This programme contains very strong language and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting
MUSIC: "Born In The USA" The golden age of American rock,
when singers were gods, guitarists were axemen
and songs were anthems.
♪ Born in the USA
♪ I was born in the USA... ♪
The soundtrack of a nation forged one stadium at a time.
♪ Welcome to the Hotel California... ♪
For three decades from the late '60s,
rock music was the sound of America,
taking over virtually every mainstream radio station in the country
and then its TV screens.
♪ Welcome to the jungle We got fun and games
♪ We got everything you want... ♪
Rock music that became the embodiment of America at its most brash
was born during the protest movement of the late '60s.
This programme explores the emergence of American rock
at the end of the decade - the era of flower power,
mass protests, Vietnam and LSD.
Inspired by the experimental sounds of the Beatles,
some of the biggest names in US rock released their first albums in 1967.
♪ Break on through to the other side
♪Break on through to the other side... ♪
They were musicians who not only sang about the social revolution,
they were the revolution.
It was just great to be part of it. You felt part of something.
I think that the youth finally had a voice.
Make love, not war.
It was as if someone had lifted up a giant flat rock
and everyone crawled out from underneath it.
It was pretty crazy, yeah. It was madly, wonderfully crazy, though.
Thank God.
MUSIC: "Born To Be Wild"
This is the story of classic American rock told by
the people who were there and made the music that shaped a generation.
♪ Born to be wild
♪ Born to be wild... ♪
♪ You shake my nerves And you rattle my brain
♪ Too much love Drives a man insane
♪ You broke my will But what a thrill
♪ Goodness gracious Great balls of fire... ♪
Classic American rock has its roots in the rock 'n' roll era
of the late '50s, when the US was enjoying
an unprecedented cultural and economic boom.
Growing up through the end of the decade,
our fledgling '60s rockers were all turned on by the new craze.
♪ Hm, feels good... ♪
When I was growing up in the '50s,
what was on the charts was hard-ass rock 'n' roll.
It was Little Richard.
It was Elvis Presley.
♪ Everybody in the whole cell block
♪ Was dancing to the jailhouse rock... ♪
Rock 'n' roll took the '50s by storm,
blowing away the austerity of the post-war years.
For the first time in history, teenagers had a voice.
But not everyone was seduced by the sexual awakening of the baby-boomer generation.
♪ Everybody let's rock... ♪
I think the DJs got wise to it
that the girls are getting moist, shall we say?
The boys are hard.
Again. Constantly.
And things were going on that were untoward, that were not allowed.
Rock 'n' roll has got to go and go it does.
That's the best way I know to get rid of them.
The USA entered the '60s in a self-confident and optimistic mood.
That was expressed by the election of a 43-year-old president, John F Kennedy, in 1960.
JFK's message of hope reflected the liberation felt by the Fifties teenyboppers.
But rock 'n' roll's original spirit was already in danger of burning out.
Chuck Berry were sent off to jail.
Little Richard wanted to be a preacher.
Um, Elvis was in the Army.
Then, all of a sudden, we had this, what I call, the pretty-boy singer era.
♪ I love, I love, I love my little calendar girl
♪ Every day Every day
♪ Of the year... ♪
There was very white bread kind of music, you know.
Rock 'n' roll kind of very clean
and, um, you know, formulised.
♪ Who wears short shorts?
♪ We wear short shorts
♪ They're such short shorts
♪ We like short shorts... ♪
Kind of soft, melodic pop.
And young girls, you know, loved that,
but for people who wanted some meat on the bone, what happened?
♪ Round, round Get around, I get around
♪ Yeah Get around, round, round... ♪
Bands like the Beach Boys reflected the happy-go-lucky,
cash-rich lives of the country's teenagers.
Two bonus burgers, a vanilla shake and some French fries.
Under the spell of Kennedy's vision,
there seemed to be no limits to the country's ambition.
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving
the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to the Earth.
♪ We shall overcome. ♪
JFK also challenged America's younger generation
to look at the inequalities in their country.
And when the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, marched on Washington
in August 1963, it resonated with young people of all races.
The First Amendment deals with certain basic freedoms,
such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of press
and the right to protest for rights.
The failure on the part of the government to protect these rights
is one of the great failures that we face.
Frustrated by the failures of the older generation
and inspired by their new charismatic leaders,
young people were no longer afraid to voice their opinions
on everything from civil rights to impending war in Vietnam.
Kids are just getting to the point where they just say,
"Forget you, Mom and Dad, I don't want your society."
♪ Baby love, my baby love... ♪
One clear sign of the changes in American society
was the growing commercial success of black artists with young white audiences.
♪ I never loved no-one but you... ♪
Yet much of American popular music of the early '60s
was still preoccupied with teenage love.
But when folk singer Bob Dylan stepped into the spotlight in 1963 from the booming folk circuit,
his thoughtful, intelligent songs articulated the baby boomers' concerns
with the slow pace of change in modern America.
