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The Eagles are about to land at Mandalay
Bay By
Bobbie Katz Back in
1980, it was looking more and more as though the Eagles were on the
verge of extinction. After a wild 10-year run on the showbiz scene, the
legendary rock group had decided to disband, wiped out by a dreaded
creative disease one of its members dubbed “the hardening of the
artistry.” If
someone had asked the Eagles then if they’d ever regroup, the response
might have been, when “Hell Freezes Over.” As fans know, that event
happened in 1994, with an album of the same name and a coast-to-coast,
sold-out world tour, the North American leg of which was the
highest-grossing tour of the year. As
further proof of their enduring popularity, last month their “Greatest
Hit-1971-1975” collection was certified as the best-selling album of
all time with 26 million units sold in the US. Today,
the Eagles once again are flying together and will roost at the Mandalay
Bay Events Center Dec. 8 and 29, with special guest Jackson Browne. The
engagement is one of only two by the band in 1999, the other being at
LA’s Staples Center on New Year’s Eve. The concerts are the
group’s first in four years. “Glenn
Frey was the one who came up with the ‘hardening of the artistry’
phrase to describe this creative disease we had in 1980,” says Don
Felder, who’s been with the group since 1974. “It’s like every
time you put something out, you have to surpass yourself. The next
project, the next song, the next album has to be better than the last
one, until you get to the point where you’ve done something like
‘Hotel California and it becomes so insurmountable to do it again that
it becomes a massive burden to try to better yourselves. In the process
of trying to do that, we squeezed so hard that we squeezed the life out
of ourselves. Nobody wanted to do this anymore.” Then,
in 1994, country star Travis Tritt was recording one of the Eagles’
hits, “Take it Easy,” and his manger called the band’s manager and
said Tritt really wanted the Eagles in his video. The group agreed to do
it. The
producers even dragged a bunch of band gear down to the bar, where the
filming was being done, and the Eagles just started jamming. It was a
lot of fun; they hadn’t done it in a long time. Though they had all
seen each other on and off, the five had not been in the same room for
14 years. Shortly
afterward, phone calls started going around among the various members.
The seed was planted for more gigs, and it all bloomed into the “Hell
Freezes Over” tour and album. Because
of the reason they had broken up, when the members—Frey, Felder, Don
Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit—got back together in ’94,
they decided it wasn’t wise to start out with very intense work. Every
album they ever made had been an almost two-year, “grueling, difficult
and wearing ordeal with a lot of collisions in the process,” Felder
says. And usually the album finished the band, rather than the band
finishing it. Trying
to make things as fun and painless as they could, they incorporated into
“Hell Freezes Over” four new songs that had been penned mostly by
Frey and Henley before the recording of the album even started. The
other 11 selections were culled from an MTV appearance taped in April of
that year. That MTV set was the first time the five had performed
together since 1980. This
first Eagles album of new recordings in 14 years was released in
November 1994 and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Album chart. By
1996, it had sold more than 6 million copies in the US and remained in
the Top 100 for 15 months. That kind of success was hardly new for the
group. While many have one or two hits and then disappear, Felder notes,
the Eagles stayed on top for a decade. They
were inducted into the the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 and have
sold more than 100 million albums worldwide. They have had five No. 1
albums and five No. 1 singles, won four Grammy Awards and headlined
numerous sold-out tours throughout the world. “I
think it’s the songwriting,” says Felder of the band’s enduring
popularity. “The writing by Don and Glenn, has just been exceptional,
and the band has kind of propelled itself forward based on those songs.
That’s why today they’ve sold so many albums of songs written 20 to
25 years ago. I think Henley is just a brilliant lyricist. He was an
English major, and he writes very poignant, insightful, really short
phrases that say an amazing amount. He’s
really gifted at that. And musically, he’s able to take a tape or
track or guitar progression that somebody’s played and come up with
melodies and lyrics on top of that. Glenn and he work really well that
way.” Henley
and Felder have worked that way on some songs as well. Felder would sit
down and make a tape of 15, 17, 20 tracks of music he wrote and give
them to Henley. The
latter would then pick a couple of tracks out—one became “Those
Shoes,” another “Hotel California,” and so on. That’s
the way a lot of the writing works with the group, “Hotel
California,” co-written by Henley and Felder, received the Grammy for
“Record of the Year” in 1977; the album of that name has sold more
than 15 million copies domestically. Felder,
who plays electric guitar, joined the group in ’74, during one of its
three lineup changes. He was brought in to help the band go more in an
R&B direction, as opposed to its country-flavored songs, so it could
get AM radio play and fill up bigger auditoriums. The
members began writing songs like “One of These Nights” and
eventually dropped much of the softer, country stuff. From
the minute he joined the Eagles, Felder became aware of the group’s
fluctuating dynamics. “The band was always like a keg of dynamite with
the fuse lit,” he says. “You just never knew how long the fuse would
burn before the next explosion took place. As soon as I joined, I
thought I had joined a band that had just broken up—every day I
thought that. There was always a struggle, always chaos, arguments and
fighting over lyrics and songs. It was difficult because everybody
thought he was right. But the proof was in the pudding. When you put out
an album that had 10 or 15 songs on it, what songs were the hits? It was
always the songs that Don or Glenn wrote or sang. After three or four
albums, you go, ‘You guys have got the stuff. I bow to you humbly,
show me the way.’” Felder points to his experience with “Hotel California.” When he had Henley finished writing the song, it was 6 ½ minutes long and didn’t have a dance beat, which Felder felt made it all wrong for AM radio. At that time, the radio format generally took rock cuts no longer than 3 ½ minutes. When Henley told Felder it was going to be their first single, Felder tried everything in his power to dissuade him. “Boy, was I wrong,” Felder laughs. Currently
at work on another album, possibly their last, the Eagles are planning a
year 2000 tour, though Felder isn’t sure which will come first, the
finished product or the dates. So far they have cut about six tracks,
but Felder is staying mum about the project’s details.
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