The most vivid memory I have of Glenn Frey, the co-founder of the Eagles who passed away this year, is the time he came within a few feet from me.
I was covering the Eagles’ The Long Run show on a June day during the last year the Eagles would play before re-uniting fourteen years later. The passes I received put me behind the stage. If I had any disappointment that I wasn’t out in the stadium to actually see the band, it all changed in a few seconds at the end of the Eagles’ set. The band was in encores for an otherwise staid show and took it up a notch covering the classic “Sea Cruise.” The song had barely ended when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw guitarist Glenn Frey bolting up the steps of the stadium with Eagles’ manager Irving Azoff right behind him.
Frey was still snapping his fingers in time and when he passed by I could hear the words he had just been singing to 80,000 people. “Won’t you let me take you on a sea cruise,” he was uttering under his breath just loud enough to make it feel like the song was still being played. And with every step he took to the exit at the top of the stadium, it gently faded away.
The scuttlebutt going around was that Azoff had demanded to concert promoter Jim Koplik that unless he produced a cashier’s check for $600,000, the band wasn’t going on. Azoff was smaller looking up close than his legend might demand. But I was taken watching Frey flying by snapping his fingers in a moment of sheer joy. For the moment all my preconceptions about the Eagles went out the window. All the perceptions of dysfunction and the well-known acrimony that circled around the band seemed to disappear. I wasn’t thinking about how you could spend a million dollars in the studio and get the tepid The Long Run. I was caught up in the moment, realizing you could still savor the simple joys of life even when you were bore the burden of being the biggest group in the world.
Here in front of me was the kid from Detroit who had once talked his way onto singing on Bob Seger single “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” when he was practically still a teenager. Bob Seger, the Midwest’s homegrown regional superstar, let Frey play acoustic guitar and sing his heart out all over the chorus of the song that would finally help Seger reach the big world out there. And he had the help of Frey, the kid who was raised on Motown and later left his rhythm and blues fingerprints all over “The Long Run” and “One of These Nights” and put a little swagger in “Heartache Tonight.”
I’d been taken by the Eagles ever since I opened Circus Magazine and read Janis Schacht’s glowing review of their debut album The Eagles. She had a rating system of one and two ears depending on how much she liked the music but this one got her beloved heart that said “love it.” I instantly was hooked on “Take It Easy,” the album’s opening track that would define the country-rock genre for a decade to come. I couldn’t tell you where Winslow, Arizona was but it seemed liked a mystical place that I wanted to go to. I wanted to stand on the street corner so, as Frey wrote, a girl in a flatbed Ford could slow down and take a look at me.
“That’s the Hotel California,” a publicist said to me driving around Beverly Hills on one of my first trips to Los Angeles. We were stopped at a traffic light on Sunset Boulevard and the Beverly Hills Hotel loomed in front of me just like it had on the cover of Hotel California. It was daylight and I might have wondered went on at night in the master’s chambers. I also knew metaphor was a powerful device and I would replay each line many times in my mind, deciphering and trying to decode the symbolism of what Frey and co-writer Don Henley intended in this extensive narrative.
It was hard to believe that a Midwest boy whose mom worked for General Motors had in a few years helped to develop country rock as it became known that defined the sound out of Southern California for the greater part of a decade. Frey’s most memorable songs were among his first including “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” His greatest songs were at the heart of epics like “Hotel California” and the rich storytelling ofDesperado but at the core they were most beautiful in their understated simplicity. There was “New Kid In Town” whose underlying lull and gradual build make the implications of its narrative even more devastating. And there was that perfect line in the bridge of “Tequila Sunrise”: “Take another shot of courage/wondering why the right words never come.”
As news of Frey’s passing hit, I began to think of my favorite songs and was overcome by the R&B that was in his roots and that permeated songs like “The Long Run,” “One of These Nights” and “Heartache Tonight” and later as a solo artist, “You Belong To The City.” Songs that wouldn’t have sounded the same if Frey hadn’t come out of Detroit and been mesmerized by the palm trees and vegetation of Southern California.
It’s unimaginable to think where Blake Shelton, Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert and virtually an entire generation in Nashville would be were it not for Frey. It’s easy to picture each of them as toddlers running around in diapers while their parents blasted The Eagles Greatest Hits, chasing after them as they got their earliest and perhaps most valuable childhood education. The music of that album cannot be measured alone by the millions of units it sold. It’s as much responsible for what we call “today’s country” as anything else you can point to.
“Maybe we won’t do this always or maybe we can’t do this,” Frey’s partner Don Henley posited in a scene from the Eagles documentary The History of The Eagles – Part One. “It’s not something that you can do forever.”
Henley was always the analytical one and you had to wonder how much fun he really had at times. “This is not a lifetime career that we can do, you know?”
Frey looked into the camera challenging Henley with two simple words. “It’s not?”
I can still see him smiling. Just like he was when he passed by me on that day in June.
Originally posted here.
