Chapter 2: Taking Off

Glenn Frey was an operator, a mover and a shaker from the start. Probably more than any other member of the Eagles, Frey grew up wanting to be a rock & roll star. His pattern had been set by the time he was in high school in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. Though he was small, Frey was a terror in athletics, starring in baseball, football and wrestling. Even then he played in local bands called the Subterraneans (he was a big Jack Kerouac fan), the Mushrooms and the Four of Us. And Frey was eager to use his rock & roll status with the local girls. "I got into rock & roll for the girls," he jokes.

Frey became known around town for his rocking talents and served a kind of apprenticeship with Bob Seger, singing background on "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" while being handled by Seger's manager Punch Andrews. When Frey graduated from high school in 1966, his mother, Nellie, wanted him to go to college, but Glenn resisted, preferring to stay close to home where he could de-velop his connections in the music scene. Nellie went to Punch Andrews and requested that Glenn's manager not give her son any bookings un- less he stopped smoking and started going to school. Frey responded by leaving town.

A recent girl friend of Glenn's had moved to Cal-ifornia, so the budding rock & roller figured he'd head out west and make a living hanging out. His arrival in Los Angeles was magic. Some people take to tinsel town at first hit and Frey got it right between the eyes. "The first day I got to L.A.," he recalls, "I saw David Crosby sitting on the steps of the country store in Laurel Canyon, wearing the same hat and green leather bat cape he had on for Turn! Turn! Turn!. To me, that was an omen." When he found his girl friend he met a guy, named J.D. Souther, who was hanging out with her sister. The lanky, cynical kid from Texas and the short, ambitious kid from Detroit hit it off immediately. The two decided to form a group, which they called Longbranch Pennywhistle, and recorded an album for Amos records.

Longbranch Pennywhistle was doomed from the start. Amos records, a small outfit run by Jimmy Bowen, was hardly a stepping stone to stardom. But ironically, during these hard times Frey was walking with giants. Frey and Souther moved into Jackson Browne's $60 a month apartment in Echo Park. "The three of us were all living there," Frey recalls, "Listening to records or to Jackson. I'd just lay in bed and hear him practice downstairs. The piano was right below my bed. Those were great times." Times during which the three talked, laughed and drank together. Times when they would write songs together and trade ideas. It was the time when Frey and Browne wrote "Take It Easy," and the time during which the seeds were sown for the concept of the Eagles' second album, Desperado.

"Then one day," Frey continues, "J.D. and I got in a fight with our record company and suddenly we couldn't make any more records. Every day we'd go to the office, ask if we could get released from our contracts and they'd say no, so we'd go down to the Troubadour bar and get drunk. The Troubadour was and always will be full of tragic characters. Has-beens and hopefuls. Sure, it has brought a lot of music to people but it's also infested with spiritual parasites who will rob you of your precious artistic energy. I was always worried about going down there because I thought people would think I had nothing better to do, which was true."

While Frey was brooding, drowning his sorrows, and trying to figure out a way to break out of the mess with Amos and find a better situation, Don Henley was hanging out in the same place with similar problems. Henley had just come from a tragic background in Texas with his band, Shiloh, for which he played drums and sang lead. Henley hailed from the small town of Linden, Texas, (population 2000) and like countless Texans before him, had to learn the hard way that the only thing a musician who stays in Texas gets is heartache. He headed for California's greener pastures, looser morals, and better opportunities.

Linden is located near the Louisiana and Arkansas border, not one of the best spots to try making a living as a musician. In 1962, at the age of fifteen, Don's mother Hughlene bought him a $600 drum kit and Henley joined a Dixieland band, but switched styles as soon as he heard the Beatles. "We made some small-time records on small-time labels, like Crab records, and we went through various small-time managers," he muses. Things started to happen when Henley joined a band called the Four Speeds, a hot outfit that liked to cover Ventures song. The group was without a vocalist and Henley took the spot even though it was unusual for a drummer to be lead singer. The group changed its name to Felicity and played the bar and college circuit, while Henley went to school at Stephen F. Austin University and North Texas State. One of the group members, Jerry Dale Surratt, met Kenny Rogers of the First Edition, and when Rogers went to L.A. he promised to help the band out. Rogers eventually sent for the group, which by now was calling itself Shiloh, and they came to L.A. to record a single, "Jennifer," before returning to Linden for more rehearsals.

