All language subtitles for BBC.Hotel.California.LA.from.the.Byrds.to.the.Eagles.2007.DVBC.XviD.MP3.MVGroup.org.en

This programme contains
some strong language.

The impetus to move West and
blast all that open and be free,

being in that gorgeous state
of California.

You smoked a big one, took the
shrink-wrap off, put the record
on the record player

and you were gone.

There were things that we all
felt were right

and the truth is, I don't think we
were wrong about hardly any of them.

I had to watch the fights, the egos,
the drugs, the alcohol,

the...the...paranoia that came along
with all of that.

And it scared me.

10 million girls
and 2,000 bumps down the line,

you don't know who you are any more.

What's happening in the process,
which I served gladly,

is the corporatisation of rock.

We just...

took it to the bank.

# On a dark desert highway

# Cool wind in my hair... #

In 1965, Manhattan and London
monopolised the music business.

A decade later, for musicians
and moguls alike,

there was only one place to be,

and it wasn't rain-soaked England
or uptight New York.

This is the story of how a small
community of singer-songwriters,

exiled in a rustic paradise
at the heart of the metropolis,

transformed Los Angeles into
the music capital of the world.

#..This could be heaven
or this could be hell... #

It's a tale of artistic brilliance
and decadent decline,

of how a bunch of hippies gave rise
to the biggest-selling record
of all time,

of the birth of corporate rock music
and the death of a dream.

#..Welcome to the Hotel California

# What a nice surprise
What a nice surprise

# Bring your alibis... #

At 3am on 18th August 1969...

..a new group from Los Angeles
took the stage at the Woodstock
music festival.

Thank you.

They faced an audience
of several hundred thousand

and a cross-section
of their musical heroes.

This is the second time we've ever
played in front of people, man.
We're scared shitless.

There's that remark by Stephen,
"This is our second gig and
we're scared shitless."

I mean, he was right.

We'd played a couple of nights
before in Chicago

and that was our second gig.

Everybody that we really thought
was good was there.

Hendrix, Airplane, Grateful Dead,
the Band.

The Band.

Did I mention...the Band?

Uh...all standing around
right behind us.

"OK, the record was OK.
Come on, show us."

We knew who we were and what
we could do, but nobody else did.

# It's getting to the point

# Where I've no pride any more

# I'm sorry

# Sometimes it hurts

# So badly I must cry out loud

# I'm lonely... #

Woodstock marked the collective
climax of the hippy dream

and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young,

along with their friend Joni
Mitchell and manager David Geffen,

were the alternative generation's
hip new disciples.

# By the time we got to Woodstock

# We were half a million strong
and... #

We arrive at LaGuardia airport
and the New York Times says,
"400,000 people sitting in mud,"

and I said, "Forget it,
I'm not going."

#..We are stardust... #

Joni and I stayed in New York
at my apartment, where she wrote
the song Woodstock.

#..And we got to get ourselves

# Back to the garden... #

David Crosby, Stephen Stills,

Graham Nash, Neil Young,

David Geffen, Joni Mitchell.

Six rising stars
of the counterculture

who came together in a city
where ambition and idealism
went hand in hand

and helped put Los Angeles
on the musical map.

That man on the end is Jim McGuinn.

The one playing bass is
Chris Hillman.

The one playing the drums is
Michael Clarke.

And I'm David Crosby and, when we are
together, uh, they call us the Byrds.

MUSIC: "Mr Tambourine Man"
by the Byrds

You'd be driving down Sunset Strip
in your car

and you'd hear the beginning notes
of that and think, "Wow!"

It'd just be such a rush.

The quintessential folk-rock music.

# Hey, Mr Tambourine Man

# Play a song for me

# I'm not sleepy and there ain't
no place I'm going to... #

In May 1965, the Byrds,
a Los Angeles beat group,

released Mr Tambourine Man,

a song written by
the definitive hero of '60s folk.

#..I'll come following you... #

The convincing case, the QED
for the singer-songwriter...

..was Bob Dylan.

Would you say that the words were
more important than the music?

Uh...

the words are just as important
as the music.

There would be no music
without the words.

I got turned on to the Byrds
because...I was a Dylan fan.

And the music was important
all of a sudden.

Music was saying something,
something that might move you, might
change you, might change the world,

might...push buttons.

And there was a sense that something
very important was going on.

The Byrds transformed Dylan's
acoustic folk ballad

into a number-one pop single,

directly inspired by another
revolutionary team of songwriters.

George Harrison, John Lennon,
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

We just were in awe of them.

They were SO good.

They'd put out a song like Paperback
Writer and I'd wanna just give up

cos I could never do that,
I could never get close.

Probably the thing that John and I
will do will be write songs,

as we have been doing
as a sideline now.

We'll probably develop that more.

You could be an artist who did songs
that were written for you

but you really wanted to be the kind
of artist that the Beatles were

because they wrote all their stuff
and you could - ha-ha! -

you could really express yourself
if you could do it.

Everyone was so thrilled,

and nobody was thrilled about
folk music at all.

It was as if it didn't exist,
and pretty soon it didn't.

For a generation schooled in the
folk tradition of the East Coast,

the Byrds' artistically credible
but commercially successful pop

opened up a whole new world
in which the singer-songwriter
reigned supreme.

Musical life in Los Angeles would
never be the same again

and a small stretch of Hollywood
became the only place to be.

# So you want to be
a rock'n'roll star

# Then listen now to what I say

# Just get an electric guitar

# And take some time and learn
how to play... #

The Sunset Strip is just this
bizarre anomaly,

physically part of the city
but politically unincorporated,

and from the '30s and '50s,
essentially governed by the Mob.

By the early '60s, the Strip was
in decline

and so what happened is that
the folk-rock scene inherited

what was the ruins of the glamorous
Strip of the 1930s and '40s.

The place where the musicians and
songwriters felt they could be most
in touch with

the kids who represented the shape
of things to come.

All these kids would come,
and they'd be underage kids,

wearing bell-bottoms and beads
and flowers and all that stuff.

There was this flowering of feeling
and reverence for life,

like a carnival midway.

And so the music scene was happening
right in the middle of all of that.

There was a magical quality to it.

We suddenly found ourselves
in the centre of a vortex.

Somehow, music became

a medium for an entire generation.

You know, they're shooting this
for television.

I'm sure that they'll edit this out.

I want to say it anyway,
even though they WILL edit it out.

When President Kennedy was killed,
he was not killed by one man.

He was shot from a number
of different directions
by different guns.

The story has been suppressed.
Witnesses have been killed.

And this is your country,
ladies and gentlemen.

Nobody articulated the values
of the Sunset Strip's
burgeoning counterculture

with as much swagger
as the Byrds' David Crosby.

David was the mouthpiece
for our generation.

In Rolling Stone, he was the one who
had the mouth - he was speaking out

and saying stuff,
politically speaking.

I certainly wasn't anybody's guru,
man. I'm not smart enough.

Er...and I...

..I was certainly outrageous.

I probably helped tilt it
towards outrageousness.

So outrageous and so outspoken

that it was no surprise
when David Crosby was kicked out
of the Byrds in 1967

and began to look for a new band.

