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... #

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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?