Echo in the Canyon - A Movie about Music and Listening

When I was about 15, I went to see the movie Woodstock.  One of the things that stuck with me was the statement by David Crosby asking the crowd to go easy on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young because this was only the second time they had played together.  I remember thinking, “What a stage to start your career on.”  Well, not so much.  These guys had been singing and playing together for years – they just hadn’t been a band in that particular configuration…

Echo in the Canyon is a documentary put together by Bob Dylan’s son, Jakob Dylan, to commemorate a period of time – roughly 1965 to 1967 – when a group of musicians, living in and around Laurel Canyon on the west of LA, redefined pop music by marrying folk with rock and roll and creating something that appealed to the masses, but was much more sophisticated than bubble gum pop.  As my reaction to David Crosby betrays, despite this being music that was formative for me in various ways, I was not tuned into this scene when it was happening (I was between five and seven years old during this time) nor did I have much access to knowledge of the players in Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, or the Beach Boys. 

This is film is not, at least in Dylan’s mind, aimed at me and educating me – though I am likely to be the tail end of the audience that is most interested in it and, based on the highly unscientific sample of the others in the audience who were humming along with most every tune at the screening on Friday night, this is the once hip and now hip replacement age group that turns out for it.  But his intent is to show musicians of his generation (he was born in 1969) and those younger than him, what happened in Laurel Canyon so that it can inform their artistic growth.

This is a project with an interesting intent then – to (to quote Crosby Stills and Nash) “Teach your children well” and to pass the creative torch.  And the story that is told is, I think, inherently interesting.  Essential to the story is the Beatles, coming to America with folk informed tunes – the chord changes they were playing were known to the folk artists in the various groups – and those individuals recognized the folk roots with a rock and roll beat and realized they, too, could become pop stars instead of being counterculture people eking out a living in smoky bars (O.K., they never said anything like that, but the implication was there – what they said was that they were excited about the possibilities of stretching their art form).   They began writing and performing folk informed rock and popular music (The Mamas and the Papas song that begins “All the leaves are brown” and is called California dreaming epitomizes this for me), and they lived near enough to each other in Laurel Canyon that they could drop in on each other unannounced and simply play together.  And when they did this, they also wrote songs together.

If the Beatles were the creative inspiration, it was Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, that was the artistic genius at the center of this group.  Perhaps the most interesting bit of lore that is at the heart of this movie is a tale that is quite well known in musical circles.  Brian Wilson, who would go mad at some point, and who had as successful an interview in this film as perhaps he has had in decades, wrote the album “Pet Sounds” while the rest of the Beach Boys were on tour.  He wasn’t touring with them because it was distracting.  When Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas dropped into his home, she asked his wife what was going on with the house – all of the furniture was gone from the living room and in its place was six inches of sand on the floor with a grand piano, a beach ball and a bench.  Brian Wilson’s wife replied, “I don’t know, but he’s making some incredible music.”  That incredible music was Pet Sounds which was the first rock and roll concept album – an album of music that used instruments and sounds that couldn’t be recreated in the concert hall – so it was an album not made to support touring and other typical band activities.

The Beatles, who were no longer planning to tour because they couldn’t hear themselves play above the screaming of their fans, were so enamored of Pet Sounds that they produced their own concept album – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – the album Rolling Stone Magazine rates as the number one Rock and Roll Album of all time, with Pet Sounds rated number two.  Now, I don’t know, but I think that the these two albums are very good, but my sense is that they may be given pride of place because they heralded to the world that Rock and Roll was not just for teeny boppers, but that it was art – and created a whole new way for the genre to think of itself.  It was, of course, also one of those echoes that this film is trying to capture and to create in the generations that will follow.  The Beatles inspired the Laurel Canyon musicians and one of them, Brian Wilson, inspired the Beatles in return – and the history of music changed.