I like eclectic music, you know.

I like things that have roots.

# New Jersey turnpike
in the wee, wee hours

# I was rolling slowly
cos of drizzling showers

# Here come a flat-top
He come movin' up with me

# Waving goodbye
to some little old souped-up... #

When my group was playing in
New York, we played at a jazz club
and we sang four-part harmony.

And we discovered him down the block
playing in a little coffee house.

#..Bye-bye, New Jersey
I'd become airborne... #

Wow! This young guy with the guitar
is really neat.

#..And you can't catch me... #
My group moved to LA

and, soon after,
Stephen moved to LA.

He'd stand at the edge of the stage
and watch us singing
and he loved the harmonies.

#..You can't catch me
No, baby

# You can't catch me

# Cos if you get too close, you know
I'm gone like a cool breeze. #

In 1965, Stephen Stills,
a folk-singer from Texas,

joined the musical exodus from
Greenwich Village to Sunset Strip.

The following year,
another precocious songwriter
from Canada arrived,

chasing sunshine and stardom in LA.

Everybody having a good time,
or what?

# I think I'll pack it in
and buy a pickup

# Take it down to LA

# Find a place to call my own
and try to fix up

# Start a brand-new day... #

I was sitting on the trunk of my car
and he saw me and he pulled in

and, er...

"How are you, man?"
And he dug out his guitar

and sang me four or five of the best
songs I'd ever heard in my life.

#..See the lonely boy

# Out on the weekend

# Trying to make it pay... #

If he'd been a girl,
I would have kissed him!

His power as a songwriter
is undeniable.

#..Can't begin to say... #

In April 1966, Neil Young
and Stephen Stills

came head to head in a traffic jam
on Sunset Strip.

Well, we, er...came to Los Angeles
in an old hearse to, er...start...

to try and make the stars -
you know, we're gonna be stars.

So, er...we were just about to leave

and I saw him in a van
going the other way on Sunset

and he stopped and we stopped and
we all stopped and then we started.

Stephen Stills had found the band
that he'd always wanted.

# I don't tell no tales
about no hot, dusty roads... #

They were widening the street on
Franklin - a street in Hollywood.
I went outside

and they were all arguing
about what to call the group.

And on a bulldozer, I saw the words
"Buffalo Springfield".

Buffalo Springfield represented a
hip, new wave of musical emigres -

more a collective of mutually
ambitious individuals

than the uniform pop groups
that preceded them.

Er...my name is Neil Young... Neil.
How do you do?..lead guitar player.
How do you do? This is Richie Furay.

Big Dewey Martin - Buffalo Dew.
Hello, Dewey.

Bruce Palmer from Toronto,
Canada. OK.

Steve Stills from New Orleans.

#..I don't like being alone. #

Buffalo Springfield
brought a new musical momentum
to the Sunset Strip.

And when their audience provoked the
city's reactionary establishment,

their response was a pop protest
that, like LA,

was both cool and commercial.

Los Angeles was the scene of one
of great culture wars in US history.

They want everybody to do the same
thing and live their own life.

They want you to grow up, get an
education, raise children and die.

From the coming of Hollywood,
with its sinful lifestyles,

into a city into which a million
pious, Protestant mid-Westerners
had moved during the 1920s...

Because you don't have a job
because you don't have a direction,

you're not a part of
the super-society called "America".

And in a sense, the battle
of the Sunset Strip in the late '60s

was the last battle
in this 40-or-50-year-long clash

between Hollywood Babylon on one
hand and the kind of main-street
puritanism on the other.

Why do they think they can put down
on our music?

They say it's bad. They say it's
noise - "Turn down the noise."

But do they ever listen
to the words?

# Somethin' happening here

# What it is ain't exactly clear

# There's a man with a gun over there

# Tellin' me I've got to beware... #

In the daytime, Sunset Strip had
all these posh clothing stores.

Those people didn't like the kids
hanging out at night.

And so, pretty soon,
the police would come down.

They'd park a big bus in the middle
of the Strip and take everyone that
was underage on the bus to jail.

Pulling these beautiful young girls
and throwing them on the bus.

What is that about? You know.
Everybody... "That's crazy!

"It's the man. It's the pigs.

"It's the other side.
It's the same people
that are trying to send us to war.

"It's the older generation that
doesn't know what life is about."

#..Battle lines being drawn... #

They were worried
about the counterculture.

#..If everybody's wrong... #

Godless communism.

#..Young people speaking
their minds... #

Corruption of youth.

#..So much resistance... #
Drugs.

# I think it's time we stop
Hey! What's that sound...? #

He's communicating with his peers
and the cop says, "You can't do it.
Get off the street!"

#..Paranoia strikes deep

# Into your life... #

The Sunset Strip riots provided
the perfect showcase

for Buffalo Springfield's
socially conscious folk rock -

a distinctive sound

that was sending shockwaves through
LA's new musical establishment.

# Stop! Hey, what's that sound?

# Everybody look
what's going down... #

I saw dollar signs. I thought,
"These guys will do something great!"

#..Stop! What's that sound...? #

There was sort of
a whole marketplace.

These guys were doing something
purely unique and wonderful

that I really loved.

That was it.
It was like the moment of truth!

Whether or not any one group
could hold that much talent...

Don't forget, in Buffalo Springfield,
on top of Neil and Stephen you had
Richie Furay and Jim Messina

and, er...

It was...

It was explosive!

Despite producing three albums
and a hit single,

a combination of incompatible egos
and bad management

made Buffalo Springfield's demise
inevitable.

And by 1968,

Stephen Stills and Neil Young
were once again solo artists.

If you're political, I guess
it means a political revolution

and, to some people,
it's a spiritual revolution.

I like to believe that maybe people
are getting more together.

# I've looked at clouds
from both sides now... #

When Judy Collins sang, "I've looked
at life from both sides now..."

#..It's clouds' illusions
I recall... #

"Clouds' illusions".

We'd never used words like that,
and so we discover a new songwriter

named Joni Mitchell.

# Rows and flows of angel hair... #

#..And ice-cream castles in the air

# And feathered canyons everywhere

# I've looked at clouds that way... #

By 1967,

Joni Mitchell, a Canadian
folk singer based in New York,

had already found success
as a writer.

But a chance meeting
with David Crosby, following his
unceremonious exit from the Byrds,

would draw her west to LA.

#..Oh, I've looked at clouds
from both sides now... #

Walked in to a coffee house
in Florida.

She was singing.

My heart nearly stopped.

#..I really don't know life... #

I'd never heard anybody play
like her, anybody sing like her.

I most especially had never heard
anybody write like her,
and I still haven't.

For about a year after that, we...

..stayed together. It was good.

David Crosby had been thrown out
of the Byrds

and hadn't found Crosby,
Stills And Nash yet,

so he was bumming around town
in a VW bus with a Porsche engine.

And one night, David says, "Come on
up to the house and we'll get high."

He always had the best dope.

It was like being invited for a
wine tasting at Baron Rothschild's.

About three or four in the morning,
we're pretty wasted and David said,

"Oh, there's someone
I want you to hear..."

..and comes back downstairs

with Joni Mitchell -
live, with a big guitar.

