Robert Christgau once wrote, in the midst of a think piece about one of California’s chief 1970s exports, “Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them.” I hate them too, but what’s more interesting is that I hate them while liking (or even loving) some of their music, which seems downright perverse. You’re supposed to LIKE the bands who make music that you like. That’s the natural order of things. The Eagles force you to do the unnatural, and doing the unnatural makes you uncomfortable.
If I had the same problem with the Red Hot Chili Peppers I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I’d jump off a bridge.
This is why 1978’s The Long Run is the perfect Eagles album. It’s their worst album, for sure, an abomination in fact, but at long last Eagle haters such as myself found their hatred of the Eagles themselves—and Glenn Frey and Don Henley in particular—in perfect alignment with their hatred of the Eagles’ music. I loved Hotel California, and talk about your cognitive dissonance—I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.
The Long Run I loathed, and I finally knew peace. It was easy to loathe The Long Run, because it’s a bad, bad album, full of songs that made it starkly apparent that the Eagles—the most arrogant and reptilian frozen noses in an LA scene full of arrogant and reptilian frozen noses—had finally run their long course.
There are several decent songs on The Long Run, but none of them come within Lear jet distance of their best work. I’m don’t listen to them. And there are songs on The Long Run that defy description. Throwaways like “Teenage Jail” and “The Disco Strangler” plumb abysses of utter suckitude that even the band’s biggest detractors never dreamed the Eagles had in them.
The Eagles themselves—and once again I’m primarily talking about Frey and Henley—were the ultimate corporate creatures, elitist egomaniacs whose wealth and privilege had not only insulated them from the hoi polloi (i.e., their fans) but given them carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. They didn’t take it easy—they took it all. And wanted more. Cocaine. Lear jets. Mansions. An endless succession of models, actresses, female musicians (the famous ones), and underage girls. Fortunes in turquoise!
Said Ned Doheny of the Eagles and their like, “It becomes the same grinding-out-your-cigar-on-the-outstretched-palms-of-the-poor that you fought so desperately to deny yourself when you were starting.” And unlike some, the Eagles had never had much in the way of artistic scruples to begin with—theirs had been a ruthless grab for the brass ring from their country rock days, which had led Tom Waits to famously say of their calculated image as denim desperadoes, “they don’t have cowshit on their boots—just dogshit from Laurel Canyon.”
The Eagles sneered at glam, disco, and punk, but behind their very public loathing there was a very real fear. Come the late seventies they saw Huns at the gates, and their arrogance curdled into outright spite. They walked around in “Song Power” t-shirts despite the fact that punk bands like X were writing far better songs about their own chosen subject, the depravity of Los Angeles—a depravity the Eagles hypocritically both moralized about and personified.
They existed in a cocoon of studio blandness, surrounded by a posse of like-minded musicians (e.g., the loathsome J.D. Souther) only a few of whom–Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon, Randy Newman—seemed to possess scruples and to grasp the age-old fact that power and celebrity are acid to the soul.
In the wake of Hotel California the Eagles found themselves at the top of the rock heap—and in trouble. They’d released a commercial and critical blockbuster and now faced the eternal question—how to top it. Always a problem, but in the case of the Eagles the challenge was exacerbated by the fact that they basically hated each other’s guts. Henley and Frey in particular had grown to despise one another with a passion, which was hardly a surprise given there wasn’t a Lear jet on the market large enough to accommodate their combined egos. And the sheer weight of their mutual antipathy meant even getting the jet off the ground was problematic.
Collaborative songwriting—they were, after all, the Lennon and McCartney of turquoise—was nearly impossible. Throw in burnout—the result of hedonistic living and nonstop touring—and the stage was set for a colossal letdown of a follow-up that would kill the beast in a way that all of those steely knives from “Hotel California” couldn’t.
The Long Run was originally envisioned as a double album. That idea seemed to have died a quick and painless death. And good thing, because the finished album includes all of the filler you’d expect from a twofer without the top shelf stuff to balance it out. Eighteen months, five different studios, and what does the listener get? Dreck like “The Disco Strangler” and “Teenage Jail.” And the novelty throwaway “The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks.” To say nothing of the Big No-Statement that is “King of Hollywood.”
The opener and title track reads like a love song, but is actually a retort to those who were saying the Eagles were old hat and that disco was king. Unfortunately, the Eagles more or less prove it with this slick and bland slice of midtempo R&B. It’s a lukewarm thing, “The Long Run”: I don’t hate it, I certainly don’t love it, and if there’s anything I like about it at all it’s that the Eagles don’t sound as cocksure about their coming out on top as you’d expect. “We Are the Champions” it is not.
Newbie vocalist/bassist and Poco alum Timothy B. Schmit brought the slinky slick “I Can’t Tell You Why” to the band. Frey and Henley tinkered with it, Schmit sings it, and it works, if you’re looking for slow and tender easy listening with atmospheric electric piano and one very relaxed guitar solo. Walsh’s “In the City” is a sign of just how hard up the Eagles were for songs—it’s a re-recording of a song that had already appeared under Walsh’s name on the soundtrack to the 1979 film The Warriors. A midtempo and melodic hard rocker with humongous power chords and lots of sweet vocal harmonies, it’s as hard to hate as most of Walsh’s songs, but “Funk #49″ it ain’t. Or “Walk Away.” Or “Turn to Stone.” Or even “Life’s Been Good,” for that matter.
