[ Switch clicks, tube hums ]
[ Tubes humming ]
-My interest in music, yeah, it starts when --
when things become electric.
-♪ They wanna get my
♪ Gold on the ceiling
♪ I ain't blind -Pluggin' in
started a music revolution.
-Blues went electric.
They put it on a train and took it up North
and plugged them in.
Hot-wired the blues.
[ Guitar solo ]
-I plug it in. I get it home and I turn it up it's like "Khhhhh."
-"Ehrrrrr!"
-"Euhhhhhrrrrr!"
♪♪
-Suddenly, you didn't need a horn section anymore.
-I spent most of the mid-'60s
not hearing anything I ever sang.
-Electricity didn't just turn up the volume,
it opened up a world of new sounds.
-These albums are kind of sonic fantasies
that could never actually exist in real life.
-♪ I could never drown in
-I fell in love with the synthesizer.
-Is this how you make up all these songs?
With all these --
-We let the machines make up the songs.
♪♪
-You cannot put me anywhere near a synth.
I don't care if it was old-school synth,
you know it's still a manipulated sound.
-♪ They wanna get my
♪ Gold on the ceiling
-It was like they were working on Frankenstein.
All day, all night.
-This is the story of how one epic innovation
triggered a musical chain reaction
that's still throwing off sparks today.
♪♪
-It's amazing technology already happening,
which expands what can be created,
'cause someone will use one of those things,
and by accident, stumble into a brand new sound
that no one's ever heard before.
♪♪
-Just think of what would happen to the music business
if we pulled the plug on all the electricity.
♪♪
-Okay, then. Okay.
-It'll be an F for you.
-Here we go.
Just one more time.
-Right after I say, "Are you sure?"
Da da da -- yeah.
-Oh.
-Hal, here's how I want to do it. Takes like this.
-All right, it's fun time. Fun time.
-Here we go.
-Oh, really? -17, take one.
-This will be the keeper. -[Chuckle]
♪♪
[ The Who's "My Generation" plays ]
-♪ People try to put us down
♪ Talkin' 'bout my generation
-Well, amplification in The Who, uh, is a very long journey.
-♪ Things they do look awful cold ♪
-I mean, I remember when The Who first were using Beatle 100s.
-Those are the first big amps we ever saw;
they're called Super Beatles.
-And we covered the speaker fronts with Union Jacks.
And it was such a fantastic celebration
of, uh, loud music, loud, loud, loud.
-Incredibly loud. Incredibly loud.
-You didn't feel like you were gonna be sick;
you felt like you were gonna float up to heaven.
-In the area of London we lived,
there was a shop called Jim Marshall's,
and he started making amplifiers, and he says,
"Well, I've done this, and I've done that.
Try this one out."
And they gradually got bigger and bigger.
-It got bigger and bigger and bigger,
and it was like, kind of like the, uh, arms race
against other bands we played with.
[ Guitar solo ]
If Jerry had two Fenders, Jorma wanted two.
Jorma went up to four. Jerry went up four, uh, Fenders.
♪♪
-Everything got louder, and the drummer had to get louder, too.
-And we're playing 'em harder and harder and harder.
Too hard.
Bob and Jerry, they were ripping their cords out,
trying to sing over the din.
-♪ We'll be fighting in the streets ♪
-And I think I spent most of the '60s
not hearing anything I ever sang.
It made me develop a pair of lungs that I've still got today.
-♪ And the men who spurred us on ♪
-In 1976, The Who were recognized
as the loudest band in the world.
125 decibels.
-♪ Yea-ea-ea-ea-ea-ea-h!
♪♪
-Over the course of the 20th century,
electricity and amplification didn't just make music louder,
it transformed it, and there's no better example of that
than the electric guitar.
[ Playing outro ]
-The electric guitar is its own instrument.
[ Guitar solo ]
-It magnifies every little nuance
that the string gives off,
that you probably wouldn't hear on a regular acoustic guitar.
[ Solo continues ]
[ Applause ]
The richness of tone and the treble,
it brings that out.
[ Solo continues ]
-It can sustain.
[ Down-tempo blues playing ]
-You can make it sound almost voice-like.
You can make really gentle chords
and almost ethereal sounds,
and then with a flick of the switch,
you can knock down buildings, you know.
[ Up-tempo rock music plays ]
♪♪
-The electric guitar became so popular
and it gave the power to guitarists,
and it took all of us a long time to go
and wrench it back out of their nasty, little hands.
[ Up-tempo blues plays ]
-Well, first thing that happened with the electric guitar
that was so important was Charlie Christian.
People don't understand how important he really was.
And he was discovered by John Hammond.
-John Hammond helped define the landscape
of American popular music and jazz for a very long period.