♪ How many years could a mountain exist
♪ Before it's washed to the sea? ♪
When we first start hearing some Bob Dylan, that was a different voice.
What we liked is the message, more than anything, from Dylan.
He was one of... He was a symbol for change.
♪ The answer, my friend is blowing in the wind
♪ The answer is blowing in the wind. ♪
As Americans faced the increasing threat of their country's involvement in Vietnam,
the younger generation still hoped that their dynamic president would be the catalyst
for a peaceful, fairer country.
But, in November 1963, their hopes were dashed.
After President Kennedy's assassination, Sir Winston Churchill
said that the loss to the United States and to the world is incalculable.
'The bright promise of the Kennedy administration has been replaced by doubt and apprehension.
'Most, when you ask about the days to come, have no answer, or a shake of the head.'
Kennedy's short presidency had captured the imagination of America's youth
and when four cheeky musicians from Liverpool landed in New York,
three months after his funeral,
they found a country that was eager to build on his legacy.
♪ She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
♪ She loves you Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
♪ You think you've lost your love
♪ Well, I saw her... ♪
They were like our gods.
Wow, every two weeks there was a new record, both sides were fantastic.
The Beatles led us all.
Musically, we all looked to the Beatles
and the Beatles were the pied pipers and they took us down that road.
♪ It's been a hard day's night
♪ And I've been working like a dog
♪ It's been a hard day's night... ♪
Suddenly, kids like me, that were 15 years old,
that was going to go to work in a car wash, decided to start bands.
And it scared the other generation to death,
because, all of a sudden, this generation
was getting creative.
I was an Elvis fan.
It didn't seem like an attainable thing to be a rock star.
But when I saw a self-contained unit, like the Beatles were -
they were making the music together, they were singing the music together,
writing the music - then you went, "Ah, I see.
"I see how this can be done."
In the wake of Beatlemania, new bands formed all over the US.
♪ Hey, Mr Tambourine Man play a song for me... ♪
In California, The Byrds were pioneers of folk rock,
playing traditional and folk material on electric instruments.
They reached the top of the American charts in April 1965
with a radical cover version of a Dylan song that was influenced
by the new sounds of the Beatles.
♪ In the jingle-jangle morning I'll come following you. ♪
When we first heard it was like 2/4 time.
♪ Hey, Mr Tambourine Man play a song for me
♪ I'm not sleepy
♪ And there is no place I'm going to... ♪
I took it and I put a Beatle beat to it, like... PLAYS MORE SLOWLY
♪ Hey, Mr Tambourine Man
♪ Play a song for me
♪ In the jingle-jangle morning I'll come following you... ♪
Hot on the heels of the Beatles was another British outfit,
the Rolling Stones.
The band made a huge impression on white American audiences
with their cover versions of songs by largely unknown blues artists,
such as Howlin' Wolf's Little Red Rooster.
♪ I'm the little red rooster, babe
♪ Too lazy
♪ To crow for day... ♪
The Stones started bringing the blues back,
our blues back to us.
There were people who had never even heard
of most of the blues musicians they were playing
a lot of their songs.
♪ Upset in every way... ♪
When these guys came from England, playing American rock 'n' roll
and playing it really, really well, adding a whole new life to it, actually,
thank God for that.
As we used to say, "I love the limeys for what they're doing."
To their everlasting credit, it was the Stones
who insisted on Howlin' Wolf appearing with them on Shindig.
You know, they said, "He doesn't get to play, we don't play."
I was in Chicago a little while ago
and I came across this restaurant and I went in and I found
a chap singing the blues, I thought he was fantastic, so I booked him.
And, er... "Jolly good chap. He's on."
And it turned out to be somebody you know about, in fact he's quite famous, isn't he?
Yes, he was the first one who recorded Little Red Rooster. Was he?
Up until that time, most white kids... "Who are these guys?"
Well, they're the ones who laid the groundwork
for that music that cool music that you love so much.
♪ How many more years
♪ Have I got to let you dog me around?
♪ How many more years
♪ Have I got to let you dog me around? ♪
The difference between the Rolling Stones and us is they idolised
all these great old blues guys,
but we could actually go see these guys.
We'd have to sneak in, but, you know, we did,
and Jimmy Reed and Howlin' Wolf and all these people we got to see.
While the first wave of the British invasion inspired
the emerging American rockers to look closer at home for musical direction,
when the Beatles returned to the US in 1965,
they'd become politicised pot-smokers, who had a huge influence
on the way young people thought and behaved.
MUSIC: "Tomorrow Never Knows" by the Beatles
It's hard to imagine, if you didn't live through it,
when the records came out, how important it was -
culturally, how much we all went to someone's house
to listen to that album come out that day and all the bands followed,
and when the Beatles said something, you listened.
