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The music in the '70s was more interesting than the music today.

The decline of the Roman Empire is what happened in the '70s, I think.

The '70s had a lot of good stuff. Every decade has good stuff.

There were a lot of good contributions that were made...

and there was a lot of crap, too.

There's an awful lot of disco crap...

and other stuff, as there has always been.

But now, I look back at the '70s...

and I find things that were really very good.

The great stuff from The Eagles.

- ZZ Top. - Stevie Wonder.

- Fleetwood Mac. - Frank Zappa.

- Sly and the Family Stone. - Little Feat.

- Bob Marley. - Lynyrd Skynyrd.

- Roxy Music. - Rod Stewart.

- Led Zeppelin. - Marvin Gaye.

- Aerosmith. - Bob Seger.

Elton John.

I started in the '70s, for Christ's sake.

What a healthy time it was for music.

There was this huge circle, 360 degrees...

each degree being a different musical category. Wonderful.

And it just got to be more music.

Used to be, you had to be pretty big to make an album.

But suddenly, there were albums by people I had never heard of.

I really believe that in the '70s, there was a great combination of fashion...

artistic sense, song writing. It was an incredible time.

Musically, it just seems like in the '70s...

everything was an excuse for a party.

We're just having a party.

It was okay to have a lot of money. It was okay to flaunt it.

Everybody had an airplane.

Beautiful women, any time you wanted them.

Then came the cocaine. Then came the booze.

- Jack Daniel's. - Cognac.

Budweiser.

Don't drink anything you can't see through.

Nobody knew that everything was bad for you yet.

Or that that could cause you to crash your car...

or you're going to have to go to rehab for that one.

It was a great time to be alive.

The '70s was the time when music blossomed.

So many different styles and so many ideas.

The artist had developed the ability to create an income...

to allow him some freedom.

It was definitely a fun time.

Lots of the bands that I was involved with: Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers...

used that time to experiment.

There were so many different aspects to music...

what was being appreciated, what was actually being...

invested in by record companies.

The one good thing about the '70s, I would write 10 new songs...

record them, give them to a record company, and they'd say, "It's great."

No politics or anything.

And if it did well, which they did, most of them...

it would be up in the charts, and there would be no political...

You know, "We don't hear a single."

That sort of thing, which they do now a lot, to lots of people.

A band like Steely Dan probably would have...

We couldn't get arrested now.

Because it's, "What format are you in?"

"Are you AC, are you AOR, are you CHR, are you FBI?"

"I don't know."

The music of the '70s was very unique...

because it was reaching for origination.

In other words, you didn't have to...

There was no groups of artists copying each other.

Everybody was reaching for their own originality.

And so I found that very interesting and all.

And also, the standards had not been set.

There were new standards, so everyone was going for new things.

There had been enough time in the rock 'n'roll timeline...

to be able to draw from that.

There had been enough rock 'n'roll, the three-chord guys.

There was the rhythm and blues, and the blues of the '40s and '50s.

There was the jazz era.

There had been enough rockabilly, enough country music.

You have the wellspring, you can draw from a lot of different things.

A lot of the bands in the '70s did that.

I'd like to introduce Led Zeppelin to you.

On bass guitar, John Paul Jones.

On drums, John Bonham.

Lead guitar, Jimmy Page.

And myself, Robert Plant.

I think one of the most exciting things about the music of the '70s...

was it was a hybrid of what came before it...

but it staked its own territory.

What Cream was doing, what Zeppelin was doing...

was taking blues and pumping it up on steroids...

and doing something that changed the nature of the beast.

See, the miracle about Zeppelin is that for four people...

to come together like that...

and this alchemy that actually occurred there...

it was just something that had...

It was something that was, you know, written in the stars.

That it had to be.

Chemistry is another one of Page's...

sort of, philosophical overview terms.

I guess it was just luck...

and the fact is that it worked really well.

Whatever it was, it was pretty honest, a little devious...

and certainly not adverse...

to a little bit of thievery, musically.

However, we're not the first people to have done that.

My vocal performance comes from everywhere...

whatever I listened to, that I like:

Ray Charles'howl on Drown In My Own Tears...

or Wynonie Harris or Louis Jordan. There's loads and loads of stuff.

All that stuff, you throw it all in a blender...

and throw the switch, and you've got me.

I remember listening to the first Zeppelin album, saying it was like...

such a great...

Like a breath of fresh air...

for someone to be doing something acceptable, but yet so different, you know.

I haven't liked a single thing that they have done.

I hate the fact that I'm ever even slightly compared to them.

I never, ever liked them.

It's a problem for me, 'cause as people, they are all really great guys.

Just never liked the band.

