Original subtitles

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