A Good Day In Hell - The Official ILM Track-By-Track EAGLES Listening Thread

For a garage rocker from Detroit, Frey is a surprisingly good Country singer.

Frey, despite being a mediocre player, singer and a generally dreadful personality, was essential to the band: the nasty, greasy central cog in the works.

and, um, one of the chief songwriters.

arrr... apologies about the length, but I couldn't really cut anything out of it.

here's the thing about Frey the songwriter (& i agree he did write some of the hits): he's invariably teamed up or double-teamed up to get anything decent. Most of the hits aren't just him and Henley, they're Frey/Henley/Souther or Henley/Browne/Souther or it's a Tempchin song, or Felder and Walsh do most of the chords and the riffs. It's hard to assess him on his own.

Henley said in a Musician interview linked to upthread that Frey is the ultimate utility player, and it bore out when I saw'em in '03. He played rhythm (more than competently) and lead guitar (better than expected and not flashy), plus keyboards and synths. I don't at all think he's expendable.

One last trivia bit on Azoff from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Azoff

It has long been rumored that singer/songwriter Randy Newman wrote the song "Short People" as a stab at Azoff (Azoff is 5'3"). Azoff's overaggressive pursuit of Newman for Azoff's Front Line management company is said to have been the reason for Newman's displeasure with Azoff. This rumor has never been definitively confirmed by Newman

We don’t rip anybody off . . . it’s just comes down to hard, cold business. I was very fortunate, as were my clients, that the time we all hit, the business quadrupled. A gold album don’t mean shit now. If you handle an Eagles, their road crew and families, you become responsible for fifty-five people and you’re running a $15-million business. You gotta know how to handle the money. You don’t handle it right and the government’ll come take it all away from you.”

otm as far as it goes

Recommended reading for how the sausage got made back then: Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business

"hit men" is fantastic. it should have its own wing in the rock and roll hall of fame.

I bet Neil Young drove Frey nuts. The eagles and Frey try so hard, & Neil would get all this attention and respect for being weird and remote and doing all this purposeful self sabotage but he can just pull things out of the ether

Speaking of Neil, I wonder how many people gravitated towards the Eagles after buying and loving Harvest but then got frustrated when Neil didn't do a proper follow-up.

then again, one thing neil young could not pull out of the ether was albums that sold 20 or 30 million copies each.

No, but Neil made sure he got paid. He never had to chase down his money or duke it out with managers/labels like the Eagles did.

(Well, not until the 80s, and he won that battle while simultaneously making Geffen look like an idiot)

Recommended reading:
https://twitter.com/irvingazoff

http://terrysdiary.com/post/53940092293/irving-azoff-and-jared-leto-at-my-studio

but Neil made sure he got paid. He never had to chase down his money or duke it out with managers/labels like the Eagles did.

but the story of rock and roll is the story of artists chasing down their money, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. i'm not sure there's anything unusual in the eagles' story in that regard except that there was more money at stake and they liked to talk about it more than a lot of other artists did.

No, but Neil made sure he got paid. He never had to chase down his money or duke it out with managers/labels like the Eagles did.

(Well, not until the 80s, and he won that battle while simultaneously making Geffen look like an idiot)

Two Words: Buffalo Springfield

The first three people Azoff followed on Twitter are Jerry Brown, Bob Lefsetz, and Kim Kardashian. Says it all really...

ah right azoff! forgot about him. that's kinda like having the mob backing you up.

Two Words: Buffalo Springfield

Oh...right. But 1968-1988 is still a pretty good streak.

that's kinda like having the mob backing you up.

https://twitter.com/FakeIrvingAzoff

Yeah but Harvest sold plenty

And Neil had a lot of things the Eagles couldn't buy with all that money

"Irv, lookit the size of Neil's amps! Why can't we get amps like those?!"

"irv, lookit that bass player that does exactly what neil tells him to do! why can't we get a bass player that does exactly what we tell him to do?!"

"Why doesn't my Les Paul sound like his Les Paul?"

^Also a phrase known to be uttered by Stephen Stills.

when stephen stills saw neil's road crew he had to go to rehab for a month. true story.

http://ijustreadaboutthat.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/rust.jpg

okay, not really. but i will never not think about the part in that hotel california book where stills hallucinated that he had been a soldier in vietnam. for years apparently! possibly the weirdest tidbit in the book.