I don't know whether I've just got a block to them because they...

became so much bigger than The Who in so many ways...

in their chosen field. But I've never liked them.

The bands that were alternative then...

like the Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin...

those were the alternative bands to the pop bands, like the Beatles...

and the early Stones. They were like the pop idols.

And then these bands that would come in and play the blues...

and that kind of stuff, that was the underground, rebellious music.

Now, you consider everyone's all jolly...

and tiptoeing around, stoned on acid...

having Woodstock, and all love, peace and sex and drugs and rock 'n'roll...

and all that's great, yeah.

But for us guys, who were living in this hole in the world...

it wasn't that way.

And Tony lommi said to me one day, '"Wouldn't it be interesting...

'"to put this horror vibe to a musical thing? '"

And then we started to write "doomy music," we used to call it...

of this death music, doom music.

I'll never forget when I got the first Black Sabbath album...

and I took it home to my parents.

It starts with rain and thunder, and it's all this demonic devil stuff.

And I can see my mother and my father look at each other in amazement.

And they both simultaneously turn around to me and say:

"Ozzy, are you sure you're just only drinking the occasional beer here?"

I hate the word '"heavy metal'" because it's like...

What musical connotations does it have?

What's heavy metal? Lead?

Where does the music come in there?

Lt'd be unfair to say that anybody who sings in the band...

thinks that Led Zeppelin was ever hard rock or heavy metal...

'cause at least a third of our music was acoustic.

To me, it's basically all rock 'n'roll.

Some people play a little faster, some people play a little slower...

some people play it louder.

It's all basically really based on the blues.

Writing the blues, different people write different ways.

But it's real easy to clutter up, especially when you're going for...

a blues-type structure in the song.

If you want one cluttered up, send it to me. I'll be glad to...

It's difficult writing blues.

It would seem like it would be real simple, you know.

And you either get it real trite...

or it gets real congested.

Our band started out, in a lot of ways...

the way we evolved was instrumentally, with the jams.

We did a lot of jamming.

We would set up and we would play...

and then we would listen to Miles Davis, John Coltrane...

and then the old blues cats, Robert Johnson, people like this.

There were a lot of bands that, in the early '70s...

did relate to our music a lot.

Marshall Tucker, Charlie Daniels, Lynyrd Skynyrd...

but nowadays it's not really fair to call the Allman Brothers...

a southern rock band, you know.

Rock 'n' roll was pretty much born in the South.

So was the blues, a certain kind of blues, anyway.

And saying "southern rock" is like saying "rock rock."

The rock-and-roll white boys had blues...

which I never would have thought would be happening.

So we had to find a new music. And to me, the tempo of blues...

right in the middle of rock 'n' roll, that midway point is funky music.

It was not fast, like rock 'n'roll...

it was not all the way slow, like the blues...

but it was basically the same three chord changes.

We went back to James Brown, the two-four thing and just a basic groove.

You couldn't define exactly what it was, so we called it "funkadelic."

Two-four is basic dance music.

James Brown taught us...

the one was more emphasis put on it.

The one is like that. You can hit it on this end early...

you can hit it in the middle, which is what most people try to do...

or you can hit it late, but it's still in that...

time of the one.

We were like...

the last second, you know, right behind the beat, but hard.

We did it to a point that it was cartoonish.

So we exaggerated, you know, till it was animated...

and then with the costumes and the spaceship...

it knocked your head off.

You'd walk around flinching to yourself.

In the '70s, George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic...

and Earth, Wind & Fire were very serious about our music...

and who we were trying to touch.

I think that's one reason why the music of the '70s has not died.

Because it has a rejuvenating quality about it.

Bob Marley made a great contribution in presenting us with reggae music...

and creating more universal acceptance of it.

I think Bob Marley's message was a universal message...

so therefore it would touch everybody.

There's nothing that he can't sing about in those songs.

It's the freedom that I relate to.

He was one of those Stevie Wonder-types: True to the middle of the road.

He didn't favor no sides of a thing.

It was just, people should be together no matter what.

What is your special message?

Show peace and love and music, you know. And liberty.

I met Bob quite a few times.

We used to joke a lot because every time I saw him...

he'd always have a spliff with a big old brown paper bag...

and I'm like, "That paper bag would choke me to death."

Never mind the weed, but that paper bag would hurt.

'"He wanted everything at the same time...

'"and was everything at the same time:

'"Prophet, soul rebel, rasta man, herbsman...

'"wild man, and natural mystic man...

'"ladies'man, island man, family man...

'"Rita 's man, soccer man, showman...

