Stairway to Heaven How the Brits Rocked America: Go West

It was reported that Bernstein has banned the version of his song America by The Nice.

He is reported to have said

that they'd turned it into an anti-American dirge.

-We asked if this was true.

-The Nice?

-You haven't heard of them?

-No.

This programme contains some strong language

For British rock music in the '70s,

America truly was the land of opportunity.

The thing is about the size of America,

if you can see that door opening slightly,

you've got to kick it down, kick that door through and just go racing in.

Between 1967 and 1976, British rock groups became lords

and masters of a new stadium-based touring empire.

Oh, my goodness, I hope the Beatles are on after us.

Cos there's just too many people.

They ain't come just to see us, have they?

The radio stations would want to know,

TV stations would want to know.

A Lord Mayor would come and give you the key to the city and you'd go,

"Oh. Thank you.

"What does this open?"

In a decade famed for its excess, this is how British rock,

in all its varieties, came, saw and conquered America.

It's always that sense of being on the freeway,

of going west. It's the wagon trains, this pioneering spirit.

"Oh, you just played the States?" Yeah, you know.

"Oh, wow." We just went up in everybody's esteem.

Once you've played the States, boy, you were there.

Ladies and gentlemen. Boys and girls. The chocolate room.

In August 1965, the Beatles played at Shea Stadium

on their second tour of America.

It was a ground-breaking idea.

No band had ever played such a large venue.

With the Beatles we experienced a big thing at Shea Stadium.

We were kind of the first band to play a really big sports stadium.

No-one had done that before, and we played Shea Stadium

and it was 56,000 people.

It was a riot, it was crazy, we couldn't hear ourselves at all,

but it started that kind of thing.

The Beatles' amplification lacked the punch to cut through the screams,

with the result that nobody could hear the music,

including the band.

CROWD SCREAM

For the Beatles, Shea marked the beginning of a transition

from the road to the studio.

However, within a few years,

stadium rock would become the golden ticket for British acts in America.

But first, we needed to create a new sound.

In 1967, Britain created rock.

It was loud, heavy and serious.

THE band leading the charge was Cream.

# Might fill spoons full of water

# They might fill spoons full of tea

# Just a little spoon of your precious love

# Is that enough for me...? #

Cream would become the first British rock band to conquer America,

and they would find a new way to do it.

Instead of relying on radio and television,

they would knuckle down and take their music direct to a new audience.

# Everything's a-fighting about it... #

Up until then, you know, most of the British bands had been hit bands,

you know, The Animals, The Hollies, The Beatles.

And that was the way it was. It was happy, singalong big hits.

The band that broke it all over there really was Cream.

They are the ones that went there in mid-1967

and played in every place there was.

We didn't know how to do it,

and it hadn't been established yet that you could do it.

We would fly into the airport and rent a station wagon

and go to the gig, do the gig, then drive back to the airport

and go to the next place on the plane and rent another station wagon.

Very hi-tech!

# Feel when I dance with you

# We move like the seas... #

Treating America like the A1

and playing nearly 150 dates in less than two years,

Cream did it the hard way,

and created the template for the touring British rock band.

# I feel free... #

The gear went in a truck with our vast crew,

which was two or maybe three guys.

# I can walk down the street There's no-one there... #

We had no PA, so that made it relatively easy.

We just used to sing loud in those days.

Anyone who'd seen the Shea Stadium concert from The Beatles

will kind of get the idea of what our concerts were like.

Little amplifiers, lots of noise and nobody really hearing very much.

Especially the band.

When they could hear, what captivated American audiences

was a new, aggressive sound and attitude,

a strange brew of transatlantic styles.

We were kind of outsiders, interlopers, if you like.

But very soon we discovered that they loved us.

# Strange brew

Kills what's inside of you... #

We were taking blues music

back to the country that had kind of shunned it.

The blues was considered by young blacks to be old hat music

and the whites hadn't really heard much of it, so in a strange way

we were taking their own music back to them

and reintroducing it to them.

At one time when Cream was at its height,

we were grossing more than the next five bands put together.

That's how big we were as a money-making machine.

