So Glenn Frey is dead. I feel for his loved ones and fans, but he never meant shit to me. The Eagles personified so many negative things: corporate rock, misogyny, a sneering contempt for the punks who supplanted them in Hollywood, and a sybaritic life style that involved mountains of cocaine snorted in David Geffin’s hot tub and a proclivity for flying Lear jets to sexual assignations that led them to quip, “Love ‘em and Lear ‘em.”
Still, unlike almost all of my friends, I didn’t despise the entire body of their work. The Eagles had their moments, one or two cool songs on each of the five albums that preceded 1979’s The Long Run. I count nine songs that I like in all, two of which I enjoy—although it was hardly their creators’ intention—because they make me laugh. As for The Long Run, I don’t particularly care for any of its tunes. The Eagles spent two long years producing it, and I find it simply bland.
Blatant opportunists at heart, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, and Company were unafraid to change skins; they began as a bona fide Levis-wearing country rock band, but switched directions following the poor sales of their sophomore LP, 1973’s Desperado. No more were they the Laurel Canyon “outlaws” about whom Tom Waits famously said, “Those guys grew up in L.A…. they don’t have cow shit on their boots, just dog shit from Laurel Canyon.” Instead they toughened up their sound, and reinvented themselves as a hard rock band with a propensity for writing award-winning ballads. And it worked. Instead of fading away like plenty of their ersatz country rock compatriots, they climbed the charts until the air got thin and even Stevie Nicks wanted to board that Lear jet of theirs.
The LP opens with the title track, which isn’t bad but isn’t particularly compelling either. In short, I can take it or leave it, but generally prefer to leave it. When the best part about a song is its backing vocals, that song is in trouble. Timothy B. Schmit, who replaced Randy Meisner on bass after Hotel California, sings lead on the slow, nighttime groove that is “I Can’t Tell You Why,” and while I don’t much care for it, I can understand why some people might. Schmit’s vocals are exquisite, and the band sustains the mood quite nicely.
As for Joe Walsh’s “In the City,” all I can say is I like Walsh (who doesn’t?) but think he shot his wad with “Walk Away” and “Funk #49.” Joe’s problem has always been that all his songs sound the same, and “In the City” is no different. A tale of the travails of urban living, I would be remiss in not pointing you towards Randy Newman’s “Baltimore” or Sly Stone if what you’re looking for is more than a string of banal clichés.
“The Disco Strangler” is unintentionally funny, and misogynistic to boot; to a riff that is damned good, Henley sings about a woman who, by trying to entice men, “slips into the arms of the disco strangler.” In short, Henley seems to imply, she gets what she deserves for being good looking and knowing it. The strumpet! Don Henley sentences thee to death! With a different set of lyrics this would be a good tune, but instead we’re subjected to what I suspect was not just misogyny but also Henley’s latent and paranoid fear of disco, which he probably feared was cutting into his album sales.
“King of Hollywood” is another boring tune about a sexual predator, albeit one who doesn’t kill his victims, just accepts “favors” for his help in getting them movie parts. This is one of the Eagles dullest tunes ever, and the only things I like about it are the guitar solo, which when all is said and done really isn’t much to write home about, and the fact that the best the Eagles can come up with, in terms of putting the guy down, is saying he has a tiny cock.
I’ve always hated “Heartache Tonight” and I refuse to apologize; its propulsive beat and handclaps annoy, and not even Frey’s frantic vocals, the snazzy guitar work, or the busy vocal arrangements can prevent me from grimacing every time this one comes on the radio. As for “Those Shoes,” it boasts a hard rock beat and distorted guitar and causes me to ask, “Are these guys foot fetishists or what?” Once again the band’s misogyny rears its ugly head: “You’ve got to have your independence/But you don’t know just where to start.” That said, the guitar solo is top-notch, as is the drumming. But towards the middle they kinda sound like the Bee Gees, and I’m off the boat.
“Teenage Jail” is not a great song, but at least it’s an interesting one; the Eagles get as close to Black Sabbath as they ever will, and while the almost-metal tune doesn’t impress me much, I give the Eagles bonus points for trying something completely different. The same can be said for the rollicking throwaway “The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks,” which is a fast little bout of frat puke that I think I’d like better if I didn’t suspect that the Eagles thought of themselves as belonging in the Greeks camp.
Still it’s my favorite song on the album, which is a sorry commentary on said album, which ends with the lugubrious “The Sad Cafe,” a doppelganger of Hotel California’s “The Last Resort” about the Troubadour in L.A. It’s classic Henley, a look back at the days when hippies thought they could change the world by means of peace and love, and the triumph of filthy lucre over said principles. Which is an odd thing, coming from Don Henley, Mr. Lear Jet himself. The song’s nostalgia is both bathetic and self-serving, and Henley’s tendency of pointing the moral finger at everyone but himself is nowhere else on such blatant display.
Ironically titled, The Long Run turned out be the Eagles swan song, that is unless you count their 2007 reunion LP Long Road Out of Eden, which I don’t even like to think about. The Long Run received mostly negative reviews but sold like gangbusters, which just goes to show you that the record-buying public is simply not to be trusted. The Long Run was a sorry way to go out, but go out they did, disproving a theory I held back in the day; namely, that the Eagles were referring to the critics and themselves when they sang in “Hotel California,” “They stab it with their steely knives/But they just can’t kill the beast.” Well, the beast is dead, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say “what a nice surprise/bring your alibis,” I for one won’t miss them. Much. Take it easy, Glenn.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
