40. “Busy Being Fabulous” (Long Road Out of Eden). Something of a sequel to “Life in the Fast Lane,” critiquing grownups who can’t leave their hard-partying ways behind, “Busy Being Fabulous” is the best of the new Henley-Frey songs on Long Road, thanks to its winning combination of relatable lyrics and countrified hooks. Gliding along on a mid-tempo beat that easily supports thick harmonies and the occasional delicate instrumental flourish, the track lives on the lighter side of the Henley-Frey songbook, less a comprehensive treatise and more a pithy critique. There’s also a certain been-there/done-that quality, inasmuch as the Eagles had already crafted more than a few songs about people with frail grasps on the big picture. Considered from a fan’s perspective, however, the song finds the band’s top songwriters revisiting a core theme with new maturity and wisdom. What’s more, “Busy Being Fabulous” is beautifully rendered—each verse forms the setup for a caustic punchline, the dense chorus allows the listener to luxuriate in the signature Eagles sound, and the song runs a satisfying four minutes, just enough to fully explore its lyrical and musical ideas. The tune gained some traction in the marketplace, hitting No. 28 on the Country chart and No. 12 on the Adult Contemporary chart.
39. “Doolin-Dalton” & “Doolin-Dalton (Instrumental)” & “Doolin-Dalton/Desperado (Reprise)” (Desperado). Excepting perhaps the group’s stillborn attempt at a reunion in 1990, here’s the most interesting near-miss in the Eagles saga: maverick filmmaker Sam Peckinpah briefly considered transforming the group’s cowboy album into a movie. To see the material’s cinematic potential, examine the photos on the LP’s sleeve, taken by Henry Diltz during an adventurous session—which also involved Browne and Souther—at an old Western-movie location in the hills above Malibu. Singer-songwriter Ned Doheny, the story goes, gave Browne a coffee-table book about gunfighters, and upon seeing the book, the Eagles zeroed in on the real-life story of the Doolin-Dalton gang, sensing potential for a parallel between robbers and rockers. Written by Browne, Frey, Henley, and Souther, the album’s opener, “Doolin-Dalton,” has a great high-lonesome quality, with Frey’s anguished harmonica strains bouncing off the ballad’s arena-sized rhythms like coyote calls in a canyon. Yet the song is really just a prologue, establishing the characters and mood for the album. “Doolin-Dalton” gets an instrumental callback near the top of side two, and it returns again during the album’s beautiful finale, “Doolin-Dalton/Desperado (Reprise).” Inserting additional lyrics as a means of concluding the album’s narrative, this effective fusion of two tracks eventually becomes a gigantic round that’s pure Zane Grey mythmaking. Elegantly capping the rock parallel are these lines: “Is there gonna be anything left? Only stardust.” The notion comes across that in the same way gunfighters leave in their wakes slabs on Boot Hill and some tall tales, rockers leave behind their music. This romantic analogy reflects the self-assuredness of young songwriters determined to earn their places in the pop-music pantheon. Decades of subsequent Eagles success prove the men behind that analogy eventually made good on their boasts.
38. “Pretty Maids All in a Row” (Hotel California). Side two of the Eagles’ best album features some of the most delicate musicianship in the band’s entire catalog. Coming out of the acidic “Victim of Love,” side two’s dreamy stretch begins with this Walsh cut, continues with Meisner’s gorgeous “Try and Love Again,” and concludes with the magisterial woe of “The Last Resort.” Lyrically, “Pretty Maids,” composed by Walsh and his old Barnstorm bandmate Joe Vitale, is the weakest of the three because except for some strangely evocative phrases about the fleeting nature of life, “Pretty Maids” is more of a mood piece than a narrative. Musically, however, it’s crisp and resonant. Over a minimalistic beat defined by airy breaks—huge snare hits punctuating dramatic pauses—Walsh uses guitars and keyboards to paint clouds in a dusky sky, taking listeners to some reflective place where they can add their own specificity of circumstance to the generalized sighs and sways and swoons. Walsh injects his vocals with a rare degree of vulnerability, giving the effect of a shy guy revealing himself to a sympathetic listener. There’s something sexy about the number, as well, thanks to the cascading harmonies and that smooth slide-guitar lead, a steady hand on the small of a partner’s back during an intimate pas de deux.
