From left, the original lineup of Leadon, Henley, Meisner, and Frey, photographed by Henry Diltz in Joshua Tree, California, circa 1972. Photograph copyright Diltz and available via Morrison Hotel Gallery.
Despite their reputation as the quintessential California band of the 1970s, the Eagles’ relationship with the Golden State is nuanced. The group formed in Los Angeles in 1971 and recorded some of their best work there, often using Southern California as subject matter, but only one Eagle—Timothy B. Schmit, the band’s second bassist and also the final permanent member to join the group—is a native Californian. The chief architect of the band’s destiny, founding singer-guitarist-keyboardist Glenn Frey, came from Detroit. His main songwriting partner within the band, founding singer-drummer-guitarist Don Henley, grew up in small-town Texas. The other musicians who were there at the beginning, singer-guitarist Bernie Leadon and singer-bassist Randy Meisner, are from Minnesota and Nebraska, respectively. Singer-guitarist Don Felder, who became an Eagle during the recording of the band’s third album, is a Floridian, and singer-guitarist-keyboardist Joe Walsh, who joined for the fifth album, was born in Kansas. For all these reasons, it’s more accurate to call the Eagles—or, as Frey preferred, simply “Eagles”—a quintessential American band.
The first original Eagle to find his way into the music business was Leadon. His family moved frequently during his teen years, and he made important connections on both coasts while still a high-school student. In San Diego, Leadon and friends including Chris Hillman (later of the Byrds) formed a short-lived bluegrass band called the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers. Later, while living in Gainesville, Leadon met Felder, who was already in a band called the Continentals. The group needed a guitarist because future superstar Stephen Stills had just quit. Leadon and Felder spent a couple of years with the Continentals (later the Maundy Quintet), even recording a regionally released single in 1967, before Leadon drifted back to California. Upon reaching Los Angeles, Leadon established himself as a hot player of stringed instruments, serving brief tenures in Hearts and Flowers, Dillard & Clark, and finally the Flying Burrito Brothers, in which he reunited with Hillman. The Burrito Brothers stint was also important because of the time Leadon spent creating music alongside country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons.
Leadon cut one LP each with Hearts and Flowers and Dillard & Clark, plus two with the Burrito Brothers, and it was during his Burrito Brothers tenure that he landed a fateful gig supporting Linda Ronstadt. (More on that later.)
Meisner emigrated from the Midwest to L.A. with the Soul Survivors, whose name changed to the Poor before the band released several singles in 1967. Then Meisner joined the initial lineup of Poco, quitting after the group’s 1969 debut album, and spent time in Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band. Following a brief sojourn back in Nebraska, during which he contemplated leaving music behind, Meisner returned to L.A. and bounced through various journeyman gigs before he, too, found work backing Ronstadt. (Incidentally, Schmit was next to hit the L.A. scene, originally arriving as part of a band called Glad, formerly the New Breed. Building on their 1965 regional hit “Green Eye’d Woman,” Glad signed to ABC and released one album, Feelin’ Glad, in 1968. Then, as he later would in the Eagles, Schmit replaced Meisner in Poco, recording and touring with that band until 1977.)
When Frey arrived in L.A. circa 1968 at the age of 19, he was already supercharged with determination, having recently earned his first significant credit by performing backup vocals and guitar on fellow Motor City musician Bob Seger’s single “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.” Soon after arriving in California, Frey connected with fellow displaced J.D. Souther. (A fellow Detroit native by birth, Souther was actually raised in Amarillo, Texas.) They formed a folksy duo called Longbranch Pennywhistle, whose first and only album—featuring some of Frey’s earliest songwriting efforts—was released in 1969 to little notice. Despite the album’s commercial nonperformance, Frey made important lifelong connections during this period. At one point, he and Souther shared an address with another young singer-songwriter, Jackson Browne, whom Frey credited alongside Seger as an important early influence.