As the Beatles pushed the boundaries of popular music,
they inspired young American bands to believe
that rock 'n' roll could be much more than pure entertainment.
Suddenly, they had a voice.
Now they felt, "Well, if the Beatles and Bob Dylan can protest the war, so can we."
And that's when the whole thing ruptured, I think.
Energised by the British invasion and Bob Dylan's social commentary,
American bands branched out in many directions,
taking influences from the blues, folk, country and rock 'n' roll.
♪ Get your motor running
♪ Head out on the highway
♪ Looking for adventure
♪ And whatever comes our way... ♪
What began to emerge was a distinct American rock style
that was heavier and louder than the bubble-gum pop that had dominated the charts in the early '60s.
Songs such as Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf captured
the spirit of rebellion and freedom
at the heart of the new wave of rock bands.
♪ We were born, born to be wild... ♪
And as bands all over the country added their own local flavours to the mix,
classic American rock was born.
♪ Born to be wild
♪ Born to be wild. ♪
Many early American rock tracks were as much about attitude as social awareness.
But when the US Marines were dispatched to Vietnam in March 1965,
it marked the beginning of the ground war, and the message changed.
♪ I see the bad moon arising
♪ I see trouble on the way... ♪
For teenage boys in the mid-'60s, including those in rock bands,
the threat of being called up was a constant worry.
That unease was captured by the foreboding lyrics of songs
such as Creedence Clearwater Revival's Bad Moon Rising.
♪ It's bound to take your life
♪ There's a bad mood on the rise... ♪
President Lyndon B Johnson's government drafted 400,000 ordinary teenagers into the Army every year.
By 1967, half a million young Americans
were fighting on the other side of the world in Vietnam.
Name? Raymond Daniel Manzarek.
Age? Born 2.12.39.
Here come the politicians.
"You boys are going to have to go off to war to go fight Vietnamese."
"What's a...? Excuse me?
"Where is it Vietnam, first of all, and what's a Vietnamese?
Name? John Densmore.
Age? 23.
We certainly were all educated,
so we quickly learned that the Vietnam War was not where it's at.
It was, in our eyes, a very unjust war.
We had no business being there.
This was the first time everybody looked at America
as a country where God was no longer on our side.
It just didn't fly the way...
For example, nobody had to question why we were fighting
after Pearl Harbor,
in World War II, that just didn't come up.
When it became clear to this younger generation that it could be
drafted and sent to Vietnam, to be blown up, or to kill
maybe harmless people,
this started to become a rallying cry for our generation
in a way that might not have been if it hadn't been for the draft.
Guys didn't want to go. Guys said, "No way, man. Hell, no,
"we won't go." There were big protests in the street.
ALL CHANT: Hell, no, we won't go!
Inevitably, the draft impacted the newly formed rock acts.
Creedence Clearwater Revival singer John Fogerty
and drummer Doug Clifford were both drafted in 1966
and their sense of injustice in the system was expressed in Fortunate Son.
♪ And when you ask 'em How much should we give?
♪ The only answer More, more, more
♪ It ain't me, it ain't me
♪ I ain't no military son. ♪
A lot of the people - the elected officials' kids somehow managed to not go.
They were able to buy a favour, or knew somebody, so it was obvious.
It was the working class and the middle class
that did the dirty work.
♪ More, more
♪ It ain't me, it ain't me
♪ I ain't no fortunate one. ♪
With more young men called up,
dodging the draft became a game of cat and mouse.
The image of unruly '60s kids head-to-head with the US Army
became ingrained in the American psyche.
These encounters were captured in the black humour
of the 1978 cult movie Big Wednesday.
This is your induction visit.
Now if you pass today, you will be a member of the United States Army.
I hope you brought your toothbrushes.
When I was in the Army psychiatrist's office,
I pulled my chair over to the corner and sat with my back to the man.
Er, this is amusing now - I was terrified, let me tell you.
And he yelled at me and I said, "I am not good material for the Army. I took LSD."
And he said, "Great, you're going in."
Oh, thank you very much(!)
And so on the way out, this wonderful, elderly, large black woman,
who was taking the forms looked at me
and she could tell I was just so shattered, I could barely function
and she pointed to the "homosexual tendencies" box.
And implied that if I checked that, I wouldn't be in.
And this was back when they didn't even have the word "gay",
it was more derogatory.
And, you know, um, I checked that box.
Thank God.
Sent to fight or left at home, the baby-boomer generation
was desperate to escape from the reality of war.
Thousands of young Americans flocked to San Francisco,
attracted by the city's liberal attitude to sex and drugs.
It also boasted one of the most dynamic music scenes in the country,
where acts such as Country Joe and Janis Joplin provided the soundtrack to 1967's Summer of Love.
♪ I need a man to love me
♪ Don't you understand me, baby?
♪ Why
♪ I need a man to love... ♪
San Francisco's always been a liberal place, where there's so much going on.