37. “Saturday Night” (Desperado). This deep cut was an offbeat selection to open concerts on the History of the Eagles tour, though Frey and Henley clearly wanted to make a statement by appearing together onstage before other band members emerged—call it Rewriting the History of the Eagles. After all, the composition of “Saturday Night” was begun by Meisner and completed with help from the other original band members. Furthermore, the recorded version is such a group effort—Leadon decorating the track with mandolin washes, Meisner singing a few lines—that reducing it to an acoustic duet lessens the song’s beauty. Worse, repurposing the song underscores the ungallant nature of the band’s fractious dynamics; at the end of the day, it’s all about Don and Glenn, so hit the road if you’ve got a problem with that, pal. In any event, this effectively world-weary song is told from the perspective of men realizing youth has slipped into the rear-view mirror. Bittersweet and tender, the tune articulates the same hard-won wisdom—or uncanny prescience, given how young the Eagles were when they cut this material—as the same album’s “Desperado” and “Tequila Sunrise.” Solid stuff.
36. “How Long” (Long Road Out of Eden). It’s a safe bet the overwhelming majority of fans who pushed the first official Long Road single up the Adult Contemporary and Country charts glossed right over the song’s original intentions. Written by Souther and included on his 1972 debut album, the tune was part of the Eagles’ live set back in the day, its boppy rhythms and sweet harmonies masking a topical narrative about a Vietnam War deserter. When the Eagles resurrected the song in 2007, it became a perfect invitation to their audience—whereas “Get Over It” told fans the Eagles could still lay down macho grooves, “How Long” sent the comforting message that the “Take It Easy” guys could still manufacture cotton-candy sonics. Featuring a vocal split between Frey and Henley, “How Long” is a blast whether you probe the lyrics or simply ride the song’s pleasing textures. Galloping assuredly through a rangy melody, the band sounds fantastic, their playing as taut as their close-harmony singing. (Fittingly, the track won the Eagles a Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.) To fully appreciate the propulsion of this song, track down video of the band performing “How Long” on TV in the mid-’70s, because their back-in-the-day take on the song, all raunchy guitars and strutting confidence, smokes the Long Road version—some tunes are better suited to passion than precision.
35. “Waiting in the Weeds” (Long Road Out of Eden). With all due respect to that song’s noble sociopolitical aspirations, forget “Long Road Out of Eden.” The real epic worth discussing on the band’s last album is “Waiting in the Weeds,” a breathtaking ballad running nearly eight minutes and featuring some of the most beautiful lyrical and musical imagery that Henley, who cowrote the song with Smith, has ever conjured. Ostensibly a bittersweet romantic tale told from the perspective of a man watching in anguish as his lost love throws her affections at an undeserving rival, it is also, as Henley has noted, a veiled statement about the band circa the mid-2000s. The romantic rival in the song (“He’s the darling of the chic”) is a stand-in for some of the musical horrors that dominated the pop charts while the Eagles were sequestered in the recording studio. And if that sounds like another shot of back-in-my-day crankiness from Henley, who turned 60 shortly before Long Road was released, he justifies his scorn by countering the Auto-Tuned emptiness of boy bands and pop tarts with the handmade intricacy of the guitar parts and overlapping harmonies that drive “Waiting in the Weeds.” (Translation: “Lemme show you how it’s done, kids.”) Some of the wordplay is positively sublime, as when the end of one phrase, “the flavor of the week,” becomes the beginning of another, “is melting down your pretty summer dress.” And the melody is truly haunting. Finally, the tension of the bridge gives way to the grandeur of the third chorus, evoking sunbeams breaking through clouds after a summer storm, and the multilayered round that takes shape during the closing chorus is on par with the band’s finest moments of recorded performance. To this writer’s ears, only the closing vamp of “Hollywood Waltz” is more achingly pretty than the last stretch of “Waiting in the Weeds.”
