All language subtitles for DIRE STRAITS - (Classic Albums)-en

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.

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.

Harvest was a huge success

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

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.

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."

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.