Cream blazed the trail,

and other British rock bands were quick to follow,

such as The Who,

who headlined their own 23-date coast-to-coast tour in 1968.

A new frontier was opening up,

and one particular British export would come to own it.

On 2nd January 1969, Led Zeppelin arrived in California.

# I've been dazed and confused so long it's not true

# Wanted a woman

# Never bargained for you... #

We played at the Whisky A Go Go in Hollywood

and then we went on to San Francisco.

# Tongue wags so much when I send you to hell... #

It was really clear that we were just making waves from that point.

To play in San Francisco, which we'd all respected the music

so much that had come out of there.

# I said you hurt and abuse

# Telling all of your lies

# Sweet little baby, baby How you mesmerise

# I try to love you, baby But I know what you're seeing... #

They were accepting us and respecting the fact

that we were really way out there, if you like.

In the era of acid-drenched Californian sounds,

this was a British attack on the senses.

America had heard nothing like it.

We definitely had an edge over some of the other bands

that were around, no doubt about it.

We had four musicians on the top of their game,

but they could also play together as a band.

# I told you, baby, time and time and time again

# I would never leave you, woman

# God knows since when

# I'd tell you everything I could... #

Like Cream, Led Zep grew on American blues.

# ..ever do to me, baby

# Baby, break down and I'd cry... #

Not only was their sound unique,

but here was a band bringing stagecraft

back to the home of showbiz.

We'd worked out areas of real dramatic light and shade,

so you could have volume at one minute

and then it'd come down to a whisper.

It could take you there and just keep your hanging, you know.

It spread like wildfire, about the group and what it could do.

It was a show not to be missed.

In less than a year, Led Zeppelin stormed the USA.

Their runaway success opened the floodgates for a generation

of virtuoso prog and blues-based British rock musicians.

Most had served their apprenticeship

as fringe players in the '60s in the UK.

And as a new decade beckoned, they would saddle up and go west.

# Let us be lovers

# We'll marry our fortunes together... #

We'd seen an awful lot of Birmingham Town Hall,

as much as any one man can take of Birmingham Town Hall.

# Got some real estate in my bag... #

As soon as you've invented your thing and started to sell it,

so you have to go very quickly to somewhere bigger - Europe,

or in our day, America.

# Walked off

# Walked off

# Walked off to look for America... #

It was just so exciting.

We rented a big station wagon, which I drove, cos I love driving.

Our gear was travelling in a truck with two crew,

cos that's all we could afford.

I stayed in what I thought were wonderful hotels,

cos I'd been used to B&Bs in the UK.

To have a hotel room that actually had a bathroom,

that was just absolutely unbelievable. I couldn't believe it.

We went across the top and the bottom,

we never went across the middle, but the bottom I really liked. That was good fun.

# Forgot my six-string razor

# Hit the sky

# Halfway to Memphis before I realised... #

We were flying most of the time,

with two sets of gear and one roadie.

# My ex has called... #

We'd go out to the tarmac, slip the guy 20 quid

he'd load it all up and he'd take it all off.

# Now it's a mighty long way down a dusty trail... #

And I wrote a song, All the Way From Memphis.

That was a 20 quid job. All the gear, on the plane, 20 quid.

# All the way from Memphis... #

It wouldn't be luxurious yet.

But for the pilgrim fathers of British rock,

that first American foray would be both the adventure of their lives and hard work.

During that first tour there was a lot of driving involved between gigs.

That's for sure.

I remember getting sort of caught up in the snow drifts

and things like that where the freeway was closed.

I think Richard Cole was driving at the time, and he just

took on this freeway regardless of whether it was closed or not.

I don't think he'd driven across the plains going towards the Rockies,

and just suddenly seeing them rear up

and then rear up and then rear up.

You couldn't help but thinking what the pioneers must have thought.

"How are we going to get across that?"

The first gig was in Detroit at a place called the Grande Ballroom

with Iggy and The Stooges.

And then, from Detroit, which is one hell of a drive,

we drove to Los Angeles on Route 66.

We stayed one night and stopped in a motel in real redneck country.

These cowboys started saying "Look at these freaks, guys."

And we actually got into a fight with these cowboys. A proper fight.

