Original subtitles

If we believe in them, we'll stick with them. We're not going to drop an artist if they don't sell.

not to cry...

Geffen's close relationship with his acts

led Asylum to to sign some of the most talented, established and interesting songwriters in LA.

But just a year after its birth, its solo artists would produce a band

that would become one of the most successful acts in music history.

For any musician serious about making the big time,

LA was the only place to be,

and by 1970, an new wave of artists had followed the heroe of the counterculture west.

Among them were Glenn Frey,

a guitar player from Detroit,

and JD Souther, a songwriter from Texas.

Befriended by local hero Jackson Browne,

the three young troubadours found cheap digs in a Mexican neighbourhood near downtown LA,

the unlikely setting for another songwriting collective

that would, once again, transform the city's musical identity.

its heart removed

as I can run...

I moved to Echo Park

and was instantly surrounded by people coming up through this...

beautiful cloud, this merger of literature and music

that seemed to take place around acoustic guitars.

Glenn Frey and I roomed together for a while, Jackson moved out, I moved downstairs,

Glenn moved out, Jackson and I both got houses on Camrose Court,

all writing in different combinations with each other. It was growing all the time.

That was the little ball of dust that became a tornado.

The Echo Park posse would provide the songwriting basis for the biggest band in LA's history.

Their musical inspiration would come from a raucous music club half a mile west of the Sunset Strip.

I mean, it was a heart of a scene that encompassed James Taylor,

Ry Cooder, Randy Newman, Little Feat,

John David Souther...

There was 20 or 30 people that all became very good friends

and would, on any given night, go to the Troubadour bar

and then drive a short distance up into the canyons to party at one or the other's houses

and germinations of songs and love affairs, and terminations of love affairs, and deals were made

within two or three miles of the Sunset Strip.

LA's singer-songwriters had emerged from the folk tradition.

At the Troubadour, they absorbed another form or reassuringly authentic American music.

As the idealism of the '60s faded,

country music would offer LA's troubadours a new sense of identity.

at night

At the centre of LA's country revival was a charismatic cowboy called Gram Parsons.

Country music was so horrible

and you didn't even imagine that you would dare listen to it,

but he sat me down in his room, took out his little record player

and forced us to listen to George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and made us get it.

During a brief stint in the Byrds,

and as a driving force in the Flying Burrito Brothers,

Parsons was just one of a large pool of players

infatuated with the music and mythology of the West.

Chris Hillman, in the Burritos and the Byrds,

he'd been a bluegrass mandolin player,

I'd been a bluegrass banjo player,

Jerry Garcia had been a bluegrass banjo player,

so they were people who became influential musicians

in the late '60s, early '70s,

who started out in folk but had been off into the bluegrass thing as well.

One of the most influential figures, and the undisputed queen of the Troubadour scene,

was yet another exile in LA.

I'm going to do a truck-driver's song now.

I live with a bunch of people I knew from Tucson, on the beach, and we started hanging round the Troubadour.

It's responsible for the entire music scene.

This song was written by my friend Lowell George from Little Feat, and it's called Willin'.

Of all the people responsible for the country-rock revolution,

maybe Linda Ronstadt is the one that's overlooked the most,

because she's a woman and considered a pop artist.

Linda, in many respects, was the glue that held this together,

because she never was a singer-songwriter - she has barel written a song in her life -

but Linda picked singers, and songwriters in particular, brilliantly.

to Tucumcari

ever been made...

She was the vehicle for JD Souther,

for Warren Zevon,

Karla Bonoff, Eric Kaz. She introduced me to Willin', by Lowell George.

In June 1971,

Linda Ronstadt's boyfriend, JD Souther,

and his friend Glenn Frey were in a country duo.

But when JD decided to pursue a solo career,

it seemed that Frey, despite being assigned to David Geffen's Asylum Records,

was out on a limb.

By the end of the year,

he was fronting what would become LA's biggest band.