The culture that supported the creative exploits of the musicians was a boundary crossing and mixing culture.  Not only were they mixing folk with rock, which of course had been appropriated from the blues, but they were mixing with each other.  Michelle Phillips describes her sexual relationship with fellow band member Denny Doherty that caused her husband John, also a band member, to write the song “Go where you want to go” encouraging her to engage with whomever she wanted wherever she wanted with, as she pointed out, the snide but unstated “bitch” at the end of it.  Watching the group perform that song was poignant, but watching a cover being done by Jakob Dylan as John and Jade joyfully singing the part of Michelle as she is able, guilt free, to revel in the freedom that is being afforded her was absolutely delightful.  In other words, as much as free love was part of the culture, that did not mean that the sexual boundary crossings did not come without cost - but also carried with them a creative enthusiasm.

Similarly, the musical boundary crossings involved “taking what didn’t belong”.  Who knew that George Harrison’s “If I needed someone” is modeled after what I assume is an old folk song that he heard Pete Singer singing, “The bells of Rhymney”.  Or that Eric Clapton would cop to outright stealing (if not being conscious that he was doing it at the time) “Let it rain” from Buffalo Springfield’s “Questions”.  I am reminded at this point of a book that I have not written about but probably should someday called “Steal like an artist” by Austin Kleon.  It’s hard to write a post about it because it is so brief – but in its pithiness it proposes that we are less likely to create something out of nothing than to discover novel ways of rearranging things that already exist – and that we should, as Eric Clapton did, just cop to that.

  

Creative communities engage in all kinds of boundary crossings – as did the early psychoanalytic communities, as portrayed in the film A dangerous method – another thing I should post on.  I have posted on the importance of boundaries, especially sexual boundaries in current psychoanalytic practice, but I think this movie raises the question of the relationship between boundaries of all sorts, including sexual boundaries, and creativity.  Is there something about exploring who it is that we are in the eyes of others – is there something about relating to a variety of people in a variety of situations that evokes feelings that get portrayed in poignant and important ways?  Do we have to experience certain things in order to express them?  As I write this, I find myself saying how could this not be the case?  But I also hear another voice saying that we can imagine ourselves into the minds of others – we don’t have to experience the loss (for instance) of a child to know what that would feel like – and to write, or sing, about what that would be like.

The film also raises questions about the relationship between using drugs and creativity – but also madness.  I was struck by a story about Brian Wilson requesting speed to power a twenty four marathon of working on a single tune – one that he kept banging away at without stop apparently during the entirety of a trip that seemed to be based on a high dose.  What the relationship between his pre-existing predilection to madness, his use of drugs - including LSD, and his creativity was and how these are related to his going off the rails is purely speculative, though I think there is evidence that each of these aspects played some role.  One of the things that I liked about the interview with Wilson was his talking about the sound qualities of each of the recording studios in LA – he clearly viewed them as instruments in their own rights.  And I think it important to remember that the individuals who created these songs and this genre were incredible musicians in addition to being members of a unique and highly interconnected community.   

Competition was also clearly an important motivating factor in this group of musicians.  As George Harrison said in another documentary, when I saw that people like John and Paul could write songs, I thought, well why then can’t I?  There was clearly competition between the Brits and the members of this group, and also a great deal of competition within the group to achieve greater popularity and to produce better material than the last guy had done.

I would like to end with a comment on the film.  It exists because of an idea of a record company executive that this community and its products should be remembered.  But it also exists because of the interest of Jakob Dylan.  His presence as the interviewer of so many of the artists in this film is essential to it – and his presence – as the son of Bob Dylan and as a musician in his own right – is essential to the integrity of the film, but it is more the way that he is present – in a very un-ego motivated way – listening with curiosity and no agenda – that binds the film.  He becomes, in the film, a psychoanalytic exemplar – listening without determining – present and engaged but without his own agenda.  Wanting to know what it was that this place was – and wanting – as best he is able – to get a sense of that and, because he is doing that, we are able to get some sense of it, too.

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