I don't know why fortune smiles on some/And lets the rest go free," sings Don Henley on "The Sad Café," the concluding song on the Eagles' last studio album, The Long Run. Those lines capture eloquently the degree to which the Eagles had come to see the superstardom they enjoyed in the Seventies as a kind of curse that generated dissension among the band's members, critical controversy, creative paralysis and a nearly metaphysical discomfort with the hedonistic delights "however fully indulged" that success brought in its wake.
Things started out innocently enough. When the Eagles were formed in Los Angeles in 1971, the group — guitarists Glenn Frey and Bernie Leadon, bassist Randy Meisner and drummer Don Henley — set out on an exuberant exploration of the country-rock synthesis that had been a hallmark of earlier California bands like the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. The Eagles' first three albums — Eagles (1972), which yielded the hits "Take It Easy," "Witchy Woman" and "Peaceful Easy Feeling"; Desperado (1973); and, as guitarist Don Felder was joining the band, On the Border (1975) — were distinguished by catchy melodies, reassuring harmonies and a fascination with outlaw imagery.
On One of These Nights (1975), the Eagles began to examine the dark side of the California dream, a concern that grew into an obsession on Hotel California (1976), the band's greatest album. Novelist Joseph Conrad used the term "fascination of the abomination" to describe the hypnotic power that self-destruction can exert on the soul, and that phrase well suits Hotel California's depiction of a gorgeous paradise — the geographical end point of American aspiration — transformed into a Kind of sunny hell of unsatisfying pleasure.
With Hotel California's massive success, Henley and Frey dearly emerged as the main voices of the Eagles, not only because their songwriting and singing had come to define the band's vision, but because — with the departure of Leadon and Meisner and the addition of guitarist Joe Walsh and bassist Timothy B. Schmit — they were the last remaining members of the original lineup. Battles over the direction of the group, anxiety over crafting a worthy follow-up to Hotel California, legal struggles with the band's management and a growing perception by critics of California rockers as spoiled, narcissistic sybarites created an environment in which three years passed before the release of The Long Run, a process that left the group exhausted and disaffected. When Frey announced in 1981 that he had begun work on a solo album, the Eagles' breakup became official.
On a bright day this past August, Henley and Frey met at Henley's home in Beverly Hills to do their first interview together since the Eagles' split. Fresh from the extensive tour that followed the release of The End of the Innocence, Henley seemed relaxed and happy. Frey appeared comfortable as well, despite a solo career that stalled in the late Eighties. Frey's image — and that of the Eagles — had also not been well served by his recent "Hard Rock/Rock Hard" ads for Jack LaLanne, which implied that his years as a Seventies rocker consisted of little more than pointless excess.
But if the past was the subject of the day, the future loomed as well, in the form of a projected Eagles reunion. Henley and Frey are starting to write songs together, and other former members of the group are being recruited for a possible album and tour next year.
And already the backlash has begun. "Don Henley must die," psycho-punk Mojo Nixon screams on his new album. "Don't let him get back together with Glenn Frey." So history is once again repeating itself, but this time around, Henley and Frey seem to have the equanimity to enjoy themselves more naturally and, at least in the short term, to settle in for the long run.
Do you think of the Seventies as a distinct era, or does it blur around the edges?
Frey: Well, it can sort of be defined by the life of our band, because the band started in the fall of '71 and broke up probably sometime in 1980, so we were working together for the whole decade.
Henley: The decade has some definite parameters for me because I came to L.A. in the summer of 1970 from Texas. And men the band. I think of the Desperado period, which was '73, and then '75, which was One of These Nights. I think '75 was around the point when the Seventies changed — '74, '75, '76.
Frey: We changed, too.
Henley: Yeah. And then late '76 started another period — the Hotel California period. That's when disco and punk were starting to come in, and I guess that was the beginning of the Eighties.
What do you mean, that's when the Seventies started to change and you changed? What were those changes?
Frey: I think we got a little more serious; maybe we became more politically active. You know, something happened around the time of the Bicentennial. We got Hotel Californiaout by Thanksgiving 1976 — we wanted badly to have an album out in that year.
I remember interviews in which you'd say that the record was about more than California. It was really about America.