He put Charlie Christian together with Benny Goodman,
which put the electric guitar on the...map.
He not only went to Oklahoma and brought him,
he forced him on Benny Goodman.
A black guy on the most famous white bandleader in the country.
And Goodman hated guitar players!
[ Up-tempo jazz plays ]
-Early on in the '30s, jazz guitar players
were the guys in the big band with acoustic guitars,
and they would play chords, just chords,
and it wasn't loud enough to play the melodies.
[ Jazz music continues ]
-So somewhere around 1939, Gibson comes out
with a amplifier with the guitar.
It's like 150 bucks, and Charlie Christian bought one.
-Hammond was so confident
that Goodman would completely freak out
when he heard that a guitar player
could play like a saxophonist, that he would change his mind,
so he said, "Benny, just do this one audition.
Just, you know, he's a kid from Oklahoma, just do it."
[ Jazz guitar solo ]
And as soon as Charlie started playing,
and that sound came out of the amplifier,
the Benny Goodman sextet was born.
[ Solo continues ]
-For the first time, the guitar was not a background instrument.
Used to be dominated by saxophones and trumpets.
Now, when you needed any more power,
just turn that amplifier up.
♪♪
-Well, I'm a big Charlie Christian fan.
♪♪
He's definitely the first rock guitarist.
You can see from there to Hendrix,
he's just blowing everybody away.
-The fact that there was a black man
playing an electric guitar, it opened up the doors,
'cause when you hear his sound,
it's -- there's a direct connection between the tone
of Charlie Christian's instrument and the blues.
♪♪
-It's difficult to think about music
without thinking about the blues.
When you love music, no matter what --
You like punk rock, or pop music, or rock 'n' roll,
or jazz, or rockabilly, country, they all lead right back
to the blues; that's the root of all of it.
♪♪
-I didn't get an electric guitar till 1946.
It would cost about $100 for the amplifier and the guitar.
But the people just making a living on the farm
ain't getting no guitar too much, you know what I mean?
♪ Standing at a corner
♪ Fell down on my knees
♪ At a corner
-When I was young, I'd never seen an electric guitar,
and where we lived it wouldn't have did me
any good anyway because we had no electricity.
-This area in Mississippi gave birth
to this incredible laundry list of people
who are the pioneers of the blues.
Honeyboy Edwards, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters,
and some of them, of course, left there.
[ Blues music plays ]
-From the early 1920s, you have this massive migration
of African Americans from South to North.
Chicago absorbs a lot of Southern black migrants.
People call it the Up South.
-But really why I left the South for was to make records.
I couldn't find no way to get to make records down there.
I couldn't get no connections, you know.
Said, "Well, I'm going to Chicago.
-♪ Well, I'm goin' away to leave ♪
♪ Won't be back no more
♪ Going back down South
-Every bit of music that happens,
happens in the context of a space.
So at some point, somebody said,
"Hey, we can't -- we can't hear this acoustic guitar
over the amount of people who are here."
-And you playin' without an amplifier,
and people havin' a little fun,
takin' a little nip, they forget you there.
-So let's plug it in. Let's, like,
let's -- let's ramp it up.
-♪ Got my mojo workin'
♪ But it just don't work on you ♪
-The difference in the Mississippi Delta Blues
and Chicago Blues was they basically just put it on a train
and took it up North and plugged it in.
Hot-wired the blues.
-♪ My command
♪ Got my mojo workin'
-♪ Got my mojo workin'
-When the arc of the blues hits Muddy Waters,
at that time with the electrification of instruments,
it was all roads perfectly met in one man,
in Chicago, in that moment.
Then when the blues invaded England,
to me is one of the most important moments in music,
because somebody had to recognize these guys
for the musical heroes that they were.
-♪ I don't want you to
♪ Be no slave
-It was fairly surreal,
the transfer of this music into England.
Blues was completely different
to anything that we'd ever heard before,
and it just had a natural attraction.
-♪ I just want to make
♪ love to you
♪ Love to you
-Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, I think,
had gone to school together, they had known each other,
but they meet on a train platform in London
and Mick has a Muddy Waters record
and Keith looks at him and says, "What's that, mate?"
you know, and that says a lot, doesn't it?
They love, revere, the blues, you know, they've studied it,
they are so heavily influenced by it.
-♪ I just wanna make love to you ♪
♪ Baby, love to you
-Well, I didn't quite know how to take the Rolling Stones.
It sounded like they were
trying to sing badly.
You know, it sounded like they were going out of their way
to not hit the right notes, you know what I mean?
-♪ I don't want you to wash my clothes ♪
-The Rolling Stones were the bad boys
of English rock 'n' roll,
and, and they were always marketed that way.
