The Eagles’Little Known First Flight
as Jackson Browne’s Surprise Band

 

By Harry Viens

 

In 1972 two icons of the entertainment world got their start without much fanfare or initial public notice. One, The HBO subscription channel, virtually created premium subscription cable channels. The other, the founding of the seminal band, The Eagles, changed the music scene dramatically, bringing country-western inspired rock into the mainstream and onto the airwaves across the USA.

Starting out as a road band for Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon and Randy eisner had quickly discovered the personal and musical chemistry that would later make them successful. Once the Ronstadt tour was finished they had begun practicing together with the goal of recording an introductory album and beginning to tour. Late in the winter of 1972 they took a break from the studio and dropped by The Cellar Door in Washington DC to spend some time with an old friend, Jackson Browne.  Jackson Browne had just released his album Saturate Before Using in September of 1971 and was in the middle of a post-release club tour.

The Cellar Door, under the astute management of Jack Boyle (now retired and former chairman of the music division of SFX Entertainment, now Clear Channel Communications) had recently achieved national stature as a premier live music venue and was considered the East coast equivalent of the legendary Troubadour in Los Angeles. Jackson Browne was there for a weeklong gig along with David Blue who was the opening act. I specifically remember that Blue performed his song “Outlaw Man,” which a year later would appear on the Eagles second album i>Desperado, featuring Glenn Frey on lead vocals. Back in 1972, I was the bartender, and right out of college.

The Cellar Door was a terrific live venue with a high profile in the music industry. The smallness of the club, seating at most two hundred and twenty people (if the fire marshal wasn’t looking) made every show intimate and exciting. The professional lighting and sound enhanced the experience and made for a near perfect show time after time. It was a grueling gig for most musicians though. The standard contract paid between $6000 and $8000 for the week and required fourteen shows: two each night Monday through Thursday, three on Friday and Saturday night. Some groups, the Butterfield Blues Band for example, barely cleared anything for themselves once they paid their bar tab. It was a far cry from today’s concert scene where a single performance in a large stadium can gross well into seven figures. In 1972 musicians really worked for their money!!

During the Monday afternoon set-up and sound check Jackson told the club manager (Ralph Camilli, who today owns and operates Blues Alley in Washington DC, one of the premier jazz clubs in North America) to expect a “drop-in” from some musician friends and to please extend every possible courtesy to them. Actually the words were more like, “Take good care of these guys.”  Ralph passed the word along to the doormen, the sound engineer and me. As bartender I provided the second most valuable service to the musicians: access to free booze.

None of us knew at the time who Ralph was talking about, and even Tuesday evening when Glenn, Bernie and Randy showed up at the bar with a mighty thirst it took us a little while to sort out where we knew these guys from. Through casual conversation it dawned on us that we knew them from one of Linda Ronstadt’s appearances at The Cellar Door; we also knew Randy as a founder of oco and from his work on their first album, Pickin Up The Pieces, and we knew Bernie’s work with Dillard & Clark and The Flying Burrito Brothers. It was exciting to really have a chance to get to know these artists face-to-face, and at the same time it was pretty ordinary. Working at The Cellar Door had exposed us all to some remarkable talents such as B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Tom Rush, Linda Ronstadt, Neil Young, Richard Pryor and dozens more. The simple truth of it is that, at least in 1972, most of these fabulously talented artists, when off stage, were “just regular folks.”  By Wednesday a few of the waiters and I were playing poker together with Glenn, Bernie, Don and Randy in Jackson Browne’s room at the Marriott hotel in Arlington, drinking beer and carrying on like a bunch of fraternity brothers. (Important note, if any of them ever invite you to play poker, don’t, unless of course you have plenty of money to lose. They’re that good.)

We had some great conversations at the card table that I still remember to this day. Glenn told me he was from Detroit and was a big hockey fan. A couple of years later after The Eagles made it big, I would always see pictures from their concerts of Glenn onstage in hockey jerseys of the Chicago Blackhawks; every time I saw him in one of these pictures, I would wonder why he was never wearing a jersey of his hometown Detroit Red Wings. Go figure. Bernie was very mild-mannered and we both talked about our upbringings in the Catholic Church. I think he told me that he was one of nine kids. I always thought him to be conservative in his mannerisms. I would have a chuckle four years later at the height of his fame with the band when I learned that he had been living with Patti Davis for a while; it seems that her father, Ronald Reagan, the nation’s premier conservative, did not invite her to join the rest of the Reagan clan onstage at the 1976 Republican convention (in which Reagan narrowly lost the nomination to President Ford) because she was “living in sin” with a rock star.

Don was extremely affable and told me about growing up in a small town in rural Texas. I specifically remember him telling me that he loved playing as part of Linda Ronstadt’s back-up band for a host of reasons. While he thought that the pay was more than adequate for a struggling musician like himself, and that the food was great, he pointed out that the Ronstadt tour gave him the opportunity to fly in a plane for the first time. Randy told me that he had been the bassist with Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band only the year before. It was clear by what he said about his former boss that he had only the utmost respect for Nelson as both a musician and as a person.