'"shaman, human, Jamaican! '"

The '70s was a very significant time for black musicians...

because a lot of things had been wrestled with, you know...

and kind of settled in everybody's mind by that time...

about having the courage to just go straight ahead...

with what your energy's about, and go for it.

To me, Sly was an intellectual version...

of James Brown and Motown.

How in the hell can anybody get soul music...

to be that tight, until it's popping...

and still have as much soul as the old-fashioned blues singers?

He's, by far, one of the most brilliant songwriters there ever was.

He was a genius.

To be able to conceive of all different types of music...

and to fuse it into one thing, and to set new standards at that time...

because prior to Sly...

black musicians didn't sell a lot of albums, mostly sold single records.

So when Sly came along, he kind of broke that chain.

There was a concert I went to that I'll never forget.

It was a Sly and the Family Stone concert.

The whole place was rocking. Stupidly rocking.

I always wanted to have my concert be like that.

I said, "Gosh, I'll know...

"I will have really made it to the top when my concerts do that."

Stevie Wonder, "Little 'Tevie."

We've watched Stevie grow up, even before we got to Motown.

He was so frisky when he was little...

and, you know, he used to always jump when he was performing.

Doing like that, and we used to say, "Okay, Steve. Keep it up.

"You better get somewhere and sit your little butt down, okay?"

"I ain't gonna do that." Stevie jumped one time, jumped right off the stage.

"Okay. Didn't we tell you to get somewhere and sit down?"

The interesting thing about Stevie Wonder is he broke away from the Motown mold.

He matured to the point where he said to Berry Gordy:

"I got to do what I do. I want to create my kind of music."

Stevie Wonder, going back to Talking Book...

he was playing all the instruments himself and playing synthesizer.

It was great.

Stevie was recording like 150 to 200 songs during this period...

and he did four of the greatest albums he ever did in his life:

Innervisions, and all those great things. And he just fell in.

I remember there were these two synthesizer players...

Bob Margouleff and a friend of his...

and they had this huge, monstrous array of synthesizers.

In old-fashioned days, you had to put in plugs...

and they had cords like telephone operators had to plug in...

and they called this thing TONTO. That was the name of it.

And Stevie just did some of the most miraculous things...

and from thereon, the synthesizer became another child...

that was a part of the vocabulary.

In the '70s, the artist had the opportunity to take the time in the studio...

to spend the time that he deemed necessary...

to really do his or her art, whether it was self-indulgent or not.

With Steely Dan, it used to take me six weeks...

just to find a comfortable chair at $300 an hour.

It was pretty silly.

The biggest problem with recording studios...

is the surfeit of options. There are far too many things.

Can I just hear the new Mellotron sound, please?

That wasn't really quite exaggerated enough.

There always is an oscillation of attraction between...

going the whole hog with studio technology...

which always goes over the top at some point.

The music of the early '70s was actually fairly tedious...

as a result of people suddenly becoming possessed by the idea...

that they were symphonic composers.

What Eno and I found that was the most interesting aspect of the new music...

that we were doing at that time was actually...

working with synthesizers, but throwing the manuals away.

So we had no idea how the damn things worked.

It was the mistakes they made that we found more interesting than the stuff...

Because these things are programmed by hi-tech buffs...

who don't have any sensibility of what can be done musically.

So they put in the stuff that they believe...

musicians would want to use.

That's the stuff you really don't want to hear...

because it's like fake strings and things like that.

If you get the wrong circuits going, you get crackles...

and farts coming out of these things.

It produces the most extraordinary sounds...

in different range of textures.

There is music that is sacred to us...

and that's what's caused this attitude in the studio.

An album like Sergeant Pepper...

everyone thinks they have a Sergeant Pepper in them somewhere.

But if there is a Sergeant Pepper of the '70s...

you'd have to say that Dark Side of the Moon was it.

We were thinking in the '70s, as we do today, of making great records...

which means an album to me.

I mean, singles seem like part of a different business.

We all believed in, or were aiming for, the same thing...

which is perfection. Every piece of music being magical...

and uplifting and wonderful...

and the lyrics doing whatever particular job they were doing...

to that same extent.

So we were working towards a common goal.

- Can we run back and drop it a bit? - You can if you like. Turn it down a bit.

Dark Side of the Moon was done at Abbey Road Studios.

At some point during that, I don't remember exactly when it was...

Roger came up with the idea of making it a piece about madness...

and all the other things that it's about.

I think that I tend to bring musicality...

and melodies and all that sort of stuff.

Roger was certainly a very good motivator...

and, obviously, a great lyricist.

Roger was much more ruthless about musical ideas...

where he'd be happy to lose something if it was for the greater good...

of making the sense of the whole album work.

He'd be happy to make a lovely-sounding piece of music disappear...

into radio sound or something...

that sounded really awful, if it was benefiting the whole piece.