Henley: America, in general, California being the microcosm. That didn't seem to take. I mean, it just went in one ear and out the other.
Frey: There was a time, somewhere in 1976, when I thought things were going to get better. We had gotten rid of Nixon. We had a Democrat in the White House. Jimmy Carter and the boys were going to have barbecue on the hill.
The president was quoting Bob Dylan.
Henley: It seemed like the Sixties were back for a second.
Frey: And then Khomeini...
Henley: And the helicopter mechanics. Events conspired against ol' Jimmy.
Lets go back a bit The two of you come from very different parts of the country. What brought you to California?
Frey: Well, I grew up in Detroit, so I never really had any desire to go East. Being from the Great Lakes and watching the sun set in the west, that's where I wanted to go. I played in one of the only bands in Detroit that did surfer music!
What was your sense about it when you got here? Did it meet your expectations?
Frey: Oh, I think I was a little bit intimidated, a little awed. But you get over that. I came here once and went back to Michigan and really decided I hated Michigan. Then I figured I better just go and try to make something out of my life in California.
What were your first impressions when you got here, Don?
Henley: Kind of gaw-lee! I mean, I used to read a lot of the fan magazines, the music magazines of that day, and everything musically that excited me seemed to be emanating from here. It was all happening here. There were the Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Linda Ronstadt and Joni Mitchell, Steppenwolf and Spirit. The thing that definitely pushed me in this direction was that Kenny Rogers had discovered my little group [Shiloh] in Texas, and he lived here. He was the only person we knew here, and we didn't know anybody in New York. So he was instrumental in our decision to come out this way, with the promise of an album, a record deal.
We came here the first time, I believe it was February of 1970. We came out to cut a single, not really to move here. I remember driving into town; we came up on the Hollywood Freeway. It was a nice, clear February night, one of those nights when the town looks really pretty. I had never seen the Capitol Records Tower — I was freaking out. It was like there was this big metal and concrete symbol of the record industry. I had so many Capitol records when I was a kid — 45s, you know, when they had that purple label with the Capitol dome. I believe the writing was in silver. It was a manifestation of all my childhood records. I was awe-struck. I had never seen any terrain like this. Where I come from there are rolling, gentle hills but no vistas like this. And, of course, I had never seen a grid of lights like that in my life. It just went on forever.
What about when you got the Eagles together? What were your ambitions?
Frey: I think we had a lot of optimism. You don't know any better than to think that you can do really well. I mean, every time you put together a band, you think, "This is going to be the one."
Henley: The best band in the world — until you really get to know everybody. We were young, and the times were exciting, and the world lay stretched out before us. The beginning is when it's great Money and girls were the two big motivations — that's what it was for everybody. Then you become a serious artist and set out to change the world.
Frey: There was a time during 1976, 1977, where the record business went crazy. That was when Hotel California came out, and Saturday Night Fever and also Rumours, by Fleetwood Mac, and?
Henley: Frampton Comes Alive! — for a minute.
Frey: That was the music business at its decadent zenith. I remember Don had a birthday in Cincinnati, and they flew in cases of Chateau Lafite Rothschild. I seem to remember that the wine was the best and the drugs were good and the women were beautiful and, man, we seemed to have an endless amount of energy. Endless stores of energy. Hangovers were conquered with Bloody Marys and aspirin, you know what I mean? There were no two-day purges or hiding in your bed. It seemed that you bounced back, you were resilient.
Henley: There was much merrymaking. Those kind of record sales were unprecedented. I guess everybody thought it was going to continue like that. Lots of money was spent on parties and champagne and limos and drugs. And then, of course, the bottom fell out.
Frey: I know we were pissed off, but the music business seemed a little friendlier to me.
Henley: It was friendlier to the young man or woman starting out. It wasn't quite the claw-your-way-into-the-business that it is now. It was much more organic, as was the world. The whole country-rock movement — I hate that label, but for lack of a better term — was even connected to environmentalism, because it was a music that had grown in part out of country music. It was very much connected to the earth, and everybody was wearing earthy clothes and celebrating the outdoors.
The very term 'country rock' suggests a rural origin.