That Vietnam thing is amazing

Other favorite Stills story is him being high in england and deciding to go visit Park McCartney, he drives his jag to his house wearing a fur coat and McCartney never answered the door

he's lucky McCartney didn't pretend Stills was Ringo, shout, "I'll show you all!" and toss him out of the house.

In Shakey, somebody claims Still bought a new Ferrari (paid for in full with cash Stills carried in a shoebox) especially for the occasion of meeting Maca. He ended up totalling the car in a wreck a few days later.

haha yeah that stills in vietnam story awesome, reminds me of reagan somehow convincing himself he liberated concentration camps in wwII. one thing i got from shakey was how much the cw in certain circles was that neil should be doing more w/ csn and stop wasting his time w/ crazy horse, the extent to which csny were a focal point of how some ppl thought of him (vs most ppl i know that generally try not to think about csny that much whereas crazy horse stuff is the whole point). anyhow enjoy 'tequila sunrise', even before i decided to abandon kneejerk hatred of the eagles (which isn't the same as abandoning hatred of the eagles) it probably would've made my top whatever eagles songs i tolerate list. one thing i'm curious about w/ this album underperforming and even the single not doing well is when exactly this and 'desperado' (which wasn't even a single) became the 'hits' we know them as today. was it w/ their inclusion on the first greatest hits album? how did 'desperado' merit inclusion on that album - did it get fm play? concert fave? hit cover version by someone else that's been supplanted by the original on classic rock radio?

How well did the Linda Ronstadt cover do? It was released as a single the same year...

I didn't know until I read HC that Desperado was a flop. I assume the title track was popular on FM radio w/out crossing over pop?

Something like that. The eagles didn't return to singles juggernaut status til "Best of My Love", which was like the second or third one from On The Border.

Linda's version didn't chart. I honestly can't recall either version being played on the radio when they were new.

tequila sunrise a good gateway to liking tequila, it's got that in its favor

it sounds like "Brass Buttons" with a much dumber concept

god i wish there was good airplay data w/ 70s fm radio, i always wonder how/when certain classic rock chestnuts entered the playlists, esp on a national scale. did stations just play almost all of zoso immediately or did they play 'black dog' and 'rock n roll' at first (very possible as these were the singles right? 'black dog' crossed over to am top 40 amazingly) and then gave 'stairway' and 'levee' their due and then while they were still waiting for a new zep lp start playing 'misty mountain hop' and 'four sticks'? or was 'misty mountain hop' a hit out of the gate and later 'levee' got it's monolith status, the way 'levon' was a much bigger hit than 'tiny dancer' initially?

henley on 'tequila sunrise': I believe that was a Glenn title. I think he was ambivalent about it because he thought that it was a bit too obvious or too much of a cliché because of the drink that was so popular then. I said, 'No-Look at it from a different point of view. You've been drinking straight tequila all night and the sun is coming up!' It turned out to be a really great song.

cool story bro

He goes on to talk about how girls made them nervous!

they turn into witchy women

...who make you eat your lunch all by yourself.

god i wish there was good airplay data w/ 70s fm radio

Yeah, me too. This isn't much, but links below are from my local FM station circa 1978. They went from pretty much freeform to tightly formatted in 1977, but the morning show still has many holdouts from their mellow album cut daze: Dave Mason, Jackson Browne, Jesse Colin Young...

http://www.radiotapes.com/KQRS/KQRS-FM_Streetsheet_Sept_78a.pdf
http://www.radiotapes.com/KQRS/KQRS-FM_Streetsheet_Dec_78a.pdf

thx!

when did AM radio stop being a thing?

probably late 70s. Whenever the majority of cars got FM radio, basically.

in terms of "Tequila" and "Desperado," agree the 1976 best-of LP made them radio stalwarts. Not sure how much they got airplay before that.

yeah if you go to the page for wabc music radio - http://www.musicradio77.com/index.html - you can see it transition from pop to more easy listening and then it finally makes the switch to talk.

i always figured the really smart people were the ones who didn't do tons of drugs. and made good money.

In that other laurel canyon book there's a quote from someone (the turtles flo and Eddie guy?) to the effect that the two ppl who didn't do coke were Nash and Neil, and the two who, today, don't have to tour to pay the bills are Nash and Neil.

well they did coke and plenty but the same way I do chocolate ice cream: if it's offered I eat it, etc