They may not have been,
but that was the way they were marketed.
-♪ I just wanna make love to you ♪
♪ Baby, love to you
-Keith is the riff meister.
How in the world does he come up
with something like "Satisfaction"?
[ Cheers and applause ]
[ Rolling Stones's "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" plays ]
♪♪
♪ I can't get no
♪ Satisfaction
-That really was the moment that changed everything.
When "Satisfaction" came out, that was it.
The Stones were the number-one rock 'n' roll band.
♪ And I try, and I try, and I try ♪
♪ I can't get no
♪ Oh, when I'm driving in my car ♪
-Prior to that song,
Brian Jones had always provided all the riffs.
So when they went to America and recorded "Satisfaction"
and brought it back, the fact that Keith had played a riff
at all was pretty astonishing.
Equally, the fact that it had such an amazing influence
on the song was quite remarkable.
[ Guitar tuning ]
-I mean, it was a big deal
when I learned that a lot of the stuff,
like, that I was scratching my head over,
when I realized it was in a different tuning.
That's how he was doing that thing, you know?
It all started to make sense, you know?
Muddy Waters would have used this tuning a lot.
This was like, "Oh, yeah, Keith Richards was doing..."
[ Strumming guitar ]
-Err-err [Laughs]
You know, just think of it in terms of human speech,
what, the attitude behind making a sou--
[ Grunts ]
It's like a machine gun, man, you know.
That's -- that -- that's -- That's the statement being made.
That's what -- what -- what Keith's doing with that sound,
that's -- that's what Mick's doing with the vocal.
-♪ When I'm driving in my car
♪ And a man comes on the radio
♪ And tellin' me more and more
♪ About some useless information ♪
-It's this cocky, rebellious music.
It's, like, right in the face of the oppressor.
Get the...out of my way.
[ Laughs ]
And that -- And if you're 14 years old,
it's audio testosterone.
-♪ All right
♪ I can't get no
-The production elements that are employed on those records
only enhance the message.
Probably the earliest use of the fuzz-tone.
It's very early use of that.
-The first specific unit that was made to distort a guitar
opened up incredible possibilities,
just because you could make a note sustain
for as long as that, apart from anything else,
and it made it sound more aggressive.
-♪ Phenomenal lies
♪ On the cosmic eternity party line ♪
The guitar can be a shield and a weapon.
It can scream when I can't.
It can be the monster or the villain.
It oughta just be a noisemaker
and if serving the song means that it's a knife coming in
and slashing the painting, then that's what it ought to be.
♪ Like a birth in reverse
♪ What I saw through the blinds ♪
-The guitar, when it's distorted,
sounds threatening, even at low level.
If you switch off the distortion and then turn up the level,
you don't feel threatened, because it's a clear sound.
But for some reason, the distortion,
it strikes, like, fear.
-I remember when I first got my electric guitar,
it just didn't sound right.
I'm like, "Wait a second.
This doesn't sound like 'Revolution' by The Beatles.
What, oh, I need a distortion pedal?"
I said, "Mom, can I please have $25?
I have to get this thing. It's called a distortion --"
"Distortion pedal, what's that?"
So I plug it in, I get it home, and I turn it up,
it's like khhhh, and I'm so excited!
My mom's, like, "Is that thing broken?"
I'm like, "No. Doesn't it sound great?!"
She's like, "Absolutely not! [Laughs] Sounds horrible!"
[ Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" plays ]
-It must've been '66, maybe.
I was a student at the Regent Street Poly,
and for our end-of-term dance, we had Cream.
-♪ It's getting near dawn
♪ When lights close -And the curtains open.
♪♪
It was like ohhh!
-♪ I've been waiting so long
♪ To be where I'm going
♪ In the sunshine of your
♪ love
♪♪
♪ I'm with you my love
-And it was just an incredible moment.
And then, they suddenly said,
"We'd like to bring on a friend of ours from the United States,
who's gonna play a few songs with us"
and this bloke came on. It was Jimi Hendrix.
[ "Purple Haze" plays ]
-He was the one that completely upset the apple cart
amongst the guitar fraternity in London, I know for a fact,
and pretty much everywhere else.
-Hendrix toured in soul bands,
so he really knew soul music, like dance music.
He understood, like, what made people move.
[ Mid-tempo swing music plays ]
-♪ Girl
-Jimi Hendrix was a hell of a entertainer,
but he was in competition with Little Richard
and you don't go on a stage with Little Richard
and outdo Little Richard.
Little Richard got rid of him.
He was a genius!
Very technical and get the... [Imitates guitar]
[ Guitar solo ]
[ Cheering and whistling ]
-He was influenced by people,
but because it went through his brain,
it was filtered through his mind, it sounded like him.
