough coverage here or over which bands and singers were overlooked. My only quibble is that Ellwood occasionally lets her interviewees dictate where her focus goes. It's not important to archive each and every band member's comings and goings, and others who never even lived in the Canyon seem to have just attended a party or two. It's all interesting stuff, but, unless you are doing a Ken Burns style 15 hour series, the focus should have stayed on the scene proper. Still, overall, LAUREL CANYON is quite good (and a heck of an improvement over last year's cliquish ECHO IN THE CANYON).

This is a very compelling look at a place and time that was remarkably influential. It has the nostalgia of being the soundtrack that I grew up with, listening on the OTA radio. But I never knew about the fascinating collection of people all living in this one small area because celebrity culture at the time wasn't all on Insta all day long.

It really seems like it must have been a special Brigadoonish place, that can't be replicated and must emerge on its own, rarely. And the right people need to find it.

That said, it's almost an entirely white male story, and certainly wasn't the only thing going on in the world. But it was an interesting capture of the lightning in a bottle of the late 60s with great photos, sounds, and film. Very worthwhile.

In the years this documentary covers, I went from 15 to 25. I listened to these songs on the radio, bought the albums, and went to the concerts. It was a time of explosive creativity in pop music of all kinds, from England to Motown to Nashville to San Francisco and L. A., and Laurel Canyon was the epicenter of everything happening in L. A. As the documentary shows, the singer/songwriters and bands all found their way to a close knit community, where they fed each other's creative juices, and made a lot of memorable music. Clearly it was quite a project, as there are interviews from many years past with artists long dead. It was great to see one of my favorite bands, Love, get a fair amount of attention, but I don't see how the band Spirit got no mention at all. They did some of the most creative music of the time, and their guitarist, Randy California, invented various devices that are now incorporated into every electric guitar made. The band's chief composer, Jay Ferguson, is still doing tv and movie scores today. Highly recommended, especially for those of you unaware of what went on in that place at that time.

They cover everything from Love, Byrd's, Doors, Nash, Stills and an amazing Crosby and of course Joni and Neil. Just wonderful to see this hive of creativity minutes from the city. We get to be flies on the wall during an epic period of popular music history. Can't wait for episode 2