# Light up

# Light up

# Light up your lazy blue eyes

# Moon's up, night's up

# Taking the town by surprise... #

She played songs
that hadn't even been recorded yet.

Nobody had heard that music.
Nobody had heard that voice.

For us, it was like a hallucination.

But by the time Crosby had finished
producing her first album,

everybody in LA knew
about Joni Mitchell.

I did not do a very good job
of producing her record.

But I did do one wonderful thing,
which was keep everybody else
off it.

THAT'S a good thing.

We have the power.
We have the tolerance.

We can go in front of a TV camera,
we can go on the air

and we can say with definition that
Hitler was wrong, Rockwell is wrong,

people who hate Negroes are wrong.

We can get up there
and shout it to the world, Pete!

# I thought I was dreaming
But I was wrong, yeah, yeah, yeah

# Oh, but I'm gonna keep on schemin'

# Till I can make you

# Make you my own... #

I spent years with the Hollies
perfecting the pop song.

#..Yeah, yeah, yeah... #

Frivolous is not the right word,

but certainly a little shallower than
the stuff I was feeling personally.

#..Oh, oh

# Just one look... #

So, at one point, the Hollies
were not wanting to do my stuff -

I'm talking about Marrakesh Express,
Teach Your Children,

Lady Of The Island, the first Sleep
Song - and it kinda made me feel bad,

because I thought
they were decent songs.

At the beginning of 1968,

Graham Nash was a highly successful
but thoroughly discontent
Mancunian pop star.

By the end of the year,

he'd joined Joni Mitchell,
David Crosby and Stephen Stills
on the musical trail to LA.

# Don't you know we're riding
on the Marrakesh Express...? #

Stephen is at loose ends
after Buffalo Springfield.

David has been thrown out
of the Byrds.

He and Stephen tried
to cut some songs.

Graham, as it turns out,
meets up with Joni

while he's on tour with the Hollies.

#..I smell the garden
in your hair... #

Joni and I spent the night together
in Ottawa

and I fell completely in love.

Listening to his high harmonies
on the Hollies records,
David and Stephen

have conspired to kidnap him.

#..Let me hear you now... #
"That's just the thing we need!"

#..On the Marrakesh Express... #
David shows up at a Hollies show
in England.

Crosby came, with his cape
and his cane and his attitude.

"Hmm. Having a hard time with all
these drinking guys who don't wanna
cut Marrakesh Express."

He had the best drugs.
He had the best grass.

He had the prettiest women,
who were always naked.

#..All aboard the train... #

Crosby said,

"They're crazy. We'll record it.
Come on over."

#..Come aboard... #

If Nash had any doubts, they were
banished after a musical gathering
in the Hollywood Hills.

My memory is
that we were in Joni's living room

and David said, "Hey, Stephen,
play that song."

And it was, um...
You Don't Have To Cry.

#..Cry, my baby

# You don't have to cry... #

And he said, "Sing it again.
That's fabulous!"

#..You don't have to cry... #

"OK, one more time.
Just sing it one more time."

#..You don't have to cry... #

The third time, I put my harmony
in there and my world changed.

#..In the morning... #

Stephen and I both had the same
thought, which rarely happens.

We both thought, "Oh! We know
what we're gonna be doing."

I heard that sound and that's what
I wanted. I wanted that sound.

And I left everything. I left
the Hollies, I left my band, I left
my family and I went to America.

#..Cry, my baby

# You don't have to cry... #

Graham Nash was the latest addition
to a communal Who's Who of LA music

that had made its home in
the most tranquil of city settings.

Los Angeles is unusual in that it has
a mountain range running through it.

There are several canyons that slice
through it in a more or less north
to southerly trace.

Laurel Canyon was settled
at the turn of the 20th century -

in the early 1900s -
by land speculators.

It was a place where, mostly, people
would come to hunt on the weekends -

a bucolic canyon in the middle
of this unsparing urban environment.

Since the 1920s, Los Angeles
had traded on the contrasting
allure of sun and surf by day

and Hollywood glitz by night.

But the spiritual Shangri-La
for a generation

collectively committed
to going back to the garden

was Laurel Canyon,
a rural paradise nestled
right behind Sunset Strip.

# I'll light the fire... #

I lived across the street

from Mark Volman of the Turtles.

On my street alone

was Mama Cass, Henry Diltz,
Joni Mitchell, Carl Wilson.

Jim Morrison right up the hill.

#..Staring at the fire... #

Tim Hardin was living there.

There was Frank Zappa and the
Mothers. There was Frazier Mohawk.

Stephen Stills, David Crosby.

I'd been living there
since the Byrds. Jackson Browne.

Micky Dolenz lived round the corner.

#..Such a cosy room... #

Tim Buckley

and Larry Beckett
lived somewhere else,

but they were at our house really,
really a lot.

Eric Burdon was living
in the canyon.

The Doors had a place in canyon.
John Mayall lived in the canyon.

Crazy Horse had a house
in the canyon.

The late, great record producer Paul
Rothschild had a house in the canyon,

with the late Fritz Richmond,
who was the jug player...

#..Our house

# Is a very, very, very fine house

# With two cats in the yard

# Life used to be so... #

Graham Nash found himself in the
midst of an extraordinary community
of songwriters.

But his alliance with David Crosby
and Stephen Stills was hampered

by a series of contracts binding
all three to their previous bands.

They needed professional help.

We knew that we needed a manager,

and we thought we had met one
that was intelligent, that we liked,
in Elliot Roberts.

He was already managing Joni,
and we liked him.

But we also knew that we were going
into the big leagues,

and, essentially, the big leagues
are a shark pool,

so we thought it would be good if
we had our own shark.

I think I liked music.
Whatever strikes me as being good
is something that I wanna record.

I don't think that every record
we make is a hit,

or that every artist that we record
is going to be a star,

but I think that all the music we
put out is very valid.

First of all, I had
no contracts with my clients.

They could all leave at any time.

As it happens,
none of them ever left.

It was my job to stand like a dam
against the river of shit that was
coming down on these people,

and that was a difficult job.

I don't think THEY had a sense of how
difficult it was,

but I certainly did
and, given how young we were,

how inexperienced we were,
I think we did a pretty great job.

David Geffen and Elliot Roberts
set up shop on Sunset Strip in 1969,

and set about challenging the
balance of power

in LA's increasingly outdated
music industry.

Most of the business was still
centred in New York,

so...we had an advantage
over the people

who were surfing
and smoking a lot of pot out here.

Our metabolisms ran
at a much higher speed.

New York's Tin Pan Alley
and Brill Building -

songwriting factories churning out
hits for artists considered
disposable by their record labels -

had dominated the industry
for decades.

Geffen and Roberts had
a different model,

in which the artist was the centre
of the musical world.

There were deals for artists
with the record companies
that were, you know, horrible,

and David and Elliot, in particular,
changed the dynamic.

Up until then, the artists were
getting screwed in a profound way.

After them, they only got screwed
in a less-than-profound way.

In 1969, David Geffen set about
negotiations

to release David Crosby, Graham Nash
and Stephen Stills from
their previous commitments,

and allow them to begin work on
their eagerly anticipated
first album.

He's a rapacious businessman.