     One fact that stands out in my mind to this day is that one or two of the future rock stars referred to their friend Jackson Browne as “The Kraut”, which Browne just laughed off. I later learned that Browne had been born in West Germany, but on a US Army base and therefore was not German at all.

It was over a hand of five card stud that Jackson first suggested that they take the stage with him. The remark was a game stopper. Hands were folded up or put (face) down on the table and a pretty serious discussion ensued. There were lots of reasons not to play. They didn’t feel like they were ready. Their material was new and still coming together.  They’d really only performed the material in the studio so far. Frankly they were unsure of themselves and they were a little bit scared.

Jackson pooh-poohed their concerns and just kept repeating the idea. The concerns, fears and hesitation continued, but in the end, their enthusiasm and passion for what they were trying to do won out. They agreed, sort of, and Thursday they nervously filed into the dressing room where they continued the debate. I was busy running bottles of beer back and forth, supplemented with some shots of tequila. The club opened its doors at seven PM and I went to work putting out drinks for the crowd filling up the floor and two balconies of the club for Jackson’s first set at eight. The club was packed for the first show and Don, Glen, Bernie and Randy were walking back and forth from the stage entrance to the bar, detouring through the club, sizing the crowd up, lifting their heads up and around to study the lights, the acoustics, the size of the stage. It was as if they were looking at the room for the first time. Sometime between the eight o’clock show and the ten o’clock show the final decision was made.

I was on the club floor helping the waiters clear tables as the early crowd filed out past the line waiting for the ten o’clock show. Randy walked down the main aisle of the club looking for Glenn. They literally stumbled into each other at the curtain to the service bar and I heard Randy say, “So, we’re going to do this?” Glenn nodded his head and that was it. While the waiters set the club up for the next show, the doormen, Ralph Camilli, the light and sound engineer and I helped move their instruments onto the stage, set up some extra microphones and got their amps powered up. The whole set-up took maybe twenty minutes and the crowd started piling in moments later just as the lights came down.

David Blue took the stage precisely at ten o’clock for a thirty minute set. The waiters worked the crowd putting out a second and third round of drinks and Jackson Browne took the stage around ten-forty-five. He opened with his standard set but after the second song he stopped, stepped up to the microphone and said, “Paging Mr. Blue.”  David joined him on stage, and then Jackson turned to the audience and said, “I have some friends here tonight, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner. They’ve started a new group and I’ve asked them to play with me tonight. So, here for the first time anywhere live, won’t you please welcome The Eagles.”

There were only about two hundred people in the audience that night, but it was the loudest round of applause any of us had ever heard. You could see Don and Bernie shaking a bit as they picked up their instruments and adjusted their microphones. Glenn grabbed a microphone, blabbered something to the effect of, this was their first time as a group in front of an audience and they were nervous as hell. The crowd responded with a knowing laugh and encouraging applause and a moment later, with Jackson and Glenn taking the lead, they launched into “Take It Easyi>.”

I closed the bar and was standing on the club floor just enjoying the show. The waiters, the doormen, Ralph and the assistant manager all did the same, all of us just basking in the magic that was taking place on stage. At the end of their first song the audience went wild. You could see the tension melt off of the faces of what was now, forever, The Eagles. They launched into their next song and proceeded to turn the place out. Ralph shooed us all back to work, but as we plied the crowd with liquor we all found ourselves moving to the rhythm the band was laying down. By Saturday we knew most of their first album, i>Eagles, by heart.

I think that there is a bit of fate in the fact that they opened their first ever appearance with “Take It Easy,” a song that unbelievably would only reach number twelve on The Billboard charts, but has taken on a life of its own as one of the staples of classic rock, country and easy listening FM stations nationwide, en route to becoming one of the most widely plays songs of the rock era. Not only did they start off with “Take It Easy” that night, but the song would also start off as the first song on their 1976 album i>The Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975. This album would go on to become the top-selling album of all-time, passing out Michael Jackson’s Thriller in the 1990’s, while leaving Carole King’s Tapestry as just a footnote in history.

Friday and Saturday Jackson Browne and The Eagles played to a sold-out club. They played with energy, enthusiasm, passion and by the Saturday night midnight show, a confidence that hasn’t waned to this day. Their “official” first public gig would be later that year in Venice, California at a gallery opening party for Boyd Elder, a well-known artist and friend of the Eagles, but a select few hundred Jackson Browne fans in Washington DC had the real “first appearance” privilege.(i>ed..official band lore is that the band's first appearance was at Disneyland) I wonder if any of them have ever realized that they saw history in the making? Hopefully this article will somehow cross their paths.

The Cellar Door closed in the late-seventies as large venue concerts became increasingly the norm. No surprise I guess. How can you charge only a $3.50 cover charge per person and expect to compete with stadiums that seat thirty thousand and more? The Eagles’ appearance at The Cellar Door was the only time they ever played there, and I would guess it was also the only time the Eagles played as a backup band, for no pay./p>

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Harry Viens, a Connecticut resident and former advertising executive, is currently working on a novel about his unique experiences at The Cellar Door. He can be reached through his website at www.HarryViens.com.

© Copyright 2005, H. H. Viens, All rights reserved.