[ Playing with teeth ]
-And he was doing all this stuff with his teeth
and behind his head and all of that.
I was just, like, "Oh, my."
[ Guitar solo ]
-He taught us that you got to loosen up.
The teeth in the back, behind the head,
we wouldn't dream of doing that.
Can you imagine if Eric and I had done this at the time?
They would've just thrown... at us, you know?
His appearance was also outrageous.
I mean, he had an afro,
which was sort of out of control.
[ Guitar solo ]
His clothes were out of control, sexy, as well.
I mean, all the ingredients needed were there.
[ Guitar solo ]
He had it all. He had fantastic technique,
which no one can really get hold of.
[ Down-tempo blues-rock plays ]
♪♪
-He's such a historically aware musician.
So he knows the masters.
The three kings as he called them.
Albert, Freddie, and B.B., you know.
[ Guitar solo ]
But he's also a psychedelic hippie,
and he understands the whole world of recordmaking
as this world of enormous possibility.
-Jimi Hendrix was the greatest electric guitar player
I've ever seen or heard
or had the great privilege of recording.
For about two weeks, we were experimenting
with stereo phasing, which had never been done before.
We said, "Jimi, come in.
We've got something we want to play you."
So Jimi comes in, and we start playing
the middle part of "Axis: Bold as Love"
where the drums come in.
It goes badoo, doo, doo, baduckadaduckada.
[ Drumbeat ]
And the phasing kicks in.
[ Drums phasing ]
He grabbed his head in his hands, went,
"Ah! Oh, my God! I can't believe you.
How did you do that?! That was in my dream! Ahhh!"
I want that on everything, man!
And so every day we were trying new things.
Heavy compression, weird types of EQ,
backwards tapes.
[ Chimes, cymbals playing ]
-These albums, like "Electric Ladyland"
are kind of sonic fantasies.
They are worlds unto themselves
that could never actually exist in real life.
♪♪
I don't think there was any artist
exactly like Jimi Hendrix who could use his guitar
to mold and sculpt time and space,
and just through his guitar performance,
could give you a complete essay on what the '60s were like,
on what it was like to be an African American man
who was working in multiple genres,
who was living in between
certain intersections of identity.
[Cheers and applause] [Phasing]
[ Guitar feedback ]
When you hear Jimi Hendrix play guitar,
it's Jimi Hendrix's voice
screaming through the instrument.
[ Guitar rumbling ]
He radicalized the use and the form
and the point of what the guitar was,
and so everybody started thinking,
"What can I do with a musical instrument?"
In large part because of The Beatles
and what they were doing with using Eastern instruments
and so on, but also I think you have to credit Jimi Hendrix
for changing the game.
♪♪
-The impulse to change the sound of the music
was nothing new.
It was -- That's what rock 'n' roll always was,
always looking for something different.
Then as technology continues to develop through the '70s,
there's just more and more possibilities.
[ The Who's "Baba O'Riley" plays ]
♪♪
-My first introduction to the synthesizer
was through Pete Townshend,
when he asked me to do "Who's Next."
And he sent me the demos that he'd made in his own studio.
He's an extremely accomplished engineer.
[ The Who's "Baba O'Riley" continues ]
[ Drumbeat ]
I couldn't believe the sounds
that were coming out of these demos,
because of the synthesizer he'd used.
Back in those days, they were really complicated
[ "Greensleeves" plays ] and looked a bit like
the old-fashioned telephone exchangers,
[laughs] cords going everywhere.
-There are oscillators, which produce the sound.
Filters, amplifiers, and envelope generators,
which shape it. [Note descending]
-First of all, he figured out how to work it,
but he then took it and used it,
for the first time in my experience anyway,
in the most extraordinary way,
"Baba O'Riley" being a classic example.
[ Intro to The Who's "Baba O'Riley" plays ]
He created a rhythm pattern
that was not only a very strange sound,
but the actual rhythm itself was rather odd,
and then wrote a song 'round it.
[ Band joins in ]
And juxtaposed it against the power of Keith Moon,
John Entwistle, and himself,
playing guitar, bass, and drums.
And then, the extraordinary explosive vocal
that Roger Daltrey gives us.
-♪ Out here in the fields
♪ I fight for my meals
♪ I get my back into my living
-One of my major problems was to compete with Pete's demos,
which were invariably amazing,
and very often, I'd steal elements from the demo,
the synthesizer track, and then would play that in to the band,
and they would -- They actually recorded
to a playback of Pete's synthesizer,
because the synthesizer suggests the rhythm.
♪♪
-Keith had terrible trouble with it.
Keith used to have to play to a click track.
