Original subtitles

what's going down...

I saw dollar signs. I thought, "These guys will do something great!"

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.

from both sides now...

When Judy Collins sang, "I've looked at life from both sides now..."

I recall...

"Clouds' illusions".

We'd never used words like that, and so we discover a new songwriter

named Joni Mitchell.

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.

from both sides now...

Walked in to a coffee house in Florida.

She was singing.

My heart nearly stopped.

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.

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!

But I was wrong, yeah, yeah, yeah

I spent years with the Hollies perfecting the pop song.

Frivolous is not the right word,

but certainly a little shallower than the stuff I was feeling personally.

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.

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.

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.

"That's just the thing we need!"

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.

Crosby said,

"They're crazy. We'll record it. Come on over."

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.

And he said, "Sing it again. That's fabulous!"

"OK, one more time. Just sing it one more time."

The third time, I put my harmony in there and my world changed.

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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.

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!

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."

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-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?"

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 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.

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.

at the edge of town

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?