School's Out Born to be Wild: The Golden Age of American Rock

This programme contains some strong language

The golden age of American rock, when singers were gods,

guitarists were axemen and songs were anthems...

# Like a bat out of hell I'll be gone when the morning comes

# But when the day is done And the sun goes down... #

..the soundtrack of a nation forged one stadium at a time.

# Welcome to the Hotel California... #

For three decades from the late 1960s, rock music was

the sound of America taking over first the country's radio

stations and then its TV screens.

# School's out for summer... #

This programme follows the '70s generation, the multi-millionaire

rock stars who left the protest marches behind and decided to party.

You want rock 'n' roll to be dangerous,

we were dangerous. I said,

"When you're in this band, three things are for sure,

"you're going to see the world,

"you're going to get paid, you're going to get stitches."

I saw the '70s as starting down the road

of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll,

we stopped the war, now we're going to party.

It was a decade when America's world image faltered,

but American rock music was in its pomp.

Maybe you could name the last really cool

rock 'n' roll song from a French artist...

HE BLEATS

This is the story of classic American rock, told by those

who were there and made the music that shaped a generation.

In the late 1960s, American rock music had been the soundtrack

to rebellion, the backdrop for student protests

and anti-war demonstrations. It was the era of The Doors,

Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and the Woodstock Festival.

But as the 1960s ended, so did the hippy dream,

with the deaths of Hendrix,

Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin and the horror of the Altamont Festival

where Hell's Angels murdered a black Rolling Stones fan.

As the new decade dawned, the USA was in turmoil with widespread

demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

When national guardsmen shot dead

four student protesters at Kent State University in May 1970,

there was outrage across much of the country.

# Hey, all you people

# For goodness' sake

# Let's get together

# What does it take? #

But the tragedy of Kent State was the zenith of the anti-war movement.

Although the Vietnam War still raged,

the hated draft, which had fuelled the protests, was slowly withdrawn.

When the draft went away, that took away a huge part of why

people were in the streets, because they were afraid of getting

drafted into a war they didn't believe in.

Oh, I think people were exhausted, the revolution,

trying to speak up, marching,

making music that reflects this, you know,

it's hard work and the death toll, as we know, was quite high.

At the start of the 1970s, the American music industry was firmly

based in California.

The hedonistic atmosphere of the West Coast

was a magnet for would-be rock stars like a young Tom Petty from Florida.

Los Angeles in the '70s, you really had to be here to...

HE LAUGHS It's a hard thing to...

if you didn't see it, it's really hard to describe,

but it was quite a place, the place was really alive.

It was the Wild West, it was the equivalent of the Wild West,

it lasted a lot shorter than people would admit.

There was a lot of money floating around back then.

It was the beginning of a lot of things.

We were all influenced by some of the best music that you can imagine.

This industry was springing up and getting bigger every day.

You were seeing things that you never dreamt of,

like rehearsal rooms.

Like, I had never seen, like, a complex of rehearsal rooms for bands

and, you know, Sunset Boulevard

was just lined with record companies.

To be in your twenties and to be here,

that was really pretty exciting.

Rock music of the new decade was in a state of flux.

The big names of the late 1960s were exhausted, burnt out or dead,

there was plenty of room for new artists to come to the fore.

On the West Coast, the sound was gentle. It was the sweet

harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the reflective

records of singer/songwriters like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.

Young Americans had tired of confrontation

they now sought comfort instead.

The music of the '70s was all about escape. It really is. Even if

it wasn't an escape lyrically, it would be the music would take you

somewhere or the show would take you somewhere or the music and the show.

One of the first bands to capitalise on this new escapist mood was

The Doobie Brothers.

Named after the slang word for a joint,

The Doobies had formed in the San Francisco scene

of the late 1960s, but their outlook was a world away

from the politically-conscious bands of just a couple of years earlier.

I think the type of music that the band made,

I don't think it had a lot to do with what was

going on in the political arena

and we were so busy on the road

that you really didn't have time to get involved with it.

The Doobies breakthrough song was Listen To The Music in 1972.

# Don't you feel it growin' day by day...? #

Their lyrics saw solutions not in protest, but in relaxing

and listening to your favourite band.

# Some are sad

# Oh, we got to let the music play... #

The idea was that if the world leaders got together on some

grassy, warm, sunny place, and listened to music

and let that be the language, as opposed to the rhetoric

of politics, that somehow the music would eat through all the red tape

and they'd realise, "Cheers!

"We have a lot more in common than we think."

Like I said, it was utopia, it didn't work, but it was a neat idea.

# Oh, oh, listen to the music... #

The engine that drove rock's new popularity was FM radio.

What had been started by a few hippies in San Francisco in 1967,

was now spreading like wildfire across the country.

