Heller wisely distinguishes between the Eagles we know and loathe, who notched enormous hits like “Seven Bridges Road” and “Life in the Fast Lane,” and the Eagles who are less well known, who recorded deep-album cuts like “Tryin’” and “Early Bird.” While not quite convincing, the list does point out one important idea: The Eagles are known almost exclusively for their hits, to the extent that their albums, aside from “Hotel California,” might as well not exist. Most people can sing a few bars of the radio staple “Take It to the Limit,” while few could tell you which album it appeared on.
There is a very different band lurking on their first two albums, 1972’s “The Eagles” and 1973’s “Desperado,” one admittedly more adventurous than “Greatest Hits” would have us believe. That version of the Eagles experimented with texture and tradition, adding Scruggs-style banjo to “Earlybird” and glam-rock guitars to “Out of Control.” That makes them interesting -- albeit still not very good. Those early albums show a band still trying to figure out what it wanted to be and what kind of music it wanted to play; the shifts in genre can be jarring and even arbitrary. While they might have become a respectable boogie-rock act (a West Coast Lynyrd Skynyrd) or a serviceable glam-rock unit (an Americanized T. Rex), they chose instead to let “Take It Easy” guide their career. It’s the first song on the album, but it’s also the most generic, with none of the country-rock or pop-bluegrass flourishes that animate much of the album.
As their career progressed, the Eagles shed much of their country aspects, with only their fairly bland harmonies remaining. They became high priests of lowest-common-denominator rock, crafting studiously inoffensive rock designed to appeal to the broadest swath of the record-buying, radio-listening public. And perhaps that’s why Jeffrey Lebowski and so many of us continue to villainize the Eagles: They didn’t stand for anything. They lacked the outrage that drove John Fogerty’s music and Gram Parsons’ unwavering belief that the answers were blowing in the hickory wind. Their hedonism was never as much fun as Marc Bolan’s, and their desperadoes had no code of honor like Willie Nelson’s redheaded stranger or Townes Van Zandt’s Pancho and Lefty. The Eagles may have decried record industry avarice on “Hotel California,” but they were already the multi-headed beast at the head of that table. Don Henley may have transformed himself into a public scold, but his ecological concerns, however valid, never informed the music he made with the band or as a solo artist.
The Eagles’ legacy is selling a lot of records. All the reappraisals in the world won’t change that.
@ anyone black giving 2 shyts about American cacs, much less english cacs. You sound stupid and arrogant.
Do you though breh...
hey lets fall back on my man weird al here 