Back in Linden Surratt was killed when his dirt bike smashed into a car in full view of his family and the other band members. The group resolved to continue, adding a keyboardist and a steel guitarist and moving to California, where they re- corded an album for Shiloh. "It was a total complete flop," Henley says. "We sat around broke and bummed out. I was hanging out at the Troubadour getting drunk a lot and getting ready to go back to Texas and call it quits. Glenn was bummed out too, so we sat around and talked about our problems with Amos records and everything else."

Frey's ruminations on management options had produced results. From Jackson Browne he heard about an up-and-coming manager of L.A. song- writers named David Geffen. Geffen's Asylum label was soon to be a major force in the music industry, so Frey took it upon himself to hustle a gig with Geffen. Geffen was interested in J.D. Souther, but not Frey. "I had just played a couple of songs for Geffen," Frey recalls. "Geffen told me point blank that I shouldn't make a record by my- self and that maybe I should join a band. Then Linda Ronstadt hired me. It was two days before rehearsal was supposed to start and they still hadn't found a drummer. And here was Henley, just standing right in the Troubadour. So I struck up a conversation with him. I told him my whole trip was just stalled. I had all these songs and couldn't make a record and I wanted to put together a band, but I was going on the road with Linda. We were both at impasses. So he joined Linda's group too. The first night of our tour, we decided to start a band."

"Glenn kept telling me about his manager, David Geffen," Henley laughs. "I didn't even know who Geffen was, but I decided I would stick my neck out to play with Glenn."

Geffen had told Frey to call him when he had a demonstration tape of his band to play for him, but Frey had other ideas. When the four Eagles took their oath they wasted no time going directly to Geffen. Leadon, the elder statesman and most accomplished member of the group, did the talking. After two weeks of rehearsals the band knew how good it was so Leadon put all the cards on the table. "Here we are, do you want us or don't you?" He dared Geffen. The man who'd managed Crosby, Stills and Nash knew a gold mine when he saw one and said "Yeah."

Geffen gave the band a lecture about staying together for at least a year. He was mindful of the tensions within such bands and their often short life span. There was also the fact that Leadon, Meisner and Henley had just quit groups. But these four were bent on success. "We had it all planned," says Frey. "We'd watched bands like Poco and the Burrito Brothers lose their initial momentum. We were determined not to make the same mistakes. This was gonna be our best shot. Everybody had to look good, sing good, play good and write good. We wanted it all. Peer respect. AM and FM success. Number one singles and albums, great music and a lot of money."

For Leadon and Meisner it was that long awaited cooperative venture that was the most appealing part of the Eagles. "In the Burritos," Lead- on recalls, "everyone had just as much talent, but it was difficult to make the best possible use of it with that combination of people. Either everyone is to- tally in accord, or else nobody plays anywhere near 100% of their potential. Sneeky is an incredible steel player, Chris Hillman is just amazing on bass, but their performances could and would have been so much better if there hadn't been the personality conflicts and differences of ideas in the band. I didn't do as well as I could have either."

At this point the possible permutations of country rock had already been tried, so the Eagles knew pretty much how to go about setting up their musical strategy. "There's a lot of things we decided not to do," Frey explains. "First of all we decided not to use steel guitar in the band. When we first were putting the band together we had literally our choice of any steel player we wanted, who would've gone with us with what we were offering, but we decided first of all to stay away from that because it's too obvious. And with just four guys it's a little bit lean, there's not so many notes, there's a lot more air in the music. And the other thing to me is that Don Henley plays a different kind of drums and Randy Meisner plays a different kind of bass than you find in other country rock groups, so it's a little heavier rhythm section than Poco has or the Burritos had. If Bernie wants to play some steel guitar in the four-piece concept, that's fine."

When the time came to name the group it was Leadon who hit on the eagle image. Leadon's interest in Indian folklore had led him to study the Hopi Indians' veneration of the eagle. "Certain spiritual powers are attributed to eagles," he says. "It's high soaring, flying closer to the sun than any other bird, and it's spiritually the richest of them all. We were all reading books about the Hopis, and in the Hopi mythology the eagle is the most sacred animal. It symbolizes all highest spirituality and morals. High morals. The best a man can be. I think it's a beautiful symbol. I would hope that the music would soar that high."

Of course, the symbol is also perfect because the eagle represents the U.S. seal, the ever present de- sign on our currency. "Glenn likes the name for different reasons," Leadon adds. "Glenn likes the name because it sounds like a teenage gang." Frey had previously tried to sell the band on names like Teen King and the Emergencies.

