When the mountains and canyons started to tremble and shake

Spent my days with a woman unkind

Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine.

Made up my mind to make a new start.

Going to California with an aching in my heart,

Someone told me there's a girl out there,

With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.

Took my chances on a big jet plane

Never let them tell you that they're all the same.

The sea was red and the sky was grey,

Wondered how tomorrow could ever follow today.

The mountains and the canyons started to tremble and shake

As the children of the sun began to awake.

Led Zeppelin, Going To California

Has anyone ever asked you what period of history, if time travel was possible, you would want to visit? No, me neither. But if they did, my Tardis fantasy would be to return to the year of my birth, 1967. Not for that event, which would be just weird (“Paging Dr. Freud!”), but to a bucolic corner of California where a particular sub-culture of the free spirit flourished in the Summer Of Love. 

My interest was piqued when Barney Hoskyns, ertswhile rock scribe and founder of the Rock's Lost Pages website, brought out his wonderful (and lengthily titled) 2005 tome Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys In The LA. It not only captured a remarkable time, but also a remarkable place - the seismic valleys of the Hollywood Hills, and the incredible body of music that nestled within amid a haze of drugs, bed-hopping and hippyish idealism. Covering the denim-clad years that were the first nine of my own existence, Hoskyns charted the fortunes of, frankly, an incredible group of musicians living, mainly, in and around Laurel Canyon, a semi-rustic community barely a ten-minute detour from the gaudiness of Sunset Boulevard. 

With Mulholland Drive running through it, the canyon has always attracted Hollywood royalty, seeking escape from the bright lights of Tinseltown, but in the period in question it became the epicentre of artistic idealism, exemplified by the presence of Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Steven Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne (who shared a house with Glenn Frey, with the two of them writing early song for the Eagles, like Taking It Easy). Another figure in this internecine cauldron was Linda Ronstadt, who would run into the likes of Frey and Don Henley ‘down the hill’ at West Hollywood's Troubador, a legendary venue that played a huge part in the careers of Mitchell and Taylor (with whom she had a relationship, as did Crosby), the Eagles themselves and sometime member JD Souther, The Byrds, Elton John and Carole King. Another figure inextricably linked to this web was David Geffen, a prominent figure in Hoskyns’ book for his own colourful life, as well as the ambition that made him one of the most powerful figures in showbusiness.

Five years prior to Hoskyns’ book, Cameron Crowe stepped back into the same place and time with his semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, recalling his own experiences as a teenaged Rolling Stone writer, mixing with the likes of Poco, the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin and [again] the Eagles during their wildest period of LA hell-raising. This was clearly a time of arch decadence and louche behaviour, but it should never be forgotten that there was also some sweet, sweet music that came out of it. 

Which brings me to a new film (well, a new film in the UK), that celebrates the countrified rock (or folkified pop - take your pick) that poured out of LA’s canyons from the mid-60s onwards, becoming known, invariably, as ‘the California Sound’. Echo In The Canyon, directed by former music journalist and record executive Andrew Slater, captures the fertility of both the time and a locale that intoxified so many rock luminaries, many of whom came to stay and enjoy Laurel Canyon’s various pleasures.

The film features interviews with the late Tom Petty (in his last filmed interview), Brian Wilson, Eric Clapton and Graham Nash, all of whom fell under the canyon’s spell (a “legendary paradise,” - Petty, a “heavenly place,” - Clapton). Crucially, it examines the "avalanche" of music that poured down the mountainsides from the likes of Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas And The Papas and the various bands and artists they were associated with. "The music that came out of the Laurel Canyon scene was inspiring to my generation of songwriters," says Jakob Dylan - Bob’s son and both the film’s anchor and executive producer. "The best test of songwriting is that it transcends its moment in time," Dylan explains, "and there is no doubt that the songs we explore in this film are as powerful today as they were in 1965."

The documentary, which has finally appeared theatrically in the UK, two years after I first came across its US release, also includes interviews with Stills and Crosby, ex-Mama-and-Papa Michelle Phillips, The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and even Ringo Starr, who became enamoured by the canyon scene’s romanticism himself. Indeed, critics have claimed that the film spends too much time in the company of the Beatle and Beach Boy Wilson, under-representing many of the names and actual residents of the LA canyons that contributed to the richness of its musical and artistic output. But, in fairness, it only takes the canyon story up until the year in which I popped into the world. In the process, it also revisits the richness of canyon’s musical output, with new recordings of Pete Seeger’s The Bells of Rhymney by Beck, Norah Jones’ interpretation of The Association’s Never My Love, Stephen Stills and Eric Clapton covering Buffalo Springfield’s Questions, and a couple from Canyonite, Neil Young. 

Plenty of distinct geographies have been responsible for musical genres - from New York to Liverpool, Nashville to Manchester - but there was something about Laurel Canyon and the bungalows and hippyish spirit that fermented there which led to some of the most interesting fusion of folk, rock and pop the 1960s and 1970s produced. And Echo In The Canyon captures it all, in highly entertaining form.