Driving halfway across America not long after the June 1975 release of One of These Nights by The Eagles is when I truly realized just how massively popular this band had become. This was long before 21st century satellite radio, so driving 1400 miles from Lincoln NE to Hartford CT meant re-tuning the car radio about every seventy-five miles or so to a new local station. And every one, whether AM or FM, big city signal or small, were playing “One of These Nights”,”Lyin’ Eyes”, and “Take It to the Limit” as if their FCC licenses depended on it.
All three of those hits from the album One of These Nights went Top 10, with the album topping the Billboard sales chart and “Lyin’ Eyes” winning a Grammy. Original Eagles singer/bass player Randy Meisner, now gone, and the late Eagles co-founder singer/guitarist Glenn Frey joined me here In the Studio in a classic rock interview which is precious now. This album single-handedly took country and western music from the bunkhouse to Broadway, permanently jettisoning the qualifier “and western” in the process, and taking the longhorns off of Hank Williams’ Cadillac. –Redbeard
It’s odd, but until preparing this interview about The Eagles‘ second and third albums Desperado and On the Border, released in 1973 and 1974 respectively, I had not really noticed how little each Eagles album sounded like its predecessor. For a possible explanation as to how that might be the case, we tapped the In the Studio interview archive for the insights of two original Eagles bandmates, co-founding singer/songwriter/guitarist Glenn Frey and original bass player/singer/songwriter Randy Meisner, both now gone.
Like the first two Eagles efforts, On the Border was begun in London England and supervised by veteran English producer Glynnis Johns. But those sessions only yielded two usable recordings. Glenn Frey was so at odds with producer Johns that one of the two salvaged songs, “Best of My Love”, was sequenced dead last when the album was released, buried on side two as if to hide the pain. Neverthelss, through a quirk of fate, Frey reveals how “Best of My Love” became The Eagles’ first #1 hit, eventually propelling the On the Border album to over two million sales.
The dedication to songcraft on Desperado, which is evident from the first note of “Doolin Dalton”, on through “Tequila Sunrise”, “Certain Kind of Fool”, “Outlaw Man”, “Bitter Creek”, and the timeless “Desperado”, would later bear bountiful fruit for Frey, Meisner, Don Henley, and Bernie Leadon on the Eagles’ 1975 #1-selling One of These Nights. That effort was their first album to soar that high, a cosmopolitan country/ R&B hybrid that generated three Top 10 hits and effectively founded uptown Modern Country music as we now know it, fundamentally changing the course of contemporary music. Hotel California in 1976 and The Long Run in 1979 closed out the Seventies in colossal fashion for the Eagles, whose popularity remained undiminished deep into the 21st Century.
(Playing possum L-R: Bernie Leadon, Glenn Frey, Randy Meisner, Don Henley, J.D. Souther)
But in this interview Glenn Frey waved off the initial success of the first Eagles album to the songs of Jackson Browne, Jack Tempchin, and beginner’s luck, and placed the later record-setting success of The Eagles hinging on his 1973 decision, along with band co-founder Don Henley and songwriters Browne and J.D. Souther, to write a cinematic “cowboy concept” album. Heavily researched and historically accurate, the Eagles’ second album Desperado was recorded, arranged, and orchestrated in London, topped off back in Hollywood with tintype photography and period clothing for the cover, and even a guns-blazing promotional video a decade before MTV that would have made Quentin Tarantino envious. So did their handlers like what The Eagles had hatched on Desperado ?
“(Co-managers) David Geffen and Elliot Roberts were really kind of against it, in a lot of ways”, admitted original Eagles bass player/singer/songwriter Randy Meisner, “because they didn’t like it after we’d finished it. It wasn’t the kind of album you’d think we should have had for the second album. They thought it should be more down the line of the first album with more rock’n’roll songs, and it shouldn’t be a theme album. That it was chancey, that it was a big chance to take.”
Until the day that he died in January 2016, Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey was exceedingly proud of their second album, 1973’s Desperado. But Desperado did not have three Top 20 hits like the Eagles debut, nor did it contain the Eagles’ first #1,”Best of My Love”, that distinction belonging to 1974’s On the Border album released fifty years ago in March 1974. Purely in popularity and chart stats, that sophomore record had the lowest glide path of any Eagles effort, yet in this exclusive In the Studio interview, Frey and original Eagles bass player/singer/songwriter Randy Meisner make a detailed case for why Desperado may be their most formative one of all.
On the Border is also notable for an eleventh hour personnel addition, Don Felder on lead guitar, and Randy Meisner is quick to note that Felder was, in fact, suggested by Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon from their earlier Florida days. Songs include “James Dean”, “Already Gone”, the Tom Waits chestnut “Old ’55”, “Best of My Love”, and the title song, “On the Border” hosted by the sincerely missed Glenn Frey and the dearly departed Randy Meisner for the fiftieth anniversary of The Eagles’ On the Border. –Redbeard
Down through the history of mankind, first flights such as The Eagles first sortie in 1972 are revered: the Montgolfier brothers in Paris in 1783 with their hot air balloon; the Wright brothers in 1903 with powered flight; Charles Lindbergh’s first transatlantic flight; Yuri Gagarin first into space in 1961, Alan Shepard first American to do so, and Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, first to land on the Moon and return with Michael Collins in July 1969; and on Earth, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew around the world in 1986 without ever landing!