34. “Peaceful Easy Feeling” (Eagles). Prominently featuring the word “easy” in the titles of two cuts on their first album had the effect of putting targets on the Eagles’ backs, critically speaking, and the fact that both tunes became classic hits only made things worse. For decades, wags opined that “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Take It Easy” were panaceas during turbulent times and nothing more. Had the Eagles produced only upbeat songs about overcoming life’s difficulties, the critique would have been valid. What’s more, “Take It Easy” is a deceptive song, since the narrative implies the protagonist might continue a losing pattern by hooking up with the girl in the flatbed Ford; he is the unreconstructed Me Generation male, feeding his desires and kicking the notion of consequences down the road. The main character in Tempchin’s “Peaceful Easy Feeling” doesn’t think nearly as deeply, though it’s hard to imagine any woman wanting to stone him, like the bed-hopper in “Take It Easy.” Pretty, rural, and warm, “Peaceful Easy Feeling” paints romantic word pictures with the first verse, those earrings and skin “beneath a billion stars,” but it’s not just a come-on. Rather, it’s the earthy overture of a longhair in denim seeking communion with another soul—which just happens to occupy a comely physique. Frey’s tender vocal also marks the beginning of his lifelong association with Tempchin, who became his writing partner after the initial dissolution of the Henley-Frey team.
33. “Those Shoes” (The Long Run). It’s a shame Frey and Felder developed such animosity toward each other, because when those two joined forces with Henley (and sometimes Souther), the collaboration worked. Telling a dark story about a young woman enduring the indignities of the singles scene (“You’re so smooth and the world’s so rough”), “Those Shoes” blends a menacing groove with fierce attacks of electric and slide guitars to create a frightening Looking for Mr. Goodbar vibe. Whereas the other nihilistic cuts on The Long Run have distracting shortcomings, “Those Shoes” represents the apogee of the band’s nadir, if you will—only songwriters intimately familiar with the shame of prowling for empty gratification could express this specific piece of the human experience so truthfully. Written by Felder, Frey, and Henley, the song captures the Eagles at their most supple—the call-and-response section pairing Henley’s vicious lead vocal with otherworldly Greek Chorus harmonies—and their most cruel. The talk-box guitar stuff at the end has a wonderfully evil quality, even when you discover that the voices blending into the guitar notes are singing repetitions of “butt out.” (Felder and Walsh play in tandem for a while, and Walsh handles the big solo.) Delivering some of his strongest percussion on the Long Run LP, Henley adds dark edges throughout the song with clanking ride-cymbal hits and strafing-run tom fills.
32. “Good Day in Hell” (On the Border). In his score-settling memoir, Felder describes being welcomed to the Eagles by his old buddy Leadon, who whispered: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” By all reports, the pickup sessions for this track—during which Felder played blazing slide licks, his first contributions to the group’s recorded output—echoed the song’s title. If life among the Eagles was hell when the musicians fought with each other, this was indeed a good day. The excitement of a “late arrival,” as Felder was billed on the resulting album’s sleeve, made for a break from the torments of the damned. Even though it’s greatly elevated by Felder’s quicksilver playing, the basic track is terrific, a darkly funny twist on “Take It Easy.” Whereas the protagonist of that song hopes for salvation in the form of a kindhearted woman, the guy suffering through a “Good Day in Hell” accepts his lot in life, with the recurring line “tomorrow I’ll be glory bound” coming across like some small-town dreamer’s empty promises that, tomorrow, damn it, he’ll finally leave for the big city. (Some reports indicate that, like the same album’s “My Man,” this tune was inspired by Gram Parsons.) Throughout the song, the countrified funk of the melody reflects the seedy appeal of living below one’s moral standards. Underscoring how cohesive a music-making unit Henley and Frey had become, they not only wrote the song together but also sang the verses in unison, an effect they didn’t repeat until “King of Hollywood” several years later.
31. “Certain Kind of Fool” (Desperado). Like “Take It to the Limit,” this was a Meisner song fragment that Henley and Frey helped complete, and it’s a fine synthesis of their abilities. Drawing, perhaps, on his own heartland upbringing, Meisner, who sings the lead, tells a vivid story about a young man dazzled by the six-shooter—or the Les Paul, depending on how you read the number—that he spots in a store window. Practicing until “he knew he could stand with the best,” the boy sets out for glory, little suspecting how closely notoriety and infamy are linked. The key line, “It’s a certain kind of fool who likes to hear the sound of his own name,” could just as easily be said about a rocker as an outlaw, so this tight track hits the album’s theme with the precision of a bullet blasting through a target. The song’s measured pace, which picks up speed during the chorus, supports Leadon’s emotive guitars just as strongly as it supports Meisner’s plaintive wails, giving the brief tune memorable widescreen impact.
