'Troubadours': How sweet it is

The late 1960s were a crazy time, and there was crazy music: Vietnam, assassinations and race riots, to the crashing guitars of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly. "There was just all this generational turbulence, cultural turbulence, and there was a hunger for the intimacy, the personal thing that we did."

So says Carole King in the music/culture portrait "Troubadours." Its fine 90 minutes trace how that one-to-one style mushroomed from the folk roots planted in coffeehouses by people like Bob Dylan, into the '70s singer-songwriter wave.

King is one of the film's tentpoles - her "Tapestry" album was one of pop's top sellers until Michael Jackson's "Thriller," with enduring hits like "I Feel the Earth Move" - and James Taylor is the other. The good friends have worked together from Taylor's breakthrough 1970 album "Sweet Baby James" to last year's "reunion" tour that grossed more than $60 million.

As they discuss their lives and sounds, other revealing comments are intercut from genre titans like Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Elton John, plus familiar liner-notes names such as producers Peter Asher and Lou Adler. The legendary L.A. club The Troubadour is another thread of "the scene," recalled by everyone from Kris Kristofferson to Cheech and Chong.

MY SAY "Troubadours" has such a feel for this era of music that it seems to move to the same "mellow" rhythm. But it does more than simply trace the sound. It's a virtual bio for the effusive King, from home movies of her New York youth to her pre-fame days as a songwriter-for-hire and on to her earth-mama parenthood. Though Taylor is a bit more elusive, director Morgan Neville (he produced "Johnny Cash's America") includes moments like Taylor's walking today in snowy Massachusetts, making his lyric "the Berkshires seemed dreamlike on account of that frosting" rewind in the minds of vintage music lovers like me.

This "American Masters" isn't all dreamy-eyed, though. It covers the drugs that destroyed many (Taylor was fortunate) - and the next musical backlash, where punk and electronica would depose the troubadours' "woody organic sound."

BOTTOM LINE You've got a friend. (Two, in fact.)

GRADE A