We had to jump in the car, and the tyres were screaming.

These guys throwing stuff at us. There weren't any shots fired.

It wasn't that bad.

By 1970, American amplification had improved dramatically

since the days of Shea Stadium,

in stark contrast to what the bands were used to in Britain.

It was all pretty low-tech still. PA systems weren't that great.

Lights were pretty terrible. If you could hear the singer, you were lucky.

It was very low-tech.

And it was the Americans who upgraded the technology.

We toured here with an American band called Iron Butterfly.

They carried their own PA system. Couldn't believe it.

The extravagance. You carry the PA system with you?

And they had a thing called a monitor system.

Which is those wedges at the front of the stage that everybody sees.

That means you can hear everybody else in the band.

That was fantastic.

-RADIO:

-Have a good day, and thank you, Los Angeles.

Another major technological development

was the birth of FM radio.

Overlooked by the all-powerful AM pop stations,

stereo FM would build a new audience for the new music.

In the country where the car was king,

FM fanned the flames of rock far and wide.

One of the great American experiences is rolling down the freeway,

80mph, top down, cranked up to an amazing radio station.

That's what it's all about.

MUSIC: "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd

It was a great time in that all the stars were aligned,

cos you had a musical and a cultural revolution.

Part of FM radio then was not just the music, but the way was presented.

Hiya, baby. Right on!

If you could see what was coming out through the speakers,

it would look like long hair and kind of cool.

And if you could smell the speakers,

it would probably smell like a joint, you know.

It's a good record, man, outstanding record.

I love it.

I remember sitting in the back of this Cadillac,

and there was speakers all the way round in the car

and this incredible stereo sound, listening to FM radio.

In England, you know, the Ford Cortina, one speaker, AM radio.

It seemed louder and more bassy

and more exciting somehow than the sound of British radio at the time.

They were starting to play full LPs.

A whole side of an album, say 20 minutes.

They'd put it on and you'd get a chance to really understand what these bands were doing.

There was almost a hunger on the part of the American audience

to see what Britain coughed up next.

Like a dose of bad phlegm.

All sorts of weird and wacky things came out of the UK.

And even if it was sometimes rather complex

and difficult to appreciate on first listening,

American radio was quite inviting

and played what they called deep album cuts.

MUSIC: "Us And Them" by Pink Floyd

Of all the new British bands,

Pink Floyd would come to own the airways.

The cinematic soundscapes of Dark Side Of The Moon

sounded so good in your cans

that it became the biggest-selling British album in America,

and still is to this day.

# Us, us, us

# And them, them, them, them... #

The American FM radio story was so geared to our sort of music,

to albums, and in terms of promotion it was brilliant,

cos of course they'd play the whole record.

It was a sort of golden age at one level.

In the previous decade,

New York had been the portal through which Britain had invaded.

But in the '70s, Los Angeles became the hub of the rock world.

# Sun is shining in the sky... #

For those hailing from Britain's rock city, Birmingham, LA was a paradise.

You get off the plane,

all the air smelt like orange blossom.

It was just gorgeous. The sky was blue. The sun was belting down.

It was fantastic.

So it was like totally unlike anything we've ever experienced.

So we get round the corner to the hotel, which was the Hyatt.

On Sunset. And it was all, like, magical.

# ..here today Hey, hey, hey

# Mr Blue Sky

# Please tell us why

# You had to hide away for so long

# So long... #

We got in there and went for a walk in the afternoon,

and in this open-top sports car came this car full of girls,

and as they came past they went "Woo-hoo,"

and we all went, "It's good here, isn't it?"

For a long-haired British rock musician in the '70s,

America was a stairway to heaven.

We had the best of everything. We really did.

And we probably abused it in a lot of ways,

but we did have anything we wanted. I mean, anything.

Drugs, booze, women.

Anything you'd want was available then.

And that's the way it was. It was just like that, you know.

I'd always find it funny that we were searched

coming into the United States, and it's like,

"You've gotta be kidding,

"you're searching us for dope coming INTO the States?"

And anything really meant anything.

One tour we did, we stipulated on the rider that we wanted curries.