Last of the original Eagles to arrive in California was 22-year-old Henley, who rolled into town as part of the short-lived group Shiloh (formerly Felicity), which scored a record deal thanks to a push from fellow Texan Kenny Rogers, then riding high as the front man of the First Edition. Shiloh’s only album came and went in 1970, though, like the Longbranch Pennywhistle platter, Shiloh is noteworthy for commemorating an Eagle’s first serious attempts at songwriting and lead vocals. It was almost inevitable that Frey and Henley would meet, since Longbranch Pennywhistle and Shiloh were both signed to the same doomed independent label, Amos Records.
The boisterous Motor City kid and the bookish young Texan first crossed paths as part of the hip crowd at the famed Troubadour nightclub.
In 1971, Frey, Henley, Leadon, and Meisner were hired by Ronstadt’s producer, John Boylan, to join the roster of musicians participating in Ronstadt’s recording sessions as well as a tour promoting her second solo LP. (She was a rising star thanks to her 1967 hit with the Stone Poneys, “Different Drum,” and her first solo success, 1970’s “Long, Long Time.”) Thrown together by circumstance, Frey and Henley soon realized they’d rather form a band of their own than continue as sidemen. All four original Eagles performed on Ronstadt’s self-titled third LP, though not on the same tracks, so the first time they played together was during a Ronstadt gig at Disneyland, of all places. Apparently that experience was enough to persuade Frey and Henley that Leadon and Meisner were ideal collaborators. Once the quartet agreed to form a band, Boylan and Ronstadt gave their blessing for the musicians to leave Ronstadt’s employ.
Running parallel to all of this activity were Frey’s ongoing conversations with Asylum Records cofounder David Geffen, whom Frey met through Browne, an Asylum artist prepping his debut LP at the time the Eagles converged. It was Geffen who advised Frey to assemble a band rather than pursue a solo career, so once Frey found his lineup, Geffen signed the group and shipped them off to a residency in Aspen, where they polished their act and wrote original songs. Somewhere along the way, the name “Eagles” emerged, with Frey the likely originator. (Better that than an early joke contender for the band’s name: Teen King and the Emergencies.)
The group’s first recording sessions occurred in London because Geffen hired famed British hard-rock producer Glyn Johns to man the boards for what became the group’s eponymous 1972 debut, a mixture of mellow balladry and rambunctious country rock. Three hits, including the sunny classic “Take It Easy,” ensued. (Browne wrote most of “Take It Easy,” but he let the band record it first because Frey finished the composing chores.) Johns also produced the band’s sophomore disc, a 1973 cowboy-themed concept album called Desperado. Although the LP underwhelmed commercially, something important happened during the development of Desperado: Frey and Henley became a songwriting duo. The seeds for the band’s greatest successes, and greatest strife, were planted. (Later in 1973, the reputation of the new Henley-Frey songwriting team received a significant boost when their onetime boss, Ronstadt, recorded “Desperado” for her album Don’t Cry Now. Unlike the original Eagles recording, Ronstadt’s cover scored in the marketplace.)
Eager to toughen their sound, the Eagles parted ways with Johns in early 1974 after recording just two cuts for their third album. (Ironically, one of those tunes, “Best of My Love,” became their first chart-topper.) Producer Bill Szymczyk, whose work on Joe Walsh’s LPs impressed the Eagles, recorded the balance of the album that became On the Border, and toward the end of the sessions, the group expanded to a five-piece with the addition of Leadon’s old buddy from the Sunshine State, nimble instrumentalist Don “Fingers” Felder. (By this point he was a veteran of the short-lived fusion act Flow, which released one album in 1970, and just prior to joining the Eagles, he worked as a sideman for the duo of David Crosby and Graham Nash.) The amped-up Eagles sound debuted with “Already Gone,” the first single from 1974’s On the Border, and “Best of My Love” affirmed their status as the most popular country-rock band in the world. The expanded lineup continued their winning streak with their next LP, the 1975 release One of These Nights, but work on the band’s fifth disc proceeded slowly. Asylum filled the marketplace gap by releasing the band’s most successful platter, Their Greatest Hits: 1971–1975, in early 1976. (The collection was later certified as the best-selling album of the 20th century, its incredible 29 million units eclipsing even the sales within the same time frame of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.)