These free-form stations weren't tied to playlists

and were perfect for the new era of album-orientated music.

I got there just as FM radio was starting to really take off

and reach a lot of people.

Songs were anywhere from 10 minutes to 15, 20 minutes long,

and there were so many segments of music that were available.

FM radio would play even album sides, an entire side

in its entirety, so you got this exposure from all over the world,

so your musical tastes would start to grow, your musical influences.

In those days, you would get maybe, honest to God, 30 new albums

a week, so a big part of our calling,

I don't want to say job, but we felt it was our calling,

was to find new bands and share it with the audience. It wasn't

to just play the hits, we never thought in those terms ever,

we were there to find new music and share it and get it out there.

FM radio gave space for new acts including Steely Dan

and The Steve Miller Band. Miller had been touring

since the late 1960s, but remained resolutely under the radar.

Then his track The Joker

started to get heavy airplay right across the country.

They put The Joker out as a single

and they would just sort of throw it out to see what

would happen, they didn't have any plan or spend any money.

"There's this great new group," or any of that stuff

and it just sort of went out and just became a huge hit.

# Ooo-eee baby, I'll sure show you a good time

# Cos I'm a picker

# I'm a grinner

# I'm a lover And I'm a sinner... #

I remember coming back to San Francisco to play the homecoming

concerts, driving to the show,

and The Joker was on four radio stations at the same time.

I was like punching it from here to there and I was kind of mad,

because it wasn't on the fifth channel, it was just,

I mean, they played it twice an hour, 24 hours a day for a year.

You can't have a national smash,

because it's hot on Sunset Strip, it's got to work in the Midwest,

it's got to work in the South, it's got to

work in Arizona, it's got to work in Maine, it's got to be national.

As rock music played on car radios and eight-track players,

the look of America began to change as well.

Although Republican Richard Nixon was president, young Americans

all over the States began to adopt rock's new, relaxed styles.

Suddenly, you had the multicoloured platform shoes or the funny hats,

everything came along in the '70s, amazingly enough,

although the people who were now glomming onto those fashions

and the attendant music, weren't part of the '60s but they still felt

the glow of it, there was still some kind of a real curiosity about it.

Rock of the 1970s was especially diverse, drawing together

influences from country, jazz, blues and soul, it encompassed

everything from the southern rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd

to The Grateful Dead's Americana

and Lou Reed's streetwise New York sounds.

The most distinct musical city

outside of the West Coast was Detroit.

In the 1960s, it had been home to Motown

and revolutionary rockers, the MC5,

now it became the base for Alice Cooper.

A misfit in LA, Alice went back home to Detroit to find his

audience and his signature sound. With the help of producer Bob Ezrin,

he turned his ragged, theatrical heavy metal into hard rock anthems.

# I'm 18

# And I don't know what I want... #

We had all these great psychedelic songs.

They were not something you could put your teeth into and say,

"Oh, that's Alice Cooper." When Bob Ezrin saw us, he says, "I'm going to

"do it like this and make hit records out of those,"

so 18 that used to be 20 minutes long

was now three minutes and it was a teen anthem.

# 18, 18

# 18 and I like it. #

"I'm 18 and I like it, I celebrate the fact that I'm confused

"and I'm an idiot and like this,"

and that related to every kid in the world.

You know, they just went, "I get that," School's Out,

how can you get more commercial than that?

And what is the best thing that

ever happened in school, is the last three minutes of the last day before

summer vacation. If you could get that three minutes on tape, just the

joy of when that bell rings and you know you don't have to go to school

for three months and it's summer - he said, "That's going to be a hit."

# School's out forever

# School's been blown to pieces... #

With his make-up and his outrageous stage act, Alice Cooper was

the biggest American rock star of 1972.

But it was the British bands

that were setting the pace. The early 1970s saw

a second British rock invasion of the USA.

Elton John had huge success.

His shows were events and raised the bar for rock performance.

Since The Stones and The Beatles,

British bands had gone down a storm with young Americans.

But it was Led Zeppelin who changed the game.

# Mellow is the man who knows what he's been missing... #

In the mid '70s, Zeppelin was like an event, it was like some huge

thing. It's hard to describe what it was like when they came to town.

Bands were playing for half an hour. The Beatles played for 23 minutes

at The Hollywood Bowl and the first time I saw the Stones, it was like

30, 35 minutes. Zeppelin started playing for two hours.

It was unheard of...

it was completely unheard of. That alone changed everything.

The first notes of Good Times, Bad Times.

It stopped my life,

and went,

"This is a new thing that just happened, wow, what is going on?"

There are certain moments in your life that music will just

take you and just rip you out of your own skin.

