Many relationships in life are conflicted, but none anywhere is more so than my own to the Eagles. No, not the Philadelphia Eagles (though that too is complicated) or bald eagles (for whom I experience a patriot’s unnuanced love). I’m talking about the Eagles from Los Angeles—the most successful country-rock band ever to aggressively straddle the globe.
They were the talented rookie athlete who never shut up. They were the cockiest commingling of self-styled swinging rods that ever smugly rocked and countried their way to the top. Bad men. Surly. They made a federal case over whether you called them the Eagles or just Eagles because they said it was just Eagles. They were led by the dueling macho songwriters Don Henley and Glenn Frey
Fifty years after the Eagles’ first release, they continue to exert a monolithic familiarity. For one thing, their infuriatingly precise mix of rock and roots essentially created the template for contemporary country music radio, with its brick-walled story songs and note-perfect ripping solos. Secondly, they have a way of turning up in the strangest contexts. A couple generations now know them as the Dude’s most hated band in The Big Lebowski. Millennials might have first heard of “Hotel California” when emergent supernova Frank Ocean sampled it on Nostalgia, Ultra in 2011, a flattering occurrence to which Don Henley responded by referring to the culture-shifting Ocean as “a talentless little prick.”
That episode was not a discrete phenomenon—this has always been Henley and Frey’s modus operandi. They are, and have always been, dedicatedly off-putting.
Why are the Eagles the most unloved band to ever sell a hundred million records? Where and when did all of this start and is there any chance for this cognitive dissonance to be resolved?
In an attempt to finally achieve convergence, I conscripted a panel of experts that included radio legend and rock historian Tom Scharpling, treasured cultural critic Rob Sheffield, and celebrated singer-songwriter Will Sheff to reexamine the case against the Eagles 50 years after they first thrust their way into the mainstream. These hand-picked panel members are all music enthusiasts who consume music at a pace roughly equivalent to an average 18-wheel driver on trucker speed. Life in the fast lane. Here are the findings and verdict.
Charge No. 1: The Dickishness
The Eagles were a machine built on umbrage and limitless material gain. Unlike many bands who achieve dickishness in escalating proportion to their success, the Eagles seemingly needed no prompting. Almost immediately their grievances were countless. They were mad at the press, their label, their publicists, concert promoters, fellow musicians, and one another. Their anger is a feature, not a bug. Punk rock never knew such pugnaciousness.
A representative example: The group despised their first producer, Glyn Johns—legendary for his work with the Who and the Stones—whom they blamed for being too bossy. Not a partier, Johns informally banned drugs from the studio, meaning that “we’d have to sneak off to the bathroom to do dope,” according to Henley. And sure, that must have been a nuisance for the Eagles. But this was the band’s first time in the studio and Johns needed their full attention. The Eagles’ self-titled debut ultimately yielded the standards “Witchy Woman” and “Take It Easy,” and set a template for their cultural contributions. The band found the experience unhappy, and decades later, Glenn Frey would continue to complain that his vocal on “Peaceful Easy Feeling” was out of tune.
Tom Scharpling advances this theory about their paper-thin skin: “I think they knew the rap on them the whole time is that they’re these pretty boys who are trading in the mythologies of country music and Americana or whatever you want to call it, but they’re just not legit,” he says. “That crushing insecurity is why they’re dicks.”
An authenticity gap plagued the Eagles from the outset. The legendary Gram Parsons, whose sound the band slavishly aped, called them “bubblegum” in an interview shortly before his tragic death in 1973.
“They’re not actual country music people! They’re not cowboys,” Scharpling says. “They were just kinda handsome guys who saw an opportunity to smash a couple genres together with an eye toward the charts. The Eagles could confidently play with their shirts off. They were the shirtless Byrds!”
Will Sheff, whose forensic folk-rock character studies sound something like Townes Van Zandt by way of Buffalo Springfield, sees the tendency toward bullying as innate to their temperament. “I always thought of the Eagles as the high school jocks who joined bands because they thought they could get laid or something,” he says. “The dudes who are gonna bust into band practice and be like, ‘You fucking loser!’ and push you over and grab your guitar.” (...)
Rob Sheffield has always been annoyed by this: “At least 90 percent of Eagles’ songs are telling a woman, ‘You think you’re really cool but you’re not, and I’m going to explain why by making a bunch of points that certainly never occurred to you before.’”
This bothers me, too. And it’s weird because as a lady, I’m perfectly happy listening to AC/DC or the Stones or whatever, who have songs in which women are more or less constantly objectified and variously badgered. In the case of those groups, there is always the idea that on some level they recognize that the joke is ultimately on them. Not so with Henley and Frey. Their unctuousness and self-pitying solipsism is simply one more insult than I can endure.
Sheffield finds “Lyin’ Eyes” risible: “That song really, really bugs the shit out of me. The way it begins, like, ‘City girls just seem to find out early how to open doors with just a smile.’ It’s like, ‘Excuse me Glenn Frey, how the fuck do you open doors? Is it your brilliance?’”
It’s similar to a shitty boyfriend going into forensic detail about how they were always utterly blameless in everything that happened when the break-up occurred, only this time with harmonies.
“For the Eagles, being arrayed against women is an ethic in itself. There’s no wit, and you don’t feel like they’re trying for wit and failing at it,” Sheffield says. “A song like ‘Already Gone’ is monstrously irritating. Because the singer is so incredibly proud of himself for dumping his girlfriend, which honestly isn’t that huge an achievement, you know?”
Sheff paints a nightmare scenario of preordained entitlement meeting with an endless sea of approbation: “When you’ve had that much success, and you’re a man of that generation and sort of a dick to begin with, and literally millions of people are reinforcing your self-conception as a demigod, you’re probably going to end up the official band of toxic boomer masculinity.”
by Elizabeth Nelson, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty Images/Ringer illustration