Henley: It was a very natural time. And it all made sense with the music. Then in the late Seventies there was a backlash against that. Music started to become very urban oriented, a reflection of the concrete and steel and the pace. So we didn't, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, get back to the garden. If we did, we didn't stay there. The country, the natural sound that is connected with nature, has gone out of music pretty much. I lament that. I lament that loss, that contact we had with nature.
Frey: I think when the Seventies started, music wasn't giving much hope. There was almost no way that musically the Seventies were going to be on a par with the Sixties. The only people that even got remotely close were Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but all their problems — they sort of blew it. But they had that myth going for a while. Looking back on things, the music of the Seventies doesn't sound that fucking bad to me at all. You can name the great albums of the Seventies. I don't know if you can name the great albums of the Eighties, but if you do, how great are they compared with Layla?
What other records do you think really stand out?
Frey: I might forget some things, but I'm thinking of a string of Elton John hits. We had the Spinners, we had the Philadelphia Sound — I liked those records. It's kind of funny even to have resented disco compared with where that kind of music has gone. Some of the older disco songs, shit, if it's Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, those are pretty good fucking records. Some of the Donna Summer records I like a lot better than things that I've heard recently. There's a lot more craft and a lot less programming involved, that's for sure.
Henley: Some great R&B records were being made in the early Seventies — that wasn't only in the Sixties.
How do you feel about your own stuff?
Henley: I pretty much like the same things and hate the same things now that I did then. I mean, we knew when we were making those albums that some of the songs weren't very good. We were trying to run a democracy, and there wasn't a hell of a lot we could do about it. We just had to swallow it, just to keep the group happy and together. As time progressed, there would be another album, Glenn and I would put up more of a fight to try to get the quality of each song to rise. But, I mean, shit — we were what? Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven years old? We weren't exactly mature. We were growing up in public, you know? I look back at some of the lyrical content and cringe sometimes, but we were just as mature as anybody else that age, I guess.
A few moments ago you both were describing what a great time you were having as the Seventies kicked into high gear. But as the decade went on, your records got darker and darker. Why was that?
Henley: I think we knew intuitively that it would pass. I think we could sense the future. It was land of idyllic. It was very exciting. It was a time of discovery. And people were just friendlier in general. But I think intuitively we were aware of the end of the boom. Not exclusively for ourselves, but the nation.
Was there a sense that the tensions within the band or that the tensions between the two of you were getting channeled in your work?
Henley: We did use the tension a lot to be creative. We would divide up into factions. It was me and him against them, in general, and we would use that. We were very much for quality music and growth and mature subject matter. At the same time we wanted to be successful. We wanted to get a big audience. We felt that that was the whole purpose of being in the record business in the first place. There were some people in the band who didn't, for one reason or another. Guilt. And I understand that, you know. But the tension took its toll after a while. It finally got the better of us.
Frey: The band just got bigger and bigger, and it became unmanageable. I think the underbelly of success is the burden of having to follow things up. We started to run out of gas. Don sort of blew his literary nut on Hotel California. I mean, we covered it, from love to sex to drugs to the future of the planet to ...
Henley: Religion.
Frey: We weren't thinking about selling 15 million records at the time. It's one thing if you have a couple of hit singles and get a gold record. That's different from selling 15 million albums. There's only a few artists who have had the education of having to continue working on stuff after some sort of blockbuster success. So it wore on us. We spent a lot more time in the studio toward the end of the decade, and we got a lot more critical of our own work, because we wanted it to be better than the last thing we did. We probably should have just given up and written a couple more love songs and put out The Long Run a couple of years earlier. Now I realize that.
Henley: So much momentum built up that instead of controlling the momentum, we started getting pushed along by it. Instead of having maybe six months or a year after Hotel California to sit back and take a deep breath and assess the situation and figure out what direction we should go in, we plunged into another album. The beast wanted to be fed. We tried to feed it, and we were pretty much paralyzed. Like Glenn said, I didn't have much left to say at that point. I don't think any of us did. We were pretty tired.
Obviously the two of you went through a real bad patch. Do you have any regrets?
Frey: So much time has passed now that I'm not even mad at the guys I was really mad at. We just sort of drifted. The Eagles were like an ongoing nightmare for us toward the end.