And he used to tape the earphones to his head,
'cause he was such an animated drummer.
You know, when we used to do "Baba O'Riley"
and "I Won't Get Fooled Again," to a backing track
of that sound, it's a fifth member of the band.
[ Synthesizer playing calliope music ]
-The synthesizer really migrated from the music lab
to the pop music scene because of Bob Moog, a wonderful man.
He was a guy with a pencil protector.
You know what I'm saying?
Short-sleeved white shirt, pencil protector,
lots of pencils.
He was an engineer, and a good one.
[ Synthesizer playing ]
A synthesizer means massaging the electrons in space
to create a new sound from nothing.
Bob Moog had a certain vision,
and a bunch of us played into it --
[ Ethereal tune plays ]
Beaver & Krause...
Keith Emerson...
Silver Apples,
Wendy Carlos, Peter Nero.
A few people were starting to push the synthesizer
into being an instrument that people could use.
There was no school you could learn
how to play the synthesizer. There was no course.
You just had to pick it up and start learning.
♪♪
But when I heard it, my world exploded.
I ran straight into the arms of electronica,
and I ended up buying one of the first
Moog Series III synthesizers.
I loved it, because it made me feel like
I was a U-boat captain from another galaxy
when I was standing in front of it.
And there was this very wonderful guy
named Malcolm Cecil.
First-class upright bass player and,
he was upright and the bass was upright.
He said, "I have to learn how to play the synthesizer."
I said, "I'll make a deal with you."
-And he said, "Would you be willing to show me
how to record properly?"
I said, "Well, would be willing to show me
how to run that thing?"
-"I'll show you how to play the synthesizer,
if you teach me how to become a real recording engineer."
-And, I said, "Yes."
[ Synthesizer playing ethereal sounds ]
-And that began our journey together.
♪♪
-They were these two crazy guys, and they built this massive bank
of synthesizers they called TONTO.
-Modules by ARP, modules by Moog,
modules by me and Malcolm.
-It looked like [Laughs]
it just took up, I don't know, several walls,
with the patch cords and it was insane.
♪♪
-We made a record which we weren't sure was even music.
It was called "Zero Time."
Got a huge write-up inRolling Stone
because it was so wacky and weird.
Stevie Wonder heard it,
and the next thing we know there's a knocking at the door,
and there's Stevie in a chartreuse jumpsuit,
5:00 or 6:00 at night, with our album under his arm,
and he wanted to know how we were making this kind of music.
-I called Bob on the phone, and said,
"Get over here. We've got a new client."
-And we let him in the studio,
and we didn't wake up for another five years.
[ Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" plays ]
-♪ A boy is born
♪ In hardtime Mississippi
♪ Surrounded by
♪ Four walls that ain't so pretty ♪
-Steve walked into that studio.
He had so many songs in his head
that had been pent up in there for so many years.
I don't know. Motown had him on a formula.
-♪ Living just enough
♪ Just enough for the city
♪ Yah
♪ His father works
♪ Some days for 14 hours
♪ And you can bet
♪ He barely makes a dollar
♪ His mother goes
♪ To scrub the floors for many
♪ And you'd best believe
♪ She hardly gets a penny
♪ Living just enough
♪ Just enough for the city
-Motown treats their artists.
They have almost, like, a finishing school,
so the way the artists dressed, the way they performed onstage,
all cultivated so as not to offend
what were considered mainstream white sensibilities.
-And Steve turned 21 and he got --
was really fed up with it.
He's finally reached his majority, said,
"I'm over. I'm leaving."
And he came to New York, and we just started recording.
[ Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" plays ]
-It was like they were working on Frankenstein.
I mean, just up all day, all night,
and coming up with these nuances and timbres.
-♪ Very superstitious
♪ Writing's on the wall
♪ Very superstitious
-One slight touch of a button could give you
a whole nother color.
So, Malcolm and Bob's whole job was to figure out,
you know, what colors were inside of his head.
-♪ Broke the lookin' glass
-I had a two-track tape running at all times,
because that's where most of the ideas came from.
And, I'd say, "Hey, is that a song?"
And, we'd play it back,
something that he was just musing around,
and he'd go, "Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah."
And he would get an idea, off we would go.
♪♪
We recorded well in excess of 250 songs.
-When we finally got to making an album, we said,
"Oh, we'll take this one and that one,"
and somehow, for five years, we could do nothing wrong.
Every record we touched turned to gold.
-♪ You are the sunshine of my life ♪
-Grammys, platinum, gold.
-♪ That's why I'll always be around ♪
-Stevie Wonder was able to take all the innovations
and then just bring it to a level
that was so simple to understand.
It was funky enough for soul people and rock people
and music lovers in general to appreciate it.