And we'd have curries every night,

and they'd come from all sorts of places,

because you might play in a town and they haven't got a curry restaurant,

so they might have to drive it 50 miles to bring it to you, this curry,

and of course it'd be awful.

You wouldn't always eat them, but they'd be there.

It was like getting married every day.

So if you're getting married every day, you would have flowers,

you would have a girl, you would have all kinds of booze.

# Carry the news

# Boogaloo dudes... #

It does get boring after a while,

cos if you got married every day for a week, the same thing,

you'd want a day off, you know.

# All the young dudes

# Carry the news... #

With their far-out name and image,

Mott The Hoople seemed like they were from another planet.

America wanted in on their secret.

They thought we were on something that they'd never heard of.

They really wanted it bad, you know.

# Boogaloo dudes... #

I remember a girl sitting on a sofa backstage,

and she went through all these, LSD, BCF, 932.

I'd never heard any of this.

Meanwhile I said "I'll have half a lager," and got on with it.

# Boogaloo dudes

# Carry the news... #

There was a kind of madcap quality to the English rock bands.

There was an insouciance and a devil-may-care thing,

and although we were all serious about our music,

we weren't serious about our music.

We weren't navel-gazers, particularly.

The bacchanalian spirit of the British rock band threw

the sensitive nature of the Californian singer-songwriter

into sharp relief.

These guys'll do anything for love!

Was there a brotherhood or a camaraderie between we British bands,

a sort of Laurel Canyon feeling of London?

No. I don't think so.

I think we were all insanely competitive.

There was a kind of a very laid-back

American hippy way of being a musician

and a very much more straightforward,

quite incisive British way of being a rock musician.

And I think that attracted the American audience.

America was in an era of social unrest,

but British fans weren't interested in getting with the revolution.

They wanted to put on show and please the crowd.

We played many college campuses

and felt that level of student dissidence.

We got questioned a lot by campus newspapers and so on, saying,

"Are you with the revolution? Are you with us against the pigs?"

"Against the pigs? I'm awfully sorry.

"What don't you like about pigs?"

For the first time, the special relationship was in danger,

as American critical opinion of British music

differed from the public response.

The Beatles, everybody thinks The Beatles are great.

Bob Dylan, everyone thinks Bob Dylan is great.

The Rolling Stones, everybody thinks they're great.

But then you get a certain point where it's like,

"Well, is Deep Purple really great?"

You know, is that just kind of interesting music?

There was a moment, led certainly by The Beatles,

where there was this element of going to a kind of new world,

of really creating this new vision.

You know, subtly, it became about stadium shows

in which people were taking terrible barbiturates

and vomiting all over each other and getting terribly drunk.

It seemed like there were a lot of British bands

leading the charge on that.

Hard to believe now, but the entire output of Led Zeppelin

was dismissed by US critics.

They were hostile to the albums

because they couldn't understand them.

They couldn't understand what it was.

That might have been whatever, the press,

but it didn't bear any relation to what was going on in the real world,

or our real world which was the audiences and the record sales.

They were dynamic.

Suddenly these British bands were like marauders

and there wasn't a sense of large, social purpose.

It was like, "Let's just go make a lot of money,

"get laid as much as we can,

"get as high as we can and go back home."

But for the legions of American fans,

British rock was a great spectacle of virtuosity,

interspersed with buffoonery and occasional profundity.

Jethro Tull arrived in America

like wise men bearing gifts from another universe.

HE SNORTS

I didn't do rock 'n' roll lifestyle.

I didn't do drugs, I didn't do all the groupie things and the excesses.

We were really, really boring people,

apart from an hour and a half on stage every night

when we seemed vaguely interesting.

Ian Anderson brought a distinct British phantasmagoria

to the US touring spectacle,

conflating Sherlock Holmes, a country squire and a court jester.

Tull were out there, and they took America by storm.

# I hear you calling in your sweet dream

# Can't hear your daddy's warning cry. #

It's always that sense of being on the freeway,

in a way you just let yourself slip into an idea of travel,

of going west. It's the wagon trains, this pioneering spirit.

The way that you share it with Americans, in America,

is the sense of mobility, the sense of independence,

hitting a different city every day

and leaving town early in the morning

before the newspaper reviews came out.