Once you give him
something to work with,

he will, you know, tear it up,
and he did.

Elliot and I were baby doctors
helping them deliver their baby,

but it was about them.

They were genuinely exciting.

When you heard them sing,
you were blown away.

When Stephen wrote Suite -
Judy Blue Eyes, about Judy Collins,

who he was having a relationship with
at the time,

and you heard them sing that song,

it was awesome.

# Friday evening

# Sunday in the afternoon

# What have you got to lose? #

They had wonderful songs,

exquisitely roving melodies,

and the simplest of arrangements.

The whole thing was so pure.

And it sang.

And it worked.

And it touched your heart.

Just like their LA predecessors,

the Beach Boys
and the Mamas And Papas,

Crosby, Stills And Nash were
a harmony group,

but they encapsulated a new spirit -

the laid-back acoustic sound
of Laurel Canyon.

We wanted to engage the listener
and put the listener on a journey

where you smoked a big one,
took the shrink-wrap off,

put the record on the record player,
and you were gone!

# Guinevere had green eyes

# Like yours, milady, like yours... #

People say, "I don't know how many
hours I stared at that picture."

I had a musician from England say,
"We used to sit and look at
that Crosby, Stills And Nash cover

"and say, 'What is it like
to be there in California?'

"and just stared at that thing
while the music played."

#..Peacocks wandered aimlessly
underneath... #

The '60s counterculture
had been dominated
by the strident psychedelia

of acts like Jimi Hendrix, Cream
and the Grateful Dead,

but LA had produced a new sound
that was both commercial
and politically credible.

FM radio, which was our path
to the marketplace,

was all hard-ass rock'n'roll,
you know,

and then along came acoustic guitars
and three harmonies,

and it just changed everything.

# Da-da
Da-de-dum-de-dum... #

They had a hit album,
a formidable manager

and were planning a live tour,

but Crosby, Stills And Nash
also had a problem.

Stephen played both guitar
and keyboard on the record,
and you can't do that on stage.

Stephen talked to Ahmet Ertegun, who
owned Atlantic Records at the time,

a dear friend and a great supporter
of Crosby, Stills And Nash, and he
said, "Why don't you talk to Neil?"

# He's a perfect stranger

# Like a cross of himself

# And a fox... #

Less than a year after the collapse
of Buffalo Springfield,

Neil Young had already begun
to make his mark as a solo artist.

Now he was the fourth front man
in a supergroup
overflowing with individual talent.

Even then,

Neil was powerful.

You weren't sure if you wanted
to be competing with that power
or co-operating with it.

# It's the loner... #

It was inevitable that
that band would be as big
as it turned out to be.

No question about it.

And it was also inevitable
when Neil joined the group

and it became
Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young,

that, inherent in that greatness,

was the seeds of its destruction.

# I'm not going back to Woodstock
for a while... #

Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young's
mutual ambition

had brought them fame and fortune,

but over the next ten years, their
early potential would be squandered

amid clashing egos, drug addiction
and the trappings of celebrity,

and as the collective spirit of the
'60s gave way to an age that would
come to be known as the Me Decade,

LA's solo singer-songwriters
found their voice.

When listening to music,

look at the social forces that
surrounded it when it came out.

Look at what happened that year.

In the summer of 1969,
there was a genuine feeling

that the collective values
of the Woodstock generation
might change the world.

By the end of the year, that
optimism would be all but shattered.

The assassinations
of Martin Luther King

and Robert F Kennedy

so shook our world in America...

..but in '69...

Charles Manson
visited Los Angeles,

and that changed the entirety
for ever.

# Now we live in a trailer
at the edge of town

# You'd never see us
cos we don't come around... #

'The Manson family has become the
most notorious of hippy groups...

'It is said they were
a pseudo-religious cult.

'People who worked on the ranch said
they were heavy users of drugs.'

We went horseback riding out there
at that farm.

We knew some of the people.

It was just terrifying.

'Among his followers,
members of the family,

'Manson is regarded as a saint.

'Many call him Jesus.'

It was the commune gone wrong,
wasn't it?

# Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon

# Is full of famous stars

# But I hate them worse than lepers

# And I kill them in their cars... #

I don't have any big illusions.

I know what I have done,
and no man can judge me.

I judge me.
What have you done, Charlie?

This crazed, misguided, drug-driven
cultism...Satanism...

touched the irrationality of the very
thing that sustained flower-power,

and that was the sense of
unbridled optimism
and social integration and trust,

and all of that was shattered.
It was like the snake
that came into the Garden.

The Manson gang's killing spree
shamed and terrorised LA's
alternative artistic community,

of which he'd been a well-known
if barely tolerated presence.

Three months later, at a free
Rolling Stones' concert at Altamont,
near San Francisco,

the counterculture was dealt
another devastating blow.

It was crazy, man.

The Hell's Angels were the security.

The were all drinking cheap red wine.

They were all loaded on PCP...

and acid.

And it got really ugly.

Can everybody just clear out!

Will you clear out, everybody!

Altamont's defining moment was
the murder of an audience member
called Meredith Hunter

by a Hell's Angels gang member.

People have been killed
in sight of the stage, you know.

While the Stones sing Sympathy
For The Devil, everybody went,
"This is a little NOT OK."

That was death in your own backyard.

It happened where people
were congregating.

It became larger than life.

And it all occurred within months
of the Woodstock festival,

where everything had bloomed,

and the sense of real possibility,
suddenly you were brought up short
at Altamont.

There was a sense, in a way,

like the discovery of AIDS,
that the party was ending.

It was time, it seemed,
for the comedown.

The new decade brought a shift
in the emotional landscape
of LA's emerging singer-songwriters,

as the failure of the collective
gave way to the
power of the personal.

Here's another really new one that
isn't quite finished, just for fun.

I think, if you listen to the
material, you can see
how everyone was forever changed.

In 1970, Joni Mitchell,
who two years earlier
had penned the theme to Woodstock,

recorded a collection of
startlingly autobiographical songs.

It was the basis of an album
that would become
the definitive statement

of confessional songwriting.

In my first week of college,

she called and asked would I
come out to California

to do some photos of her.
She was writing the songs for Blue.

# I am on a lonely road
and I am travelling

# Looking for the truth in men
and in me

# Oh, my jealousy, my greed

# They all unravel me

# It undoes all the joy
that could be... #

From a songwriting viewpoint,
most songwriters still
are in awe of that record.

# Blue-ue-ue-ue-eu... #

Blue is an overwhelming album.

# There is a song for you too

# Ink on a pin

# Underneath the skin... #

All of a sudden, there's this woman
writing about personal relationships

on a very profound level,

and it was deeply affecting.

# Well, there's so many sinking now

# You've gotta keep thinking

# You can make it through these waves

# Acid, booze and ass

# Needles, guns and grass

# Lots of laughs... #

She changed the way I wrote,

because I realised that it was OK
to talk about what was
happening in your heart,

so that other people could go,

"I know what you're saying.
It happened to me the other day."
Those kind of songs.

A year after Joni Mitchell
released Blue,

Neil Young, an equally
uncompromising singer-songwriter,

produced a breakthrough record.