That's hard to do.
-♪ I feel like this is the beginning ♪
-There's still a lot of controversy,
because people feel like, if you introduce electronics,
you're sort of changing the nature of the sound.
Some people are against this,
and Stevie not only embraces it, he, I think, leads the pack.
-♪ I'd find myself drowning in my own tears ♪
♪ Ooh-whoa, oh, oh, whoa-oh, oh ♪
[Synthesizer playing] ♪ You are the sunshine
♪ Of my life
-It's one of the most versatile instruments.
This thing can sound really clean.
It can sound like a whistle,
or it can sound really gnarly and, like, disgusting.
[ Sound modulates ]
Through the process of looking for a sound
that sounds like a flute,
I'll come up with something that sounds like,
you know, someone getting, like, stabbed in the neck.
This is my Mini-Moog.
This one's, like, super-modified,
and I wanted it 'cause it's exactly like the one Devo used
and they were, like, the kings of the mini-Moog.
-We're all Devo.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-The first time I was made aware of Devo,
I said, "You've got to be joking.
They spit on people. They do all of this?
They're never gonna do anything."
Of course, Devo came out with their first album,
and they were on "Saturday Night Live."
I saw them on that and was totally blown away.
[ Devo's "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" plays ]
-We really were only on college radio before that,
so nobody knew who we were.
It was almost like "Saturday Night Live"
played a prank on the nation.
♪♪
"Satisfaction," it was like my anthem.
I remember playing the 45 at home, you know,
on a little portable machine.
-♪ I can't get no
♪ Satisfaction
♪ I can't get me no
♪ Satisfaction
♪ And I try, and I try
♪ And I try, t-t-t-t-try, try
♪ I can't get no
-There were people that took offense
to Devo covering "Satisfaction."
And, and there was -- 'Cause, you know, it's like, guard dogs.
They sniffed that we were trying to change things
and that we wanted to, like,
tip over the potato cart one more time.
10 years earlier, we were art students at Kent State.
I just remember being kind of shocked
that all of sudden something that came
from just all of us announcing that we were against
the war in Vietnam,
was now Jeeps and tanks and National Guardsmen.
[ Barrage of gunfire ]
-The university campus has been closed.
-After all the student protests were crushed in this country,
everybody kind of went, "Okay, that was a little too real.
They killed people.
They're putting people in jail
for disagreeing with the government.
Let's just go back to having a good time."
So, the bands like Kansas and Styx and Foreigner came along
and the politics were kind of, like, "I'm white.
I'm a misogynist.
I'm a conspicuous consumer and I'm proud of it."
And, we were, like, "What happened to Bob Dylan?
What happened to all these people
that had something to say and were critiquing our culture?"
I remember watching footage of medical evacuations,
you know, from Vietnam, and I thought,
"Those are the kind of sounds I need.
I want to make music with helicopters
and with ray guns and with lasers.
I want to make music where we're using sounds
that have something to do with what's going on in our world."
[ Synthesizer sounds playing ]
I'd been interested in synthesizers
and really felt that technology was leading the way.
-You've got to explain all this to us. I mean, like, is this how
you sort of make up all these songs, with all these --
-Well, we let the machines make up the songs.
We just are the human instruments.
-We're using technology to make caveman sounds.
-♪ Wha-hoo
♪ Ooh-ooh, ooh
♪ Ooh
♪ Wha-hoo
♪ Ooh-ooh, ooh
♪ Ooh
♪ Wha-hoo
♪ Ooh-ooh, ooh
♪ Ooh
-For the first couple records,
our record company just thought of us
as this weird little art band, but "Freedom of Choice,"
that album, still kind of robotic,
but we hired a producer named Bob Margouleff.
[ Engine starts ]
[ Siren wails ]
-I'm sitting there in the front office,
and these two little Volkswagen Bugs
come into the parking lot
and the Devos get out.
They're wearing jumpsuits
and hard hats with like a tank on the side
with a plastic hose going up their noses.
Even the jaded people at the record plant
had to look at that one twice.
♪♪
But how did I construct the record?
The same way I constructed the record with Steve and Malcolm.
♪♪
The records have their same root, the Moog synthesizer.
The synthesizer is every instrument.
It depends on how you want to use it.
♪♪
[ Cheers and applause ]
-The electric guitar was still the primary instrument
of album-oriented rock.
In the mid-1970s, that really starts to change,
especially with the rise of disco.
Real watershed moment
was when people heard, for the first time,
Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, "I Feel Love."
[ Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" plays ]
-First, I took down a click track.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,
and automatically the rhythm was
♪ Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun ♪
Whatever the synthesizer could do.