“The Disco Strangler” is proof—as if any more proof were needed—of just how far the Eagles had come from their peaceful easy feeling pop country roots. It features a nasty hard rock riff, some powerful lead vocals by Henley, and is inadvertently hilarious. This is what happens to people (women in particular) who go to the disco looking “for the good life”—they get murdered! Or at least in the Eagles’ fantasies. The disco strangler is the Eagles’ creature, invented by them and sent out into the world to punish women for the mortal sin of liking the Bee Gees. The final stanza is a kind of fever dream of unadulterated dumb, and I contemplate its words whenever I want to wallow in stupidity:
“He’s the crimson in your face du jour
The fiddler in your darkest night
He’s the melody without a cure
And Rome is burning, but that’s alright.”
“King of Hollywood” is more than just an insipid and boring sequel to Hotel California’s “Life in the Fast Lane”—it’s a six-and-a-half-minute song in which the Eagles project their own sexual loathsomeness onto a Hollywood producer. Imagine—a powerful man using the casting couch to bed beautiful women! Why, Henley and Frey would never have dreamed of such a thing! They would have had their roadies pull the cuties out of the audience, and the cuties wouldn’t even have gotten a bit role in a flick in exchange! It totally lacks the elements that made “Life in the Fast Lane” work.
No cutting hard rock edge, no remorseless red-light-running white line power drive towards an inevitable crack-up—just a putdown of a figure the Eagles have way too much in common with (“Still his Jacuzzi runneth over/Still he just couldn’t get off/He’s just another power junky/Just another silk scarf monkey”) followed by a childish jab at his dick size (“You’d know it if you saw his stuff/The man just isn’t big enough”). Execrable.
“Heartache Tonight” is the album’s one unalloyed triumph, that is if you you’re partial to El Lay MOR rock ’n’ roll studio-polished to a blinding gleam. The handclaps give it a modicum of personality, Glenn Frey punches out the vocals, and there’s no denying it sounds good on the radio alongside glossy late-era Steely Dan and the like.
“Those Shoes” is a hard rocker with an admittedly cool guitar and a stagger-beat gratis Henley on drums. And as usual (see “Lyin’ Eyes,” “The Disco Strangler,” and just about every song the Eagles ever wrote) it’s about a pretty woman who knows she’s pretty thinks that buys her something getting her just desserts. In this case it’s her shoes that are her downfall, although I’ll be damned if I can tell you why:
“Desperation in the singles bars
an’ all those jerkoffs in their fancy cars.
you can’t believe your reviews.
Oh, no, you can’t do that,
once you started wearin’ those shoes.”
“Teenage Jail” is an all-time low for the boys, a kind of sub-Black Sabbath dirge about god only knows who or what—it’s almost impossible to imagine that anyone could write a song like “Teenage Jail” and not inject it with a sense of humor, but we’re talking about the Eagles here. “The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks” is a sixties frat rock throwaway that gives me the willies, because I can’t escape the suspicion that the Eagles are firmly on the side of the Greeks—freaks don’t get laid, hence their losers, and how could Don and Glenn possibly relate to that? If this song had appeared in Animal House, I’ll give you one guess as to which frat it would represent.
Closer “The Sad Café” is a sad attempt at a big romantic statement by Henley about the golden days at the Troubadour when every nobody who was destined to become somebody (along with those who weren’t) in the country rock community was there every night on the make. There was undoubtedly a comradery there, but the song itself—from opening electric piano to closing saxophone by David Sanborn—is El Lay slick (the “suave and synthetic” that Christgau once used to describe their music applies here as well) and a betrayal of the musical spirit of the time.
As for Henley’s lyrics, they’re almost risible in their insincerity and mawkish sentimentality:
“Oh, it seemed like a holy place protected by amazing grace
And we would sing right out loud the things we could not say
We thought we could change this world with words like love and freedom.”
Pretty highlutin’ words, amazing grace and love and freedom—funny how cutthroat ambition doesn’t find its way in there, nor does Henley’s failure to implicate himself or his friends in the failure “to change this world.” Rich and detached, and living in separate insulated worlds where freedom meant doing exactly what you wanted to do, everyone else be damned, the former habitues of the Troubadour had long since lost touch with everyone but their agents and coke dealers.
Wrote Christgau in connection with Hotel California, “Don Henley is incapable of conveying a mental state as complex as self-criticism—he’ll probably sound smug croaking out his famous last words (“Where’s the Coke?”).”
“The place was just awash in sycophancy.” That was an English writer’s description of the Eagles “first proper LA gig” way back in the early seventies, and things just got worse. You could write a book about why people hate the Eagles, and it would be rich in detail and funny as hell. What’s harder to write about is loving and hating the Eagles at the same time.
At one level there’s nothing to it—all we’re talking about are some assholes who possessed the capacity to write great songs and were canny enough to change with the times—they gave country rock the heave ho at the right moment, and they might have survived into the eighties had they not turned their blow-besotted egos on one another and imploded.
And thank God they did. It spared people like me the continuing agony of doing psychic cartwheels. Just long enough for Don Henley, damn his pure-as-the-driven-blow white soul, to write great songs like “The Boys of Summer” and “The End of the Innocence.” Oh well.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