Inspired by Led Zeppelin, blues rock was the dominant

sound of America in the early 1970s, but after the death of Jimi Hendrix,

rock music was played by white musicians for white audiences.

Look, I was in high school in the mid '70s

so we clearly would say rock music was some white boys' shit

for real, yeah, and I was smart enough to know

even more than them,

that rock music had came out, rock 'n' roll was came out of rhythm

and blues, but like I said,

America's bad on history and geography, so to inform

and educate your average America... American, could be jarring.

It comes from black people,

it's a black music.

We live in a multi-racial world.

Until the music is accepted by more

than just one race, it can no longer carry that banner.

But there was always some kind of black component in rock

somewhere down the line. There was always a black player, whether it

be The Allman Brothers or The Doobie Brothers, always a black player that

is in that mix, because these guys were copying rhythm and blues and

then going off on rifts that were fragmented off those original beats

and grooves, anyway.

You do have black involvement, how much black

acknowledgement are you going to give? That's a whole other story.

The USA of the early 1970s was in deep recession.

The boom times of the previous decade were long gone.

It wasn't rock's party animals,

but black artists like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye who

commented on the state of the nation.

And then in 1973, American rock's symbol of freedom, the car,

almost ran out of gas when the Middle East war

led to a ban on oil exports to the pro-Israeli USA.

For the first time in their history, Americans had to queue for petrol.

But politics weren't completely absent from rock

and Nixon's re-election campaign

was the perfect target for rock's leading court jester Alice Cooper.

First of all, who was president? Nixon was the greatest

object of satire of anybody.

He was really out there, he was a great character,

you know, this, "I am not a crook."

# Elected! #

It was the election. Who would

be the least likely person to run for election would be Alice Cooper,

you know. Let's write this song. And it was a big, powerful, dun-unnn!

You couldn't deny it.

When we did Elected on stage, it was a convention,

it was balloons, it was confetti, but the absurdity was

it was Alice Cooper with all the make-up

and the blood and everything like this

and I was the candidate,

just a great, absurd glimpse of American politics.

If Alice Cooper's theatrical antics represented one strand

in American rock, another side stressed authenticity.

Acts like Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band toured bar rooms

and colleges, reaching out to ordinary Americans in the

country's heartland.

And in 1973, a new star arrived to embody blue collar America

and was soon tipped as the future of rock 'n' roll.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's first two albums

were critical but not commercial successes -

Born To Run changed all that.

# Beyond the palace

# Hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard

# The girls comb their hair in rear-view mirrors

# And the boys try to look so hard... #

Well, it's very interesting

because in the beginning they were almost presenting him as another

Dylan, which even though he has brilliant lyrics, he clearly wasn't

doing the same kind of thing as Dylan was, you know, he hadn't taken

the same path at all. In a way, he was more about the glory of America

and the glory of being able to escape, particularly from the point

of view of being the kind of working class guy who needs to escape,

which means open roads and cars,

you know, and that great American mythology,

so that was his thing, but always there was this sense

of glory in his songs, you know, the great big crescendos and everything.

One, two, three!

# The highways jammed with broken heroes

# On a last chance power drive... #

So, he was very much the kind of... a bit of a working class hero but

without any of that kind of standing on a platform and moaning about it,

it was a kind of, "Give me a chance and I'm going to get on and move."

Springsteen's sound was rooted in the pop music

he grew up with in the 1960s like Phil Spector and The Who.

Like at the time of Born To Run

I was listening to a lot of rock 'n' roll guitar sound,

that was, you know, Duane Eddy,

that was like Peter Townshend, the chords, you know,

but I went back to that stuff, because it was just

the stuff that was ringing most true to me at the time, you know,

because it was a strange period in the music from late '60s

into early '70s, I wasn't connecting with

too much of what was going on, you know.

# ..tramps like us, baby we were born to run

# Whoa-oh

# Whoa, oh, oh... #

The East Coast was now in the ascendance with two bands

that were soon to be among the biggest in American rock.

# Some sweat hog mama with a face like a gent... #

Aerosmith had been formed in New Hampshire in 1970

when singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry

met in an ice cream parlour.

Their third album Toys In The Attic

was the breakthrough. Its swaggering twin guitar sound on songs

like Sweet Emotion and Walk This Way, defining a new,

hard rock style.

I was influenced by The Stones and by Zeppelin a lot, you know,

I loved their records, Aerosmith was like the combination of those, just

this very, very cool sort of pseudo sloppy,

very dynamic, punchy guitar,

you know, approach, very riffy, very loose and I just identified with it.

# Sweeeeeeet... #

Probably the best two guitar player band to come out of America

ever, as far as I am concerned.

# Sweeeeeeet

# Emotion

To stand out from the crowd, rock bands now needed a strong image.

