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.

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.

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.

What a nice surprise

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.

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.

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."

Joni and I stayed in New York at my apartment, where she wrote the song Woodstock.

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.

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.

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.

a rock'n'roll star

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.

in the wee, wee hours

cos of drizzling showers

He come movin' up with me

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.

I'd become airborne...

Wow! This young guy with the guitar is really neat.

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.

No, baby

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?

and buy a pickup

and try to fix up

I was sitting on the trunk of my car and he saw me and he pulled in

and, is ...

"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.

If he'd been a girl, I would have kissed him!

His power as a songwriter is undeniable.

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.

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.

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?

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."

They were worried about the counterculture.

Godless communism.

their minds...

Corruption of youth.

Drugs.

Hey! What's that sound...?

He's communicating with his peers and the cop says, "You can't do it. Get off the street!"

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.