Over the next 35 years,
his relentless soul-searching

would underpin an unpredictable
musical journey.

These guys will do anything
for a laugh.

# I wanna live

# I wanna give

# I've been a miner for
a heart of gold... #

Harvest was a huge success

and it kind of put Neil on the map
in a very profound way.

#..That keep me searching for
a heart of gold

# And I'm getting old... #

But immediately after, there were
some tragedies.
There was a roadie named Bruce Berry,

and then there was Danny Whitten
from Crazy Horse,

both of whom OD'd in
a short period of time, from heroin.

#..I've been to Hollywood

# I've been to Redwood

# I crossed the ocean for
a heart of gold... #

Neil, at the peak of his success
in the marketplace,

exorcised all his demons,

and that was Tonight's The Night,
which was,

in some ways,
the most imperfect record he made.

# Tonight's the night

# Tonight's the night... #

He was rebelling against production.

He said, "I wanna make a record,
and I wanna do this live,

"but I want people to hear it before
the band knows what they're doing."

# Bruce Berry was a working man

# He used to load
that Econoline van... #

So we went on tour,

and everyone expected that he would
play all the songs from Harvest.

The Eagles were the opening act.

The Eagles came out
and were fucking great.

#..And sing this song
in a shaky voice

# That was real as the day was long

# Tonight's the night... #

And then Neil came out and he
did the Tonight's The Night album

from beginning to end.

He would say,
"If you stick with this,

"at the end I'll play songs that
you've heard before."

And then, at the end,
he started the album over again!

And that's when I knew I loved him.

And the place emptied out.

Pretty much every night!

You know, it was fantastic.
I never saw anyone do that.

It was just awesome.

It was just the power of his
own belief and his own convictions,

that he just didn't give a fuck.

#..Tonight's the night

# Whoa... #

I guess I'm writing about
a part of me that
I don't know if I'll ever share.

I don't know.

It's just, um...

I'm writing about, um...

..the way I feel inside

and no matter how many people
are around me...

I keep talking about it,
all the things that go on inside me,

and, um...

I guess by talking about it,
it helps.

Neil Young's low-fire rock'n'roll

and Joni Mitchell's acoustic poetry

sounded worlds apart,

but they were both
serious, sensitive musicians

whose songwriting
was intensely self-centred.

They led a new generation of
ruthlessly single-minded artists

and prompted a radical change
in the commercial strategy
of LA's music industry.

In the early days of Warner Reprise,

the label had signed artists
like Neil Young and Randy Newman

and Joni Mitchell,

and I think the label became aware
that those artists had a vision,

and it wasn't just
a creative musical vision.

It had to do with who they were
and how they were represented
and how they were perceived.

Warner Reprise -
part of Warner Bros -

and previously best-known as
Frank Sinatra's record company,

was the first to gamble on
LA's uncompromising troubadours.

It was a calculated risk.

And it paid off.

If you put out great records
by great artists,

regardless of what they did,

as long as you weren't getting hurt
too badly financially,

that was a way of drawing
other artists.

# Something in the way she moves

# Or looks my way, she calls my name

# That seems to leave
this troubled world behind... #

I was in a band in New York for a
while, after I finished high school

and, um...when that broke up,
I decided I'd like
to travel a little bit,

so I went over to London and, um...

I...I found it very difficult
to get work without having papers,

so I decided instead
that I'd like to make a record.

#..And if I am well you can tell
she's been with me now

# She's been with me now

# Quite a long, long time

# And I feel fine... #

I was here in California
and made a record deal for James

with Warner Bros,
choosing Warner Bros because of the
cool people they had already,

and because of the ads Stan Cornyn
wrote,

which were the coolest album ads
we'd ever seen.

James Taylor left Apple Records
to be on Warner Bros.

Apple was as hip as it could be

and he wanted to be on our label.

This was Sweet Baby James.
This was amazing.

# Well, there is a young cowboy

# He lives on the range

# His horse and his cattle
They're his only companions... #

Sensitive lyrics,

mellow music and the intriguing
suggestion of a tortured soul

made James Taylor LA's latest exile
singer-songwriter

a powerful artistic force.

#..So goodnight
You moonlight ladies

# Rock-a-bye
My Sweet Baby James... #

Neither James nor I
have ever particularly liked
the mellow, um, application,

nor sensitive,

because he's not that mellow
and he's not that sensitive.

But there is a contrast between
a certain mellowness, for want of
a better word, musically,

with the fact that the lyrics
are pretty intense.

#..Just yesterday morning

# They let me know that you were gone

# Susanne the plans we made
put an end to you

# I walked out on a morning

# And I wrote down this song... #

There are lyrics about a friend
who killed herself

and experiences in a mental hospital
and drugs,

so the subject matter is not mellow
at all.

#..I've seen fire and I've seen rain

# I've seen sunny days that I thought
would never end... #

He was a harder-core drug addict
than any of us.

Sweet Baby James
was this fucking animal.

He was a hippie junkie. And there was
something about that mentality

that, somehow or other,
set him apart from everybody else.

I remember saying to him one time,
"It's a good thing

"you're a fucking folk guy.
If you were a rock'n'roller,

"you'd have been dead years ago.

"You can't behave like this
without someone killing you,
or killing yourself."

#..Oh, I've seen fire
and I've seen rain... #

Backed by musicians drawn
from a pool known as the LA Mafia,

James Taylor's first West Coast
record stayed on the album charts

for over 100 weeks,

making the sensitive
singer-songwriter front-page news,

and, in the same year,

a fellow East Coast exile
released the most successful record
that LA had ever produced.

I know that many of you
are admirers of James Taylor.

I am myself.

I'd like to get him out here
to help me.

He was kind enough to volunteer,
so, come on, James!

Carole King had made her name as
one half of Goffen And King,

a prolific partnership at the
heart of New York's hit songwriting
factory, the Brill Building.

But in LA, she would undergo
a radical re-invention.

# So far away

# Doesn't anybody stay in one place
any more...? #

Carole King,
she played on Sweet Baby James,

so Carole was a huge part of it.

#..It doesn't help to know

# You're just time away... #

She wrote all the great songs
that we all grew up learning,

from Up On The Roof to One Fine Day
to Natural Woman.

I mean, she wrote everything.

Carole King's transformation
from writer-for-hire
to introspective singer-songwriter

exemplified the music industry's
shift from New York to LA,

from Brill Building to
Laurel Canyon.

#..One more song about
moving along the highway... #

Tapestry spent a staggering 15 weeks
at number one,

confirming LA as the natural
commercial and spiritual home for
a new kind of popular artist.

I think it's fair to say that
Los Angeles had every intention

of becoming the place to
bring that heightened individuality

of the singer-songwriter
to the fore.

We developed a thing out here called
"the heat behind the beat",

and those were the attorneys
who made this whole thing possible.

The idea of self-publishing,
for example.

The new autonomies that were
available to the singer-songwriter.

These things were codified
out here.

By the end of 1971,

LA was the centre of a
multi-million-dollar music business

increasingly driven
by its songwriters...

..and among the city's community of
self-absorbed artists,

one young musician emerged as the
voice of the collective conscience.