In June 1972, when the debut album by a Southern California-based band The Eagles was quietly released, it had none of the anticipated date-with-destiny public spectacle shared by all of the aforementioned events. But history proved that the original quartet’s first flight would quickly allow a career to take wing that would soon soar, resulting in The Eagles becoming the most popular American band ever. By June 1972 America’s musical continental drift had shifted dramatically westward, in part a reaction to the psychedelic sounds of the Summer of Love five years earlier. Bob Dylan had put upstate New York’s Woodstock into his rear view mirror, headed for Nashville’s skyline, while The Band likewise bailed for Malibu California a continent away. David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash had left their respective internationally established bands to convene in Los Angeles’ Topanga Canyon where The Byrds already had flocked around newcomer Gram Parsons. Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay”,”Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Neil Young, and John Sebastian’s Lovin’ Spoonful hit “Nashville Cats” all had snuck pedal steel guitar onto U.S. Top 40 radio, but these were anomalies rather than a trend, as AM pop stations were peppering in more rock singles in response to new competition from FM progressive rock stations in 1972. Despite those few exceptions, it is impossible to overstate just how rigidly segregated musically the pop and country music establishments were when the first Eagles album was released in June 1972. The Roy Acuff-era Nashville-centric radio format, officially known then as Country & Western, was so autocratic that they considered Buck Owens’ Bakersfield recordings almost heretical. And Willie and Waylon who? Thus in Summer 1972 the rock media viewed the “country rock” hybrid as an orphan, while Nashville’s all-powerful Music Row mafia rejected the bastard spawn as patently illegitimate. It was into this musical migration westward that rode two independent, unheralded, and very young musicians, Don Henley (2nd from right) from Northeast Texas and Glenn Frey (far right) from Detroit Michigan, who would meet at country rock’s nexus in Southern California where they would recruit country rock pioneers Bernie Leadon(far left) from the Flying Burrito Brothers and Randy Meisner ( 2nd from left) of Poco. Frey, who spoke to us before his shocking passing in January 2016, and Meisner join me in this classic rock interview recalling the Eagles’ debut, impressively containing two Top 10 hits “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling”, plus the Top 20 ” Witchy Woman”. – Redbeard
We all know the perilous times we’re in nearly fifty years since The Eagles revealed the zeitgeist zip code of the Hotel California. Not on any Google map or travel brochure, it featured absolutely the best music: “New Kid in Town”,”Life in the Fast Lane”, the achingly honest loving and losing “Wasted Time”, the searing “Victim of Love”, and the epic “The Last Resort”. And then there was Don Felder’s “electric Mexican reggae” as Glenn Frey called it, on the “Hotel California” title song. Don Henley takes your reservation, Joe Walsh shows you to your room, and Eagles co-founder the late Glenn Frey is the night clerk with all the keys to unlock the stories, all on duty for the Eagles’ Hotel California stay here In the Studio .
Even before Hotel California, driving halfway across America in March 1976 is when I first realized just how massively popular The Eagles truly had become with the release of One of These Nights. This was long before 21st century satellite radio, so driving 1400 miles from Lincoln NE to Hartford CT meant re-tuning the car radio about every seventy-five miles or so to a new local station. And every one, whether AM or FM, big city signal or small, was playing “One of These Nights“,”Lyin’ Eyes”, and “Take It to the Limit” as if their FCC licenses depended on it. All three of those hits from the album One of These Nights went Top 10, with the album topping the Billboard sales chart and eventually winning a Grammy.
So for the Eagles next effort, did the band have anything prove? No way. Had their four platinum and multi-platinum albums in a row set the expectations bar exceedingly high? You bet, yet Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Randy Meisner, Don Felder, and newest guitar player Joe Walsh ( replacing Bernie Leadon) and the impressive combination of cinematic vision, songcraft, and high tech production seemed to be coming from a place in the near future to which the rest of rock would have to catch up. “Don (Henley) and I admired the nerve that (Donald) Fagen and (Walter) Becker had in their lyrics,” the late Glenn Frey admitted to me regarding Steely Dan when asked about the imagery in the song “Hotel California”. “They did bold things lyrically. With ‘Hotel California’ Henley and I started talking about writing a song where you didn’t have to explain what everything meant…And be a little weird for the sake of being weird, or not having to have every line in your song make absolute sense. And I guess what we achieved is perfect ambiguity, where people read things into that song that were beyond our wildest ideas about what that song meant.”
It is indicative of the incalculable loss to music and pop culture that was the January 2016 death of Eagles co-founder and visionary Glenn Frey who, along with Henley & Walsh, have the last word here in this classic rock interview on Hotel California at check-out time. –Redbeard
Driving halfway across America not long after the June 1975 release of One of These Nights by The Eagles is when I truly realized just how massively popular this band had become. This was long before 21st century satellite radio, so driving 1400 miles from Lincoln NE to Hartford CT meant re-tuning the car radio about every seventy-five miles or so to a new local station. And every one, whether AM or FM, big city signal or small, were playing “One of These Nights”,”Lyin’ Eyes”, and “Take It to the Limit” as if their FCC licenses depended on it.