The station wagon era was long gone.

In going west, successful British rock bands like Jethro Tull

had renegotiated the terms of the rock 'n' roll contract.

Without the support of the press,

British rock was constructing its own highly profitable pleasure dome,

exclusively for the kids of America.

And one man in particular was the architect of this new Xanadu.

Peter Grant was an amazing manager.

He saw so many ways through things.

Of course, once he had the clout of the band to go with it,

he could realise these situations that he'd worked out,

his little plans and going to the promoters and saying,

"You're now getting 10% rather than the bands are getting 10%."

Woe betide anyone selling fake merchandise at a Zep gig.

Don't fucking talk to me, it's my bloody act.

I'll leave you any time.

You couldn't even get them a starting line.

You're going to tell me... It wouldn't happen in Europe.

I don't know how the guy got in the building,

this isn't Europe or England.

No, I can see that, because it's so inefficient.

It would be all this restructuring

and making real milestones within the business in various ways

that really changed the shape of business over there at the time,

which helped lots of other bands too.

He was an incredible visionary in that side of business.

Grant out-sharked the predatory American business

and put Zeppelin firmly in control of their own destiny.

The band travelled like royalty,

their limousine arrival facilitated by police escort.

It was something that was laid on. I guess there was a necessity for it.

We weren't doing it just for show,

there was a real necessity to be able to go through with these motorcades

and police escorts to get into these venues.

Grant also managed Bad Company,

another successful British rock export

for whom he had a similar level of ambition.

# Bad company

# I can't deny

# Bad company

# Till the day I die... #

His idea was, "OK, we're just going to bypass all the clubs.

"I want to get you straight into arenas,

"but you've got to be ready for it." We had all the equipment ready,

we had a private plane to take us from each venue, so when we landed,

there was a limousine on the tarmac.

We all jumped in the limousine, and it was a really good idea

because it meant you could do more shows.

You could work five or six nights a week

because your travel was so smooth.

Straight off the stage, into the limo, onto the plane,

to the next town, go to sleep, wake up, do the show, bam, bam, bam.

It was pretty evident how popular we were by the amount of people

that were coming to the shows.

We were always sold out and it got to a position,

very, very early on, where we couldn't supply the demand

of people coming, so we'd do multiple shows,

and we still couldn't supply the demand.

We were doing bigger venues and we still couldn't supply the demand.

We'd go there in '73

and we do Atlanta and there's 55,000 outside

and then we break The Beatles' record in Tampa

more or less the following day.

Good evening.

It really was the biggest crowd ever assembled for a single performance

in one place in the entire history of the world.

It was tonight and it was in Tampa. The name of the group, Led Zeppelin.

Tonight, they broke the world record set by The Beatles

in New York City in 1965.

55,000 people grossing 306,000 for the promoter.

Tonight in Tampa, there were 56,800 sold seats,

a gross of 309,000.

If you were at Tampa Stadium tonight, or anywhere nearby,

that's the sort of thing you saw and heard.

It was really a shock to the system.

I didn't realise things could get that big.

They were really football stadiums. These places were huge.

I remember some kind gentleman taking me to Madison Square Garden

or someone like that, took me up to the back row

to show me what the stage looked like before the show.

I just went, "Oh, my God!"

Madison Square Garden was, for the Americans, a big status.

When you've played Madison Square Garden,

then you'd made it.

# Ooh, yeah

# It's been a long time since I rock and rolled

# It's been a long time since I did the stroll

# Woo, baby

# Let me get back, let me get back let me get back

# Baby, where I come from

# It's been a long time been a long time

# Lonely, lonely, lonely lonely, lonely

# Yes, it has...

British rock music in America started to have

this very big momentum,

and I guess a lot of people thought they could do no wrong.

And in a sense, for a few years, no-one could because bands like...

I mean, Elton John sold out I think...

..five nights at Madison Square Garden.

We could only sell three!

# It's been a long time been a long time

# Lonely, lonely, lonely lonely, lonely time... #

In '73, Led Zeppelin were on top of the world,

finishing a 4 million tour with three sold-out nights

at Madison Square Garden.

