The delight of “Echo in the Canyon” is in the delicious details its subjects impart. Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas remembers Brian Wilson’s living room, a piano planted on the sand-covered floor as he wrote the Beach Boys’ influential “Pet Sounds” album; Tom Petty notes that “Pet Sounds” was considered to be responsible for “Sgt. Pepper”; a white-maned David Crosby reveals why he was ejected from the Byrds; and the narrator, the singer-songwriter Jakob Dylan, coaxes Stephen Stills to tell an embarrassing story about sneaking out the back when the police broke up one of the Laurel Canyon house party/jam sessions where the performers tried out their music, inspired each other’s work and got high.

The musicians were drawn — and dazzled — by the array of recording studios in Los Angeles and built a neighborhood in the canyon. They agree the peak of this period of change occupied a precise slice of the mid-’60s, before the psychedelic era. The Byrds were central to the scene, but their frontman, Roger McGuinn, makes the transformation they accomplished sound deceptively simple. Between honeyed acoustic guitar riffs, he explains that he merely “souped up” some folk chords with a Beatles beat.