I remember I got an 8 x 10 glossy
of this really cute guy

with a demo, and I thought,

"Can't beat Bob Dylan."

Then my secretary listened to it and
called me up the next day and said,

"You ought to listen to that tape.
That guy is really good."

# Jamaica was the lovely one

# I played her well

# As we lay in the tall grass
where the shadows fell... #

Jackson Browne had moved the
short distance from Orange County

to Los Angeles in 1966,

aged just 17.

He was soon a popular
and much-admired favourite

of the Laurel Canyon community.

#..Jamaica say you will... #

There was a couple of years that
I had offers, but didn't
feel that I was really ready.

I had it demonstrated to me
really early that it took
a lot of intention to make records,

and that one couldn't
just drift into the studio

like our legendary heroes did

and sit down, and, for $250,
make your first masterpiece.

I heard about Jackson through
a woman named Pamela Polland -

P-O-L-L-A-N-D. Gentle soul.

Pamela's in Hawaii.
When I found Pamela, Pamela said,
"If you think I'M good,

"you ought to find Jackson Browne."

Musically,
he was tremendously respected,

and really a touchstone

for a lot of the new genre of
singer-songwriter.

# Well, I've been out working... #

Confessional lyrics,
beautiful poetry, and wondering why
the world is so screwed up

and why your life is screwed up.

He's an incredibly important
seminal artist of our times.

When Jackson wrote, "Please don't
confront me with my failures,

"I've not forgotten them,"

and he was only 17, you know!

# Don't confront me with my failures

# I had not forgotten them... #

Good grief! You're writing like
you're a man of 60!

"Don't confront me with my failures,
I've not forgotten them."

Wonderful.

Wonderful!

Jackson Browne had the talent,
charisma and looks to be a star.

What he didn't have
was a recording contract.

David Geffen had been a manager and
an agent, and he'd been well-versed
in the different aspects of that...

music business.

I think he was going to put me
to Columbia or Atlantic.

Suddenly, I decided...

Hell, I'll do it!

I went to see Ahmet Ertegun, played
the tapes and said, "You should sign
him. You'll make a lot of money."

He said, "I have a lot of money. Why
don't you start a record company? You
could have a lot of money." So I did.

We use independent producers,
or we let the artist produce
themselves. Whatever they want.

It's a very artist-oriented company

and whatever they want to do,
we support them.

What I like the most were people
who sang their own songs.

That's what they all had in common
at Asylum Records.

That was the...gestalt of the day.

He was also everybody's manager, too.

Later, we had people grumbling about
conflict of interest

but there was no conflict of interest
because I don't think he ever
charged any of us for management.

He was our patron, you know.

The medici.
The medici of rock'n'roll.

# Doctor, my eyes have seen the years

# And the slow parade of fears
without crying

# Now, I want to understand... #

Asylum's artist-driven ethos
was anathema

to the conventions of the
music business,

and Geffen's approach to A&R
was typically direct.

David realised that other musicians
are very often

an extremely important source for
finding out about new talent.

Went over to his house,
played some songs to him. Yes.

He knew that when Jackson told him
about John David Souther,

or whichever order it happened in,
he really paid attention.

I don't think that every record
that we make is a hit,

or that every artist is going
to be a star, but I think
the music we put out is very valid.

I thought, "Wow. This is just the
way you think it's gonna work.

#..Doctor, my eyes... #

If we believe in them, we'll
stick with them. We're not going to
drop an artist if they don't sell.

#..For having learned how
not to cry... #

Geffen's close relationship
with his acts

led Asylum to to sign some of the
most talented, established
and interesting songwriters in LA.

But just a year after its birth, its
solo artists would produce a band

that would become one of the most
successful acts in music history.

For any musician serious about
making the big time,

LA was the only place to be,

and by 1970, an new wave of artists
had followed the heroes
of the counterculture west.

Among them were Glenn Frey,

a guitar player from Detroit,

and JD Souther,
a songwriter from Texas.

Befriended by local hero
Jackson Browne,

the three young troubadours found
cheap digs in a Mexican
neighbourhood near downtown LA,

the unlikely setting for
another songwriting collective

that would, once again, transform
the city's musical identity.

# Like a bluebird with
its heart removed

# Lonely as a train

# I've run just as far
as I can run... #

I moved to Echo Park

and was instantly surrounded
by people coming up through this...

beautiful cloud,
this merger of literature and music

that seemed to take place around
acoustic guitars.

#..You tell me how long, how long

# Woman, will you weep...? #

Glenn Frey and I roomed together
for a while, Jackson moved out,
I moved downstairs,

Glenn moved out, Jackson and I
both got houses on Camrose Court,

all writing in different
combinations with each other.
It was growing all the time.

That was the little ball of dust
that became a tornado.

# Oh, goodbye-bye, baby

# Rock yourself to slee-ee-eep... #

The Echo Park posse would provide
the songwriting basis for the
biggest band in LA's history.

Their musical inspiration would
come from a raucous music club half
a mile west of the Sunset Strip.

I mean, it was a heart of a scene
that encompassed James Taylor,

Ry Cooder, Randy Newman, Little Feat,

John David Souther...

There was 20 or 30 people
that all became very good friends

and would, on any given night,
go to the Troubadour bar

and then drive a short distance
up into the canyons to party
at one or the other's houses

and germinations of songs and love
affairs, and terminations
of love affairs, and deals were made

within two or three miles of
the Sunset Strip.

LA's singer-songwriters had emerged
from the folk tradition.

At the Troubadour, they absorbed
another form or reassuringly
authentic American music.

As the idealism of the '60s faded,

country music would offer LA's
troubadours a new sense of identity.

# You made me

# Sweet and nice

# But that won't keep you warm
at night

# Cos I'm the one... #

At the centre of LA's country
revival was a charismatic cowboy
called Gram Parsons.

#..You're doing now

# He may feel... #

Country music was so horrible

and you didn't even imagine
that you would dare listen to it,

but he sat me down in his room,
took out his little record player

and forced us to listen to
George Jones, Waylon Jennings,
Merle Haggard, and made us get it.

#..I was right beside you then... #

During a brief stint in the Byrds,

and as a driving force
in the Flying Burrito Brothers,

Parsons was just one of
a large pool of players

infatuated with the
music and mythology of the West.

Chris Hillman,
in the Burritos and the Byrds,

he'd been a bluegrass
mandolin player,

I'd been a bluegrass banjo player,

Jerry Garcia had been
a bluegrass banjo player,

so they were people who became
influential musicians

in the late '60s, early '70s,

who started out in folk but had been
off into the bluegrass thing as well.

One of the most influential figures,
and the undisputed queen
of the Troubadour scene,

was yet another exile in LA.

I'm going to do a truck-driver's song
now.

I live with a bunch of people I knew
from Tucson, on the beach, and we
started hanging round the Troubadour.

It's responsible for the
entire music scene.

This song was written by my friend
Lowell George from Little Feat,
and it's called Willin'.

Of all the people responsible for
the country-rock revolution,

maybe Linda Ronstadt is the one
that's overlooked the most,

because she's a woman
and considered a pop artist.

