The Eagles – An American Band by Andrew Vaughan

Review by Larry Coffman
Special for The Acoustic Storm
September 2010

When the Eagles laid the groundwork in the 1970s for country music stars like Travis Tritt and Trisha Yearwood, little did they know that those artists would help the Eagles reunite in the mid-1990s.

The 1994 Eagles reunion, along with the rest of the band’s history, is laid out impressively in a  book titled The Eagles – An American Band by Andrew Vaughan. The author, who compiled a staggering amount of information and quotes, embellished the product with numerous vintage photos and other graphics.

While it reads a little like a college textbook, the oversized book has the look of a coffee table collectible. Serious fans of the Eagles will want to have it.

Irving Azoff, who had served as the Eagles’ manager in the 1970s, was owner of the Giant record label in 1993 when he recruited 13 Nashville acts to record a tribute album titled “Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles.” The CD was a huge smash, and the Eagles agreed to appear in the video for Tritt’s rendition of “Take It Easy.” During the filming they discovered the good things that they had missed during the 14 years since their break-up. They enjoyed playing music and goofing off with one another.

Said drummer Don Henley, “We just started jamming together during the making of the video. That was how it all began. We always maintained that if we were ever going to tour again we wouldn’t want it to just be two or three of us. Had to have all five of us together.”

Early in 1994 Henley, along with guitarists Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh and Don Felder and bassist Timothy B. Schmit, filmed an MTV special which would become the CD and DVD “Hell Freezes Over.” Then they went into rehearsals for a concert tour. The Eagles were back, and rock and roll lovers around the planet couldn’t be happier.

As the ‘70s came to a close, the Eagles went from benefiting from creative tension to basically hating one another. They argued endlessly in recording sessions, and things got so bad that they began traveling separately on tour and staying in different hotels.

Vaughan reports that the end of the band came July 31, 1980, when the Eagles were playing a benefit concert for presidential candidate Alan Cranston in Long Beach, Calif. Frey accused Felder of being disrespectful to Cranston’s wife, and Felder was tired of Frey’s controlling attitude. Hostile verbal exchanges on stage caused the men on the sound board to turn down the microphones between songs. After the show an enraged Felder smashed an acoustic guitar in frustration. Standing right behind him were Frey and the Cranstons.

The band was in the process of doing the final edits of their double live album, but Henley went to Miami to get away from the others. His tapes were shipped to him by producer Bill Szymczyk. 

At the end of the mixing process, Frey called Henley to chat about sports. At the end of the conversation he casually remarked that he was done with the Eagles.

Frey later stated, “I think my decision may have boiled down in the end to the fact that I just couldn’t see myself spending all of the ‘80s making just three more Eagles albums … three albums that wouldn’t be any fun. I needed to be more involved with music than that. I wanted to do solo albums, and friends had been urging me to produce records. The idea of working on 50 pieces of music a year instead of struggling through three or four while dealing with all the other tensions and intrigues of being in the Eagles was just too appealing to ignore.”

So, Frey relaxed in California while he contemplated his first solo album. Felder contributed to the movie soundtrack of “Heavy Metal.” Walsh recorded and toured, and Schmit began a solo project. But Henley remained traumatized by the break-up, feeling the loss of the band like bereavement.

The formation of the Eagles, as told in great deal by Vaughan, took place in the club scene of West Hollywood. Henley migrated there from Linden, Texas, with his band Shiloh. Frey left Detroit for Los Angeles just before an induction notice from his draft board arrived at his Michigan home.

Original member Bernie Leadon, although born in Minneapolis, received his musical education in L.A. during the folk era of the 1950s and ‘60s. As a teenager he moved to Gainesville, Fla., when his father got a teaching job there. He first met Felder there, and they played in a band together briefly. Leadon moved back to L.A. in ‘67 and joined Hearts and Flowers, which played the soft rock and country that was popular then. Bass player Randy Meisner, a son of Nebraska sharecroppers, found his way to L.A. and the band Poco. Unhappy at not being treated as an equal member, he jumped to Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band.

Vaughan cites many California musicians as being contributors to the country/rock sound, such as the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, Jackson Browne, Michael Nesmith, Joni Mitchell and John David Souther. Several sidebars are positioned amongst the text to provide details about them.

L.A. musicians who regularly played the Troubadour club on the Sunset Strip lived in the hills of nearby Laurel Canyon. Vaughan comments, “It was back to the country, the hippie reaction to corporate America, and a desire for community and a new way of living. This was a time of shared living arrangements, of passing joints around campfires, pulling out guitars and sharing songs and poetry. The music being played was usually acoustic.”

Producer John Boylan, who had brought Meisner into the Stone Canyon Band, was charged with recruiting musicians to back Linda Ronstadt. He selected Meisner, Henley and Frey, and their first gig was at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. Boylan later brought in Leadon for a Ronstadt show in L.A.

The four-man back-up band secretly hatched a plot to form their own act, however. “All four agreed that they would make a concerted effort to make it big, work incredibly hard and bring a rare professionalism to the proceedings,” Vaughan writes. “Just as the Beatles had reacted to the changes and trends of the early 1960s and become the mouthpiece of that era, so the Eagles seemed intuitively to respond to a different set of social circumstances and, like the Fab Four before them, would come to write the soundtrack for their era.

“America had been searching for its own Beatles since 1964, and with John, Paul, George and Ringo calling it quits in 1970, the new decade started with a rock and roll vacuum that the Eagles were more than capable of filling.”