But I didn't have a melody,
so I started to sing a melody on top,
then Donna Summer came in and wrote the lyrics
and she sang it.
-♪ Ooh
♪ It's so good, it's so good, it's so good ♪
♪ It's so good, it's so good
Growing up, I wanted to have more of that, you know,
like R&B sound, but my voice was always really kind of pure.
♪ Ooh
♪ I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love ♪
♪ I'm in love, I'm in love
So when we started making music with the synthesizers,
I felt at home in that kind of synthesized space.
♪ Oooh
♪ I feel love, I feel love, I feel love ♪
♪ I feel love, I feel love
I was so caught up in producing the music at the time,
but I think in retrospect, I see the door that we opened.
♪ I feel
♪ lo-o-o-o-o-ve
♪ I feel love
-During the mix, the engineer gave me a delay in the bassline,
and instead of doing, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun,
We do, duttle, duttle, duttle, duttle, duttle, duttle.
They'll repeat.
And I was suddenly, I said, "This is -- this is it!"
The reaction was absolutely fantastic and,
after a few months, it was number one all over the place.
It's the most requested song of mine.
-♪ Fallin' free, fallin' free, fallin' free ♪
♪ Fallin' free, fallin' free
♪♪
-It's not something that can easily be reproduced live.
The song is totally synthesized.
-Even the drums are a synthesizer.
-When people heard it, they suddenly realized
that there were all kinds of new possibilities
for popular music that had nothing to do with the guitar,
that had nothing to do even with traditional instrumentation.
-That possibility, to make music out of technology,
was something that had been there for a long,
now there's just a new gizmo that we can do it with.
Isn't that cool?
I mean, you can trigger this and sync it up,
and wow, let's do it.
There's never a kind of like a,
"Oh, I don't think we should do that" moment.
[ Playing "Don't You Want Me" ]
-Eventually the synthesizer becomes common enough
for bands to brag that they had no synthesizer.
♪♪
The synthesizer came to symbolize something not natural.
-All through the '80s, there's not
a really authentic-sounding record in the '80s.
They're all highly processed.
-♪ Let's get physical
♪ Physical
♪ I wanna get physical
-Late '70s, those horrible synthesizers,
it's hard for me to imagine
that that was the golden age of recording.
-♪ Body talk
♪ Let's get physical
♪ Physical
-I never did like synthesizers.
No talent in a drum machine, but it was cutting a lot
of musicians out of work, the synthesizer.
-Everything was determined by this regular beat.
Synthesizers, get on your bike; get out of here.
[ Ethereal synthesizer plays ]
-I was in Cologne airport and I was thinking
if you're going to have music, what would be
the right kind of music for a place like this?
It has to be non-narrative.
It can't have beginning, middle, and end.
It should be like a river, where there's
a sort of consistency to the object itself,
but it's never exactly the same from one moment to the next.
I studied painting, not music,
and I realized when I was quite young
that the most interesting form of painting
that you could do now is with sound.
[ Ethereal synthesizer continues ]
With the synthesizer, we can make a sound
that nobody's ever heard before.
It's a little bit like if you went to a painter
and said, "I know you've got your box of paints there,
and you've got the seven colors of the spectrum,
but here's another 4,000 colors that you've never seen before."
It's this new form that we still call music,
but we should call something else.
♪♪
-Doing things in an electronic way,
in a funny way it's more personal,
because you have to create the sound from scratch.
It's not just writing the note.
You're actually creating the sound of the note from scratch.
[ Suspenseful music climbs ]
In the Batman movie "Dark Knight,"
Batman inhabits a very particular world.
I thought, wouldn't it be interesting
to make a sonic world for this character?
So I started by creating a vocabulary of sounds
electronically.
So now on the keyboard, I can, you know, brrr, you know.
They're -- They're indescribable.
It's not like, you know, oh, here's a violin sound.
It's, you know, it's some abstract thing.
[ Suspenseful music climbs ]
We tried to come up with a very iconic sound
right at the beginning of the movie,
which is this sort of [Whooshes]
you know, like a giant flapping of the wings.
[ Wings rustling ]
And slowly, during that process, I actually start hearing
little bits of tune, or little motifs, et cetera.
[ Synthesizer plays ]
There's a lot of snobbery in classical music,
but my dad was an inventor.
I grew up with technology and I saw
all musical instruments as pieces of technology,
so for me, anything that made a decent noise
was a musical instrument,
and should be incorporated into the orchestra.
[ Note drones ]
I sort of know what I want to say with the scene,
but I usually can't find the notes straightaway, so.
The reason I regret not going to music school
is just because whenever I get stuck,
I wish I had a bit of Beethoven in the drawer,
or you know, a bit of Mozart to go and steal from.