Another East Coast outfit turned the cartoonish

element in American rock up to 11. Originally a work-a-day

New York metal band, Kiss was Alice Cooper times four.

You see, the thing with rock 'n' roll is

if you are ever going to, like, be seen

and noticed, you have to do something different.

God, Gene is going to hate me,

Oh, well!

Kiss, I think, again,

Kiss came up with something different.

They painted their face, you know, they blew stuff up on stage

you know, kids were attracted to them just because it was something

new and different and by the way, the songs have to be good,

OK? You can't just look freaky

and not have good music, you've got to have both.

# The leather skirt... #

I worked as an usher at a Kiss show once in a theatre

in Philadelphia and it was entertainment plus -

they put on a great show.

It was comic book stuff,

deliberately so. Gene Simmons with the blood and the levitating

drum kit and all this stuff.

They actually took a lot of shit from people,

not just from the critics but from the business, because they

thought, "Oh, well, this is strictly clown time." No, they were smart.

Kiss came along and they said, "If one Alice works, then four ought

"to work." "The only thing you have to be careful of,

"if you are going to do the make-up,

"do different kind of make-up than me,"

I said, "And don't do anything I do on stage, because for your own good,

"the press is going to kill you if you do."

They did a pyro, we never did pyro,

they did all this stuff that we didn't do which was very smart.

They did it without the critics

and that was one of the reasons why we divided them so much, they didn't

need us like anyone else did. But they were a very interesting story,

because they weren't particularly downtrodden other than that

Gene Simmons one of the co-founders was an immigrant,

you know, his whole thing was he loved America,

kissed the ground as soon as he moved in,

and did all the jobs that he could in order to make money, and that

was his bottom line, sitting there, "How can I make this the biggest

"band in the world?"

But they also had some good tunes and they got up in

their cartoon outfits and absolutely stampeded through the rock charts.

At this point, rock bands had been fairly sniffy about being

overtly commercial but not Kiss.

T-shirts, action figures,

make-up, nothing was beyond the Kiss marketing machine.

With make-up diagrams so you can look like Gene, look like Paul,

look like Peter or look like Ace.

The electric guitar was the iconic instrument of the '70s rocker,

thrust to the fore as it delivered long squalling solos.

No-one played their solos louder and longer than Ted Nugent.

Bare-chested and with flowing locks,

he was the Tarzan of guitar rock.

# Never before have I turned on you

# You looked too good to me... #

We played 300 concerts a year and we didn't make any money,

we could pay expenses and keep good speakers in the amps,

we all shared hotel rooms and it was tough,

but that doesn't matter, I mean I'm a hunter.

I sleep in the woods.

The music on me, I never sat down once in my life, Steve,

and went, "What can I do to really entertain people?" Never.

Practice, get to the gig, plug in and just let her rip,

never strategise nothing.

I wore a loincloth one night, because I had shot

some rabbits and I'd cured them myself with brains. It felt natural.

# Yes, it is!

# No

# Noooooooo! #

I might be the only guy, I really believe I am the only guy

who can still completely live

the original moment

every time.

They had great energy, fantastic rock 'n' roll guitar player,

one of the best ones of that era

and just wrote really great fucking riffs and, you know, simple

catchy songs, you know. I saw him a few times in concert

and, you know, it was just high energy stuff.

I still to this day don't think anybody's really...

Ted Nugent was like an island unto himself, you know.

# Well, it's a free-for-all

# Tootsie, tootsie, tootsie

# Yeeaaahh! #

Because I'm clean and sober and I am, like, a six foot two,

180 pound raw nerve ending, I'm really responsive to stimuli,

I don't know if you have noticed that about me.

Can you imagine this 20 years ago? I would have already

knocked you down! I was literally - did I say "was"? - I remain and

I have always been

inebriated on the creative procedure.

The inescapable

sensual feedback from the audiences,

the girls are dancing, so you

probably want to play that lick a little more often,

or that approach.

Rock music in the US was now a licence to print money, even

rivalling Hollywood in its commercial clout.

Record sales were booming and so were concerts.

For bands like Heart, fronted by the Wilson sisters, theatres were

no longer large enough and stadium rock was born.

# We may still have time

# We might steal goodbye

# Every time I thing about it

# I wanna cry... #

Stadium rock doesn't describe the music, it describes the place,

it has come to represent gargantuan ego, massive over-gestures, because

you're playing to 55,000 people, but there was a certain notion that it

represents money and it represents a certain distance from the listener.

At times, you have to play bigger than life.

Instead of me playing like this,

I had to start playing like this, because people, you know, three

football fields away had to be able to see me and this was before video

cameras and things like that.