Henley: It was also responsible for the failure of several relationships with the opposite sex.
Frey: Yeah, we weren't doing really well with that.
You once called your relationship with Don "my longest successful romance."
Frey: Well, here we are. We're still laughing.
Henley: Yeah, the women came and ... it was funny, he and I would live together for a while and write a certain body of material. And then one of us would get a girlfriend, and the other guy would move out. And that guy would break up with his girlfriend and be ready to move back in, and then the other guy would have a girlfriend. But the music always came first. I think we wanted it that way. I mean, it would have been nice — we wanted to have relationships with girls and have the band, too. But it just didn't seem possible. We were wedded to the muse or that vision — whatever it was and however murky it might have been.
Do you feel optimistic about working together again?
Frey: Well, we're going to see. It will be interesting. There's certainly a lot to write about.
Henley: I think we've matured a great deal. We have a better perspective on the world and our place in it. I mean, I want to stress that we had a real good time. We're pointing out the low points, but we had a great fucking time.
Your interviews about the Eagles always seem to emphasize the downside of things. But on a day-to-day basis it had to have been fairly enjoyable.
Henley: Shit, yeah! I mean we were living ... this was the dream that we all had. This is why we came to California. It just got bigger than we ever expected it to. It kind of scared us, I guess.
Frey: We tried to maintain that underdog frame of mind.
Henley: But it was hard to be an underdog when you're selling 12 million records [laughs].
Frey: Led Zeppelin might argue with us, but I think we might have thrown the greatest traveling party of the Seventies. It was called the Third Encore. Almost every night when we were on me road, we would throw this fabulous mixer. We'd hand out 3E buttons, and we'd invite all the key radio people and as many beautiful girls as we'd meet from the airport to the hotel and whatever. We had our own sound system and we played Motown and blues records and had this terrific party every night.
How were you able to get up the next day?
Frey: You go to bed at four or five and you get up at noon or one o'clock. If you're playing multiple nights, you don't travel and you don't sound-check. The Eagles — we didn't really have to sound-check very much.
Who did you see as your competition in those days?
Henley: Fleetwood Mac was the competition, but it was a friendly competition.
Frey: I thought about competition more in the earlier days. You know, once you become successful, you realize that you're competing with yourself. Somebody else making a good record can't keep you off the charts. We used to have these T-shirts that said, Song Power, because we felt that was what we had going for us. There was, even in the early Seventies, too much emphasis on packaging. There was already dry ice and smoke bombs. I looked at Jethro Tull and some of those bands as the people we were competing against.
Bands that were about spectacle?
Henley: Yeah, we were deliberately minimalist, to a fault probably. We were accused by one critic of loitering onstage — which pissed us off then. Now we can laugh about it. That's what's great about being forty — that shit's funny now.
Did you feel at any point like your identity was wrapped up in being one of the Eagles?
Henley: I guess I still think of myself, in some part of my mind, as being that. There is still in most cities, no matter how popular I am as an individual artist, a bunch of guys in the audience who at some point will start going, "Ea-gles, Ea-gles, Ea-gles." Some nights I get pissed off and say, "We'll get to that in a minute, but right now I'm up here. It's my name that's on the ticket." But, I mean, it's certainly something we're both proud of. We accomplished a lot. We were also a socially responsible band. We did our part to give something back to the community and charities of various kinds.
Frey: We didn't get to do quite enough, I think.
Henley: No, we didn't, again because there was a lot of disagreement.
Frey: This is something that disappointed Don and me toward the end of the Seventies. A couple of things happened. First of all we did a bunch of benefits.
Henley: We got some flak for that. We learned at the very end of our career that it's not really a good idea to do benefit concerts for individual politicians. For causes, yes. But for individual politicians it's not really a good idea — for us or for them. I mean, we've had various drug busts, and politics is so ruthless now that the opponent can always drag that land of stuff up. And it's not good for us, either, because you have to maintain that outsider thing to some extent.
How did your political sensibility develop?
Frey: Linda [Ronstadt] started going out with Jerry Brown [laughs].
Henley: The first things we did were for the various American Indian tribes around California. It started out as an environmentalist-nature thing. We used to go camp out in the desert and do peyote rituals. The photo of us on our first album is one when we were ripped on peyote. So I think it started out with Indian folklore and myths, which is where the name for the band came from.