Originally I told Glenn and JD

that Glenn should form a band,

that he wasn't strong enough as a solo artist to go by himself.

Glenn wanted a bigger thing, more sound,

and I wanted less,

I wanted to be like Jackson and just go play by myself.

I had left the Flying Burrito Brothers.

I'd hang out at the Troubadour,

and I'd run into Glenn Frey and Don Henley.

I found Don from this band, Shiloh. I heard them at the Troubadour.

Linda Ronstadt's producer, John Boylan, was helping them.

He told them to get Randy Meisner on bass, they thought that was a good idea.

They were missing a guitar player.

We told them they should get Bernie Leadon.

So I called Boylan and he said, "Yeah."

So the original Eagles were four people,

Glenn Frey, Don Henley, myself and Randy Meisner.

It's serious!

I never doubted that they'd be big.

We wanted him to get us on Atlantic Records,

he said, "Well, I can probably do that

"or you can be the first band on my new label, Asylum."

Then he was going to be our manager AND our record company president -

obviously, there's a conflict of interest there,

but we did it because we were sure that David was going to succeed.

The Eagles, an unashamedly ambitious band of country rockers,

seemed an incongruous addition

to Asylum's roster of earnest singer-songwriters.

But after a brief apprenticeship as Linda Ronstadt's backing band,

they made their first public appearance

in a tiny art gallery in Venice, California.

MUSIC: "Witchy Woman" by the Eagles

The first time The Eagles played was at an art opening for Boyd Elder,

our friend from Texas.

Joni Mitchell and Mama Cass and David Geffen was there,

Ned Doheny there was, you know, the whole gang.

Everybody was dancing on this wet concrete floor with beer all over it,

and the Eagles were there playing Witchy Woman over and over again.

We only knew seven songs,

so we played the same seven songs over and over.

It was fun. Joni was dancing.

They were the apex of the California sound.

It expressed the sunshine and the warmth,

they were the core of it.

A magical combination of people who could create their material,

who could pick the best of other people's material,

and roll it up again in one of those very dusted musical packages.

Helped by JD Souther and Jackson Browne,

the Eagles wrote songs that would become emblematic of '70s LA.

But not everybody was thrilled by their carefully crafted brand of country rock.

Their take on how to do it

is to reproduce the record every time perfectly, note for note,

and it works for them, you know,

it makes a good show for the crowd, but to me it's...

..boring.

They take no chances. Ever.

a corner...

The Eagles' reward for leaving nothing to chance

was a hit album and three number-one singles.

It started in the '60s.

We had a problem with the word "commercial",

and everybody said,

"We don't want to be commercial."

Commercial was like the Monkees, it's like the Turtles,

and commercial meant success.

For the sake of the audience, you're the Monkees.

When we got together, we stated the intention -

this band is about doing really well, becoming famous and making a lot of money.

That was our goal.

It was a goal that they achieved with their debut album,

confirming the denim-clad, long-haired Western troubadour

as the new image of mainstream commercial success.

The Eagles' next record was once again was written and conceived

with the help of Jackson Browne and JD Souther.

When Jackson turned 21, I gave him The Album Of Gunfighters.

There were the bodies of slain outlaws in it,

John Wesley Hardin's shotgun-riddled body...

Underneath, you could read about how all this happened,

and, in a way, it sort of became the template for that Desperado record.

The notion of cowboys, you know, those wild, taciturn heroes,

stepping into a saloon

and changing everyone's lives for ever with a single shot or comment.

It's a mythological moment that caught on.

On Desperado, the Eagles invented a collective identity

directly inspired by their country roots...

and by the ultimate American fantasy.

As young guys 100 years ago, rather than being rock'n'roll guitar players,

they might well have been rock'n'roll gunslingers - they would have been carrying guns instead of guitars -

so we decided to do this Western motif shoot way out in the Malibu Hills.

It was almost like a time-warp

because it really did feel like we were back in the 1800s.