The stage movements of singers instead

of just there, you know, they were all over the front of the stage, so

you had to entertain a lot of people,

so you had to give it your all.

Stadium rock is quintessentially American.

It couldn't have come from anywhere else in the world.

In England there's three. In France there's one arena.

In Germany, there's maybe four.

In Stockholm, there's one.

It was really mind-blowing doing the research on Led Zeppelin,

realising there weren't any arenas.

That's what promoters told me. Peter,

there was no place to play. That's why

they never played in Europe very much that could make it

worth their while, compared to an American show.

You see what I am saying?

15,000 people, Madison Square Gardens. Yeah, you can play

Toulouse for 8,000 and the costs are 50% more expensive, because petrol

is higher, you know, VAT or whatever,

I'm going...I am going to go West.

It took a lot of people coming together to design PA systems that

would work, to build stages that could be built up on them, so it was

all brand-new. So we were creating a new venue really, and first the

light shows were the new part of it,

so I was doing a show where I had

a green laser behind my drum raiser that could shoot a beam to the moon,

it had to have 120 gallons of water on it to keep it cool. There was

no regulations whatsoever. Literally if you put your hand in the original

beam it would probably have burnt a hole right though it,

just, boom, lost his hand!

I think we all put pressure on each other, the bar kept going up

and of course the stage shows started to get more elaborate.

Well, I guess we saw one band and they had pyros,

so I guess we'd better get bombs and things that explode.

So you compete with each other

and we noticed they had three trucks, we'd better get four trucks.

With stadiums and arenas packed to the rafters, the live album

became commercial gold. Once considered a cheap cash-in, they

were now essential in any record collection. But it was a live album

by a relatively unknown British performer that broke the mould.

Peter Frampton had toured the states solidly for five years,

gradually building up his fan base. Backed by a group of top US

session players, he was largely seen as an American artist.

CHEERING

Nobody foresaw the amazing success of Frampton Comes Alive.

I got the call from my manager saying, "You are number one

"on the Billboard," and then it seemed moments later

when I got the next call from him,

saying, "You have just broken the all time sales record for an album,

"you are now the biggest selling album of all time in the world."

# I wonder how you're feeling

CROWD CHEERS

# There's ringing in my ears... #

The shit hit the fan, you know! Basically,

it all went crazy overnight.

# Who can I believe in? #

I love to play live and I believe

we captured something on Comes Alive that was an energy that comes across

that you feel, somehow,

that when you listen to it you can feel that

we are enjoying ourselves playing and I think it's as simple as that.

# Oh, won't you yeah, you, show me the way? #

You had a chance to develop your craft and I think that's one of the

reasons why those bands, they were successful, they were successful in

coming out with the sound that was being underwritten, that was being

supported, the record companies were into nurturing talent.

I was very lucky I was with A&M records, which was Herb Albert

and Jerry Moss and they were, one was a musician and the other was

a music lover who was a great businessman, they only signed people

they liked, they really got involved in that artist's whole persona, if

you wanted. If you didn't, they left you alone to do whatever you wanted.

Through the '70s, it was a much more easier relationship

between artists and record company, the people

running the labels were creative thinking people, not creative

people necessarily, but certainly people that respected creativity.

I had four solo records before Comes Alive

and each one sold worse than the other, I think,

you know, so it wasn't

like they were saying, "Oh, well he's not selling,"

they believed in the artist

and were willing to let the artist grow and lose some money.

American rock's boom years contrasted with the dark times

endured by the USA itself. The Watergate Scandal

and Nixon's resignation in 1974 had rocked the country to its core.

Nixon's replacement Gerald Ford was seen as dull and lacklustre.

American troops had left Vietnam in 1973 only for Saigon

to fall to the communist north two years later. As US staff

hastily evacuated their embassy, their south Vietnamese colleagues

were left scrambling to get on the last helicopters. The USA's

position as a global superpower seemed to be teetering on the edge.

In America's cities, the situation was almost as bleak,

with mass unemployment and urban decay.

By 1975, New York was virtually bankrupt. So when Democrat

Jimmy Carter successfully ran for president in 1976, he

self-consciously hooked up with the rock generation, the baby boomers.

# When the sky is dark... #

The music that the boomers were listening to were

bands like Fleetwood Mac. They were part of a new, soft melodic style,

where superb production

and glamorous image smoothed off rock's rough edges. Originally

a ground-breaking British blues band,

Mac was now fronted by American duo

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.

Like most rock bands, Fleetwood Mac

had build their reputation through years on the road.

But the biggest US rock record of 1976 came out of nowhere.

Fittingly, in the bicentennial year, it was born in the home

of the American revolution. Boston was the brainchild of Tom Scholz.

A science graduate, he worked as a technician at Polaroid, while

creating the perfect rock sound in his home studio every evening.