And when I grew up here, there was the beatniks and the jazz cats,
so it was a natural place for something to ferment.
Everybody's wearing feathers and beads and long dresses
and wild hats.
And it was as if someone had lifted up a giant flat rock
and everyone crawled out from underneath it.
And it was kindred spirits.
Let's face it, we were all a bunch of dope-smokers,
so that was against the law.
And nobody wanted to drink
and they didn't want to do what the straight people did.
♪ I'm stuck on the LA freeway
♪ Got rainwater in my boots... ♪
We call upon the world to help us celebrate the infinite holiness of life.
We ask all who come here to come here in love
and we ask all who live here to greet all men with love.
There was this great love vibe, everybody loved everybody.
I don't know, everybody slept with everybody, as far as I know.
♪ I went flying
♪ And high...
For the first time it was, "Wow, we are united."
And it was sort of us against them, but we wanted to bring the straights into the freak scene.
It wasn't like we were... We were hoping to... That we could all become one.
It was all very much to do with that kind of belief that
we can overcome any negative bullshit with music and loving each other
and it was sincere.
The city's rock scene grew hand-in-hand
with the flower-power generation's experimentation with LSD.
The Fillmore Ballroom became home to a new breed of psychedelic bands, such as Jefferson Airplane.
♪ It's no secret
♪ When you' got me jumping up and down
♪ It's no secret
♪ Cos my heart is chained and bound
♪ I love you
♪ Yes, I love you, yeah
♪ It's no secret... ♪
At the gigs in the ballrooms, we had this barrel of apples
and every apple was syringed with acid.
And we had a big fruit bowl, you know, punch when you come up the stairs in the Fillmore,
you know, laced with acid.
So the audience is having a good time, too, you know,
and they got very loose with us.
♪ See that girl barefootin' along
♪ Whistling and singing She's a-carryin' on... ♪
The legendary shows at the Fillmore by bands such Jefferson Airplane,
Quicksilver Messenger
and Grateful Dead were mirrored in other parts of the country
as kids fell under the influence of flower power and its soundtrack.
People my age and, you know, from 15 to 20, just rocking out,
dancing, loving each other, carrying flowers and incense around,
smoking a lot of pot and feeling like part of a community,
part of a revolution that was brewing.
And the music had everything to do with it.
The words the musicians were singing, the way they looked,
it was brand-new, it was fresh and exciting.
Jefferson Airplane was the first San Francisco psychedelic outfit
to hit the big time.
And lead singer Grace Slick's White Rabbit captured
the experimental spirit of flower power.
♪ One pill makes you larger
♪ And one pill makes you small
♪ And the ones that Mother gives you
♪ Don't do any thing at all
♪ Go ask Alice
♪ When she's ten feet tall... ♪
As LSD became widespread in the music scene,
even heavier rock bands of the era, such as LA-based Steppenwolf,
experimented with atmospheric songs and abstract sounds.
In San Francisco, they were stretching out,
they were jamming, they were psychedelic,
they tried things and, since a lot of the ballroom audience
was on the same trip with them, it was not only tolerated,
it was kind of, "Wow, it's really far out, man."
It was that kind of experience.
And we started to do likewise, to see whether it can create
a mood, some kind of mental picture that we can generate in your mind.
Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride.
♪ You don't know what we can find
♪ Oh, why don't you come with me, little girl
♪ On a magic carpet ride...? ♪
It wasn't only in the studio where musicians explored with new psychedelic sounds.
When Jimi Hendrix burst onto the American scene
at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967,
he transformed the possibilities of rock music
and the first American guitar hero was born.
Come on, man!
♪ Wild thing
♪ You make my heart sing
♪ You make everything groovy... ♪
Hendrix was alien to me.
I listened to it and I went, "What is he doing, how is it happening?"
He took a Stratocaster, plugged it into a Marshall stack
and did something that was not designed to ever happen before and transferred a language.
He is somebody that, I think,
best expressed what electric lead guitar sounds like.
MUSIC: "Purple Haze"
He was the first one that really put that screaming element into it.
A lot of people are experimenting and stuff and checking out
new sounds and new techniques, all kinds of great stuff.
But when he came out, it really came from the heart and he heard music
played with that sound and he went after it and fucking created it.
I've never seen anything like that since, never. That creativity.
I mean, there's the great Jeff Becks and Claptons,
but nobody was that sexy, you know.
I see guys all the time, "Hey, I can play Purple Haze, but they don't play it like the way Hendrix...
I mean, he fucked every note, you know.
With their often outlandish image, and open use of illegal substances,
rock musicians were inevitably associated with hedonistic lifestyles.
Yet, for many of this generation, it wasn't just an excuse to smoke pot.
There was a growing sense of empowerment,
new lifestyles were butting up against conservative lifestyles
and establishment, and the counter-culture began to be
better defined as opposing forces.