Frey: And then the antinuclear movement started.
Henley: Jackson Browne was influential on us in that respect.
Do you feel that politically the Seventies suffered a hangover from the failed ideals of the Sixties?
Henley: Yeah, I'm still writing about it. The dream was unfulfilled. In the late Seventies greed reared its ugly head. We turned from a society that was concerned with our brother and our fellow man into a society that was very self-centered, self-concerned, about money and power. That took us into the Eighties, but it really started at the end of the Seventies. I guess it was a result of a disillusionment that the Sixties didn't quite pan out. For all the publicity about the baby-boom generation and how we were going to change the world, we weren't in control. The same people who had always been in control were still in control. While we were out taking drugs and preaching flower power and having rock concerts and love-ins, people were running the country.
It sometimes seems that the Eagles are on the radio now as much as in the Seventies. How does it feel to be driving in your car and hear your songs?
Frey: It seems like all of our best songs have risen to the top — they're the ones that get played over and over again. You know, you get these printouts of your publishing, all the songs you've written, and of the Eagles songs, there are about eight or ten that just consistently do big numbers — and they also happen to be the ones I like. It just reminds you that maybe you are good at what you do and that what you did when you were young is still good now. That makes me feel good.
Henley: I feel good about it, too. It depends on the mood I'm in. Some days "Hotel California" will come on the radio and I'll turn it up and listen to it. Some days I'll just turn it off or punch another station.
You also are in the relatively rare position of having lent an expression to the language: "Life in the fast lane."
Henley: Yeah, I wish we had a nickel for every fucking time somebody's used that.
Frey: We do! [Laughs.]
The Eagles had a hard time with the critics — a situation you didn't help by denouncing the New York Dolls from the stage in New York. Do you remember that incident?
Frey: God only knows what me, a microphone and a big PA could have done on any night. You know, it's hard to ... we were ...
Henley: Angry young men, using that anger to propel ourselves forward. I mean, it's not something we were really angry about. It's not like we lost sleep about the New York Dolls.
Frey: No, I think critics in New York were the real bur under our saddle. We became the symbol for that "laid-back, rich and don't-give-a-shit California lifestyle," you know what I mean? "These guys aren't struggling artists. Are you kidding?" Even when you're first coming out, they think you jump in your convertible and go to the beach, and then, when the sun goes down, you go to the club. We just had a problem with the New York critics. The New York Dolls were their flavor of the month, so that was probably why that came out.
Henley: The New York Dolls — where are they now? You know, all these so-called seminal groups, I don't get it. I don't understand what the big hoopla was about. We would just do things to irritate once in a while. But the resentment of us was part of a larger resentment — there always was a cultural rivalry between New York and L.A. New York has a certain amount of chauvinism about itself, and we fed the fires by talking back. Instead of ignoring it, we always had some rebuttal, which in retrospect was probably not a good idea. And then communications broke down completely. There was Irving Azoff's famous statement: "He is an Eagle and as such does not talk to the press."
Frey: That's when they started treating us nicer.
You spoke earlier about being educated by your success. What are the lessons of that education?
Frey: That you have to strive for perfection, but in rock & roll, you have to settle for excellence. We tried for three and a half years on The Long Run to make every note perfect, and we couldn't. Rock & roll is not supposed to be perfect. I mean, we would overdub for days on guitar parts and things, when ...
Henley: In retrospect, that's kind of silly. We spent too much time working on the album, when all one need do was listen to early Stones records to realize that all this striving for perfection is totally unnecessary. That's one thing. You learn a lot about human nature. We have more of a sense now of our place. I'm able to relax and enjoy it a lot more now and not take everything quite so seriously. Every time something bad happens, if you get a bad review or you have a bad performance, it's not the end of the world. Life goes on. You get perspective.
That's the part of rock & roll that is not talked about much. We get to travel a lot. You see a crowd of 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people every night. You read local newspapers, and you really get an overview of what's going on in this country. Sometimes it's heartening, and a lot of times it's frightening. You see that problems are widespread, and they're pretty much the same everywhere. If you spend any time touring the rest of the world, you can get a whole perspective of the globe and where this country stands in it. I mean, we've got a lot of work to do here. The underlying problem is greed and self-centeredness and the lack of a sense of community. Not enough people give a shit — that worries me.