And, what happens is I don't have that.
So, if I'm stuck, I'd better come up with something myself.
That's why hours and hours and hours get spent in this room
with me torturing this poor computer.
Let me have one more go.
♪♪
The way Hollywood operates is they make these movies
and they cost hundreds of millions of dollars
and basically, at the end of the day,
they're waiting for me to complete the music
and I'm doing it on any old PC that you can buy
for, like, $10.50 and on a piece of software,
you know, that's probably another $20.
So kids, if you want to try this at home, knock yourselves out.
[ Electronic music plays ]
-I make all my records in hotel rooms pretty much,
and airplanes, you know, or on car rides.
I've made records in car rides, you know?
Especially when you have, you know, deadlines.
[ Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" plays ]
-The synthesizer, the laptop,
they're all part of the same world.
The laptop, especially, is the folk instrument of our time.
-Our world is just -- is just a high-tech world.
You know, we are the Internet generation.
We are fast-paced. We need the laptops.
And yeah, we're not great on guitars,
but we're great with our hands, and we still make the melodies.
♪♪
-What is EDM? Electronic Dance Music.
It is our new folk music, EDM.
-Yes! Oh, my God!
It has nothing to do with the past.
It has to do with creating sounds
out of space that never existed before.
Sequences and sounds from a new place.
We're like galactic travelers.
And we're on a journey.
♪♪
-In an era where everything is being transformed by technology,
one of the most exciting aspects
of being original is reinventing what's old.
[ Blues play ]
-Well, we knew we wanted to get out of town to make a record.
-We wanted to go to a classic studio,
a place that had history.
We decided to go to Muscle Shoals,
and we got to the studio, and it was pretty much just --
it was empty. No console, really. Nothing worked.
All the wall treatment that used to be there
in the '60s and '70s was gone.
[ Chuckles ]
You know, my dream of, like, recording
in this period-piece studio, like, vanished immediately.
But we had Mark Neill, and he was the engineer.
-So Mark drove his preamps, microphones.
Dan and I drove down from Akron and brought a lot of gear.
-And so we set up all our stuff.
-No Pro Tools, 12-channel desk.
-And it was almost like we were recording in the basement again,
in a room that wasn't really acoustically correct.
But Mark understood all these old records that we loved
and why they sounded so good -- not why they sounded old,
but why they sounded really good and why the drums soundedhuge,
but they were mono, but there were just like two mics.
[ Drum set plays ]
And we learned that when we recorded with Mark.
♪♪
We called our managing assistant, and we were like,
"We need a harpsichord, now."
And he found us, like,
a student model and he drove it down from Nashville.
Started playing a little line.
♪ Do do-do do
♪ Do do do-do do
Pat started playing, and it just immediately sounded
fun and interesting.
♪♪
Pat got on the mellotron
and plugged in like 20 guitar pedals to it.
-♪ Whoa-oa-oa
-I had partial lyrics to "Too Afraid To Love You."
♪♪
Figured out the chords of the song.
And we just started recording it.
-♪ My gears, they grind
♪ More each day
♪ And I feel like
♪ They're gonna grind away
And Mark got Pat to play Mark's drums.
He's got this amazing-sounding old Gretsch kit
that just resonates beautifully.
-♪ They drive me wild
♪ They're neverending
♪ Mile after mile
-And because it sounded so good, Pat just played lighter
and it just -- His playing sounded so fluid
throughout the whole record.
♪ To love you
♪♪
♪ It's heaven on Earth
♪ It's in her embrace
♪ Her gentle touch
♪ And her smiling face
-We didn't distort the tracks
while we were recording for the first time.
That was gonna be something that was approached in mixing.
-It was Tchad Blake, and the only instruction was
I sent him an e-mail that was, "Do whatever you want, have fun,
and make it sound really effed up."
♪♪
-♪ I just don't know what to do ♪
♪ I'm too afraid to love you
-Everything is early days.
I mean, we've been doing sound recording
for just over 100 years.
And people have been building drums for thousands.
If you look at a grand piano, what an incredible piece
of thinking and they didn't do it overnight.
And I think the same goes for computers.
We're at the beginning of this.
-The technology allowed us to create new musical experiences.
It allowed us our liberty,
and it's gonna continue to move us forward.
We have to embrace change and celebrate it.
[ The Black Keys's "Lonely Boy" plays ]
-Come on!
♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh
♪ I got a love that keeps me waitin' ♪
♪ Oh, oh, oh
♪ I got a love that keeps me waitin' ♪
♪ I'm a lonely boy
♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh
♪ I got a love that keeps me waitin' ♪
[ Music fades ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-"Soundbreaking" is available on DVD.
The companion book is also available.
To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
♪♪