All language subtitles for LOU REED - (Classic Albums)

#..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 heroe 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 barel 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