The quartet took their name from the readings of the Hopi Indians, who admired the high-flying birds. As Henley put it, they wanted a name that was “something simple, something American.” The year was 1971.

By early ’72 the Eagles had signed a contract with David Geffen’s Asylum Records and were assigned to make their first album with British producer Glyn Johns. Johns was well respected in England and brought the Eagles to Olympic Studios in West London, his favorite facility. They arrived in February amid a frigid British winter and an economic depression brought on by a miners’ strike. 

“We thought, ‘We’ll get to see London and get away from Los Angeles and all its distractions, with the phone ringing and people coming in to the studio and bothering us and stuff,’” Henley said. “And we were left alone because we didn’t know anybody, and it was miserable.”

The debut album charted decently at No. 22, but the group took a chance on their follow-up by writing and recording a concept album about Western gunslingers – “Desperado.” There was a tepid public reaction to the record, which alerted the band to the dangers of playing both country music and rock and roll within a rock band format. Vaughan remarks, “They easily could have alienated both audiences.”

Leadon leaned toward country, while Frey and Henley shared a deep love for rhythm & blues and rock. They sensed their music needed a tougher, louder rock sound in order to gain mass appeal.

Hence, Johns was replaced with Szymczyk after the first two tracks of “On The Border,” the third album, and recording sessions were returned to L.A. Felder was brought in to play slide guitar on “Good Day In Hell” and soon was asked to join the Eagles as a full member. The disc peaked at No. 17 on the album chart, and “Best Of My Love” became the first Eagles No. 1 single.

But animosities sprung up among the Eagles after the success of the third album and ensuing concert tour. Leadon was disturbed by the way in which Henley and Frey, the principal songwriters, operated behind closed doors and made band decisions by themselves.

“One Of These Nights” was recorded and released in 1975 and topped the album chart. “Lyin’ Eyes” earned the Eagles their first Grammy Award, and the Eagles became international rock stars. But Leadon decided he’d had enough of the party lifestyle and the band’s bickering. He quit the group while it was on tour in December of ’75.

Azoff asked one of his clients, Walsh, if he wanted to join the Eagles, and he agreed. Vaughan notes that “Walsh was the nearest thing America had to Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. He brought a rougher, tougher element to the Eagles’ sound, clearly marking their move away from their mellow beginnings.”

About this time manager Azoff filed suit against Warner Communications, which had become owner of Asylum, for the return of copyrights in Eagles material. Says Vaughan, “Realizing they were in a delicate situation with their biggest-selling act of the moment, Warner stalled negotiations and released a greatest hits album while they did so.” 

The result was “Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975.” It was the first album ever to be certified platinum (1 million units sold) and went on to become the top-selling album of the 20th Century with 26 million in sales. The success of the greatest hits gave the Eagles more time to deliver their next studio album.

That next album would be “Hotel California,” an album that exposed the decay of the American dream. 

“This is a concept album, there’s no way to hide it,” Henley said. “Our country is 200 years old, so we figured since we are the Eagles and the eagle is our national symbol, we were obliged to make some kind of a little bicentennial statement using California as a microcosm of the whole United States.

“We’re not exactly going to win friends with this album. We’re just saying, ‘Look what’s happening.’ I don’t feel totally that way about California. I love it and hate it at the same time.”

The Eagles spent eight months in the studio recording the album and did songs over and over to get the sound right. The painstaking retakes and overdubs marked a new era in which rock albums took more than just a few weeks to record.

In the end it was financially worth it. Azoff negotiated a sweet royalty rate for the Eagles, who got $1.50 per album – unheard of at the time.

But there was physical damage, too. Meisner was battling ulcers as the band toured relentlessly in support of “Hotel California” in 1977. The arguing and power struggles within the band continued and Meisner, at the end of the tour, quit the band to spend time with his family in Nebraska. The official reason for his departure was listed as “exhaustion.”

Native Californian Schmit, who had replaced Meisner in Poco, was tabbed as his replacement in the Eagles.

While Azoff pushed for another album, he acknowledged there were problems to deal with. “The Eagles talked about breaking up from the day I met them,” he said. There’d be one mini-explosion followed by a replacement in the band, then another mini-explosion followed by another replacement. You just had to step back and give things time to calm down.”

The Eagles bought time between albums by releasing a pair of holiday songs in late 1978. Then they spent nearly two years in the studio working on “The Long Run.”

Walsh recalled, “People started asking us ‘What are you going to do now?’ And we didn’t know. We ended up on the next album in Miami with the tapes running but nobody knowing what was going on. We lost perspective. We just kind of sat around in a daze for months.”

Ever the analyst, Vaughan observes, “To the press, ‘The Long Run’ simply showed that the Eagles were running short on themes and ideas and had attempted to disguise some of the weaker songs with over-elaborate production work. Still, the album went platinum in record time and was the biggest seller of 1979. But tensions resurfaced during the supporting tour, and the band argued about everything.”

The break-up would come within the next year, proving that success came with a high price for America’s favorite band. The Eagles would be criticized by some sections of the press for putting materialism and professionalism above art and expression in their career.

But Vaughan concludes, “…those critics always missed the very essence of the Eagles. What made this band different was their united desire to be successful as a band, to instill a disciplined work ethic and to take on the music business – not as poor artistic victims but as smart, business-savvy equals.”