Not since prior to the Boston Tea Party had we been

so popular in America.

But not all of our exports went down so well.

Notably, glam rock.

We had a couple of shows, I think, in Madison Square Garden,

and Roxy Music opened the show for us.

And we went backstage to their dressing room

and introduced ourselves. Said, "Hello, have a great time" and "Nice to have you here."

Got a bit of a stiff sort of response from them

cos they were definitely a bit showbizzy, a bit dressing up in silly clothes

and doing a lot of make-up and taking themselves rather seriously.

# I tried but I could not find a way

# Looking back all I did was look away... #

They went on stage

and they just wanted it too much.

The audience just looked at them and thought,

"We don't like you. You look like you're trying too hard."

# But if there is no next time where do I go...? #

Too mannered, too art school, too dressy.

# She's the sweetest queen I ever seen... #

Roxy Music rather uncharitably sort of blamed us for their failure

and claimed that we'd pulled the plug on them or something,

which is not true at all.

It's just the audience flat didn't like them.

MUSIC: "Young Americans" by David Bowie

And whilst David Bowie's Spiders From Mars were hugely popular in the UK,

it wouldn't be Ziggy Stardust who would find fame in America.

# I want what you want

# And you want what I want

# I want you I want, you want, I want... #

Re-exporting another variant of black American music.

It was the blue-eyed white-boy soul of Young Americans

that made Bowie a household name in the USA.

# All night I want the young America! #

SCREAMING AND CHEERING

The man himself relocated to Los Angeles in 1974.

There's an underlying unease here. Definitely. You can feel it in every...

..every avenue.

It's very calm and it's a kind of a superficial calmness

that they've developed to underplay the fact that it's...

That there's a lot of high pressure here as it's a very big entertainment industry area.

And you get this feeling of unease with everybody.

The American rock business had grown from cottage industry

to cartel in barely a few years.

And 1974 witnessed its Californian pinnacle.

ANNOUNCER: On April 6th, 200,000 nice people assembled

at the Ontario Motor Speedway in Southern California

to enjoy each other and the music of eight fine rock bands.

CHEERING AND SCREAMING

Come on! Let's have a party! Yeah!

The California Jam was Woodstock without the mud or hippies.

It would be the biggest grossing gig in history,

and the three headlining acts

were all Brits.

Nobody knew exactly what it would be.

I think there was close to a million people there.

It was huge.

And we just looked around, we went, "Oh, my God," you know!

We saw everyone else was showing up and there was all these other bands,

a lot that we knew.

# Revolution in their minds

# The children start to march

# Against the world in which they have to live

# And all the hate that's in their hearts

# They're tired of being pushed around

# And told just what to do

# They'll fight the world until they've won

# And love comes flowing through, yeah! #

Gone were the days of peace, love and understanding,

as backstage, the Brits battled for top spot.

Somehow we managed to get a spot which, I think,

Deep Purple wanted and, uh,

Ritchie Blackmore ended up smashing one of the cameras

with his guitar, which cost him all of the 30,000

that they were making for the gig,

and, of course, left us without a camera.

Now, the best time of the festival is to go on just before dusk,

so you go on as the sun's just setting,

but then you finish in the dark

and then you've got the fireworks, and boom.

There's not a lot of bands who can follow after that.

ELP won the battle and Keith Emerson pulled out all the stops.

I suppose the one thing that people now remember me of in America

is spinning round on a piano.

I say, "Yes, but what about my music?"

"Oh, yeah, well, that was good, too,

"but I liked the spinning round on the piano."

"OK. Good."

As the '70s progressed, so did the size and ambition

of the touring spectacle.

In a reversal of today's economics,

it was common for an American tour to be an extravagant loss leader,

with the big money being made on album sales.

1975 would herald the arrival of Rick Wakeman,

a British knight on the most ambitious of crusades.

-NARRATOR ON STAGE:

-Journey to the centre of the earth.

CHEERING

I wanted to tour with an orchestra and choir

and everybody said I was mad, and I probably was,

and I took the New York Symphony Orchestra and a choir

and I rented two Lockheed Electra planes to put everybody on.