"The important thing to realize," Henley added, "is that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. What this band creates is bigger than all of us. It's really hard when you have a group of people who want to do everything. It's much harder than when one guy is the leader. There's no leader in the Eagles because everybody is an egomaniac. We are a product of the '60s. Nothing in the '70s has influenced me at all. All our influences come from the '60s - Beatles, Byrds, Buffalo Springfield - bands who just got up there and played. It's just the songs with us, no gimmicks, flashy clothes, or glitter. It's taken six or seven years for people to get ready for it. It's like CSN &Y all started in different bands and none of those bands were as successful as the synthesis of those four people. Rock & roll was a lot younger then. Now rock has grown up. It's not adolescent anymore."

When Geffen decided to sign this crew he most certainly had visions of the next Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young dancing in his head. The band agreed with him up to a point but had other ideas as well. "There really hasn't been an American rock and roll band since Creedence Clearwater Revival," Frey pointed out at the time. "Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young weren't a rock and roll band, they were four singer-songwriters. They were capable of anything but they failed in their approach. Neil Young was my favorite because Neil was a guy who could be a band member. Neil was able to lay back and dig his supportive role. All of us went to school on CSN&Y as far as approach. On the other hand all the Eagles had been well accustomed to playing supportive roles whether it was behind Linda Ronstadt, Bo Diddley, the Burrito Brothers or Poco. From the start we knew what we wanted. Singing one of the harmony lines and playing your part right gets you off just as much as singing lead in a song you wrote yourself."

Whether or not Geffen realized the band's full potential is a matter of conjecture, but he did know what to do with them immediately. He pumped $12,500 into the band and sent them to Aspen, Colorado for several weeks of shakedown gigs playing a place called the Gallery, a small club that, on a good night, held 500 people. "The Gallery was a small dance bar," reminisces Meisner, "where everybody just danced and drank until they fell down. It was fantastic. Everybody had a great time. We did four sets a night for a month, playing as many originals as we'd written, to work them up ready for the album, and filled out with just about every other song we knew, Beatles, Chuck Berry and Neil Young songs and all sorts of other things from the other groups we'd played in. It tightened up the group pretty well, we learned how to play with each other, and then we went to play a club in Boulder, Colorado."

It was at this club in Boulder that something happened that would make this group different from all its L.A. peers. British producer Glyn Johns was invited out to see the band. "It was exam week," laughs Meisner, "so the place wasn't very full, but Glyn liked us anyway."

Johns agreed to take on the Eagles as his next project so the band packed up and split for London to record their first album. This was an adventurous move if only because Los Angeles was generally recognized as a premier recording center at that time and leaving the city to record elsewhere was odd. Even bolder was to go with a producer who made his reputation recording British groups, particularly the hard rock sounds of the Rolling Stones and the Who. There was something of a precedent though, for Johns had recorded Traffic, a British group more in line with what the Eagles were doing, and the American rocker Steve Miller.

"We wanted a producer who could handle the folkie stuff and the rock and roll," explains Lead- on, "and we wanted the best person we could find, so names like Glyn Johns, Tom Dowd, Bill Halverson, Ted Templeman - people who'd had a history of producing the same range of music as we were into - names like that came to mind. Glyn was the first choice. We talked it over and eventually came over to England and cut the album in three weeks. He never lets up for a moment. He's a perfectionist and as well as being a producer, he's one of the best engineers in the world. He'd just get the sound straight away."

"He's really what made us different and set us apart," Frey says of Johns. "It would have been easy for us to stay in L.A. and record, but we didn't. First, Glyn's an English producer, and he feels more technically comfortable in the studios over there. I have always been fascinated by the sound of records that come out of England, as op- posed to the sound of the records that are coming from California. There is something about the bass and drum sound. There is a thickness there that can be felt. It is also great to take American music to England, and have it filtered by somebody as objective as an English engineer. Recording in London is like getting out of the forest. It is fabulous going over there to make records because there is nothing to do but record. It is not like being in Los Angeles and going to the Troubadour, going to restaurants, girls and countless friends. In London, you don't have to worry about having closed recording sessions because it is closed be- cause nobody is there... No distractions. We were able to divorce ourselves from all our usual hang· outs.

"And Johns was the key to our success," Frey elaborates. "He'd been working with all these classic English rock and roll bands, the Who, the Stones, he didn't want to hear us squashing out Chuck Berry licks. I didn't mind him pointing us in a certain direction. We just didn't wanna make an- other limp wristed L.A. country rock record. They were all too smooth and glassy. We wanted a tougher sound."