With success, predictably, came friction. Leadon bowed out in 1975, ostensibly because he didn’t dig the group’s push into harder sounds but also because ego trips emanating from the band’s emerging core of Frey and Henley made band activities a drag. Having sung and/or cowritten nearly all of the band’s hits, Frey and Henley had what they called “song power,” and they used their authority in ways some band members found divisive. Enter the aforementioned Joe Walsh, an established solo star with a reputation as the hard-partying Clown Prince of Rock. His relationship with the Eagles percolated for a while before becoming official because the musicians traded favors at gigs and recording sessions. The swap of Leadon for Walsh fundamentally changed the Eagles, pushing their country-rock roots to the background and pulling loud electric guitars to the foreground. Walsh also transformed the band’s concert style, shaking up the group’s stiff precision with loosey-goosey flamboyance and a dash of the ridiculous. In terms of studio work, everything came together on the late-1976 release Hotel California, the band’s fifth album and unquestionably their best set of songs. The LP sold a million copies during its first week of release.
Afterward, stress tore the Eagles apart in a slow-motion process of attrition. Meisner bailed after the Hotel California tour, meaning that only half the band’s original lineup remained when the Eagles convened to write and record their sixth album. Bass duties fell to baby-faced West Coast longhair Schmit, who, as mentioned earlier, replaced Meisner in Poco years before. It probably didn’t help that Walsh took time off from band activity to record a solo album; distractions often inhibit productivity. Despite lofty plans of following Hotel California with an even more ambitious double album, torturous recording sessions eventually yielded just ten wildly uneven songs for a platter the band wryly titled The Long Run, which was issued in 1979. There were hits, but it was plain the Eagles were tired of everything—especially each other. Somewhere during the Long Run tour, parts of which were recorded for the album Eagles Live (released in 1980 to fulfill contractual obligations), Frey decided being an Eagle wasn’t fun anymore, so he left the nest. The others flew away soon afterward.
For the next 14 years, from 1980 to 1994, Frey notched a few lightweight solo hits and dabbled in acting, while Henley blossomed into an exemplary singer-songwriter and scored multiplatinum album sales. Felder and Schmit failed to generate excitement with their solo efforts, and Walsh fell into a dangerous spiral of alcoholism and drug abuse. The group nearly reunited in 1990, with Frey the only holdout, and then something peculiar happened in 1993. The band’s longtime manager, Irving Azoff, put together an album of Nashville artists singing Eagles songs to benefit Henley’s charity of choice, the Walden Woods Project. The disc was called Common Thread. The 1980 Eagles lineup appeared in a video accompanying Travis Tritt’s cover of “Take It Easy.” In fact, they even jammed a version of Walsh’s solo song “Rocky Mountain Way” before filming started. The reunion was close, but life among the Eagles wasn’t a vision of camaraderie. Quite to the contrary, tense contractual negotiations preceded the official announcement of the band’s return, as did a band-mandated stint in rehab for Walsh. Finally, the Eagles took the stage for a pair of 1994 concerts that were taped for broadcast on MTV and packaged on CD and home video as Hell Freezes Over. The collection included four new songs, but, tellingly, only one cowritten by Henley and Frey.
Nonetheless, massive record sales and years of hugely successful worldwide tours followed, as did the band’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998—the only time all seven Eagles performed together. The band’s so-called resumption (Frey’s wink-wink euphemism) culminated with their Millennium Concert at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on December 31, 1999. It was Felder’s last Eagles gig. After years of bitching about unequal compensation—Frey and Henley exerted their “song power” to collect supersized paychecks—Felder was fired in early 2001. His subsequent lawsuits and poison-pen memoir permanently estranged him from Frey and, to date, Henley. The band replaced Felder with guitarist and songwriter Steuart Smith, though, like the various latter-day sidemen in the Rolling Stones, Smith was not given official band membership.