Can I put this down?

He wanted to use the ideas from the songs to get responses...

from people, and we wrote out a series of questions...

and got people into the studio, and we interviewed...

roadies and Jerry, the Irish doorman at Abbey Road.

A question like: '"When did you last hit someone? '"

And then the next question would be:

"Were you in the right and would you do it again if the same thing happened?"

Questions like: "What does the Dark Side of the Moon mean to you?"

And, of course, understanding that Dark Side of the Moon...

was not yet the title of the album.

Or not, in as far as anyone else was concerned.

They were actually asking people what does the other side of the moon mean?

Which is why Jerry, the Irish doorman, said:

"There is no dark side of the moon, really. It's all dark."

Stuff like that, which, when you put it into a context on the record...

suddenly develops its own, much more powerful meaning.

For me, rock 'n'roll just means that there aren't any rules.

It's just whatever you want to do, however you want to do it.

People say it sounds so professional and so slick.

I'd have to argue that, even today, I wouldn't say that my technique...

or some of the others' techniques were particularly in the brilliant area.

If you talk about technique, we were really crap when we started.

We really were pretty crummy. We didn't have any technique at all.

Like I say, it should be anything you want it to be, rock 'n'roll.

If it's moving any people in any way at all, then it's doing its job.

In the '70s, I don't know if you can pinpoint what was happening...

but a lot of influences were coming together and becoming refined.

And a lot of the groups, you would find, would spend months doing a record...

which was, at that time, unusual.

And Queen certainly brought in, I think, unconscious influences.

We were all brought up contrary to the way people are brought up today.

We were brought up with all this kind of...

show-type music around us, and with a lot of classical music around us.

So when we found that we had all these incredible tools in the studio to use...

we used them to make something which was...

parallel to an orchestral arrangement, I suppose.

Bohemian Rhapsody itself, Freddie would normally come in with note paper...

and he would write out the chords that he wanted to sing.

Freddie had a lot of pages of these things...

and we went, "This is going to be... Take some time."

If we make these harmonies, then we got...

We had this technique, which we called '"the sausage machine. '"

We would sing a line, all together in unison...

till you'd have three of those, and we'd bounce it to one track.

We'd then do the next part, three, bounce that to one track.

The next part, the next part.

There would be like three or six or nine parts sometimes...

and so, by the time you've finished, you had a lot of voices singing those parts.

If the '70s represent something which became refined...

I think the best of the '70s had the balance.

You had groups who were able to make, in recorded work...

something different and special...

but were really excellent at performing on stage.

So the two skills became parallel, but different.

And certainly, if there was a criticism, that people weren't...

putting as much raw energy in, I think you had to be there.

It wasn't really lacking if you were in Madison Square Garden...

or the Forum at a Queen show, or an Aerosmith show...

or, you know, a Zeppelin show.

For me, it was very gut-wrenching.

When I walked on stage, I thought, '"Well, tonight I have this opportunity...

"to maybe reach somebody the way that I felt like I was reached...

"when I was 15."

I still get butterflies.

I don't need any laxatives, because before that intro music goes on...

I'm in and out that can like a fiddler's elbow.

We had a mission. Our mission was to go out on stage...

and make sure that we made believers out of everybody.

You're on, guys.

Rock 'n' roll!

- It's gonna be great. - No, that's not an exit.

- We don't want an exit. - That's true.

- Let's not lose it, now. - Where the fuck is he?

You know, he should be here.

You go right straight through this door here, down the hall, turn right...

This way.

Hello, Cleveland!

You definitely get a buzz being up there.

You can very much get caught up in what you're doing, trip over everything.

You got to keep one eye open and one eye shut.

I always liked those people that looked a little aloof and floating around...

and for myself, I got to dance around monitors and speakers and wires...

and enough of the arguments with people to tape it down.

If they can't, they don't. Better for me that I don't trip and fall over.

You never know what to expect.

The strangest of things happen in the middle of a show, you know.

I'm out there on a cherry picker...

that huge, long arm which reaches out over the audience.

The times that thing... It took half an hour to get it back again.

And one night it would just break down and it was just stuck out there.

I finished Space Oddity, and I put the phone down.

I just didn't know what to do, because I'm just still stuck out there.

The audience is down there, and all these hands are coming up.

"What do I do? Do I do the rest of the show out there?"

That was the early days of rock theater, I guess.

I had so many of those dreadful escapades.

We were supposed to breathe fire, and I really wanted it to hit the ceiling.

The ceiling was 40 feet up in the air, but in my mind I could reach it.

So the fireball that came out of my mouth was too big.