The generation's values that had been inspired by JFK
at the turn of the decade, were given a huge boost when his younger brother,
the charismatic 40-year-old figure of Bobby Kennedy, joined the race
to become the Democratic nominee for the 1968 presidential election.
♪ Excuse me while I kiss the sky... ♪
We can start to work together. We are a great country,
an unselfish country and a compassionate country
and I intend to make that my basis for running. CHEERING
With his baby-faced looks and positive vision,
Kennedy expressed the generation's hopes for a peaceful future.
But not everyone viewed the country through the same rose-tinted glasses.
Formed in Los Angeles, in 1965, on Venice Beach
by four middle-class college boys, The Doors expressed a very different vibe.
Their combination of free-form jazz, flamenco and poetry
acted as a dark counterpoint to the San Francisco hippy scene.
♪ Carry me, caravan Take me away
♪ Take me to Portugal Take me to Spain
♪ Andalusia
♪ With fields full of grain
♪ I have to see you
♪ Again and again... ♪
They were LA's sex music,
whereas San Francisco had a groovy,
"Let's all get together in the park and smoke marijuana
"and listen to Country Joe And The Fish," you know.
The Doors were this other entity.
They were kind of this dark, sexy entity.
The band was fronted by the enigmatic Jim Morrison,
whose film-star looks
and brooding stage presence fascinated everyone who saw him.
You couldn't take your eyes off Morrison, because you didn't know
if he was going to jump off the stage,
if he was going to collapse - he was totally unpredictable.
Your name? Er, Jim.
Occupation? Um...
Morrison's stream-of-conscious poetry
was as unpredictable as his behaviour,
and pushed the boundaries of rock lyrics in epic songs
such as The End.
♪ This is the end
♪ Beautiful friend
♪ This is the end
♪ My only friend, the end
♪ Of our elaborate plans The end... ♪
He sort of expressed the underlying angst the teenagers were feeling at the time
and I remember very vividly his darkness.
He had a dark quality and it was very sexy.
And the stuff he sang about was pretty profound and deep.
♪ Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
♪ And all the children
♪ Are insane...
"Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain and all the children are insane."
♪ Are insane...
"Waiting for the summer rain."
♪ Waiting for the summer rain... ♪
Whoa, wait a second, man, is that Rimbaud? What is that?
That's not rock 'n' roll lyrics.
In the late '60s, radio was still the dominant medium for broadcasting music,
but the constraints dictated by commercial radio was ill-equipped
to deal with the changing face of rock.
Songs such as The End were too long and lyrically challenging
to be played on the singles-dominated radio stations.
In San Francisco, all that was about to change.
Prior to April of 1967...
..there was no FM radio, no FM rock radio.
It was Top 40 bubble gum, AM, mono.
And that was fine, you know, for the '50s,
but, now, the Beatles had come along and the Stones were here.
And Bob Dylan had arrived.
And The Doors, you know.
So along comes Tom and Raechel Donahue,
who are sitting in their apartment in San Francisco one night.
We're playing cards and drinking iced water,
and butterscotch candy and taking acid,
and, all of a sudden, we hear "Father, I'm going to kill you!"
"What, what? Did he just...? What did he just say?"
♪ Father Yes, son
♪ I want to kill you
♪ Mother
♪ I want to...
Agggghhhh!
♪ Come on Oh... ♪
The length alone, the construction of the song, it's scary.
And it was dark and it was not anything like anything anybody else was doing.
And Tom asked the fateful question, "Why don't we hear this on the radio?"
Next day, he gets up, Tom and Raechel get their VW van,
or whatever they're driving at the time, and they find a radio station
who is so poor their phone has been disconnected.
So Tom and Raechel go back to their place.
They pack up their own albums in cardboard boxes, go back to the station
turn it on and that was it. Like, instantly, Haight-Ashbury lit up.
People were putting their stereo speakers out on the balcony, "Hey, listen to this!"
It was so completely different, because, suddenly,
you're getting all of this extraordinarily rich culture coming at you,
delivered from people who you could relate to.
What we want to do is everybody working together to make it as cool
and groovy a trip as we can and to make it as happy a party as we can.
You had disc jockeys
that were kind of making up their own mind what they played.
They were taste-makers.
If you have a guy who had good taste,
you had a really great radio show.
This is KSAN in San Francisco, Tom Donahue and Raechel
and lots of other people tonight, lots of friends until midnight.
The DJ just went, "I've got all these albums,
"I've got these glut of music.
"I can play Quicksilver Messenger Service for 12 minutes."
You wouldn't play the same song from an album, you'd work your way through an album.
So if there was a new Jimi Hendrix album,
when the new Cream album came out,
we'd work our way through all the cuts, so that
the audience could hear everything on it before deciding to buy it.
With the arrival of FM radio,
many of the protest movement's ideas on tackling poverty,
ending sexual and racial inequality started to be embraced more widely.
They were able to relate what was going on in the street to the music.