It was so real. The guys would come running down the street

with their guns blazing, and the Eagles, and it was very heroic!

In the '60s, LA's singer-songwriters had portrayed themselves as heroes of the counterculture.

The Eagles had re-cast themselves as fictional outlaws,

an escapism that marked a timely disengagement from the political world around them.

There can be no whitewash... at the Whitehouse.

'Richard Nixon as the President,'

valiums were on the rise.

People were taking downers

just to anaesthetise themselves against the reality of this rightist regime

that was going from Vietnam to Cambodia with napalm.

is the life of an outlaw...

What that did to music

was, I think, for any person who wanted to be a player and continue,

was to stop bitching.

To shut up.

What's in now is songs of consolation that can be marketed

in the greater reality of a Republican regime.

The songs were more handsome, and a mile wide and an inch deep.

MUSIC: "Desperado" by the Eagles

But the Eagles' Western escapade was a commercial flop.

They would be forced to rethink their country roots

and re-invent their cowboy image.

And there was more bad news from their record company.

Steve Ross, who ran Warners in those days, came to me

and said that he wanted to buy it

and, uh, he offered me $7 million for it,

which, at the time, seemed like a staggering amount of money,

and I had watched Sonny and Cher go from the biggest act in the world to nothing,

and Otis Redding die in a plane crash,

and I thought, "Jeez! $7 million!" It was such a huge number.

It ended up being worth...

..so much more money than I sold it for

but, you know, I'm doing OK!

Geffen and Roberts' management, our management,

comes to us...and our record company,

and they say to us, "We've sold Asylum Records to Warner Brothers,

"we're splitting up the management company, you have to find new management." We're, like, "What?!"

Geffen continued to manage Asylum Records, now owned by Warner Brothers,

but he would be forced to hand over the Eagles' personal management

to another formidable hustler, Irving Azoff.

The first thing I think Irving did was turn around and sue Geffen

to get the Eagles' publishing back from Warner Brothers Music.

You know, in success, people feel like they're entitled to more,

forgetting that, when they made these deals,

they had nothing and nobody was interested in them.

When Warner Brothers merged Asylum with Elektra Records,

another independent label it had purchased two years earlier,

it signalled a shift in the tone of LA's record business.

The change was that more and more managers were coming to the party.

The lawyers were getting involved.

When it became more business and less music...I left.

What's happening in the process,

which I served gladly,

is the corporatisation of rock.

I mean, the music died around the middle '70s.

At least in terms of everything that defined LA

a decade earlier.

If you go back to the Strip in the late '60s,

there was a kind of Utopian dimension,

and I guess we were so carried away by that spirit

that people failed to see how much of it

was also about carrying people forward into Tower Records

or into a whole brave, new world of consumption

in which rock'n'roll was simply the soundtrack.

In an increasingly corporate climate,

the social scene was also moving -

away from bars like the Troubadour

to a more exclusive class of nightclub.

Among the clients that we had was a guy named David Blue - a friend of ours, Joni's, etc -

and we had booked all of our biggest acts into the Troubadour and I called Doug Weston

and asked him to put David Blue in there, and he wouldn't do it.

I said, "I've given you Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young, the Eagles, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell,

"Linda Ronstadt, etc. I want you to play David Blue."

He said, "I'm not going to play David Blue."

I said, "If you don't play David Blue, I'll start a club."

And he said, "You think you can start a club?"

I said, "Yeah, I think I can start a club, and if you don't put David Blue in the Troubadour, I will."

And he said, "Fuck you, do it."

So we did.

The Roxy represented a new kind of Sunset Strip venue

in which the Eagles and their entourage found themselves at the centre of an exclusive elite.

'All of a sudden,'

there was an awful lot of money,

a lot of celebrity,

a lot of, "You can come in here, you can't."

In their songwriting, the Eagles had begun to chronicle the mid-'70s hedonistic lifestyle

of which they were the prime players.