What do you feel is the Eagles' legacy?
Frey: It's hard for me to say. We've left this collection of records, this body of work. In the end, I think our work mirrored the times and that's what remains. That's what people will probably enjoy. For some people it will be nostalgia, and for other people it's like archaeology, like me listening to records from the Forties. That's not nostalgic for me, because I was never there. We are fortunate enough to be one of the bricks in the building.
Henley: I'm delighted that we have a history. We made all those albums and we stayed together that long, which was a long time for a rock & roll group, even amidst all the turmoil.
It changed my whole life, didn't it? It's what I always wanted to do. I went to college for four years and studied, but I never had any intention of doing anything except this. It just worked out from certain twists of fate or something. I used to wonder about all that stuff — why me? Why not somebody else? But we did work hard and we were very determined.
Do you ever feel your past as an Eagle is a burden?
Frey: I think if you had asked Don and me that question two or three years after the band broke up, we'd have thought about it a lot more than we do now. For us, we're lucky enough to have gone on and done a few other things, so it's just part of us now. I don't see it as a problem. It was a problem maybe when I was thirty-two and making my first solo record. I've enjoyed the last ten years as much as I enjoyed the Seventies.
What's your sense about the future?
Frey: I just decided to be open to the possibilities. I think anything is possible in the Nineties. Some things seem possible that wouldn't have seemed possible a few years ago, related to maybe working with some of the guys again. Those possibilities are starting to show up.
Henley: Glenn and I were of like mind about several things, and now that we're older and more mature, we can apply what we've learned. If we do have another go-around, I think we can do a lot of positive things — for the environment, for the homeless, for any number of elements of society that need help where the government may have abandoned them. I mean, rock & roll now for me is not necessarily an end in itself. It's a means to some other end, to trying to improve the world and the community. I think rock & roll has always been that from the standpoint of rebellion, but I'd like to build upon that and make it a little more adult. I mean, let's face it, there's not going to be anarchy in this country — or even in the U.K. So let's get with the program and start effecting some real change and get something done, besides just yelling and screaming about it.
From an artistic standpoint, you've been able to say what you want to say in your solo work and still reach a very sizable audience. Why do you want to work with the Eagles again?
Henley: It won't change what I write about. It will increase the audience, which is the good part. I would get a lot more ears turned toward what I have to say. I'll probably write exactly what I would have written anyway.
People long for the past, because it's so much safer than the future. The future is so uncertain, but the past is very concrete. We're living in very uncertain times. Even with the end of the cold war, there are other considerations now: the economy, global warming, ozone depletion, widespread pollution of all kinds. And now this war in the Middle East has just flared up. There's a comfort people take in going back — I don't know if it's healthy or not. It's like people want to take the Seventies and pole-vault them over the Eighties and put them in front of them in the Nineties.
There are also a lot of young people who weren't there the first time around.
Henley: Yeah, they're at my concerts. It's odd. I could understand it in terms of the Beatles or somebody like that: "I missed the Sixties — I want to know what it's all about." But the Seventies? I guess I'm too close to it. But, you know, music is not in great shape right now, as far as I'm concerned. Music is not very musical anymore. People don't even have to be musicians anymore. They don't have to be able to sing anymore. They can borrow other material and just do what they want over it. I just got a tape from some local record company. They used part of one of our songs from the Seventies and just rapped over it. I resent that — go make up your own fucking music. They don't even have to make up their own grooves anymore. Man, I think that's bad for art, bad for music.
And as for the Eagles reunion?
Henley: I've had ten good years of a solo career. I'm satisfied and happy. I have proven my point. And I'm happy to go back and have a little camaraderie and share some of the decisions. It gets to be a burden sometimes. It gets kind of lonesome. But I'm ready. My skin's a lot thicker now. I mean, even this Mojo Nixon thing doesn't particularly bother me. It must mean I'm famous; I guess I've made it. And I will die, Mojo — just not on your schedule.
[From Issue 587 — September 20, 1990]