# I've been warped by the rain

# Driven by the snow

# I'm drunk and dirty

# Don't you know that I'm still

# Willin'... #

Linda, in many respects, was
the glue that held this together,

because she never was a
singer-songwriter - she has barely
written a song in her life -

but Linda picked singers,
and songwriters in particular,
brilliantly.

#..And I've been from Tucson
to Tucumcari

# Tehachapi to Tonopah

# Driven every kind of rig that's
ever been made... #

She was the vehicle for JD Souther,

for Warren Zevon,

Karla Bonoff, Eric Kaz.
She introduced me to Willin',
by Lowell George.

# And if you give me

# Weed

# Whites and wine... #

In June 1971,

Linda Ronstadt's boyfriend,
JD Souther,

and his friend Glenn Frey
were in a country duo.

But when JD decided to pursue
a solo career,

it seemed that Frey, despite
being assigned to
David Geffen's Asylum Records,

was out on a limb.

By the end of the year,

he was fronting what would become
LA's biggest band.

Originally I told Glenn and JD

that Glenn should form a band,

that he wasn't strong enough as a
solo artist to go by himself.

Glenn wanted a bigger thing,
more sound,

and I wanted less,

I wanted to be like Jackson
and just go play by myself.

I had left the Flying Burrito
Brothers.

I'd hang out at the Troubadour,

and I'd run into Glenn Frey
and Don Henley.

I found Don from this band, Shiloh.
I heard them at the Troubadour.

Linda Ronstadt's producer,
John Boylan, was helping them.

He told them to get Randy Meisner
on bass, they thought that was
a good idea.

They were missing a guitar player.

We told them they should
get Bernie Leadon.

So I called Boylan
and he said, "Yeah."

So the original Eagles
were four people,

Glenn Frey, Don Henley,
myself and Randy Meisner.

It's serious!

I never doubted that they'd be big.

We wanted him to get us
on Atlantic Records,

he said, "Well,
I can probably do that

"or you can be the first band
on my new label, Asylum."

Then he was going to be our manager
AND our record company president -

obviously, there's a
conflict of interest there,

but we did it because we were sure
that David was going to succeed.

The Eagles, an unashamedly ambitious
band of country rockers,

seemed an incongruous addition

to Asylum's roster of earnest
singer-songwriters.

But after a brief apprenticeship as
Linda Ronstadt's backing band,

they made their first
public appearance

in a tiny art gallery
in Venice, California.

MUSIC: "Witchy Woman"
by the Eagles

The first time The Eagles played was
at an art opening for Boyd Elder,

our friend from Texas.

Joni Mitchell and Mama Cass
and David Geffen was there,

Ned Doheny there was, you know,
the whole gang.

Everybody was dancing on this wet
concrete floor with beer all over it,

and the Eagles were there playing
Witchy Woman over and over again.

# Woo-hoo, witchy woman

# See how high she flies... #

We only knew seven songs,

so we played the same
seven songs over and over.

#..She got the moon in her eye... #

It was fun. Joni was dancing.

They were the apex of
the California sound.

It expressed the sunshine
and the warmth,

they were the core of it.

A magical combination of people who
could create their material,

who could pick the best of
other people's material,

and roll it up again in one of those
very dusted musical packages.

# Well, I'm a-running down the road

# Trying to loosen my load... #

Helped by JD Souther
and Jackson Browne,

the Eagles wrote songs that would
become emblematic of '70s LA.

But not everybody was thrilled by
their carefully crafted brand of
country rock.

#..Take it easy... #

Their take on how to do it

is to reproduce the record
every time perfectly, note for note,

and it works for them, you know,

it makes a good show for the crowd,
but to me it's...

..boring.

#..Take it easy... #

They take no chances. Ever.

#..Well, I was standing on
a corner... #

The Eagles' reward for leaving
nothing to chance

was a hit album
and three number-one singles.

It started in the '60s.

We had a problem
with the word "commercial",

and everybody said,

"We don't want to be commercial."

Commercial was like the Monkees,
it's like the Turtles,

and commercial meant success.

For the sake of the audience,
you're the Monkees.

#..We may lose and we may win... #

When we got together,
we stated the intention -

this band is about doing really well,
becoming famous
and making a lot of money.

That was our goal.

#..Hey, yeah... #

It was a goal that they achieved
with their debut album,

confirming the denim-clad,
long-haired Western troubadour

as the new image of mainstream
commercial success.

The Eagles' next record was
once again was written and conceived

with the help of Jackson Browne
and JD Souther.

When Jackson turned 21, I gave him
The Album Of Gunfighters.

There were the bodies of
slain outlaws in it,

John Wesley Hardin's
shotgun-riddled body...

Underneath, you could read about
how all this happened,

and, in a way, it sort of became the
template for that Desperado record.

# They were Doolin

# Doolin-Dalton

# High or low

# It was the same... #

The notion of cowboys, you know,
those wild, taciturn heroes,

stepping into a saloon

and changing everyone's lives for
ever with a single shot or comment.

It's a mythological moment
that caught on.

On Desperado, the Eagles invented
a collective identity

directly inspired by
their country roots...

and by the ultimate
American fantasy.

As young guys 100 years ago,
rather than being
rock'n'roll guitar players,

they might well have been rock'n'roll
gunslingers - they would have been
carrying guns instead of guitars -

so we decided to do this
Western motif shoot
way out in the Malibu Hills.

It was almost like a time-warp

because it really did feel like we
were back in the 1800s.

It was so real. The guys would come
running down the street

with their guns blazing, and
the Eagles, and it was very heroic!

In the '60s, LA's singer-songwriters
had portrayed themselves as
heroes of the counterculture.

The Eagles had re-cast themselves
as fictional outlaws,

an escapism that marked a
timely disengagement from the
political world around them.

# I am an outlaw

# I was born an outlaw's son... #

There can be no whitewash...
at the Whitehouse.

'Richard Nixon as the President,'

valiums were on the rise.

People were taking downers

just to anaesthetise themselves
against the reality
of this rightist regime

that was going from
Vietnam to Cambodia with napalm.

#..A life upon the road
is the life of an outlaw... #

What that did to music

was, I think, for any person who
wanted to be a player and continue,

was to stop bitching.

To shut up.

What's in now is songs of
consolation that can be marketed

in the greater reality of
a Republican regime.

The songs were more handsome,
and a mile wide and an inch deep.

MUSIC: "Desperado" by the Eagles

But the Eagles' Western escapade
was a commercial flop.

They would be forced to rethink
their country roots

and re-invent their cowboy image.

And there was more bad news from
their record company.

Steve Ross, who ran Warners
in those days, came to me

and said that he wanted to buy it

and, uh, he offered me
$7 million for it,

which, at the time, seemed like
a staggering amount of money,

and I had watched Sonny and Cher
go from the biggest act
in the world to nothing,

and Otis Redding die
in a plane crash,

and I thought, "Jeez! $7 million!"
It was such a huge number.

It ended up being worth...

..so much more money than I
sold it for

but, you know, I'm doing OK!

Geffen and Roberts' management,
our management,

comes to us...and our record company,

and they say to us, "We've sold
Asylum Records to Warner Brothers,

"we're splitting up the management
company, you have to find new
management." We're, like, "What?!"