Johns was a stern taskmaster in the studio and really broke the cocky Eagles in the process of re- cording until he got them to do exactly what he told them. "Glyn made us very aware of all the little personal trips within the band," says Henley. "He'd just stare at you with his big, strong, burning blue eyes and confront you with the man-to- man talk. You couldn't help but get emotional. We even cried a couple of times."

Johns' stern approach paid off. The product of these sessions at London's Olympic Sound Studios, Eagles, was one of 1972's finest albums. In many ways it may well be the band's most democratic and representative work, for it predated the time when Henley and Frey began to really dominate the outfit. It opened with Leadon's beautiful, ringing electric guitar chords blocked against Frey's syncopated acoustic rhythm guitar part, then breaks into that timeless country rock guitar statement that characterizes the song's melodicism along with Frey's smooth, even lead vocal and the exquisite three-part vocal harmonies. By the song's end Leadon is grinning out a sprightly banjo part as well.

If the eagle concept was Leadon's, then so is this first album. The cover is starkly true to the concept, showing nothing but the darkened blue and shadow of a desert sunset silhouetting a batch of cactus, with an eagle at the top center of the front cover, the group's name spelled across its wingspan. No glossy picture of the band on the cover - only another shot taking up the inside cover, this time of a night scene amid huge boulders with a raging fire faintly illuminating the members of the band, seated around the blaze in their best cowboy fashion.

"Take It Easy" is followed by Henley's only contribution to the debut, "Witchy Woman," on which he added vocals and lyrics to Leadon's sinuous, tribal sounding electric guitar. The hard rocking "Chug All Night" follows, with Frey really showing his Detroit upbringing in the rollicking structure and tough, spitting vocal. Henley's eerie, raspy voice is quite a contrast, as is the following tune, Frey's "Most of Us Are Sad." The precious, elegiac feeling of this song is not at all surprising for a country rock band (sounds, in fact, rather like Poco), but the acoustic, harmony dominated dirge is striking in that it follows such an out-and-out rocker as "Chug All Night." Side one ends with Jackson Browne's "Nightingale," the only tune on the record not recorded in London. Frey's vocal relies entirely on Browne's phrasing and tone in an uncanny duplication of Browne's style except on the close harmony passages, where Meisner's high harmonies continue to enforce thc Poco comparison. The tune is upbeat, a fine job and a demonstration of the band's combined vocal and instrumental talents in near perfect arrangement.

Where Frey showed his stuff on side one, Lead- on and Meisner really took control on the flip side. "Train Leaves Here This Morning," written by Leadon with Gene Clark, had almost nothing to do with rock and roll. The soft, understated vocal by Leadon is the Eagles at their most laconic. The acoustic guitars are barely strummed at all. Yet the combination of vocals in the harmony once again pointed out the band's magical harmony blend and greatest strength. Leadon wends out two im- possibly beautiful leads in the solo spot before the last verse, but it's those ethereal voices that carry the day.

Meisner's "Take the Devil" opens with stark acoustic guitar rhythm and a single note electric guitar in the background wailing like a coyote. It matches Frey's "Most Of Us Are Sad" as a virtuoso ballad vocal, and in fact may be even a bit more consistent with Meisner's personality. Johns puts more echo on this vocal than any on the record to underscore the song's message. Leadon and Meisner team up for "Earlybird," which ingeniously incorporates a bird whistle into the banjo intro, making a sound like an appealing Irish piper. This tune, with its nicely arranged electric guitar/banjo tension turns out to be one of the record's most enjoyable tracks.

Jack Tempchin's "Peaceful Easy Feeling" takes it back to the desert once more in standard country rock fashion and provides Frey with a really fine melody to sing. The song eventually became as much of a trademark for the group as "Take It Easy," not just because of its similar call for serenity, but because it offers a kind of mainstream country rock attitude that transcends the band's image. Leadon's Buffalo Springfield style lead guitar break is wonderful. The record closes on an appropriate note with Meisner's "Tryin'," an earnest expression of the group's intent to do its best. The fuzztone hard rock lead and energetic, crunching rhythm guitar pattern give the band a chance to rock out a little in good-time fashion to their debut curtain call. Once again Meisner's performance is so locked into his personality that it could easily be mistaken for an outtake from Pickin' Up The Pieces, Poco's debut. Nothing to be ashamed of. It may well have bothered Frey, however, for he was determined, at all costs, to prevent his band from sounding too much like its country rock predecessors. The costs, however, would eventually prove to be pretty high.

Chapter 1   Chapter 3

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