And on the very first show that we did on a big stage...

the right side of my face caught fire, the hair and everything.

I later realized that if I didn't spray my hair with hairspray, it wouldn't catch fire.

Because the stuff says clearly, "flammable."

"Gene Simmons, this means you."

Somebody threw a chicken on stage. This was in Toronto.

I'm from Detroit. I've never been on a farm in my life.

I said, "A chicken. It's got wings. It'll fly."

I threw it back in the audience. I thought it was going to fly away into the sunset.

It went right into the audience, and the audience tore it to pieces...

and threw the parts back up on stage. The next thing I knew, it was...

"Alice Cooper bites head off chicken and drinks the blood...

"and tears the face," and all this stuff.

That's what the papers said the next day.

I got a call from Frank Zappa, and he says, "Did you do that?"

I said, "No." He said, "Don't tell anybody that. They love it."

The beauty of the '70s was...

there was no MTV.

Not saying that MTV is not any good.

But if you liked a band or an artist...

you had to physically go to the gig.

So there was more excitement.

"I am going to go and see Led Zeppelin, or I'm going to see the Rolling Stones."

We used to have incredible acts opening up for us.

There were bands that were great bands, you know.

And you gotta go and follow them. When KISS opened for us...

there were flames leaping out of the stage.

And there's us four going, "How can we ever top that?"

KISS believed the show was the end all and be all of everything.

It should be overkill. You know, everything, too much.

Overload of senses.

The makeup just evolved.

Gene was crazy about horror films.

And he came up with this demon persona.

And what made it believable was we were really KISS world.

They did that stuff, and the audience loved it.

They ate it up. It was big time wrestling. It's like, the spectacle.

We were, like, shaking our heads. We're just trying to play music.

And we were going, "What are we going to have to do now?"

About a year and a half into our existence, we were playing stadiums.

It really exploded big-time.

That's when the makeup...

really seeped into the American consciousness.

That's when we became trapped a bit by the makeup.

We couldn't go to restaurants. Our heads were wanted.

Initially, it was exciting, and then it got to be...

a little bit, sort of, too much.

There were KISS movies...

and the pin ball machines, and the garbage pails, and you name it.

They wanted merchandise, they wanted toys. "We'll give you toys."

This is KISS. Each sold separately.

And you can put them in any crazy pose you want.

They were the first band I ever saw have dolls, have games...

have all these side things on.

I mean, those guys took it to home.

I think rock 'n' roll for the longest time was boring...

especially the American bands, who were fat and ugly...

and didn't really care about their appearance.

In fact, I remember going to see a lot of the San Francisco bands...

and they'd literally turn their backs to you and play like that.

I thought it was the biggest insult. "What am I buying a ticket for?

"I could stay at home and put on the record.

"Why are you turning your back to me?"

Everybody was a little bit tired of peace and love.

Everybody got tired of this, and everybody got tired of, "Yeah, man."

Something needed to happen that was a backlash...

to all that placid, laid-back thing...

and we hit it with everything.

I would like to think Alice Cooper opened the doors to theatrics.

Our band drove the stake through the heart of the Love Generation.

We were just a rock 'n'roll band with a lot of good ideas.

It had a little Vegas, a little Broadway, but it was really rock 'n'roll.

The average kid had no idea what to think...

because he'd come in, he'd see the show, and he lived in Columbus, Ohio...

and he'd walk out of there going, "What was that?"

That was like a truck hit him.

I thought it was nuts. I was just so blown away when he hung himself...

and he also had some good songs.

I don't care about anybody else that pulled off the makeup, seedy trip.

I mean, he was, like, the first one.

He was rock history for having done it in the first place...

and he was the only one that ever has been able to pull it off...

and do it so it was really cool.

I played the part of Alice. I created him.

I don't know where he comes from, to be honest with you.

I know that if they say 20 minutes to stage time...

everybody leaves, and then I turn into Alice.

After that, for the next hour and a half, nobody gets near me.

The older I get, the more that I realize what kind of escapist attraction there is...

to taking on the role of somebody else. Because I've been through that.

I love theater. I thought it was great.

I thought it was a way of doing something exciting with the stage and rock.

The idea of a prefabricated rock star...

one that didn't exist, a sampled rock star...

I thought was kind of cool.

The time that I really put it all together, and really tried to make it work...

was on the first tour of this character called Ziggy Stardust that I'd developed.

The theater elements were...

somewhere between Clockwork Orange and kabuki theater.

Just, you know, grab this and grab that.

A real ragbag of information that didn't actually make any real literal sense.

In interviews and stuff, I would just either quote James Dean or Nietzsche.

It didn't really matter because all the ingredients that went into it...

people would interpret that, and I'd agree with them.