Geffen continued to manage
Asylum Records,
now owned by Warner Brothers,

but he would be forced to hand over
the Eagles' personal management

to another formidable hustler,
Irving Azoff.

The first thing I think Irving did
was turn around and sue Geffen

to get the Eagles' publishing
back from Warner Brothers Music.

You know, in success, people
feel like they're entitled to more,

forgetting that,
when they made these deals,

they had nothing
and nobody was interested in them.

When Warner Brothers merged Asylum
with Elektra Records,

another independent label
it had purchased two years earlier,

it signalled a shift in the tone of
LA's record business.

The change was that more and more
managers were coming to the party.

The lawyers were getting involved.

When it became more business
and less music...I left.

What's happening in the process,

which I served gladly,

is the corporatisation of rock.

I mean, the music died
around the middle '70s.

At least in terms of
everything that defined LA

a decade earlier.

If you go back to the Strip
in the late '60s,

there was a kind of
Utopian dimension,

and I guess we were so carried away
by that spirit

that people failed to see
how much of it

was also about carrying people
forward into Tower Records

or into a whole brave, new world
of consumption

in which rock'n'roll
was simply the soundtrack.

In an increasingly corporate
climate,

the social scene was also moving -

away from bars like the Troubadour

to a more exclusive class
of nightclub.

Among the clients that we had
was a guy named David Blue -
a friend of ours, Joni's, etc -

and we had booked all of our
biggest acts into the Troubadour
and I called Doug Weston

and asked him to put David Blue
in there, and he wouldn't do it.

I said, "I've given you Crosby,
Stills, Nash And Young, the Eagles,
Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell,

"Linda Ronstadt, etc.
I want you to play David Blue."

He said, "I'm not
going to play David Blue."

I said, "If you don't
play David Blue, I'll start a club."

And he said,
"You think you can start a club?"

I said, "Yeah, I think I can start a
club, and if you don't put David Blue
in the Troubadour, I will."

And he said, "Fuck you, do it."

So we did.

The Roxy represented a new kind of
Sunset Strip venue

in which the Eagles and their
entourage found themselves
at the centre of an exclusive elite.

'All of a sudden,'

there was an awful lot of money,

a lot of celebrity,

a lot of, "You can come in here,
you can't."

# Eager for action

# Hot for the game... #

In their songwriting, the Eagles
had begun to chronicle the
mid-'70s hedonistic lifestyle

of which they were the
prime players.

The summer after the fourth album,
I left.

For a long time,
I felt I couldn't talk about it,

partly because it had to do with
my own personal drug use,

too much partying,

and I needed to get away from it.

And when I left,

the whole acoustic, bluegrass, folk,
acoustic guitar thing

went away.

#..Life in the fast lane

# Surely make you lose your mind

# Life in the fast lane... #

Bernie Leadon was replaced by
guitar hero Joe Walsh,

as the Eagles ditched their
acoustic roots,

and followed the musical drift
towards stadium rock.

Was there a point in the '70s
at which you realised

that many of your contemporaries
had become self-satisfied and smug
about their own positions?

I realised that about myself
but I didn't make any judgments
on the rest of 'em.

In 1974, Crosby, Stills, Nash
And Young embarked on a world tour,

the extravagance of which
clashed wildly with
the morality of their songs.

# You...who are on the road... #

#..Must have a code

# That you can live by... #

We had 85 people in the crew,

we had helicopters, jets,

limousines sat in front of the hotel
24 hours a day...

It was just an exercise in excess.

# Teach the children well

# Their father's hell

# Did slowly go by... #

You're top of
the charts, everybody loves you,

you've got enough women
to satisfy you for years,

you have enough money and
the ability to buy the best drugs,

and, you know, it takes over,

and it took over.

#..Don't you ever... #

From my perspective, these were
the guys that were talking
about freedom, about justice,

about respect for Mother Earth,
about getting back to the Garden.

It was very hard
to make sense of it all.

#..And know they love you... #

All of them represent, to me,
the liberal Hollywood concepts.

They favoured money

and they'd just forget that
sometimes,

that it walks this thin line.

But, ultimately, it was about
being successful.

By 1975, LA's once
politically conscious musicians

were consumed by cynicism,

a mood fuelled by a substance that
had replaced marijuana and acid

as Hollywood's drug of choice.

One of its earliest advocates and
biggest casualties was David Crosby.

David had bowls of it,
big wooden bowls of cocaine,

and he walked around stark naked,
with his pudgy little belly,

and it was different. It felt OK.

It felt all right in, like,
'69, '70.

It just...
slowly got pretty awful.

# You take Sally

# And I'll take Sue

# There ain't no difference
between the two

# Cocaine

# Running all round my brain... #

When we started doing cocaine
and heroin and speed,

as a generation...

..that essentially degraded
the original spirit that we had

in that group of people,
in California,

to a very low level...

# Mama, come here quick

# That old cocaine's 'bout to
make me sick

# Cocaine... #

..and the shift from one to
the other was a palpable thing.

You could feel it.

More greed, more anger,
more craziness,

more...

..darkness.

MUSIC: "Hotel California"
by the Eagles

In less than a decade,

collective optimism had given way to
a ruthlessly self-centred culture

and, in 1976, with an honesty
typical of LA's singer-songwriters,

the Eagles captured the mood with
an acerbic tribute

to a city whose appeal had proved
seductive long before the '70s.

The whole vision of
Hotel California -

finally,
the Pilgrims come to Paradise,

only to find a seedy broken-down
hotel on a boring ocean,

where people are all
thinking about suicide -

this is a fairly consistent vision.

# On a dark desert highway

# Cool wind in my hair... #

Remember, in the 1940s,

all the great stars, and half of
Bloomsbury, were in Los Angeles,

along with a whole generation of
American writers,

and they ended up rehearsing
every possible form of despair
and alienation,

every kind of delight and euphoria.

#..I had to stop for the night... #

Everybody can find
some part of Los Angeles

that can be the bearer
either of their dreams

or their nightmares.

#..I was thinking to myself

# This could be heaven
or this could be hell... #

So, in a way, the emotional landscape
that the rock generation lived in

was repeating what the writers
had gone through in the 1920s,

veering back and forth
between the land of sunshine
and the land de noir.

#..Welcome to the
Hotel California... #

The Eagles had evolved from
a generation of artists

whose determination to succeed
had brought them to LA,

and in the same year as
Hotel California, that ambition
reached its ultimate peak

when the Eagles released
another record

that marked the commercial climax
of a ten-year journey.

People always put out the
greatest hits albums
when the bands are in decline.

I wanted to put it out when they
were at their absolute peak.

That album is the
biggest-selling album of all time.

The sales of the Eagles'
greatest hits prompted the
invention of the platinum record.

It was the first in a long line
of multi-million-selling albums

commercially and musically inspired
by Los Angeles.

And it marked the end of a journey
in which the collective ambition

of a tight-knit
community of troubadours

had turned LA into the corporate
capital of the music world.

Don't miss it. Don't miss it.

# The King is gone
but he's not forgotten

# This is the story of
a Johnny Rotten

# It's better to burn out

# Than it is to rust

# He is gone
but he's not forgotten... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd - 2007