All language subtitles for JIMI HENDRIX - Guitar Hero 2 MKV -Rom

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.