He represents it all to me:

Excitement, space.

I'm just a space cadet. He's the commander.

I thought, "Golly, what power."

I let the whole thing trickle over into my life to such a degree that...

it affected me dramatically, traumatically, for quite a few years during the '70s.

Yes, I have a kind of strange...

psychosomatic death-wish thing.

Because I was so lost in Ziggy...

it resulted in schizophrenia.

How much did Ziggy's death have to do with his own personality...

or with circumstances in which he existed?

Yeah, really it was it was his own personality...

being unable to cope with the circumstances he found himself in...

which is being an almighty, prophet-like, superstar rocker.

He found that he didn't know what to do with it once he got there.

It's an archetype, really. The definitive rock 'n' roll star.

It often happens.

I don't think anybody can really prepare themselves...

for fame on the level that we've had.

When you try to think about what it'll be like to be famous...

you can only comprehend it within the scope of what you've experienced...

or what you know to be out there.

It's so beyond that.

There's hot-and-cold-running women...

drugs, alcohol, food, limousines, jets...

and you very quickly begin to believe that that's the way to live.

We're pampered beyond belief as rock 'n'roll superstars.

I still like to get pampered. I'm not being hypocritical...

but not to the degrees that we prance around and we're very spoiled.

Although I never tie my own shoelace. I mean, never.

It's just not the thing done in rock 'n' roll.

Ironically, you become a rock star...

because you don't want to do what people tell you to do.

It's the classic thing. You want to rebel, to have control of your own life.

What happens is, if you get famous, you lose that control again...

because so many people are looking for pieces of you.

You've suddenly, like, you got friends you thought you'd never have.

Hi, fellas. How you doing?

A lot of people show up...

and you have to kind of sort out why they're showing up.

Yes, Bobbie Fleckman.

You know, like suckerfish, those people on the sidelines. Lawyers, managers...

everybody's starting to call you, "Hey, babe."

Everybody wants to start advising you on what to do...

and I get confused, you know.

This is it. I got it. I fucking have it.

'Cause it plays off that. There was this author a few years ago...

I couldn't work out how these people had those jobs, and how they retained them.

Because such an awful amount of them seemed to be such complete dickheads.

Artie Fufkin, Polymer Records.

I'm your promo man here in Chicago. Nice to meet you. I love you guys.

When you're allowed the self-indulgence of being anybody you want to be...

and having somebody tell you that that's okay...

it's very frightening.

And in a lot of ways, your art will suffer.

I think the '70s was the time...

when that danger became most apparent...

because that's really when everybody started making a lot of money.

When you have money, it buys you influence.

When you have influence, it buys you power.

Well, fame in the '70s...

it equals power.

And then you have the power to get what you want.

So we used it to party.

You know, we were the Toxic Twins.

And we had to live by night, and not by day.

And we slept all day.

And that was marvelous, and it was fun.

When I got sober, I'd get pissed off that I didn't make love to all these women.

I was in the bathroom...

with this guy and that guy, and this girl and that girl...

just filling my nose and filling my arms.

I really didn't get a chance to revel in it.

Remember this?

The torture of fame and success and lots and lots of money...

is not a subject that's guaranteed to win a lot of sympathy with other people.

It was fun for a long time because it was just me and the boys...

and our jet, you know. I mean, how cool could that be?

If you are a millionaire at 20 years old, and you're unattached...

you don't have any responsibility, except to have as much fun as you can.

At least that was the idea in the '70s.

There's more of a social conscience now than there was then.

At that time, it was just: Have fun.

It can be a very privileged existence.

I don't mean in terms of money, but in real life.

What you get to spend your time doing. I live a very privileged life.

I have always thought it was my responsibility to talk about...

life as it is for everybody.

If I want to write songs that everybody can understand...

then I can't be writing songs about...

living behind a wall in Bel Air.

In my music, I use a personal narrative to talk about things...

that, in final analysis, are more or less universal.

If I am doing it right, then they're not just about my life, but about your life, too.

It was put in my mind very early on...

that you should discover yourself, find what it is and bring it out...

and that's what people will be interested in.

What you have inside. What you have to say.

For me, writing songs is like collecting or harvesting the residue of a life.

It's almost what happened when you take your experiences...

and reflect on them, arrange them in some order.

A lot of the blues players came from very poor backgrounds.

And they had this gift...

of singing about the human element. A lot of it was despair.

And making people laugh at it.

Lot of stuff came out of anger being in rock 'n' roll bands.

It's how you do it. You don't punch your wife or get drunk.

Write a song about it. I'll fix your ass.

