Original subtitles

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.

and I am travelling

and in me

that could be...

From a songwriting viewpoint, most songwriters still are in awe of that record.

Blue is an overwhelming album.

All of a sudden, there's this woman writing about personal relationships

on a very profound level,

and it was deeply affecting.

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.

a heart of gold...

Harvest was a huge success

and it kind of put Neil on the map in a very profound way.

a heart of gold

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.

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.

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."

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.

in a shaky voice

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.

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.

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.

she's been with me now

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.

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.

You moonlight ladies

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.

put an end to you

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.

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."

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.

any more...?

Carole King, she played on Sweet Baby James,

so Carole was a huge part of it.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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!

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.

without crying

Asylum's artist-driven ethos was anathema

to the conventions of the music business,

and Geffen's approach to AandR 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.