Hotels everywhere.

And so the journey begins.

It was always going to lose money,

and I was constantly reminded,

"Oh, you're going to lose money on this."

We did 18 shows, sold out every single show in every single stadium,

but it was going to lose a quarter of a million dollars,

which was a lot of money in '74.

And so the journey continued

through a succession of arches appearing before them

as if they were the aisles of a gothic cathedral.

The walls were enhanced with impressions of rock weeds

and mosses from the Silurian epoch.

My argument was, when I started that tour,

I think Journey had sold about three million copies.

By the end of that year it had done about nine or ten million.

Their journey was completed

and they found themselves 3,000 miles

from their original starting point in Iceland.

They had entered by one volcano

and they had come out by another.

The mid-'70s really were excess all areas for British prog in America.

In that particular period in America,

radio was a complete art form.

You could hear prog rock music drive-time,

in the middle of the day, so it was absolutely sensational.

The radio itself was open to anything at any time,

unlike England which was beginning to close down

and get a bit conservative. America was an open book, radio-wise.

MUSIC: "Larks' Tongues In Aspic" By King Crimson

American radio was kind to King Crimson

considering King Crimson was never kind to American radio.

We kept producing complicated bits of music

that didn't fit into anything...

..and I remembered clearly going down Santa Monica Boulevard

in a big limousine with an under-assistant, you know,

west coast, executive guy from Atlantic Records,

and the guy comes on the radio and says,

"We're going to play the new one by King Crimson,

"Larks' Tongues...In Aspic," he was having trouble saying that, even.

Larks' Tongues In Aspic. I thought, "This is it!"

You know, "This is out big moment, we're going to be on the radio."

And after about a minute of this,

this guy's looking out of the window saying, you know, "Is this art?"

British prog triumphed in the home of razzmatazz.

It just kept getting bigger.

People are always blaming me for this, and that's saying,

"Let's go on tour with an orchestra."

And we hand-picked all the members of the orchestra.

We got through about ten gigs

and we were losing quite a lot of money.

We almost went totally bankrupt.

I mean, at one point, we got to even carrying our own hairdressers,

Carl had his own karate teacher...

It was incredible. Catering, you name it.

You know...

..total excess.

In stark contrast to their station-wagon days,

comfort was now essential for touring rock royalty.

MUSIC: "Rocket Man" by Elton John

# She packed my bags last night Pre-flight... #

The private jet was de rigueur,

and there was one particular plane that trumped them all.

The Starship was a former passenger jet

refurbished to the highest standards.

# And I'm gonna be high

# As a kite by then... #

It was a way to be able to go somewhere like LA or New York

and be able to, sort of, you know, unpack and then, sort of,

do day trips to fly to Philadelphia or Boston or whatever

and be based out of New York.

Yeah, you could set up your sounds and play music

and generally feel like you had a little home from home.

What they did when you rented it from this Starship company,

they painted your name on the side, of course.

Which was quite wonderful.

It was wonderful, of course, but it was stupid.

We were having to put extra gigs in to pay for getting to the gigs.

But, my goodness, it was fun.

It had about four bedrooms, a sitting room with a fireplace...

..a butler.

On one tour, we had a dance floor on the plane

and we actually hired a keyboard player on an organ.

So while we're playing... We're flying to the next gig going,

"Somebody should just play this music for us."

People used to say, they'd be in line waiting to take off

and the captain would come on and say,

"Ladies and gentlemen, we've got, uh,

"the Moody Blues are going to take off before us,

"so we've just got to wait in line."

The Starship may have been the height of luxury,

but ELO could go one better.

The stage was basically a space ship. It was like a flying saucer.

And there's all this dry ice and lasers flashing,

and then the... It would open.

Very, very slowly.

The band would come up on, like, risers, on to the stage,

and it was a spectacular opening to a show.

We did the last number and then it would all close down again.

This incredibly loud music.

I used to go out into the audience and watch it at the end.

"I'm off," and I'd be off, down the...

To just round the front of it to have a look as it closed.

Cos it was this enormous crash, bang, wallop finale,

like machinery whirring and hissing and whooshing noises.