At the time when we were doing Rumours, there was this rather unusual situation...

within the workings of the band...

where you had two couples that were in the process of breaking up...

during the making of the album.

So you had all this cross-dialogue going on.

You had John McVie and Christine McVie breaking up.

You had Stevie and myself breaking up.

Go Your Own Way was a song basically directed at Stevie.

Go Your Own Way was Lindsey talking to Stevie...

or not talking to Stevie.

It was basically, "On your bike, girl."

Whenever that song was at its peak...

that was Stevie and Lindsey playing out whatever roles they were playing out.

Some heavy stuff went on with that song.

The Rumours album went way through the ceiling.

At some point, it became a phenomenon...

in which the sales and the success of it...

really became disproportionate to what the music itself was.

I always perceived it as having something to do with the fact...

that it was a musical soap opera and I think all of that came through.

The emotion of that, the truthfulness of that came through on the grooves.

The Rumours album turned into a freak, really.

We weren't going to complain about it, and all the interviewers would go on:

'"Well, how much money have you made? That's what, 15 million albums now? '"

But we got through it and then we went into a situation...

where the likes of Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees...

a lot of these bands were selling a lot of albums.

Big numbers that hadn't been done before.

Frampton Comes Alive was released in January 1976...

and it became...

this gi-normous record-breaking record...

and became the biggest-selling record of all time.

The 55,000 that showed up today at Anaheim...

were there because of only one person:

The 26-year-old Englishman whose name is magic enough...

to have all these rock fans standing out in the hot sun...

from 1:00 in the afternoon to 8:00 tonight.

There were quite a few boom years there.

There were a lot of people who were realizing...

that you could make a ton of money off of concerts on a large scale.

We were certainly in the middle of that...

until the bottom dropped out of that, which was not a bad thing.

The way, I think, Frampton Comes Alive changed the industry...

was that it made everybody realize...

that there were a lot of people out there, more people than usual...

that could buy a record.

There was a bigger audience than they'd thought...

which turned it into a much bigger business almost overnight.

Do you feel like we do?

Yes!

Frampton Comes Alive...

was the first sort of generally recognized multi-platinum album.

And when people realized you could make that much money...

selling records, they became disinterested in fringe artists.

People within the industry became disinterested in fringe artists.

People started investing everything in these mega-platinum artists.

And that amount of money also attracted...

corporations that had no essential interest in music.

They had only interest in money-producing enterprises...

of any kind. Gulf and Western started buying up record companies...

and record companies started being run from accounting offices...

rather than from A & R offices.

Definitely it was a new game, as you would say, a new ball game.

There was the corporate thing in the '70s...

where people were making big stadium shows...

and the music didn't seem to be quite as good as it should have...

or it didn't seem to be being made for quite the right reasons...

and you were having certain things that weren't so good, thrust down your throat.

Time to get records on the radio.

We have a shot this week. The album is a smash.

There's such a buzz going on. Out of sight. It is a monster.

That was the beginning of that.

There is this adage in the business...

that if something works, run in into the ground.

Here are 10 Frampton albums for jocks.

There are very few moves in popular music now...

which haven't already been plotted out and considered...

by some major corporation who will put the money behind them.

There are not many accidents.

They got to the point to where they were putting things on you...

to measure your heartbeat to see what songs would work.

When you try to do music like that...

and put it on the assembly line as a commodity...

it changes every time.

Up until that live album came out...

I'd always just sat down, wherever I was, wherever I'd gone to write...

and written for myself.

I knew I had to write an album...

but I was basically writing stuff for my own enjoyment.

Then Frampton Comes Alive comes along, and I go, '"What do they want now? '"

And all of a sudden, the way I was thinking about writing changed.

There was a pressure to write for other people instead of myself.

The only way artists...

can do things is to do it for themselves...

and trying to second-guess...

what the public wants or likes is kind of a fool's game.

Thank you.

When you got to the '70s...

ourselves, Earth, Wind & Fire, Sly and the Family Stone...

who was an influence on all of us...

had music where you can dance, and it was still rock 'n' roll.

It was dance music. So we went on and on...

and as the funk bands started coming out...

they really started dancing, and that became money for the companies.

The companies tried to isolate...

the part of the record that worked, that made you dance.

So your first notion is that it's a drumbeat...

but the mistake is that it's not one drumbeat.

When they started isolating it to one drumbeat and one sound...

don't nothing get on your nerves...

more than some rhythmic that's the same thing over and over again.

It's like making love with one stroke.

To tell you the facts, that is.

The machine age took its revenge, I think, on music...

and disco music became the antithesis of what music used to be...

which was a way to communicate.

The music, instead of being an anthem...

or instead of being a voice, became an accompaniment.

It was almost the anthem of alienation.