The summer after the fourth album, I left.

For a long time, I felt I couldn't talk about it,

partly because it had to do with my own personal drug use,

too much partying,

and I needed to get away from it.

And when I left,

the whole acoustic, bluegrass, folk, acoustic guitar thing

went away.

Bernie Leadon was replaced by guitar hero Joe Walsh,

as the Eagles ditched their acoustic roots,

and followed the musical drift towards stadium rock.

Was there a point in the '70s at which you realised

that many of your contemporaries had become self-satisfied and smug about their own positions?

I realised that about myself but I didn't make any judgments on the rest of 'em.

In 1974, Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young embarked on a world tour,

the extravagance of which clashed wildly with the morality of their songs.

We had 85 people in the crew,

we had helicopters, jets,

limousines sat in front of the hotel 24 hours a day...

It was just an exercise in excess.

You're top of the charts, everybody loves you,

you've got enough women to satisfy you for years,

you have enough money and the ability to buy the best drugs,

and, you know, it takes over,

and it took over.

From my perspective, these were the guys that were talking about freedom, about justice,

about respect for Mother Earth, about getting back to the Garden.

It was very hard to make sense of it all.

All of them represent, to me, the liberal Hollywood concepts.

They favoured money

and they'd just forget that sometimes,

that it walks this thin line.

But, ultimately, it was about being successful.

By 1975, LA's once politically conscious musicians

were consumed by cynicism,

a mood fuelled by a substance that had replaced marijuana and acid

as Hollywood's drug of choice.

One of its earliest advocates and biggest casualties was David Crosby.

David had bowls of it, big wooden bowls of cocaine,

and he walked around stark naked, with his pudgy little belly,

and it was different. It felt OK.

It felt all right in, like, '69, '70.

It just... slowly got pretty awful.

between the two

When we started doing cocaine and heroin and speed,

as a generation...

..that essentially degraded the original spirit that we had

in that group of people, in California,

to a very low level...

make me sick

..and the shift from one to the other was a palpable thing.

You could feel it.

More greed, more anger, more craziness,

more...

..darkness.

MUSIC: "Hotel California" by the Eagles

In less than a decade,

collective optimism had given way to a ruthlessly self-centred culture

and, in 1976, with an honesty typical of LA's singer-songwriters,

the Eagles captured the mood with an acerbic tribute

to a city whose appeal had proved seductive long before the '70s.

The whole vision of Hotel California -

finally, the Pilgrims come to Paradise,

only to find a seedy broken-down hotel on a boring ocean,

where people are all thinking about suicide -

this is a fairly consistent vision.

Remember, in the 1940s,

all the great stars, and half of Bloomsbury, were in Los Angeles,

along with a whole generation of American writers,

and they ended up rehearsing every possible form of despair and alienation,

every kind of delight and euphoria.

Everybody can find some part of Los Angeles

that can be the bearer either of their dreams

or their nightmares.

or this could be hell...

So, in a way, the emotional landscape that the rock generation lived in

was repeating what the writers had gone through in the 1920s,

veering back and forth between the land of sunshine and the land de noir.

Hotel California...

The Eagles had evolved from a generation of artists

whose determination to succeed had brought them to LA,

and in the same year as Hotel California, that ambition reached its ultimate peak

when the Eagles released another record

that marked the commercial climax of a ten-year journey.

People always put out the greatest hits albums when the bands are in decline.

I wanted to put it out when they were at their absolute peak.

That album is the biggest-selling album of all time.

The sales of the Eagles' greatest hits prompted the invention of the platinum record.

It was the first in a long line of multi-million-selling albums

commercially and musically inspired by Los Angeles.

And it marked the end of a journey in which the collective ambition

of a tight-knit community of troubadours

had turned LA into the corporate capital of the music world.

Don't miss it. Don't miss it.

but he's not forgotten

a Johnny Rotten

but he's not forgotten...

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd - 2007