Recording sessions for the Eagles’ first full album of original music since 1979 were originally set to begin on September 11, 2001, but the events of that day made cutting music seem trivial. Thereafter, new songs were slow to emerge. How slow? The Henley-Frey composition “Hole in the World,” released in 2003, was the band’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks. The nearly two-year gap between inspiration and final product provided a clue as to how long it would take the Eagles to generate a full album in their new incarnation. Exacerbating the demands of their extensive worldwide touring, the band was slowed down by family obligations, Frey’s health issues, ongoing legal hassles, the stop-and-start rhythms of recording sessions (often in separate studios), and the endless tinkering that digital editing permits. Three songs from the in-progress album slipped into the marketplace by way of a teaser disc that was released with the band’s 2005 Farewell 1 Tour—Live from Melbourne DVD. Two years later, the double-album Long Road Out of Eden finally hit the marketplace and became yet another Eagles megahit, moving over 3 million units at a time when CD sales were in precipitous decline. The band toured behind the album for three years.
Frey’s final endeavor with the group he founded was the three-hour History of the Eagles documentary movie, which premiered in 2013, and the corresponding two-year world tour. The History shows were special because Leadon returned for all of the dates. Concerts were divided somewhat equally between a first set favoring mellow country rock and a second set spotlighting Walsh’s louder sounds. Meisner’s participation was explored but nixed because of his many health problems, and no one with knowledge of the band’s fraught internal dynamics expected to see persona non grata Felder back onstage. Though it featured an incomplete lineup, the History of the Eagles tour provided satisfying symmetry. As it began, more or less, so it ended. Frey died on January 18, 2016, just months after the final History of the Eagles date.
A month later, his old downstairs neighbor, Jackson Browne, joined Henley, Leadon, Schmit, and Walsh to sing “Take It Easy” in their fallen comrade’s honor during the Grammy Awards telecast on February 15, 2016. And then, a year and a half after Frey’s death, a new incarnation of the Eagles took shape at the Classic East/Classic West concerts in the summer of 2017. To split vocal chores on tunes originally performed by Frey, the surviving members enlisted country-music superstar Vince Gill as well as Frey’s son Deacon. This version of the band has toured heavily since 2018 (notwithstanding a pandemic-necessitated hiatus), even mounting a roadshow featuring front-to-back performances of the Hotel California album, a concept originally suggested by Frey, who intended to participate. As for the future, will there ever be another Eagles studio album? Probably not, but the band’s history suggests that a never-say-never attitude is warranted. For now, it seems safe to describe the music spanning Eagles to Long Road Out of Eden as a complete body of work, hence this appreciation timed to the 50th anniversary of the first album’s release.
Ladies and gentlemen, from Los Angeles, California . . . the Eagles.
PERSONNEL (in alphabetical order): Don Felder (banjo, guitars, pedal steel, vocals, 1974–1980, 1994–2001); Deacon Frey (guitars and vocals, touring member only, 2017–present); Glenn Frey (guitars, harmonica, keyboards, vocals, 1971–1980, 1994–2016); Vince Gill (guitars and vocals, touring member only, 2017–present); Don Henley (drums, guitars, percussion, vocals, 1971–1980, 1994–present); Bernie Leadon (banjo, guitars, mandolin, pedal steel, vocals, 1971–1975, plus touring appearances 2013–2015); Randy Meisner (bass, guitar, vocals, 1971–1977); Timothy B. Schmit (bass, vocals, 1977–1980, 1994–present); Joe Walsh (guitars, keyboards, vocals, 1975–1980, 1994–present). Key associates include longtime sideman Steuart Smith (songwriting collaborator, guitars and vocals, 2001-present), John David “J.D.” Souther (songwriting collaborator, 1973–1980), plus occasional songwriting collaborators Jackson Browne and Bob Seger.
ALBUMS: Eagles (1972) • Desperado (1973) • On the Border (1974) • One of These Nights (1975) • Hotel California (1976) • The Long Run (1979) • Eagles Live (1980) • Hell Freezes Over (1994) • Long Road Out of Eden (2007) • Live from the Forum MMXVIII (2020)
