Eagles - Dark Desert Highway by Wall Mick

Author:Wall, Mick [Wall, Mick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Music, Rock Groups
ISBN: 9781409190721
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2023-05-24T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter twenty

The Dark and the Light

It’s about the visions that come in the day and stay throughout the night.

It’s about the aesthetics of being in a big commercial band. About what that band sounds like, what it looks like, what it creates in the feverish imaginations of its most ardent followers.

It’s about the visions it gives them, the trip it takes them on. They can smell it, see the blood flower into bloom as the delicious fix goes in.

The Eagles are now ready to take you on that trip. Tell you the real story they’ve been reaching towards but only just now finally arrived at.

It starts right here, in 1975, with the arrival of anti-rock disco music; with the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford by Manson Family hit-chick Squeaky Fromme; with Bernie’s old lady’s dad, Ronald Reagan announcing a run for president; with the Thrilla in Manila, the brutal third clash between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frasier which leaves both men so badly beaten neither will ever recover.

With the arrival on NBC of Saturday Night Live. With movies so perfectly attuned to the zeitgeist they could be titles of Eagles songs: The Day of the Locust, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, Shampoo, Chinatown.

With all the mad energy and dark matter that in the mid-seventies sucks everyone down like quicksand to a new subterranean level of disbelief.

Don and Glenn know how this should sound, how this should feel. What their own place in all this should be. They take the trip and start to lay it all down in the studio with Bill Szymczyk.

They use Don Felder and his hard-edge guitars. They use the divine voice of Don Henley. They use the high harmonies of Randy Meisner. They go to Miami’s Criteria studios, stop-start, then shag it back to the Record Plant in LA, keep plugging until the mood leaves again. Slowly, slowly, over three months and a few hundred thousand dollars, they hear and see and feel their vision emerge into a record that finally, conclusively, at the fourth time of trying, actually captures the sounds Glenn and Don have heard in their heads for so long, that matches the visions they had in the house overlooking the mountain on Briarcrest Lane, the vision that has united Glenn and Don and had them take over the Eagles until they are the Eagles and the Eagles are them: Don and Glenn. Glenn and Don. The Eagles, no matter what the contracts say. The others can piss and moan all they want about the record. These are the songs that will change their lives.

Bernie is fading fast now anyway. His vision of an all-men-are-equal, hippy-happy country band full of dedicated minstrels unconcerned with money has never been what Glenn and Don thought of as the Eagles, certainly not now. Bernie knows it. He feels it as much as anyone. Has benefited as much as anyone, with a large swatch of his songs across all their albums now earning him mega bucks.

But Bernie has fallen hard for Patti Davis.

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