The process of getting the record actually released by a label

and then played on a radio station was a long and painful journey.

I had been recording demos for years.

The plan was I would record one last demo. If that didn't do it,

then I was going to liquidate, sell what I could, get what I could

out of it. I recorded at night and worked at Polaroid in the day and I

worked really hard in the recording at night, so sometimes during

the day at Polaroid, I wasn't really at my maximum potential, but somehow

I didn't get fired. I'm in a big room with a lot of other engineers

and draughtsmen. I get a call from somebody in New York that says

they're the vice president of A&R for A&M records or something like

that. I said, "Well, I don't know what that is."

I pick up the phone, "We've heard your demo,

"we want to talk to you about doing an album." And I put

the phone down, jumped up on a desk and I am doing a dance on a desk

in the middle of the office which of course attracted a lot of attention.

A band was put together around Tom Scholz to play the music live

and with the single More Than A Feeling getting heavy airplay,

Boston's first concerts caused chaos.

3,000 people showed up.

They broke down the chain-link fence, there was a riot,

the promoter was arrested. It was, it was a phenomenon!

Boston's debut was one of a string of multimillion-selling rock

albums released in 1976.

# She slipped away... #

A new platinum category was created

to account for the huge sales that rock was now enjoying.

The first record to get the award was The Eagles' Greatest Hits.

The Eagles had first come to light as Linda Ronstadt's backing group.

# Well, I'm running down the road trying to loosen my load... #

With the addition of top guitarists Don Felder

and Joe Walsh, their music was full of impeccable harmonies and soaring

guitar breaks.

# Take it easy... #

The band epitomised rock's new, glossy professionalism.

Every step of the production of a record, the overall complexity

and detail that we spent on every note that went on every

record was really far and above what any of us had tried to do before,

but we wanted to keep raising that bar every time we made a record,

to make a better record. But we had the same sense of detail in every

show when we were on stage as well. No mistakes were allowed, nobody

could sing off key, you couldn't play wrong notes on guitar. We spent

a great deal of time making certain that our show was as flawless

as our records or at least that attempt to make it at that level.

The Eagles perfected their sound on Hotel California, which rode

the wave of rock success while commenting on the uncertain state

that the country was in. The album went on to sell over 32 million

copies worldwide, but started off with one simple guitar riff.

I remember one day in July, I was just

sitting on the couch in this living room looking

out at the Pacific Ocean and the sun was kind of glistening on the water,

I was playing guitar and out came that introduction chord depression

and I played it three or four times and I said, "I have to record some

"of this before I forget it."

And then when I started trying to assemble this cassette

that had a bunch of song ideas on it, I came back and

heard that introduction and I said, "I need to finish this,"

so I rebuilt it with a little drum machine and played bass on it,

played almost all the guitar parts that you hear on the final record. I

finally got in the studio

to record what was going to become Hotel California and Joe and I...

I had always thought that Joe and I would set up with two guitars,

turn on the tape machine, I'd play a lick, let him answer the lick,

I'd play the next lick, and we'd just, you know, battle it out.

That's what we were doing for a few minutes,

until Don Henley walked into the control room and said,

"What are you doing? That's not right, stop."

I went, "What do you mean, that's not right?"

He said, "That's not like the demo."

And what I had recorded on a demo was like almost a year

before that, and I had no idea what I had played, I didn't, like, listen

to it, so we were in a studio in Miami, I had to call my housekeeper

at the house in Malibu have her find the cassette, put it in a blaster,

play it back and they held a phone up in front of this blaster,

we recorded it in a studio in Miami, I had to sit and learn what I had

just made up at the time when I was making the demo.

Don Henley turned around and said,

"That is going to be one of our singles," so I said to Don,

"I don't think, that's not a single, that's maybe an FM track."

He said, "No, that's going to be our single,"

and I've never really been so happy to be so wrong

in my life that he persisted and it turned out to be what it was.

Despite the enormous success of bands like The Eagles

and Fleetwood Mac, some thought their music represented all

that had gone wrong with American rock. Where it had once been

vital and edgy, it now seemed glossy and self-indulgent. The drugs

had also changed. In the 1960s, rock had turned on with marijuana

and LSD, now it was cocaine, the rich man's drug, which further

divorced these multimillionaire rock stars from any everyday reality.

I remember seeing huge after-gig parties and the bands would

arrive in limousines and records had never made that

kind of money before, and they sold millions and millions of copies.

The money started becoming more important

and then the drugs got harder.

And it also became because of cocaine

more cerebral, the emotional feel of the love, love, love became

much more up in your head because of that particular drug.