There was no question we were going to come out

and do an encore or something,

and people just knew, that was the end, the space ship had taken off,

basically, it had gone again. It's like, people going, "Wow."

It used to go down better than us, most nights.

Cos I used to clap it myself.

1975 would see the emergence

of the biggest British band of the late '70s from left of field.

Nobody could have predicted the stellar rise of '60s R&B act

Fleetwood Mac.

Ironically, when Fleetwood Mac were a huge band over here,

and a blues band, with Peter Green playing guitar,

they, like us, tried, at the same time,

to make it in America and really didn't do well at all.

Key to the victorious return of the Mac was a change in personnel.

The recruitment of Californian singer/songwriting duo

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham

gave the band a wildly successful transatlantic sound.

MUSIC: "Rhiannon" by Fleetwood Mac

It was only, ironically, after they became something else,

rather a west coast, kind of, post-hippy,

easy-going band that they had this huge success.

# Oh, now you know That your dreams unwind

# Love's a state of mind... #

Almost sounding like an American band.

I mean, they sounded like a Californian band then,

and it was almost coincidental

that they happened to have their origins in the UK.

# Dreams unwind It's still a state of mind

# And your, and your

# Dreams unwind And love is hard to find

# Dreams unwind It's still a state of mind... #

British rock music was now just a part of a broader church,

an international FM sound where it didn't matter where you came from.

# Take me like the wind, baby Take me with the sky

# All the same, all the same

# All the same, all the same... #

Our rock bands had enjoyed a meteoric rise,

an amazing journey, but one that couldn't last.

For many, burn-out was inevitable.

It did get to that point, yeah, when we were doing, just,

too much of everything. We were staying up partying

and nobody was getting any sleep

and it just rolled on, it became a regular thing to do every night.

"Oh, great. Whose room is it tonight?"

And they would go in, you know.

I do remember once in San Antonio, Texas,

everyone had gone to the concert hall,

Ritchie and I were coming out of our adjoining hotel rooms

to go down to the lobby to be put in the car to be taken...

And I was talking to him one minute and the next minute he wasn't there.

I turned around and he had stopped in the middle of the corridor

and was weeping copiously,

just...had just burst into tears.

"What's the matter?" I said. He said, "I want to go home.

"I just want to go home."

This is about week 13 of the fourth tour of the year, you know.

We played the Hollywood Bowl and I actually collapsed from exhaustion.

They said, "That's it, you've got to take a break

"and have a bit of a rest,"

so we came back to England and we had a break.

But it did get to that point.

But this journey ends on a high note.

In 1976, the man who had played the first stadium gig was back.

Paul McCartney returned to the US with his new band Wings.

But would America be as keen this time around?

MUSIC: "Band On The Run" by Wings

We'd been working so hard to try and see

if there was any life after The Beatles.

It's a hard act to follow, you know? Um... And suddenly there was.

Suddenly we had our identity as Wings.

# And the rain exploded With a mighty crash

# As we fell into the sun

# And the first one said to the second one there

# I hope you're having fun

# Band on the run

# Band on the run

# And the jailer man and Sailor Sam

# Were searching everyone... #

The Wings Over America tour

fulfilled The Beatles' interrupted American legacy,

as more than 600,000 flocked to see the band.

It was only fitting that they broke the stadium attendance record

that McCartney had originally set, playing to 67,000 in Seattle.

By then it was as big as The Beatles, but not as screamy,

and also, the thing is, what's happened through the years,

we can always get louder than the audience now.

So, you know, no matter how crazy they're going,

we can hear ourselves, and that kind of helped.

# Band on the run

# And the county judge

# Who held a grudge

# Will search forever more

# For the band on the run... #

In the '70s, a new generation of British rock bands

came, saw and conquered.

They created both an industry and a wonderful spectacle.

They were royalty, giants who marauded across the land.

They had enjoyed total market saturation.

So what room was there for a new generation?

We went to America because it was a...

The fatal attraction.

It was the big boil on the backside of the world, that one.

An absolute... That's a nuthouse.

Gots to get there, gots to see what that place is about.

MUSIC: "I'm So Bored With The USA" by The Clash

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