So, suddenly,
they could tie in what Dr King was saying with a Bob Dylan song.
and now you got something more powerful than the two separately.
Now you're starting to think about this stuff in a whole different way,
and it spread like wildfire,
and it started spreading across the country.
In a country as vast as the US, each city had distinct political
and social issues and these were reflected in the local music scene.
The industrial city of Detroit was home to some of the loudest,
wildest bands in the country, such as the Stooges and MC5.
♪ Love is like a ramblin' rose
♪ The more you feel it The more it grows... ♪
It was a far cry from the love vibes of flower power.
Detroit was a dynamic city at that time
and working in the factory was portrayed as bang, bang, bang, bang.
And it was sort of a bang, bang, bang, bang.
And that got into their music.
You know, the hard, driving rhythm, "Kick 'em out, don't give up."
♪ Kick out the jams, motherfuckers... ♪
The four working-class boys that were the MC5
added some urban grit to the Summer of Love soundtrack
with high-energy tracks, such as Kick Out The Jams.
♪ Well, I'm feelin' pretty good
♪ And I guess that I could Get crazy now, baby
♪ Cos we all got in tune
♪ When the dressing room Got hazy now, baby
♪ I know how you want it, mama Hot, quick and tight
♪ The girls can't stand it When you're doin' it right
♪ Get me up on the stand
♪ And let me kick out the jams... ♪
There's an old saw
that the Summer of Love didn't make a stop in Detroit.
We tried. We had our hippies.
We believed that peace and love were better than hate and violence.
If you wanted the peace and love, you could get it here, too.
There were, you know, "We love you, peace."
Well, there was also...
♪ Kick out the jams! ♪
In Detroit, there was a different vibe.
Here people wanted, like, a little bit harder
rock 'n' roll than that.
We're not that laid-back here!
San Francisco bands, to me,
they all sounded like folk guitar players with electric guitars.
The rhythm sections were always terribly weak
and they just didn't... They didn't have that...that drive.
At the heart of the Motor City music scene was one of the craziest venues on the circuit,
the Grande Ballroom.
It was just a fabulous place where anything could happen
any given night. There were scandalous amounts of sex happening in the ballroom
in the course of the evening.
Drugs - psychedelic drugs, marijuana.
On stage, it was like an orgasm.
Yeah, it was.
People would come in their... After the show, we'd find little wet spots
where the audiences were, sometimes.
The ladies got too carried away. I'm sorry, but that's the truth.
As well as MC5's celebration of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll,
they also promoted a very different message.
Along with many young black people,
MC5's members were frustrated at the slow pace of change on civil rights.
In Detroit, the Black Panther Party organised community projects
in addition to protecting black people from police brutality.
And the MC5 were sympathetic to their militaristic stance.
The White Panther Party grew out of our frustration with the slow pace of change.
We were young and we wanted things to happen now. Now, now, now.
And, um, one of our friends was in jail
and he read in the Black Panther newspaper
that the Black Panthers had asked for a group of white people
to come forward to do parallel work in the white community,
that they were doing in the black community.
And we said, "Hey, that's us. "They've got guns, we've got guns.
"They're revolutionaries, we're revolutionaries."
And, um, even though they were kind of more serious
and we were, like, more crazy. HE LAUGHS
We were, like, stoned out.
I mean, the White Panther Party was kind of like a bunch of guys
sitting around a table smoking a lot of reefer, laughing their ass off!
On generational, racial and social grounds,
American society was divided.
Viewed by many as the embodiment of the hippy generation,
the sight of long-haired musicians on the road in the American heartlands
was often met with suspicion.
People would chase you, come after you,
throw things at you, say things to you.
It was very, you know... For us it was great, you know.
We were disturbing these people.
We'd come to disturb the comfortable and make the comfortable disturbed.
Even members of bands steeped in American roots music,
such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, weren't safe on their travels.
♪ When I was just a little boy
♪ Standing to my daddy's knee... ♪
We did Johnny Cash television summer show in Nashville
and I wanted to buy a country shirt, a Western shirt, from Nashville.
And it was lunchtime. I went out. I asked where I could buy one.
Somebody said, "Two blocks this way four blocks that way, you can get...
"There's a big store, you can get all the shirts you want."
So I went down to buy one.
Went by a bar and I heard this commotion
and the next thing I know, I'm up against the wall
and there are five guys that had me pinned against the wall.
And, er, "So, what have we got here, what have we got here?
"We've got us a hippy boy.
"Well, I don't know whether to fuck it or to shoot it."
I mean, that's what they're saying. But I'm dead.
I am going to certainly get the crap kicked out of me.
Then I have this deep voice. "Hey, boys, what the hell are you doing?
"Let that man go." It was Johnny Cash.
Thank God he was going out to... I don't know where he was going,
but he passed by that bar and saved my ass.
And, er... I said. "I'm going to be staying in the studio from now on."