Halls were full of people who were mindlessly dancing...

to a rhythm that was basically a machine.

I think that it was kind of hard for the white people to get into...

R & B music because the beat is so sophisticated...

and hard for...

the kind of dancing that the white people are used to doing.

This clearly defined beat that is so apparent in disco music...

now makes it easier to learn to do our kind of dancing.

There you go. Right foot on front.

Right foot, left foot.

Having fun?

Most rock 'n' rollers that I knew had a real problem with disco.

I like a lot of disco music, but I detest most of it.

I really hate disco.

I just remember disco and hating it so much.

Number one: You could do it all on machines...

so you didn't need any people, and that put a lot of people out of work.

The record companies wouldn't give us a second look...

so we really didn't have any choice...

other than play disco music...

and we weren't about to do that.

Disco got so big and it was generic.

The record companies didn't have to deal with the personality.

They didn't have to give big contracts...

like they had to do with the rock 'n' rollers.

They made it real big.

With rock 'n' roll...

there was a drastic, violent reaction to disco.

A huge box containing thousands of disco records was blown up.

We are free again.

Fans stormed out onto the field in the thousands.

Disco records were hurled like Frisbees. Bonfires were set.

Fistfights broke out.

Our goal in the '70s was to destroy disco.

We saw that as a terrible menace to music.

What you need, man?

Chopping up the old drum machine, are you?

We have to remember the most important thing about rock is the attitude.

Because, you know, it's not supposed to be really good.

I think Petty is great.

Refugee was the most amazing sounding record.

I remember kicking the door open.

The great thing about Petty...

is the simplicity. He's a great songwriter.

Damn The Torpedoes was very important for me because...

in the writing I found a jumping-off place.

I found, like, '"This is what I do. '"

'Cause you don't know.

You do some of this, you do some of that...

and then suddenly...

"Oh, this is what we do.

"And this is our sound.

"This isn't the Byrds or anybody else. This is us."

The good thing about rock music in my mind...

it will go for a while, and then it will get very predictable, and then...

they're just bound to shake it up again.

And I love the little times when they shake it up.

In the '70s, I suppose I was aware...

that there was a connection with the fans, the people that came to see you.

There was a greater connection to be made than was being made at the time.

When we went to do our show...

my idea was that the show should be part circus, part political rally...

part spiritual meeting, part dance party.

You had to go back to the physical in the end, I always felt.

It was like, it sort of began with the physical...

and you're supposed to end with the physical.

I have seen Bruce, yes. It's a long concert. It was very long.

He's excellent, he's very talented, but that was...

when he obviously didn't have anywhere to go after the show.

He just played for about five, maybe even six hours.

It was rather long.

That's all I can stand.

How I ended up playing that long...

I'm not really sure.

It sort of just happened.

I can't stand no more!

In the end, the idea was...

there would be some sort of physical liberation...

and, '"You get their ass moving, and the spirit will follow. '"

Also, playing to the point of exhaustion was important to me.

The No Nukes show was a lot of fun...

and our slot was immediately before Bruce Springsteen...

who was headlining that night. It was his birthday, I think.

And people were yelling '"Bruce, '" all night long.

Too bad the guy's name wasn't Melvin or something.

Jackson Browne, at the side of the stage, he says to me:

"Listen, if you go on, and you think they're booing you...

"don't get thrown because they're really just saying 'Bruce."'

And I said, "What's the difference?"

The '70s for me was a time when I felt really grounded...

in the music that I was making.

For me, that was the decade when I was sort of just kind of telling my story...

focusing on what I thought that might be, what it might be about...

trying to not make the mistakes...

that I'd seen some other people make, or slip into...

not get distracted...

by too many of the different types of choices...

and keeping basically the idea of the music...

and the audience in front of me as the essential thing...

and as this thing that gave my own story meaning.

I didn't see myself as some gifted, genius-type of guy.

I felt I was a hard-working guy.

I worked really hard at learning to play...

and I worked hard at learning to write and sing...

and I always felt like...

I was the guy in the front row or the third row...

that picked a guitar up and got onstage.

I think it comes down to the performer and the audience...

and that's what it's about, in some fashion.

It can be any room.

I've had great nights in little clubs in New Jersey...

where you felt as alive and heightened as in any big place you ever played.

One, two, three, four...

When it happens, there's some direct recognition...

of some sort of mutual humanity...

and a good time is had by all.

I think music changed when Bruce Springsteen came on the scene.

I think if it wasn't for Bruce Springsteen...

we may have gone in a very scary direction.

We may have gotten to the point where disco music ruled...

and then I would have had to quit.

My fellow Americans...

our long national nightmare is over.

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