That also means you become very focused on yourself,

which becomes the cartoonish LA of the late '70s,

the cocaine cowboys, and the way people now look at The Eagles

and Fleetwood Mac is an excessive statement in their own.

I don't think that a lot of people in the music industry

understood how addictive

and how detrimental cocaine could be to your life,

your health and your finances.

It's like an addiction like gambling, once you get involved

with it, you just keep going and going and going

and in the '70s no-one really understood

how addictive and how detrimental it could be.

Yeah, nobody believed it was dangerous.

When you have lots of money, lots of sex, great music, wonderful food,

very interesting people to deal with,

it creates its own weather system

and that weather system can be sunny and balmy or it can

become a hurricane in a nanosecond. That's what created the chaos.

A junkie crackhead is a crackhead,

I mean, a musician crackhead is a crackhead, he is just

a crackhead, OK! He's not just some special category of crackhead,

because he's a musician. He's a crackhead. Maybe he's able to get

some music out, but the problem is you get too in love with a certain

kind of drug and the music always winds up taking the back seat.

I smoked as much pot as anybody, or took as much LSD as anybody, drank

a little bit but not a lot, but enough to just say,

"God, you know what?

"I must be a weakling or something here,

"because I don't know how these guys do it, but I know if I continue

"to do it, I'm not going to be around."

I think substance abuse will go down in history

and continues to go down, as we speak,

as the most mindless, soulless,

self-inflicted, suicidal indecency available to man, because the

dopers didn't show up to rehearsals on time, the dopers couldn't

tune their instruments, the dopers couldn't remember an arrangement

and the dopers had no soul to care about an efficient, professional

delivery of their craft, service or wares.

Case fucking closed.

I HATE hippies.

While The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac

and Boston were selling millions, others were looking for a more

back-to-basics style. Tom Petty had been on the fringes

of the LA music scene for four years when he released his debut

album in 1976, but Petty rejected rock's excesses and with his band

The Heartbreakers he had a simpler, rougher, pared-back guitar sound.

# Strange voice on the telephone

# Telling me I better leave you alone... #

The first thing that struck me when I went to clubs in LA was how

bad the LA bands were. They tended to have the right haircuts

and clothes, but they weren't really that good.

# Looks like I'm the fool again... #

I do remember that coming from the South where we had played for years

and there was a strong R&B presence down there where the bass and

drums were really important and you had to have good rhythm sections.

By the time that the Heartbreakers were together

and playing live, I didn't feel like anybody could touch us.

We were what they call now a classic rock 'n' roll band.

The '70s really just seemed like

more of the '60s, it was kind of like

the '60s just kept going

and then started to slowly around, say,

the end of '74, '75, it started to just get really kind of

over-bloated and fat

and come to an almost

complete standstill until about '77.

Then you had punk rock

and that reignited a whole different kind of thing.

Tom Petty was never really a punk rocker but he chimed with

the traditional, no-fuss sound that the punk championed.

# Oh, yeah, ah, oh, yes

# Sheena is

# A punk rocker, Sheena is... #

Punk has its own rich story in the USA, starting with Iggy

and The Stooges in Detroit and leading to the New York Scene

of Patti Smith, Blondie and The Ramones.

# Sheena is

# A punk rocker... #

The Ramones' first album also came out in 1976 to rave reviews,

but punk was a regional phenomenon in the USA

and The Ramones' debut didn't even get into the Billboard top 100.

There was all this stuff coming out of England,

punk wise, which was then reflected here, but we had

The Ramones. I saw The Ramones in 1976,

the same year that Fleetwood Mac was just breaking wide,

both things happening at exactly the

same time. Couldn't be more polar opposite

and yet they both made perfect sense

in the country at the time, depending on where you lived.

But in Los Angeles, punk was more of a fashion statement,

it was more of a fad and I loved the overall attitude.

It wasn't about the clothes

and it really wasn't about total anarchy thing,

because most of the kids that were into punk rock

in Los Angeles don't even know what anarchy is, really.

# Ooh, my little pretty one, pretty one... #

It was really a bit more of a kind of poseur thing,

as far as I could see. I'm sure that

I will be targeted by American pop fans for that now,

but you'd go to these things and there'd be, you know, some guys

who clearly looked like they had day jobs, but they had punked up for

the evening in their kind of studs and leather and were slam dancing

as supposed to just before I'd left England in '77, you'd go to

a place where lots of little spotty oiks

would kind of drown ten bottles of cider

and were just flying around like dervishes. I don't

think that it had that kind of earth-shattering thing

that it did in the UK.

It had a sort of a fashion thing out here, all the magazines, you

would see kind of the punk look, you know, with the torn clothes with the

safety pins that you could buy very expensive versions of at Macy's.