The culture clashes experienced by bands on the road
were a sign that the paradise dreamt
by the peace-and-love generation was turning sour.
By the end of the decade, America was out of control at home and abroad.
The body count went through the roof
as the news carried daily images of the horror in Vietnam.
The brutal assassination of Martin Luther King ended hopes of a non-violent solution
to the civil rights campaign.
And when Bobby Kennedy was shot on the campaign trail
in June in 1968, the generation's hopes
of electing a sympathetic figure that would end the war died with him.
When Robert was assassinated, that was a real sinker, emotionally,
because a lot of us
had hoped that he was the guy that was going to,
with his youthful charisma and energy,
was going to pull the whole country forward.
Shocked by the loss of their charismatic leader
and frustrated by the lack of progress on Vietnam,
the frustration of the peace-and-love movement
boiled over onto the streets and into the music.
You could not disconnect the social movement from the music,
it was that important.
Again, you tasted it, you knew it.
♪ Looks what's happening out in the streets
♪ Revolution
♪ Hey, I'm dancing Down the streets... ♪
Jefferson Airplane, who'd captured the spirit of flower power,
was one of the many bands who shed their psychedelic skins in favour
of political anthems that reflected the tensions on the streets.
♪ And now it's time for you and me
♪ Got a revolution... ♪
The hippy generation's mantra had been the freedom
to experience alternative lifestyles in peace.
As the Summer of Love turned into 1968's winter of discontent,
the message changed from peace and love
to a revolutionary call to arms.
♪ Got a revolution... ♪
'68 was a scary time. It was dark. Ugh.
'67 was beautiful and then '68 was dark, you know.
It was such a sudden change.
Things that had started out in a much more benign way,
er, started to get heavy.
People weren't seeing things happen quickly enough.
And so violence started to creep into all the movements.
Some of the worst riots were in Detroit,
home of revolutionary band the MC5,
where a police raid of an unlicensed bar
triggered five days of violence...
♪ You know the Motor City's burning, babe
♪ There ain't a thing in the world they can do... ♪
..culminating in 46 deaths, 7,000 arrests
and 2,000 buildings destroyed.
Detroit was at war for a week with the Detroit police
and, in the end, the United States Army came into separate everybody
and calm things down, because the police had gone mad.
40 or 50 people that were killed in that riot,
they weren't snipers, Black Panther snipers, picking off police.
They were just regular people that the police shot and killed.
And when the Democratic Party convention in Chicago
gathered to nominate a presidential candidate to take on
the bruising figure of Richard Nixon,
it was a disaster waiting to happen.
The event that should have been Bobby Kennedy's coronation turned nasty
when the other anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy,
was beaten by Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
'I don't know what's going on but these are security people, apparently.'
But the scenes in the convention took second place
to the running battles between demonstrators and the police
on the streets of Chicago.
The convention in Chicago was disastrous, absolutely insane,
wild, crazed.
It was like a teenage movie, a political rebellion,
except it was actually happening right on TV.
There was a girl starting a fire and I was walking by, and they...
they asked the girl what she was doing.
She said she was starting a fire.
This was this one man,
short, fat guy in a green plaid jacket, and he said, "Really?"
and he pulled out a black can
and he just put it right up to her face and shot her.
Are you kidding me? Is this going on in America?
When what we basically have
are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of hippies smoking pot.
When Republican candidate Richard Nixon
was inaugurated as President in 1969,
the flower power generation knew that their ideals had been rejected
by the majority of Americans.
But not everyone wallowed in self-pity.
In upstate New York,
an ambitious idea of a festival of peace and music
near the quiet hamlet of Woodstock gathered momentum.
Really what we were trying to do was bring everybody together.
We wanted to have an event
which celebrated the positive side of our experiences.
♪ We can be together
♪ Ah-ahh, you and me... ♪
We conceived it as this gathering of the tribes to sort of...
get ourselves together and see if we could actually live, you know,
the kind of... even for that brief period of time,
in the kind of relationships and the way that we aspired to.
What does it cost to put one of these things together?
A fortune. A fortune? Right.
I planned Woodstock for 200,000 people. That was our real number.
We built for it, we thought we were providing for it
in terms of food, you know, capacities for toilets.
Everything was based on that number, 200,000,
cos I thought, you know, "How ridiculous can it get?"
Maybe that ridiculous.
We were standing on the kerbs watching them come in last night,
all the townspeople.
It was just like an army invading your town!
On the grass!
Please walk on the grass!
At some point, somebody observed that during that weekend,
Woodstock was the third largest city in New York State.
And we had expected one-twentieth the size of this crowd.
American rock legends Jefferson Airplane,
Creedence Clearwater
and Woodstock residents The Band were among an A-list of acts
hellbent on putting on an unforgettable show.
♪ I was feeling 'bout half past ten
♪ I just need to find some place where I can lay my head... ♪
From the beginning, we all agreed.
