Hotel California by Barney Hoskyns

Author:Barney Hoskyns
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-12-02T07:00:00+00:00

Don’t Even Try to Understand

Whereas Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were intuitive and unpredictable, Glenn Frey and Don Henley set about success with the pragmatism of a Tin Pan Alley partnership. “The Eagles were made to sell a million records,” Elliot Roberts says. “They wrote to be huge.”

Yet it was the pressure that Frey and Henley felt in the exalted sphere of Young and Mitchell that spurred them on to prove themselves. “Being around Geffen, and in close proximity to Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, and Nash,” Frey said, “this unspoken thing was created between Henley and me which said, ‘If we want to be up here with the big boys, we’d better get our game together.’” Frey and Henley, who shared a pad in the hills near the Hollywood Bowl, decided they didn’t want to risk being exposed to the Troubadour crowd too early. Better to get out of town and hone their craft. Geffen agreed and dispatched the Eagles to Aspen, Colorado. As “Teen King & the Emergencies,” the Eagles held down a short residency at a club called the Gallery in the late fall of 1971. When they returned to L.A. they were ready to take on the world.

Among the songs they earmarked for their Asylum debut was one Jackson Browne had started back in the Echo Park days. It was called “Take It Easy” and to Frey’s ears it sounded like a hit single. The sentiment seemed to encapsulate the freewheeling dream of Southern California. Jackson told Glenn to run with the song. Classic Frey lines such as “It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford” were inserted into the existing lyric. The result was an anthem for every stringy, footloose youth at large in the Golden State: “Lighten up while you still can/Don’t even try to understand.” “ ‘Take It Easy’ was ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ for the next decade,” says Domenic Priore. “The guy is saying ‘Fuck this, I’ve dropped out . . . you find a place to make your stand.’ That line epitomizes the second generation of country rockers.”

Along with “Take It Easy,” the Eagles rounded up a bunch of other songs for their album. Don Henley and Bernie Leadon had collaborated on a sultry slice of rock and soul called “Witchy Woman.” Jackson Browne pitched in with “Nightingale,” an easy-rolling rocker inspired by his affair with Laura Nyro. Troubadour buddy Jack Tempchin offered the band the Pocoesque “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” the prototype midtempo country-rock track of the time. It was the peaceful easy side of the Eagles that appealed to English producer Glyn Johns when they flew to London to work with him in February 1972. This created an interesting tension at Olympic Studios, where Johns had worked with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. To his dismay, the band wanted a tougher, grittier sound. The friction between producer and band was not the best news for David Geffen, who was presented with a whopping $125,000 bill for the sessions.

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