Ironically, it wasn't punk that posed the biggest threat to

American rock, but disco. From its origins in the early 1970s, disco

had come to dominate both singles and album charts.

The sales of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack

shook rock to its denim-clad roots.

# And now it's all right, it's OK

# And you may look the other way... #

Disco music, it just kind of took the wind out of real hard rock

and that whole movement that we were so in love with, you know, so

we actually just made fun of it all the time, you know Stayin' Alive.

# Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive! #

On the radio now, the only songs they would play from us

were ballads. I would have a hard rock record come out

and they would pick the ballad, that was the hit, so I had four ballad

hits in a row, everybody thought that I had totally softened up.

Many rock stars chose to ride the disco wave.

Even Kiss, the superheroes of American hard rock, joined in.

# Mmmmmm, yeah. #

I Was Made For Loving You was

backed with a disco beat. It went on to be one of their biggest hits.

# Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do

# Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do... #

But the hardcore American rock fans were never in love with disco.

Their resentment exploded at the infamous Disco Demolition Night.

In Comiskey Park, Chicago, baseball fans got in cheap

if they brought a disco record to burn.

Disco Demolition was a one-off event.

The real battle for established rock acts was how to follow up

some of the best selling albums of all time.

The pressure became, after Hotel California, to exceed that record

just became mammoth. It was such a strain and stressful situation

to try to write more songs that were that calibre or above, that we

had created this monster and it nearly ate us,

to tell you the truth.

Dealing with all the people that success brings

you come into contact with. By people, I'm being kind, because that

connects you to some of the lowest forms of life on the planet that

get dressed in the morning. Whether music or money is the important

part for a record company is the most obvious answer of all time.

The pressure was... the pressure was horrifying.

People just thought, "Well, you have made a whole bunch of money

"for them, now what's taking you so long to make more for us?" You're

holding up the show by not, and I actually have and still have people

accusing me of messing up their career

or their fortunes, because I didn't produce

the thing that I do fast enough to make money for them.

# Like a bat out of hell, I'll be gone when the morning comes... #

The last of rock's blockbuster albums of the late 1970s was

Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell.

A concept album written by Jim Steinmann,

its grandiose, operatic style

was typical of American rock's excesses.

The record industry now had an insatiable hunger for

these multimillion selling records, a demand that was hard to fulfil.

When people realised that you could go multi platinum with a record,

that suddenly became the goal, everybody loves

a success in the music business. The bigger, the better,

but, you know, when companies who don't know

anything about music start getting involved,

then you've got to be a little bit suspicious and when some accountant

in some other part

of a large corporation starts saying, "Well, you know,

"this guy Van Morrison, you know, his bottom line has really dropped

"off in the last couple of years, I think you should drop him."

That was when the jig was up. We all knew, "Wait a minute,

"people who know about music are no longer in control of this industry."

American rock in the 1970s was prodigiously successful.

Bands as varied as Kiss and The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac

and Aerosmith sold hundreds of millions of albums between them,

but their success had changed the record business.

Rock music of the late '60s

had been the sound of rebellion and protest. A decade later, it was made

by corporations, headed by lawyers only interested in the bottom line.

The rock bands that came to the fore at the end of the '70s,

such as Styx, Journey and REO Speedwagon

got themselves a new nickname.

There was a term for a while called corporate rock...

# Babe, I love... #

..and I'm not going to embarrass the bands,

but you know who they are. They had that kind of clean, predictable,

don't say anything to piss anybody off, just get the hit played,

corporate rock sound and that was not good for people like me.

Yeah, all those bands for us

who were like the real street rockers, Speedwagon and Styx

and Journey and Foreigner and all those kind of bands,

shall we throw Chicago in there?

Oh, no! It was just too lightweight.

# Feel like giving up... #

By the late 1970s, radio was really getting kind of...bad.

They really started to smell too much like businesspeople,

attache-case smell was all throughout the music,

you know, and music was going through the roof, because

people were kind of trained to hear something. Go to the store, get it.

It was almost like the industry had kind of trained people to

kind of, like, fall into this format of just "Aaaaaagh!"

for no reason at all.

At the end of the 1970s, both America and American rock seemed

to be struggling.

Internationally, the country was powerless in

the face of the Iran hostage crisis and rock music, for a decade

the symbol of American virility, also appeared to be in retreat

reduced to mild stadium bands crooning impotently to a disco beat.

But in the next decade, everything changed with a new

generation of hard rock bands, a television channel called MTV

and a former movie star turned president.

# She says we've got to hold on

# To what we've got

# It doesn't make a difference

# If we make it or not

# We got each other

# And that's a lot for love

# We'll give it a shot

# Oh, we're halfway there

# Whoa-oh!

# Livin' on a prayer

# Livin' on a prayer. #