We did not want to make a political statement.
We felt the biggest statement we could make was,
this is going to work, we don't have to say anything.
♪ Take a load off, Fanny
♪ Take a load for free
♪ Take a load off, Fanny
♪ And you put the load right on me
♪ And you put the load right on me... ♪
Woodstock was really, really special.
You could feel the love. I mean...
I don't mean to be cliched but, I mean, I can't think of anything...
That's what it was, was pure love.
Morning, people!
I was playing cards with Janis and Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend,
and whoever kept losing, and Janis would say, "OK, you go next."
She was calling the shots, you know.
And we didn't get on till, like, seven in the morning, you know.
By that time, God, we'd been drunk and sobered up so many times.
♪ Won't you try?
♪ Come on and try
♪ Won't you try?
♪ Find a way to need someone
♪ Find a way to see... ♪
What nobody talked about out loud a lot
was the possibility of civil disorder.
Otherwise known as rioting!
We just kept our fingers crossed
and, sure enough, the audience,
recognising that it was up to them to recreate civilisation...
..reached inside and, out of some sense of...
of integrity or decency or golden rule or community, really,
and love, recreated society themselves.
What you have here is this culture and this generation
away from the old culture and the older generation,
and you see how they've bunched in on their own,
without cops, without guns, without clubs, without hassles.
Everybody pulls together and everybody helps each other.
And it works. It's been working since we got here.
And it's going to continue working.
No matter what happens when they go back to the city,
this thing is happening and it proves that it can happen.
MUSIC: "Star Spangled Banner" by Jimi Hendrix
On the fourth morning, Jimi Hendrix closed the festival
with his haunting version of the national anthem.
Yet, instead of providing a platform
for re-energising the social movement
and inspiring a new wave of revolutionary music,
the legacy of Woodstock was, instead,
hijacked by record moguls and money men who were waiting at the gates.
It was always about, you know,
fuck the establishment and we're not buying it, and...
and that started to change, you know.
When the music business, after Woodstock,
became the music industry, when great labels like Atlantic
got taken over by these big corporations
who had year-end reports and stockholders
and things had to happen according to a schedule, all of it changed
and, suddenly,
bands who would never have thought about taking a sponsor on,
for example, and "selling out" in that way
were saying, "That's what the business is."
And so, as time went on, it became more and more of the reality of...
..the world of rock 'n' roll.
Suddenly you have lawyers, you have accountants and investment
and managers and road guys and roadies and this and that,
and everybody's telling you what to do
and everybody's got their own big head
and their egos and their drugs, and it's very boring, you know.
I mean, every time the Airplane would try to get together,
after we were popular, you know, if we had a rehearsal,
lawyers would come, the accountants would...
It's the only time they could get us all together.
It was like, "Hey, we're trying to rehearse here," you know,
"We're trying to put something new together."
It took an element of its independence away
and it took an element of its...
um...
value...
..to young people away.
Just a few months after Woodstock,
the anything goes, peace-loving ethos of the flower power generation
was delivered a fatal blow
when a black music fan was killed by a member of the Hells Angels
who were policing a Rolling Stones festival at Altamont, California.
Although much had changed socially and politically
in a short space of time,
America ended this turbulent decade in its history as it began,
the world's undisputed superpower, even delivering on JFK's promise
to land a man on the moon by the end of the '60s.
But with a conservative presence in the White House,
the war still raging in Vietnam
and civil rights battles still being fought,
had the Woodstock generation
and the rockers who provided the soundtrack to their ideals blown it?
This generation that we're talking about...
..did change the world. Let me emphasise that.
The seeds of civil rights, feminism, peace movement, anti-war,
were planted in the '60s.
Now, these are deep, serious issues that need a lot of water,
maybe 50 or 100 years of water, I don't know,
but they were planted and the fruition is slowly coming.
That revolutionary time, I hope it comes...
I hope someone can make a dent like that in the future,
but it hasn't happened yet.
I think the spirit goes on. It doesn't change, you know.
The soul of people doesn't change, you know.
We all want love, we all want peace.
We all want to make something happen in this world,
and I have a feeling that we're going to.
By the end of 1971, three of America's biggest rock stars -
Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix -
would be dead in their 20s, all unable to control their drug habits.
Their deaths marked the end of an era
when rock music genuinely challenged the establishment
with its celebration of alternative lifestyles
that embodied the generation's spirit of revolution.
In the next part, we tell the story of the acts
who followed in the wake of America's rock pioneers...
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.
♪ School's out for summer... ♪
..a decade when cocaine replaced LSD...
The emotional feel of the love, love, love
became much more up in your head because of the...
that particular drug.
..when the protest was replaced by indifference
and when rock music became the safe music of middle America.
I mean, 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."
♪ For the music is your special friend
♪ Dance on fire as it intends
♪ Music is your only friend
♪ Until the end... ♪