So there I was, sitting with Don Henley and Glenn Frey in David Geffen’s hot tub when Glenn says to me, he says, “I promised to buy my latest ‘lady’ her own turquoise store but she’ll be gone by next Tuesday so I guess she’ll have to go backing to waitressing for shitty tips at the Troubadour.” And with that he gave me a big shit-eating grin, then proceeded to snort a 14-inch line of pharmaceutical grade cocaine. And I said, “Glenn, it doesn’t surprise me that there are four women out there looking to stone you.”
Look, I hate the Eagles. I’m a normal person. But I love a lot of their music, which is to say I’m able to separate my disgust for everything they stood for (greed, arrogance, a ruthless willingness to play corporate games, sexism on a massive scale, and a sneering contempt for their glam and punk betters) from their songs, which while representative of the establishment AOR coming out of El Lay at the time were also sometimes great.
In short, despite their morally repulsive and reptilian qualities Henley and Frey managed to produce songs that encapsulated better than most of their contemporaries the spirit of their times, while also sounding fantastic on your car’s FM radio. And you can find all of those songs—or at least the ones that proceeded 1976’s brilliant Hotel California—on the 1976 compilation Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975.
In their early days as laid-back, mainstream urban cowboys (“…they don’t have cowshit on their boots,” quipped Tom Waits, “just dogshit from Laurel Canyon”) purveying a watered-down but undeniably catchy species of the country rock pioneered by purists like Gram Parsons (who called them “bubblegum”), the Eagles tapped into the Zeitgeist of a New Age—one in which hippie folk and country rockers were abandoning their much-vaunted principles (“I’m about making great music, not living in a gated mansion”) for a chance at fame and filthy lucre, and lots of it. Parsons was out, and David Geffen was in. Neil Young once said, “Give a hippie too much money and anything can happen,” and that anything was the Eagles and Crosby, Stills & Nash. But the Eagles made more commercially lucrative music than anyone, including Crosby and Company.
So I give them their due; sure they were Machiavellian greedheads, but they were very talented Machiavellian greedheads, and many of the songs on Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975 aren’t just great—they’re downright iconic. Two of the Eagles’ first three singles (“Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” both released in 1972) were perfect escapist fare for escapist times—burned out on bad acid, Altamont, the Manson Family, the Weathermen, Nixonian politics and the Vietnam War, the reeling survivors of the counterculture needed to, well, take it easy.
And the Eagles gave it to them in turquoise and denim–the upbeat country rock-lite of “Take It Easy” with its girl in a flatbed Ford slowing down to take a look at Glenn Frey (who wrote it with Jackson Browne) is pure sagebrush wet dream, as is the glorious “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” which was written by singer-songwriter Jack Tempchin. Who, I ask you, doesn’t want to make love in the desert tonight? You couldn’t help but live vicariously through these guys—I know I did.
And the irony is that during the London sessions that produced “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” the Eagles were already arguing for a tougher, grittier sound—which they got, to a degree, on “Witchy Woman,” which appeared on their eponymous 1972 debut with “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” Unfortunately its stereotypical “Native American” vibe is risible—the song has everything but smoke signals—and the lyrics (“She can rock you in the nighttime ’til your skin turns red”) are as dumb as they are ambiguous—it’s impossible to know whether she’s going to fuck you Cherokee or rub your private parts raw.
The band was still in country rock mode with “Desperado,” a sad, piano-driven elegy (with slow-building strings) to a loner on the Lost American Frontier sung by Henley. It’s from the band’s 1973 sophomore LP of the same name, as is “Tequila Sunrise,” the very first Henley-Frey collaboration. Bernie Leadon’s strummed acoustic guitar and high-and-lonesome pedal steel guitar give the song a mournful and resigned feel, and the vocal harmonies are so much salt on the rim. I’ve always thought those harmonies are too perfect, and that they should have done another version after staying up all night downing shots of Cuervo Gold. The vocal harmonies would have been more entertaining, that’s for sure.
On their third album, 1974’s On the Border, the Eagles finally took a turn away from country rock–they knew which way the wind was blowing, and country rock was no longer the means to big fat royalty checks—and the results included “Already Gone,” a runaway guitar romp and “victory song” on which Frey delivers his girl the bad news (poor dear’s going to have to eat her lunch all by herself). Which of course must be a real bummer, and it doesn’t help that the song’s positively gleeful vocal harmonies rub salt in her wounds. But hey, she should have known better than to try to put a pair of emotional handcuffs on an Eagle–their motto wasn’t “Love ‘em and Lear ‘em” for nothing.
Also from On the Border we get “The Best of My Love,” which proved they hadn’t abandoned country rock altogether (Leadon’s pedal steel guitar is all over it) and is every bit as sappy as its title would lead you to expect. I can’t stomach the song, but it’s an indisputable easy listening classic with more exquisite vocal harmonies, and when it comes to shlock ballads it’s one of the best of its era.
“Take It to the Limit” is the best of the cuts from the Eagles’ 1975 LP One of These Nights. It was the signature song of the underrated Randy Meisner (who made his bones with Poco and the Stone Canyon Band, and would ultimately depart the Eagles on unhappy terms in 1977) and his vocal performance is astounding—his voice soars, and he nails those impossible high notes. The song itself—which to my ears conveys a passion that seems feigned on “The Best of My Love”—is a sort of detail-free shell of Little Feat’s “Willin’”—like Lowell George, all Randy needs is to be shown a sign, and he’ll take it to the limit every time.
As for the title track of 1975’s One of These Nights, Frey—who co-wrote the song with Henley—would later say the band wanted it “to have a lot of teeth, a lot of bite—a nasty track with pretty vocals.” But while the vocal harmonies are indeed pretty it’s never sounded the least bit nasty to me—”one of those crazy old nights” has about as much menace to it as your average Huey Lewis lyric. The band had a lot to learn about brutality and ruthlessness, and they’d learn it soon enough—“Life in the Fast Line” (which was released too late to make the comp) is about as savage a song as the LA musical mafia ever produced, Warren Zevon aside.
One of These Nights also gave us the classic cheatin’ song “Lyin’ Eyes,” an up-tempo C&W morality tale gone Beverly Hills on which Frey walks the fine line between sympathizing with and morally upbraiding a beautiful young woman who has married an ogre for money but can’t help stepping out on him on a seemingly nightly basis. Life on “the cheatin’ side of town” has its cost, but a gated mansion’s a gated mansion and every bit as expensive as the boy’s harmony. She may not be fooling her cuckold of a husband, but this song has been fooling me into liking it for decades.
The Eagles wouldn’t really come into their own until 1976’s Hotel California, on which they got down to the business of chronicling the dark side of the Hollywood Hills in a way they only hinted at on “Lyin’ Eyes.” The song “Hotel California” itself is less parable than Twilight Zone episode, and the Eagles’ greatest achievement—the distance they’d traveled from “Peaceful Easy Feeling” couldn’t be measured in miles, only in the endless succession of those white lines on the highway that weren’t cheap paint but good blow, blow that had frozen every decent impulse left in the beautiful people of the City of Angels, reducing them to amoral ghosts trapped by fame in their seafront mansions. Forget exit ramps—your best (and only) hope was to stay white powder numb. California dream has become California nightmare, and that’s not escapism—it’s eternal damnation in a city that had become a glorified roach motel.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
